I am not in full ownership of my life. Admitting this is humiliating and it makes me angry.

I am curious if the trauma associated with losing your mother at birth or soon after affects the body’s ability to know it is there.

On her birthday, my daughter is matching people’s donations with money of her own to help support Asian businesses that are struggling during COVID. It’s easier to think that birthdays are about cake and presents and wishes for untold happinesses. But the truth is that when we are birthed into life we get the whole Pandora’s Box.

Nash was not my dog first. Other people loved him before I will get to love him.

Sit down. Stand up. Drive. Go for a run. It doesn’t matter. Lie on the floor. You just have to be alive for this to work.

“What cannot be communicated to the [m]other cannot be communicated to the self.”

Sometimes it’s easier to love what isn’t there. Sometimes it feels easier to live in your head instead of in your body.

As I listened to Panache today, I thought about pretending to go to graduate school for a sense of felt safety.

Just how many times can you cry in front of your spouse or your best friend or your child and say, I’m thinking about when I was a baby? I’m wondering why my mother didn’t want me? I’m bent over double because I can’t believe this happened?

Any adoptee who is “out of the fog” knows where the grief started - day one. The separation. I just don’t know where it ends. I don’t know IF it ends.

I believe in collaboration. I believe in the power of writing. I believe that when you step into your voice and combine that with writing, community, and collaboration, anything is possible.

This blog was actually created over two years ago and has sat gathering cobwebs with the “private” setting on. (Some good that’s doing.) I would write, and then I would get too nervous to do anything with what I wrote.