The Tin Man and Little Sausage - Chapter Two

Showing up, I have discovered, is complicated when you were adopted. At least it is for me.

Again, this is going to be a situation where many readers will say, But what you are writing about is true for most people, not just those who were adopted. And, again, this isn’t for them.

In movies and on television, when the writers want to make a character a little different, they make them adopted. I don’t feel like backing this up with examples because I’m feeling irritated. I know I’m right. I don’t want to have to prove it to you, also. It’s like asking a goat to both be a goat and prove it’s a goat at the same time. God damn. Can’t we just be?

I don’t know how to get from point A in my writing, where I am now, to point B, where I want to go, so I’m going to skip all notions of smooth transitions and dive right in.

What I discovered while trying and trying to write You Don’t Look Adopted, Ten Years Later was that my sense of self had changed so profoundly after my parents had died, I would not know what to do with my body in time and space. It had never occurred to me that in addition to feeling grief and also free when my parents died, I would feel erased.

Just existing in a shocked body is more than enough work for a day. Staying alive when erased is like walking a tightrope between two shores so distant from each other you can’t see the other side. You have to keep moving forward, but it’s not because the other shore calls to you. It’s because you have a body that moves.

It was as if I’d gone back in time and become the baby who’d lost her mother, only this time I had a body and a mind that was mature enough and awake enough to better understand what was going on. And still, maybe it, was the same. This can’t be right. I don’t want to be here. This feeling was why I’d driven to Provincetown in the first place. I’d been shell-shocked in Santa Cruz for a year after my dad’s death. I thought maybe a change of scenery would knock me back into my life.

You take away a child’s family, heritage, culture, and history, and you fold the child into your family, your culture, your history, and then you die.

What happens then?

One cold day not too long ago, while I was walking Bird in Beech Forest, I noticed my head was, as usual, full of chatter. I stopped to listen to the sounds around me instead of to the chaos inside my mind. The forest was so quiet. As Keats wrote, No birds sang. In that slice of stillness, I discovered Little Sausage. My mouth was full of the taste of her. Everything felt different.

I was unquestionable there, a solid living being that was part of the world, at home in the woods, in her body. No part of me was separate: eyes, nose, mouth. I was all one, me. All Little Sausage. I didn’t have a sense of having a head or arms or legs as I started walking. I did have the sense of being complete, safe. It seemed that my reason for being was to experience sensations. To feel, to see, to hear, to taste, to smell. Without me, the world did not exist. I was there to bring it all to life.  

I had become embodied.  

Who had I been before I was Little Sausage? I wondered.

The answer came to me right away. I had been The Tin Man.