I still can’t believe when people adopt kids both parents and kids don’t get adoption handbooks. Giving a baby to parents who know nothing about trauma is like giving a baby seal to an elephant.

We can do better.  

My friend had been reading about the Big Bang, and she was excited. “It was just like a seed,” she said, “this little thing, and then one day, for some crazy reason, it exploded into everything we know, the whole universe.” She looked at her tightly fisted hand, and then flung it open into a star. “Boom!”

But nothing prepared me for Laura. She was the first person who, when I held her head as I did Reiki, I felt the bones of her scalp move. But that wasn’t even the most memorable part.

Yesterday I read a tweet by Jessenia Arias @iamadopted where she said, “It’s okay if the only thing you did today was breathe,” and suddenly my day got easier. 

How, as an adoptee, one who lives in a world where words like bastard, orphan, foster home, abandoned are part of the mythology of life, can one garner strength from language rather than buckle under disempowerment? How can one get a sense of strength from a thing—adoption—that has inherently implied to adoptees the world over you were not good enough to keep?

Even if you try to get rid of your bacterial inheritance—extreme bathing, antibiotics—the bacteria you got from your mother will come back.

So here’s everything I know about writing and adoption:

The how of writing about adoption is by starting where you are. Just write what is on your mind. “Where is she? Why did she leave? Who am I? What should I have for dinner?” The why of writing about adoption is so you can honor your own voice and questions. The when is, of course, now.

Rhonda Churchill gave a talk at the Indiana Adoptee conference that made me excited to be alive. She was adopted; I was adopted, most people in the room listening had been adopted, but her talk was more about personal choice and tenacity than fear or abandonment, and I drank in her message: chase your dream.

How do you survive an adoptee conference?

You leave.

(Hahaha. That was for you, Stephanie.)

I didn’t leave, but I did go straight to the bar.

I talked to my friend HBL about that, and the next day he called me to say he had found the pictures of his two boys with their birth (first) moms. He said he found a whole box of pictures and that he’d been crying in his garage because he’d never noticed before that in all the pictures of his older son as an infant, his son was either crying or had a face screwed up in pain.

At the conference, I was thinking about how trauma, how adversity, can be like a sword, and how you can spend your life jamming yourself in the guts with that sword or how you can use the sword to hack a path through the forest of loss to a brighter future.

Dr. Seuss would have had a hell of a time writing about adoption. There aren’t enough words. It would have had to be a picture book.