Not the whole story

I published something the other day that drew the most positive responses I’ve ever had on a piece of writing. It’s about the fortunate—if slightly dramatic—circumstances of my adoption, how deeply and unconditionally welcomed I was by my family, and how loved I’ve been my whole life. It also happens that I met my family on Valentine’s Day and published the piece 46 years later to the day, which of course makes the tale all the more poetic and swoonworthy.

Everything in that essay is true, from the make of the car my parents drove in 1978 to the bit toward the end about how lucky I’ve always been: lucky in life, having to do with the solid, loving foundation I had; lucky, period, that this is my particular story. Also true, and not in that essay, is that it did not go that way for many other adopted people. In this way I am also exceptionally lucky.

The story that’s harder to tell

I think part of why the previous piece got so much thunder is that it reinforces the heartwarming and therefore popular part of the adoption narrative: how fortunate we unwanted children were to have found families that did want us, cared for us, in some cases even cherished us. How badly those families pined for us, and what a win-win it was when we finally came together.

In writing about the love and the luck and the welcome, about how desperately my family longed to meet me (“me,” who could have been any baby, really) and the way my arrival filled that emptiness for them, I’m leaving out half the story: the part about rejection. The thing that all adopted people experienced before meeting the people who would raise us. What we had to experience for the happy stories to even be possible. And how, even if we have no conscious memory of it, that rejection has followed us through our entire lives, coloring everything we’ve done, everything we are.

It’s a weird double bind we find ourselves in, we adopted folk, and it’s scary as hell to talk about because it flies in the face of the story people love hearing. It can be hard to trust that whoever’s listening will join us in holding the disparate truths we’ve walked around with our whole lives (that is, if we’re even conscious of them. Many of us aren’t. I wasn't until recently).

For the purposes of this, of my story, I am going to trust you, the reader, to be with me in everything that is true about it—even if those truths sometimes disagree with each other.

All the truths

I say in the first essay that my adoptive family loved me from the moment they saw me, and even before. This is true.

Also true is that the moment my birth mother saw me, and long before that, she decided that I didn’t belong with her. From the time I was a detectable life form, I was rejected (though, interestingly, not ejected*). That I was an intruder, an interloper, was programmed into my cells while they were still deciding how to organize themselves into a person.

This is where my writing stalls. It’s the brick wall I keep crashing into every time I try to talk about this. Because unlike the piece about love, the feelings and experiences are far too complex for a tidy 1,000-word essay with a happy ending—or an ending, period.

I don’t want to tell you how that initial dismissal has been woven into the fabric of me, subconsciously influencing my behaviors, my relationships, my path.

I don’t want to tell you how, in spite of how adored I was, how broken I always felt. How wrong, how unworthy of love, of respect, of attention. How all of that insistent, abundant goodness coming at me hovered a millimeter above my skin, as though I wore a wetsuit that never permitted it to sink all the way in.

How I couldn’t talk about it because I didn’t know it was happening. It was subconscious. Baked in. It simply was.

I don’t want to admit that all the work I’ve done on myself—all the growth and development and healing and seeking, seeking, seeking—was not because I’m naturally prone toward being a ‘seeker’ (or, well, who knows, maybe I am), but because I have been trying to figure out and fix what was wrong with me.

This is where it gets tricky.

I especially don’t want you to come at me with even more love, encouragement, reassurance. I don’t want you to try to repair these feelings in me, as though the problem is that I don’t believe how loved I am. I assure you: I am convinced. Just revisit the last essay. It’s not that I don’t believe it, it’s just that until recently, I haven’t been able to fully register it.

Yes, until recently. What I really don’t want to tell you, because of all it may imply, is how the only thing that took that feeling of wrongness away completely was finally meeting and (importantly) being welcomed by part of my birth family when I was 45 years old. How, suddenly—literally suddenly, like within weeks—I no longer felt like I needed to explain myself or justify my existence. How, quite abruptly, I abandoned the self-repair project.

I don’t want to tell you this, lest it make you think I’m condemning the fact of my adoption—like it shouldn’t have happened, or that any aspect of my life since then should have unfolded differently.

I want us all grounded in this truth: I wouldn’t change a moment or a molecule of how any of it happened.

A story I’m ready to tell… kind of

There is a much larger story, obviously—one that contains lots of truths, many of which are conflicting. There was wounding, and distortion, and ungroundedness, and shame, and ugliness. That there was also welcome, and joy, and beauty, and goodness. There was—there is—so, so much love.

All of this is true. The pain does not render the love any less real or valid—or vice versa.

I don’t want to bring you down. I don’t want to let you down. But I also don’t want to—can’t—erase the part of the story that is equally true: the original hurt that all my fellow adoptees can most definitely relate to on some level, whether or not they can relate to the happy stuff that follows.

It’s a story I feel ready to tell, now, because so much of that hurt has been healed, is behind me. At the same time I hesitate to tell it because it means revisiting parts of my past that, while true, are not currently part of who I am. It feels like a task that is both impossible and necessary: two more conflicting truths for me to dance with.

I suppose, then, that this is what it looks like to love me now: join me in allowing all of these things to be true as I attempt, in the coming months and years, to tell a story that gives a fuller picture of what I and many like me have experienced. Again, I know my story is going to be a lot sunnier than most, but it’s that very story that has brought me to a place of healing, a gift for writing, and a calling to tell it as best I can.

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*I’m sure this will be one of the topics I write about eventually, but for now, to head off any misconceptions, I will say that I am unequivocally, assertively pro-choice.