My First Chapter

I have been told several different versions of my birth story. Some from my mother, some from my aunt, and some from my grandmother. Each time I heard it there were elements added or taken away. This person was there, there person was not there. The doctor said this, the nurse did that.  We have all heard and know that each person will experience an event differently, but I slowly began to recognize that this had become a case of 1990’s cult film “Sliding Doors,” but there were at least 9 different doors. When I met my mother, I wanted – no I craved and yearned for details about my beginnings.

Those words are not even adequate to describe a feeling that, even now, I can conjure up in the core of my body. That feeling has to be ignored because it can grow exponentially as I focus on it. I have always imagined that feeling as a ball of either yellow or blue light or electricity that grows within my stomach. It can grow and become so overwhelming it becomes a power that I can’t control. I must quell it down. I must hold it in. I was taught very early by society and my surroundings that this power I felt inside me was not welcome in most places. I had to bind it up before it became unhinged and unleashed itself.

I recognize this now still within myself. The desire to know the answers. I recognize it within other adoptees. Even those who deny the existence of this gut feeling that grows an ebb like an inner tide. Yet, we have been taught that it is a power that we cannot show the world. We cannot unleash. So, like any other Disney villain or hero (what the actual fuck Disney. We will get to you later), we try to hold its reigns until something causes the tension of it to snap. Then we are left with the wounds of holding something so heavy for so long as we watch its power and light seep out of us like a shock wave threw our lives.

Here I have to take a deep breath. I wonder if some of my readers will too. We are just getting started and here I am conjuring up mystical powers that leave us sweaty, disheartened, mournful, full or grief, overwhelmed or __________________________________ (fill-in-your-own-repones).

The last time I heard from my Birth Mother was in response to an Instagram post I had written about my birth. At the time, I had forgotten she might still be reading my work so I was caught off guard when a few months after posting it, a scathing message chimed into my phone declaring that, “(her) sister was not in the room at all! I never told you that! This is why I don’t read your writing here on Instagram or anywhere! You make things up to make me the bad guy and you the victim!” *We will have a chapter on DARVO and yes, there will be a test.

I kindly deleted the portion about my aunt being present at my birth because that’s what my job has always been; take the high road to make my parents comfortable. I remember when I was told my aunt was there. I remember being told that she held me. I remember I was in my grandparents’ home and someone was stroking my hair and face. I remember feeling like that infant that was displaced all over again.  But as a family member says, “They (our family) wouldn’t know the truth even if it hit them in the face.”

I do know a few facts that are undeniable. I was pulled out using forceps. One of my clavicle bones just out further. The left one. Growing up peoples would always point it out and ask if I broken my shoulder or something along those lines. I never knew how to answer, but I know now. I like things so warm and cozy and quiet that only metal salad spoons could extract me from my safe space.

I do know that there was family there in some capacity. I know that my grandmother was there and mostly likely an aunt or two. I know that my Dad got to meet me. ( Which he deserved after having to pay for my mom’s room and board at the home for chaste-ish women. ) I know that there was a restaurant across the street called, “Andrea’s” that soon became my name. Sadly, I was not named after the restaurant. We will get into names in another chapter.

A few things I know by report. Other things I know because my body just knows. I know that she held me. I know that she talked to me. I know that she dressed me. I know that she loved me. I know that she didn’t know to what extent her choice would damage us both. Us and the countless other’s whose shadows are still being discovered in the aftermath of an atomic bomb that is adoption trauma. It spreads far and wide. Up generations and down generations. It changes DNA on the cellular level that can be felt hundreds of years later in the bodies of those not even thought of. It reaches its blackness out into relationships not yet even dreamed about and then back into the souls of those given away without consent. Adoption – being placed- being given away – being “yeeted” as the young kids say, is the opposite of the saints those nuns prayed to in the nunnery. It is a living creature, that while sometimes needed and necessary, knows know bounds and has no limits.

Yet, I am fortunate. There are so many privileges have had, but also that I may have had. As Angela Tucker says, “Adoption didn’t save my life. It gave me another life.” I know that my story is one of privilege even in the pain. I have so many things I get to know and experience hat others won’t get. There are so many things that I know. I even know where I was conceived. I know this because for a while when I was 20, my biological parents were married. It was a spontaneous wedding and I barely made it. My boyfriend at the time drove to be there in support. After the ceremony, we were in my grandparent’s living room. We were standing. I remember the exact spot. Funny what our brains latch onto.

Exhibit A: Having the audacity of a undiagnosed ADHD male lacking a fused prefrontal cortex, my boyfriend at the time had the audacity to ask my parents where I was conceived. “In there,” my parents indicated as the pointed to my mom’s childhood room. “On that bed.”  His eyes got wide. I don’t think he thought they would answer, be THAT specific, AND have the location be RIGHT THERE five feet away.

Now. There are times we learn or see things in our lives that we absolutely never want to speak about again. But for an adoptee who craved information like a sponge, I lodged this away under “Neat Facts my brain will never forget” file. A short while after my grandmother passed, my sibling called. “I got the yellow bed set, but I don’t need it quite yet and don’t have space for it. Could you use it?”  My brain and body considered the idea that we could essentially “go back to the beginning.” My enneagram 4 wing DEEPLY felt the nostalgia of having something of my estranged mothers in my home. Something that had a significant place in my life. Thankfully, my inner child who was well into her healing journey cried from the pit of my stomach, “EWWWWWWWWWW.”  So, that was that. I recently learned it is at my cousin’s house. Which is fine. As far as I am aware, I am the only child that has been conceived on that bed, so it won’t give her the icks. What she doesn’t know won’t kill her? Well. She might read this. So, she might know now. Will keep you posted on social media what her reaction is. TBC.

After my conception, things got a little more chaste. My mother was shipped off to a literally nunnery in Southfield, Michigan. A hot spot for the unwed mothers at the time. I have run into several other adoptees whose mothers were housed in the same building and then were birthed in the same hospital as I. Maybe we will start a club. I’ll make a logo on Canva and we will have a secret handshake.  

The Nunnery has since been repurposed, the hospital wing remolded (as I learned later during a visit), and Andrea’s restaurant closed shop. My mom has shared a few tidbits about her time there. She would talk to me. She would talk to the other women there. She said she made a few friends, but friendships at nunneries for the unwedded don’t tend to stick past the birthing room. Who knows; maybe she is still in touch with them? Maybe, like many things, they have had to be erased or mutilated in my mother’s mind for her own survival.

I also know that she craved Snickers. Which may be why I am about to comfort my feelings with peanut butter and chocolate as soon as I finish this chapter. This first chapter. I could have written this chapter so many different ways. I could have told other stories or created other metaphors. I could write it over and over and over and over choosing different paths for us to all take. Just like adoption did for me. My life could have taken so many other paths. But this is the one I was placed on. Like it or not, it’s mine. Telling my story is not consent given for my adoption, but my consent for that newborn chubby-cheeked baby, conceived in a yellow 1970’s canopy bed, to take back that power left inside my stomach and use it to make my own path. A path that is mine, no matter who I was or who I could have been. This is my story with only one version.