Today marks 10 years since everything from my adopted life burned to ash on my birth father’s property. Here is a look at my 10-year climb back to happy.
Talk about adoptee resiliency, the spontaneous combustion of my writing cabin, an event that seemingly took everything, was truly the catalyst for a new reckoning, a coming to terms with self, and a plummeting toward getting the therapy I so desperately needed.
In the three years before the fire, I had found both my first parents, ended up divorced, and lost my job. The writing cabin, renovated and provided to me by my birth father, was intended to serve as a cathartic escape, a break from the madness to dive deep and finish my memoir about the journey that had led me to his door. So I was a hot mess, pun intended, the day the inferno deconstructed my life.
Of course, I felt fortunate to be alive and blessed that the fire had not started in the night, and possibly taken my life. But that day, and for months after, I felt anything but lucky. Stripped of my past, of myself, of the tangible things that had helped me tell my story, I was lost. My journals, home videos, and photo albums, all consigned to the sky — the only proof I had of my thin history. I even lost the only papers that proved who I was, but that is a whole other story.
Maya Angelou once said, “…it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it.” Today I wonder who I would be if the fire had not stripped me bare. While I am a tad less sentimental around physical possessions than I used to be, I am braver today than I’ve ever been. Risks are easier to take. What’s the worst that can happen? I think. I am also more present. Moments and memories, tucked away properly, are impervious to fire.
But it was a long road home. Just days after the loss, I moved to New Orleans into my daughter’s new boyfriend’s (and little did I know my future son-in-law’s) spare bedroom. Only months before, she had moved in with him, and my timing couldn’t have been better, or worse, depending on how you looked at it. Just before the fire, we’d learned my daughter was pregnant. In the thick of my depression, as I grappled with what to live for, my coming grandson was the light at the end of a very dark tunnel. But there I was standing on their doorstep, a foundling, asking to be taken in again.
I didn’t stay too long and quickly moved into a cute older home. My birth father was there the whole way, making long drives from Texas to New Orleans, pulling trailers of donated used furniture, all the while wishing I’d just moved in with him, into the main house, right there on that property where everything had burned. I couldn’t stand to see the daily reminder. I had to get away. So I filled my new house with used furniture, my closets with clothes from Goodwill, my vases with flowers, and tried to start over again. Two months in, that house caught on fire and reset my clock again. Luckily, only the floor above me burned, but this time my things were flooded with water.
I’d not yet found a therapist or begun to do the work I needed to do, and that meant it wasn’t long before I ended up in a new wrong relationship, one of which my birth father wisely did not approve. And there I would stew for a good 7 years, most of my unretrievable 40s a blur of self-soothing escapism with Mr. Right Now. Sure, I took trips between Texas to see Pop and home to New Orleans, but with each departure, my birth father’s heart broke a little more, waiting and watching from the sidelines for me to “get my shit together” and stop being “a sailboat person.”
After three years in therapy, trying to untangle my self-defeating habits and my complete inability to end my codependent dead-end romance, my therapist finally recommended EMDR. “When you’re dealing with the primal wound, talk therapy can only get you so far,” she said. From there, I started seeing a woman trained in parts work and EMDR. And that, my friends, is when the second round of FOG began to lift.
For me, there were two phases of “Adoptee Fog.” Phase one happened early in my reunion, as I realized I didn’t just want to know my medical history, but that adoption had long been a driving force in confusing my shabby identity. Phase two of being in the fog came from my inability to see that adoption trauma was still playing itself out via my poor coping mechanisms, my self-esteem, my apathy, and my lack of agency. Phase two meant realizing that reunion had not “fixed” me. I had to fix myself.
I was 44 the year of the fire, and it would take 6 years for me to begin to peel back the layers of trauma it sat atop. In January 2020, I turned 50, and thanks to COVID, though also traumatizing, I was forced to sit with myself. I wasn’t totally alone, I had adopted a pair of aquatic Peruvian dwarf frogs I named Bert and Ernie. Oh, how I sobbed when Bert abandoned me by floating belly up in the bowl. Ernie was soon to follow, and I sobbed some more.
Bert and Earnie were my bottom.
I found a group of writers. I broke up with Mr. Not For Me, and I got serious about my book. It wasn’t easy, often it was two steps forward and one step back. Some days I drank too much, some weeks I snuck smokes, some months I was in and out of therapy, and at some point I took Mr. Right Now back. Then Pop passed away, and well, rather than break me, that seemed to get my butt in gear. By 53, I was single again, polishing my final manuscript, and re-engaging with my long-lost adoptee community. “Look Pop, I’m speed boating,” I remember thinking.
Today I am 54, still sanely single, and the most content I have ever been. I am now speaking at adoption conferences, working on building a writing getaway for adoptees, and pitching my book to agents and small presses. Wish me luck on that. Looking back, those 10 hard years seem like ancient history, and while I can certainly wait to be 63, I am looking forward to learning what my future fantastic me ends up doing with her next decade.
SEEKING AN ADOPTION-COMPETENT THERAPIST
Use this directory from growbeyondwords.com
