I feel good about this idea. It basically made the heat wave worth it. After my plan is put into action, everything will be so different! I won’t see images of starving children. I won’t hear about single mothers struggling financially. Every night I will fall asleep thinking that all over the world children get to fall asleep the way I do, in a soft bed, with a full stomach, with a morning on the horizon where anything is possible because someone cared enough to give them support.

One thing about teaching writing is that I often spend time getting people to slow down when they read their work out loud. They went to all this trouble to put words on a page and then they read as if the paper is on fire.

I discovered something a few weeks ago. I learned how to be bigger in order to contain the joy that increasingly was filling me, waves and waves of ocean light filling the skin of me. I wanted to be able to feel joy as well as I could contain fear and sadness. It’s interesting how painful it is to feel so good. It was like stretching a tight muscle: the alarming burn that was either terrible or wonderful, the sweet deep sting of you are alive.

Being with your dad after you have met some of your birth family is a strange experience, or at least it was for me. Our relationship had always been layered. I grew up knowing he was both my dad and not my dad, sort of like when you steal a pack of gum and when you are chewing it you think about how it is both yours and not yours. But I didn’t steal my dad. He was given to me.

Here’s the thing. Many people, when they adopt a child or a baby, think they just got something of their very own. You are my child. Mine. And this is both true and not true. Adopting a person and labelling it mine is sort of like getting a cat and holding on to its tail for the rest of its life.

I have been reading The Last Best Cure by Donna Jackson Nakazawa and I am highlighting nearly every paragraph. The book is a confirmation of everything I’ve been learning and sensing this year about the mind/body connection and how it is affected by the trauma of adoption (or any significant childhood trauma).

It’s so much better to hammer yourself into silence with the belief in perfection or self-hatred. It’s so much better to stay small and hide under the table of festivities than have the world witness the belly of you spill over your bikini bottom.

I am sorry you had to suffer to get to where you are—but the truth is I think that is how we become amazing. Read any hero’s story and you’ll see these people aren’t called heroes because they sat on their asses and drank tea all day. They suffered and they preserved and their stories made other people’s lives better.

Dr. Mark said, “A meal should make you relax, put you into the parasympathetic state. It’s time to rest and digest.” I froze. I stared at him, at his cheery, tanned, healthy, I am in my fifties but I can kick anyone’s ass on my bike self. You eat to rest? What new, amazing and wonderful world was this?

If the ability to feel fear and to worry fell out of my brain, I would be a walking party. I’d be a ray of sunlight. A laugh riot. I’d be wild.

I was telling all of this to Dr. Mark, spilling my story all over him in a big, How am I going to do this? I want to be healthy and it’s all so confusing and I work in the health field and I should just know all this stuff already. I should be fine for mercy’s sake, and he crossed his arms and cleared his throat when I was done.   

In the 2003 article, A Concise History of Infant Formula (Twists and Turns Included), Andrew Schuman wrote, If you are over 40, there is a good chance that, if you were not breastfed as an infant, you were fed a formula created by mixing 13 ounces of evaporated milk with 19 ounces of water and two tablespoons of either corn syrup or table sugar.