Happy Birthday, You Don’t Look Adopted! You’re 10!

Ten years ago on July 2, I published You Don’t Look Adopted.

It started like this:

Most of my life I have felt both real and not real. I have felt real in the sense that I have a social security number and an online presence and a pulse, and I have felt not real in the sense that my birth mother wanted nothing to do with me once I arrived. Since an infant is born with a sense of self not separate from the mother, I believe part of my brain took a nosedive in the gap between mothers, and part of my brain decided I must not exist, and in some crazy unexplainable way, nothing changed in that part of my brain, even as an adult. When you are in conflict with yourself it’s like you’re a car whose gas pedal is also the brake. It’s hard to get anywhere. The deepest conflict, the thing that was doing the most damage to me and how I was living my life was that my story, my story that began the day we got you—caused people—primarily my mother, pain, and, so, logically, it was a bad story.

And if the story of your origin is bad, that means so are you.

The only way I was going to bring the two parts of myself together, the only way I was going to step fully into my life, was to tell my story. I tried to write it for over thirty years, but, along with having a stable romantic relationship, it was something I seemed incapable of accomplishing.

It’s a small thing, sort of, but I’d like to address something I wrote all those lo so many years ago: “…my birth mother wanted nothing to do with me once I arrived.”

What happens when I go Byron Katie on my beliefs and ask, Is it true?Did my birth mother want nothing to do with me once I arrived?

(If you don’t know what I am talking about, you can check out Byron Katie here: https://thework.com. If you love her work or feel gaslit by her work, know in either case, you are not alone.)

The answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know what her thoughts were. I don’t know if she held me. I don’t know if she wasn’t allowed to hold me. I don’t know if she cried and begged to hold me and/or to keep me. What I do know is that she left the hospital without me. That is potentially very different than her not wanting anything to do with me.

Why did I write something that might not be true? In my mind when I was writing it, it felt true. What I knew was that she put me up for adoption, and when I called her forty something years later to try to connect, she told me I had the wrong person, that she was not my mother. From those bits, I constructed this other narrative, this one that filled in the blank of why did she leave me?

Also, there is something strangely satisfying about saying she didn’t want anything to do with me. It’s so cut and dry. Case closed.

When you build your own story out of crumbs of facts and invisibility, this kind of creative storytelling happens organically. It’s sort of like asking someone why they used to much tape when they only had ¾ of the amount of wrapping paper they needed to cover a present. The tape was needed to hold things together.

However, it’s nice to have the facts right when it comes to your life. Know what I mean. It’s nice to have your birth date right, your mother’s name, your health history. Why, you ask, does it actually matter when you were born?

(Screw you. You’re not adopted. Why are you even reading this?)

Well, why does anything matter? Why does it matter that your name is not kept a secret from you or that we know the earth is round or that when you go to the doctor, they read your weight and blood pressure accurately? Life goes so fast and then it’s over. It’s nice to have a few facts to pin us down and make us feel like we’re on the planet to stay for a bit.

If you are writing your story, it could be fun to go through what you’ve written, and ask of things you’ve taken for granted, “Is this true? Can I absolutely know it’s true?”

If yes, great. Move on. If no, great. You have more you can write about! As you question your thoughts, you may find that the story of your life becomes more paradoxical, less linear, more challenging to write. That’s okay. If your story were easy to write you would probably get bored. A challenge is good for you.

Hold the press:

Is that true: a challenge is good for you? My gut response is Yes, people need challenges to grow. But: Can I absolutely know that’s true, that a challenge is good for you?

No. I can’t absolutely know that. Maybe you need it easy so you don’t hyperventilate or quit. I don’t know.

But you’ll figure it out.

By the way, I’m so happy I wrote that book. I wanted to tell my story, and I went and did it. Yay me! If you’ve told yours, Yay you! If you want to tell yours, but you need some encouragement, here it is:

DO IT!!

I mean, really, you can’t do it after you’re dead, so you might as well do it now while you can.

p.s. I’m over on Substack now under Adoptee Dispatch because I’m trying to make a buck. But this blog is nearly as old as You Don’t Look Adopted, and I love it here. The end.