Writing as Breadcrumbs

Why did you even go to the East Coast? my friend asked.

You’re driving back to California, again? another friend asked.

I found both questions irritating, so I changed the subject.

But here is my considered response, four days before I get in my car and head out of the snow and cold back to the land where my daughter lives, back where my heart yearns to be. 

I had thought I’d come to the East Coast for two reasons I felt were connected: one was to shake myself out of a post-dad-dying torpor and the other was to write You Don’t Look Adopted, Ten Years Later.

Instead the trip back to my hometown state is looking like the end of a very long journey where I have been writing blog post after blog post, well over seven hundred, as breadcrumbs for my younger self to follow in order to find me when the time was right. Your parents are going to die, the breadcrumbs tell her, and you will find your way home.   

I wrote my first blog post, Mother Love, June 9, 2016. It is no coincidence that I used this post to write about how much I loved my parents, my mother in particular, and to say how lucky I was to be adopted.

I wrote this post just weeks before You Don’t Look Adopted came out in print. I remember stepping outside Peet’s to post this piece in case God decided to strike me down for having something to say.

Mother Love 

Jun 9 

I’ve been writing a lot about what I didn’t have because I was adopted. I talk about the missing birth certificates and contact with birth parents and lack of health history, but I haven’t written much lately about love.

The other day I was out walking, and I thought about my mom, and I just lost my breath. I loved—love—her so much. I thought about how for the years that she had cancer, I wore a flight path from California to New Hampshire. The only thing more important than being with my mother for those years was being with my daughter.

And losing her has been the hardest thing I’ve faced in my life, followed only, much to my surprise, by my daughter leaving for college.

I wonder if it’s possible that some adopted kids (me) love their parents even more than non-adopted kids (I think it’s funny that many people might write “regular kids” here) do. I wonder if the knowledge that the two people who are raising you are only raising you because fate stepped in—why did you go to these parents instead of to the other thousands of parents waiting to adopt a child?—and this roll of this dice makes you attach even more deeply because, hopefully, you feel you won the roll: you not only got parents, you got the right ones.

(I know the idea of loving something more or less is actually a ridiculous concept. Love is love is love, but I guess I am talking about loving more fiercely. Or maybe I’m just competitive: I want to say I love my parents more than you love yours.)

I could talk about the fact of my adoption to my father but not with my mother. I knew I could make her cry, make her turn away from me, if I brought up the idea that I had another mother. I wonder if this also has something to do with the intensity of my love for her. I read once about a man who hurt a baby duck by mistake, and the duck then bonded with the man, following him everywhere. This sounds sick and hateful, but I wonder if the bonding to my mother wasn’t also a little bit of me being a baby duck who’d been hurt.

I’m working on my Adoption Handbook, the book I’m going to tie to the wrist of every infant or child or adolescent before he or she goes to his or her new parents, but I wanted to take a breather and say I am so lucky to be adopted, and that I love my parents very much.

I’ve been looking at the sentences I just bolded for the last half hour or so, the final sentences of each paragraph in particular. Well, there you have it, is what I’ve been thinking. And then my mind goes blank.

I wonder if the bonding to my mother wasn’t also a little bit of me being a baby duck who’d been hurt. I find it achingly predictable that I wrote lucky and I love my parents very much. Oh, sweet adopted person--me--and so many of the writers I work with--needing to name the traumas while also trying to self-protect from further abandonment.   

Just say it. Whatever it is, say it. 

Your younger self is waiting for the truth. That is where you can meet.  

I don’t know how to bring this to post to a conclusion because in many ways I think I’m just getting started.

And yet I also feel done.