Life Coaching Translated for Those Who Were Adopted — Part Five — Story Fondling/Story Foundling

Most adopted people have stories about being told Enough already or Everyone feels like that or Aren’t you just lucky to have a family? when speaking about adoption. Just this week I wrote an apology letter to an adopted person for saying basically that very thing. Sometimes I get overfull hearing stories that can sound victimy or repetitive or depressing. It’s not uncommon for me to criticize my own self internally for sounding victimy or repetitive or depressing while talking about something linked with adoption. Being an adoptee can be deeply confusing on many levels, and the fact that most of us don’t feel free internally or externally to talk about it can make the confusion turn into tamped-down rage or grief or helplessness or diarrhea or psoriasis. You get the picture.

Do you ever wonder why people in general tell the same story more than once? Don’t most of us have a clutch of favorite stories we can pull out at dinners or parties or car rides or who knows where because we have found pleasure in the telling and receive pleasure in the listener’s reactions? Some people tell the same stories regardless of the reaction they get. The story is its own compulsion, like a sneeze. It’s going to happen—it’s more like a force of nature than a choice. Someone brings of the subject of robbery, and I have to tell you about my friendship with a bankrobber. It feels like I might explode if the story doesn’t get air. You say A and I HAVE to say B. Telling stories can be habit or compulsion.

I think for many adopted people, coming out of the fog is a time when it’s hard not to talk about adoption. It’s like going to work an hour or a day or a week or a year after you were in a terrible car accident that the cops said you were lucky to survive. You can’t stop talking about what happened because your brain can’t believe it, and you’re trying to convince your own self it was real. You’re trying to process something that is flooding your being. The story telling is often not about connecting with another person so much as it is about trying to find your feet in the world, as if the story properly told could finally slow your mind down so you could catch your breath and realize you are safe.

There have been many, many days when I wished I could stop talking about adoption. I didn’t want to be that person. I didn’t want to be so predictable, so out of beat with the others around me who had been kept.

And yet, how could I be authentically myself and not talk about what took up much of my attention? Why even be with others if I can’t be myself?

Oy.

In Wayfinder training we learned the phrase story fondling to describe the word pour people can go on when you ask them what they would like to focus on in that day’s session. Story fondling means the starting gun has gone off and the horse has taken its head and is running down the track. Story fondling means the teller is telling you a story they have told many, many times. Story fondling means you are headed for the woods because a story that is fondled is inward-turned, and is not interested in being questioned. A story that is fondled is most likely a story the brain of the story teller has decided is fact and is not to be touched by others. A person’s eyes often get a glazed-over look when they hit story fondle mode. It’s like they’ve slipped almost entirely inside of themselves and you could be anyone, it doesn’t matter because the story fondler is seeing the past, not you.

Story fondling as presented in my training is a pejorative term made of words that sound kind. One definition of story is a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events. A definition of to fondle is to touch gently and in a loving way.

Here is an example of story fondling: You may ask me about my stomach pains, and the next thing we both know, I’m telling you about being born and having my mother disappear and being fed who knows what by who knows who and about how my stomach has been a problem ever since. The story of my digestive issues is long and could easily take up our hour. The purpose of me telling you this story is to cement my stance that relinquishment harmed me and that I still suffer. The purpose of me telling you this story is because telling it makes me feel at home. I am familiar with this story. It’s where I live. This story fills up the space between us. The purpose of this story is not to grow or change. The purpose is to talk about the past, one might argue, is so I can stay there.

But what’s wrong with staying in the past? Isn’t the past where the relinquished body finds the most hope for the future? Isn’t staying in the past in many ways the way the adopted body survives the present? What’s wrong with me fondling my stories when they are what I have instead of my first mother and that life? Story fondling, one could argue, keeps me out of the here and now, it keeps me from connecting with people who want me to be present, to be a grown-up talking about grown-up things. But one could also argue that if you carry a crying baby inside, you are not as focused on the present moment as others might be. You have past issues that still cry for your attention.

Story fondling made me think of story foundling. Mary Gauthier, an adoptee, created an album called The Foundling. The names of the songs are, The Foundling; Mama Here, Mama Gone; Goodbye; Sideshow; Blood is Blood; March 11, 1962; Walk in the Water; Sweet Words; The Orphan Kind; Another Day Borrowed. I’m curious. When she sings these songs, is she fondling the foundling?

Here’s a link to an interview she had about this album with Guy Raz at NPR. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/127913299?storyId=127913299?storyId=127913299 . Near the end of the interview, Guy Raz says It's a really difficult album, in terms of the story. It's a beautiful album but of course, it's difficult to hear as well, because of the story. But one of the things that's really great is you—you sort of leave us on an upbeat note with the song "Another Day Borrowed."

I want to tell you that the Guy Raz’s statement that the album was difficult because of the story and that what was really great was that Mary Gauthier left the listener on an upbeat note was so goddamn predictable.

It is not uncommon, it is, I mean, common for an adopted person (me) to feel we need to end our adoption stories on an upbeat note in order to earn or keep another person’s attention. In order for us to have worth, in other words, we need to be, ultimately, upbeat. Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried was, in part, about the impossibility of telling a true war story. First of all, the teller of the story has been traumatized, so the concept of a reliable narrator is called into question. Second of all, how many people want to read a story about what really, really happens at war? How many ribbons do you have to tie around terror and horror and death before someone will touch it?

If you aren’t free to tell your story in your entirety, it is not something that remains in your pocket, and would you not then just out of sheer proximity, fondle it?

And if someone then says to stop it, what are you supposed to do with your hands and with the story you both cannot tell and cannot not tell, the story that lies burning in your pocket?

If a fondled story is a foundling, what does it most need?