Adoption and Living With Attachment Disorder

PART 1

I have two dreams for my life: one is to have a house full of people and things I love, and the other is to be free to go anywhere I want with little more than the clothes on my back.

I have been toggling between the two for forty years, making friends, working to buy a bunch of stuff, leaving friends, working to sell my stuff or give it away, and on and on. 

When the novelty of new has worn off, usually after a year, I get anxious to pack up and go. I start to feel upset, on the wrong track, boring, bored. At a certain point, I feel frantic enough to chew off my own arm if I’m not able to leave. Once I forged a check on my mother’s account in order to go. Once I emptied a boyfriend’s wallet. Once I got four credit cards and maxed them out. Once I slept in my car and only ate Blizzards at Dairy Queen because that was what I could afford.

When my mind says it’s time to go, it’s like the house is on fire and staying is not an option.  

This last leaving broke something in me. I gave away things that had always made the keep list, and two things I had figured would be with me when I died. I thought I would be okay, but there’s a bruise in the center of my heart I have easy access to now. All I have to do is to think about going to Goodwill, dropping them off, and then driving away, and a finger presses on the bruise and I can’t breathe.

Then I think about them in a big pile of stuff, discarded, no one seeing their value, and I have to do something to stop the images from coming to mind because there’s nowhere to go from that point but down.

PART 2 

I had two days left to empty the house I’d rented, and the monumental task of reducing a small household to a car was wearing me down.

I wanted to make a clean break, so I was getting ruthless with my decisions. Clothes I’d bought in Paris went to Goodwill. Books I loved—Goodwill. My Japanese knives went to my daughter. I left thousands of dollars of furniture, kitchen supplies, and my bike for my landlord’s kids.

I felt like I was being tested. How much was I willing to let go of in order to become a new version of myself? Was I going to be held back from living a truly free life by things? 

My mother and father were both dead. It was time to shed childish things and to finally be adult Anne. The more I cleared out, the clearer it became to me that the biggest test of all was Bob Dog and Baby Ellen. All my life I had been bringing that stuffed dog and that Madame Alexander doll with me wherever I went. They’d driven across the country with me every time, their little heads looking out a back window. Bob Dog leaned to the left, so I’d put Baby Ellen on that side to keep him supported.

I reminded myself that the way into icy water is to jump and the way to remove a bandage is to tear if off. The mind says something can’t be done, but the body can just do it.

My body drove us to Goodwill. After I’d put Bob Dog and Baby Ellen in the white Goodwill bins, I went home and deleted any pictures I’d taken of them over the years because I was scared of how I’d feel if I saw them again. My mind was waking up to what I had done, and I could feel myself entering a kind of shock. I could not have really done that.

But I could not drive back to Goodwill and try to get them back. To go and see that the bin had been emptied and they were gone would be too much. I’d done the impossible and had to keep moving forward.

The lawyer who helped my parents with my adoption, Bob Heidelman, had given Bob Dog to me the day my parents picked me up from the agency. Bob Dog was regal. He had long silky ears, short brown fur, and a stubby tail. He sat back on his haunches, a quiet guard dog. My parents had given Baby Ellen to me when I was small. I don’t remember ever not having her. She wore a purple dress my mother had knitted for her at some point. Her skin was black and her lips were pink. Her eyes opened and shut. Over the years, her eyelashes had worn to nubs. Her short black hair was tangled and thick and smelled like me.

In my memoir You Don’t Look Adopted, the chapter I cried most writing was the one where I imagined what it was like when my brother’s mother dropped him off at the adoption agency. It was his second birthday, and the agency later told my parents his mother had not stayed to fill out paperwork. She’d dropped him off and fled.

I did not write a chapter imagining what it had been like for my mother to give birth to me and then leave the hospital without me. It’s one thing to look at a fire. It’s another thing to put your head in it.

I keep circling the flames.