The thing about the publishing business is that it really does seem to eventually come down to meeting the right person, and I’ve been fortunate enough to meet the right person many times.

The price of being a people pleaser is that you can lose your air in a heartbeat.

I wondered if this is what happens when a baby’s skin is not soothed and welcomed home by the mother when the baby is born. I wondered, yet again, if the primal wound has to do with the skin of the baby, the unfinished nature of adoptee-skin. We are like burn victims without the scars.

Dear Reader, the reason I’m talking to you about this is because I played with my lower dan tien this morning with my teacher Kent Bond, and I feel so much hope and joy. I want to share with you what I learned so you can feel the same way, if you want.

Get two magnets. Name one baby and one mother.

Your worst fear is that it will kill you, but in fact what will happen is that it will bring you to life.

The vagus nerve is the wandering nerve. It hangs from your brain stem like wild roots of a stubborn weed to have conversation with your guts, heart, liver and other organs you probably wouldn’t want to touch if you could for fear of harming your darkest, most internal self. Also because touching your own guts is weird and unhealthy.

We want to be wild, but we are so frightened of our own power, and so we wear name tags and girdles and shoes so tight our feet bleed.

The temptation is to hold on, to stay in the shallow end, feet on the floor of what we know, but then our circulation goes stagnant and the brain gets bored, shrinks.

I used to think there was a black seed of bad in me. It was a thing I could feel, the seed. It was like I was an apple that was, at its heart, rotten.

Come back. I want a second chance with you. I won’t be as scared of you, of you leaving me. I won’t be so scared I’m turning into you. I won’t be so angry you don’t do a good job with your makeup because my eyeliner, when I wear it, is always smudged and a mess. I forget I put it on and rub my eyes.

I have spent the past three years obsessively reading, writing, and talking about being an adoptee. I want to spent the next three years, perhaps, learning more about what it’s like to be a first mother and an adoptive parent.