Writing about adoption is like stealing. It’s like overeating. It’s like lying. It’s like slapping the person you love most across the face. It’s like singing. It’s like praying. It’s like breathing. It’s like hauling rocks. It’s like flying. It’s like giving birth. It’s like throwing up. It’s like carving a gravestone. It’s like standing on a tightrope. It’s like beating someone’s knuckles with a ruler. It’s like skating. It’s like spinning a web. It’s like drowning. It’s like being born.

Her mother had said that, although she’d heard of Ellen Gilchrist, she didn’t know where she was or where she lived but that her friend across the street might know her and that we could go over and ask. We couldn’t call this friend because she didn’t have a phone, but we could just drive over and look for her.

And that, I believe, is where storytelling comes in, a way for us to create our own healthy sense of self with language that we chose. So many of us grew up with others telling us our stories of origins, but now we are big enough to tell our own stories.

I have a friend who suffers from depression. She’s one of the funniest people I know. Once when we were out walking, she told me she’d decided she was going to say, “This is the best day of my life!” every time someone asked her how she was. We laughed our heads off as we practiced on each other. “This is the best day of my life!” we kept saying, and it made us laugh and laugh. Who cares if we were miserable? It was the best day ever!

1.     Be born.

2.     Realize you don’t know where your next meal is coming from.

3.     Settle for the bottle given to you by someone who doesn’t sound, smell, or feel familiar.

4.     Want something else but have no words express desire.

5.     Have above feeling for the rest of your life and eat twice as much as you need in the effort of eating yourself around the corner of loss to home.

It’s funny how actively I had to corral myself(s) to write these two scenarios. It’s easy to remember how the events hurt—what was hard was letting myself gain control in the situations and letting myself write what I wish had happened.

In both cases, I felt euphoric afterwards. (Note to self.)

I’d seen pictures of Joyce, but she was not her pictures. She’s more…real. Her hair is a red I wanted to touch, her face even sweeter, even prettier than in the pictures I’d seen online.

What I learned from Adoptees On was that my story was worth listening to. At the beginning of each show, Haley gives the person she interviews seemingly unlimited time to tell his or her story. In the world, aside from the man I love, this was not something I had ever experienced: an accepting ear with no time limit. In my world, talking about adoption was sort of like talking about, depending on my audience, herpes or dandruff.

You know when you go to a river and you put your toe in and then your foot and then you go up to your knees to get used to the water? We didn’t do that. I don’t even remember what we said to each other. What I do remember was feeling I was safe. 

I fell in love with my partner well before the twenty minutes were over. And she fell in love with me. Truly. We talked about it, laughing, amazed. We emailed for months afterwards. We had connected on what felt like a soul level solely through touch. 

You see, I forgot to take out the garbage. There is something wrong with me.

And that’s one of the hardest things about being adopted. 

The feeling of being wrong. 

I don’t remember my first class at Willow Glen Yoga, but I do remember the first time Kent told me I was in the club. I went home and told my husband. He high-fived me. “I told you you’re still an athlete. You had a ten-pound baby and you still got it.” (Okay, really, I have no idea if this dialogue occurred, but I like it, and I’m the writer here, so Namaste.)