It’s been a long time since I wrote anything about adoption or how I’m impacted by the whole “chosen baby” myth we were fed. After I wrote my first book, Two Hearts: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Grief to Gratitude, I remained relatively active in the adoption community, writing and even speaking at the American Adoption Conference in Cleveland one year. I’ll never forget one man, an adoptee, openly sobbing in the front row as I read from my book. After a time, I took a step back from the adoption community, having grown weary of the topic itself because I had worked through my grief and come out the other side, hadn’t I?
I didn’t start out intending to write anything about adoption with my second book, The Presence of Absence: A Story About Busyness, Brokenness, and Being Beloved, but my muse had other ideas, and it’s woven throughout with a telling of my first mother’s story. Surely two books and multiple published articles were enough written about my adoptee experience for the benefit of others and my own healing. Right? I don’t want to be defined by the label “adoptee” forever.
But I’ve felt a slow burn, and something pushed me over the edge recently, so here we are again.
Imagine a glass full to the brim with water. It’s so full that there’s a bead around the top of the rim where the water is actually higher than the glass. For years, there’s been a slow drip falling into the glass, but the speed of evaporation has been mostly on par with or greater than the drip, so the water has remained contained. Occasionally the speed at which the drip falls increases; now the glass is as full as it can possibly be.
Then, one more drip falls, and the water overflows the glass. It saturates the cloth underneath it and forms a puddle on the table which, if it isn’t wiped and dried thoroughly, will leave a water stain that’s impossible to remove. (Spoiler alert: an indelible stain will remain.) That’s the state I’m in this morning, and I can do nothing but write.
There is no universal adoptee experience, but my connection with other adoptees has shown me that many of us are similarly impacted. For me, it’s hyper-vigilance. A sense of having been abandoned and the fear of it happening again. Deep and lingering grief, disconnection, detachment, and a low hum of “there’s something wrong with me” that never goes away.
Many of us are competent, capable, and excel in our careers. We’re über-responsible. On the outside, it can look like we’ve got things together, but we’re also hurting. Studies have consistently shown that adoptees have higher rates of depression and are 2.5 times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adopted people. I don’t need studies to tell me any of these things because I’ve lived them for 67 years.
This adoptee is often one drop away from overflowing. Sometimes, not only does the water overflow the glass, the glass itself shatters. Somehow, somewhere, another vessel has to be found that’s strong enough to contain all the emotion, but in the meantime, a white-hot pain in my core burns. I’ve come to know that, instead of rushing to contain that which spilled over, I must give tender attention to the overflow and what it wants to teach me this time.
Because there’s always one more lesson. One more hurt in need of healing. One more piece of truth pertaining to my experience as an adoptee and to the human collective overall. Because we’re all connected, aren’t we? It’s a broken world where mothers relinquish or abandon their babies, and when those on the other side of that are expected to be grateful (we are, to an extent, but that doesn’t lessen the grief), get on with our lives, and get over it.
We’re curious about the adoptee experience and relish the opportunity to eavesdrop while they sort through their feelings, hire investigators to search for their first family, and, in some cases, reunite with the ones who left them behind or were left in the wake of that decision, as evidenced by television shows like the American series on TLC called Long Lost Family. I had to stop watching it a few years ago because the stories gutted me.
Recently, I came across a British show with the same name focusing on people who had been foundlings. Tragic in a different way, but no less so, I thought I could handle the stories of people hungry to know who and where they came from (also, it has a distinctly British flavour which, for me, is easier to take in), so I’ve been watching.
The feelings those people sort through are similar to my own. We’re all starved to know something of our first mothers, regardless of the life we had in her absence. We’re all a bit broken. And wrestle with the cognitive dissonance between being loved by our adoptive families and the underlying sense of there being something so wrong with us that our first mother couldn’t keep us. Adoptees understand adoptees in ways no one else can.
But here’s the thing.
We’re all a bit broken and messed up in a million ways. For some of us, trauma happens at birth; it comes later in life for others. But it comes. None of us are getting out of here without experiencing “the worst thing that can happen” at least once. Likely more.
There are more glasses with domes of water rising over the brim than we realize, and we encounter them every day.
Shouldn’t that make us all kinder and more generous toward one another?
It doesn’t always, but how about we make that our goal?
Trying something different and including a video with this post. Might do this now and then. What do you think?
Right on!
Grateful for you, Paige.