“There’s nothing wrong with you. The beliefs you have about what is wrong with you aren’t true. They aren’t real and they do nothing to make you grow as a human being.”
AN ADOPTEE MEMOIR TO REMEMBER
Welcome to the adoptee memoir “Parallel Universes,” by David B.Bohl. The images shown above feature David’s book, that is him on the cover, and me, just a tad older than the child in David’s picture, on a sailboat in Galveston Bay. If only I could have read those words “there is nothing wrong with you” when I was 15 or 16 years old. If only someone like the man David is today could have sat in that sailboat with those kids pictured above and explained that our “special adoption story” lay at the root of our adolescent pain and self-loathing. It is odd to think that as I spiraled as a teen in the mid-80s, David, author of Parallel Universes, spiraled too. As I skipped school to get stoned and go sailing, he would have been bellying up to the bar, cheering the day’s trades along Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, making weekend plans to race his sailboat across Lake Beulah. Two souls tethered by the pain of relinquishment, searching sunsets for far-away answers, blown along somewhat parallel paths for 40-odd years before meeting.
I was 53 years old the day I met David. Our paths finally converged in Louisville, Kentucky, at the Untangling Our Roots conference. He sat on an authors’ panel ready to talk about his book, “Parallel Universes.” What a perfect title, I thought. Those two words sum up what it feels like to grow up as a relinquishee. I would learn David refers to himself that way, “relinquishee,” rather than adoptee. This appealed to me too. Having been sold on the black market and not actually adopted, I never felt the word “adoptee” accurately told my story. I learned David was also an addiction counselor, who had started a new career after coming to terms with both his relinquishment and his addiction to alcohol.
Having been raised in a family of alcoholics and having dated alcoholics, not one I’d ever known to seek help, I could only imagine the strength and determination it took to walk away. Still, it took me a while to crack the cover. I doubt I would have had David not tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a free copy, signing it “I’m delighted our roots entangled this weekend.” Since reading the book, it now feels like we shared those roots already, each knobby vine twisting through space and time, binding us to some global Relinquishee Mother Tree. A connection akin to what David calls “Club Limbic” in the book.
At lunch, I approached David at a table he shared with several other attendees. The type to have never met a stranger, David offered me a seat, and there over turkey sandwiches I learned more about his adoption journey and the two books he’d written, one a memoir, and the other a book about adoptees, addiction and recovery. We had shared a lovely conversation during lunch that day, and a bit later on David handed me a copy of “Parallel Universes.” Yet, as I tucked the book in my bag, the anxious self-doubting adoptee in me worried that something about me must have made him think I needed it. Then I worried maybe I actually did. In the book, David writes, “Ghosts don’t show up in pictures – they awaken later, in our memories, when we finally figure out what has been haunting us all this time.”
Knowing David’s connection to recovery, and having read a good number of books on the subject, I feared the book might be chocked full of the 12 steps, or a prescription to hand myself over to a higher power. I also feared the potential shame that might arise as I looked back on my past. I was already plenty ashamed of the things my coping-self had done to me over the years; two too many cocktails on a first date, three too many at a company Christmas party, four too many before docking my car atop a foot-tall cement median and stepping out glad I hadn’t killed someone – stories not unlike those David includes in his book.
I knew I would likely find myself reconsidering my personal relationship with alcohol, how and why I’ve used it as a crutch in my life. A drink to dull sadness or manage debilitating anxiety. Adoptee anxiety, I’ve learned since my foray out of the adoption fog, is the crux of my and many adoptees’ self-soothing behaviors. Yet, my hesitancy “to look at those ghosts” was the reason I knew I needed to read the book. And boy am I glad I did.
The forward, by Jowita Bydlowska, author of the memoir Drunk Mom, introduces David and most importantly introduces readers to his emotional world, the emotional world shared by many adoptees. Quoting Gabor Mate, a favorite Canadian doctor specializing in trauma, attachment and addition, as well as Dr. Alan Swartz, a licensed clinical social worker, and Mark Cohen, founder of Attachment and Trauma Specialists, Bydlowska provides a framework for understanding the trauma, shame, anxiety and psychic discomfort at the root of David’s pain. She also summarizes David’s journey out of the fog of addition and mentions his experience with EMDR therapy, offering hope for any reader who may recognize their own pain in David’s story. That said, I was eager to get to David’s version and hear it in his own words.
SAILBOATS & RABBITS
First Sail Boats, then Rabbits, I thought, wowed by yet another similarity. In the prologue, David’s mention of The Velveteen Rabbit launched me back into bed with my mother, crying as the stuffed bunny was cast aside, separated from the boy he loved so much. I could see us both, David and I cuddled close to our adoptive mothers, sobbing, tethered across time and space, unaware of the Relinquishee Mother Tree.
Next, David expounds on the Shame discussed in the forward, capitalized here as David does in his book, giving the word the power of a proper noun. Explaining that adopted or not Shame sets the stage for the feelings of worthlessness that often come hand-in-hand with substance abuse. Thus, David’s story is a fantastic read for both adoptees, as well as anyone struggling with addiction. As a fellow memoirist, I know it’s hard to write for even one audience, but David’s story is a compelling read for both adoptees and/or anyone struggling with addictive behaviors. He writes how important it is to feel seen and not shamed, and his prose delivered both for this adoptee.
David’s precise descriptions of the anxiety of not fitting in at school brought me back to my own memories of recesses endured alone on the playground and eating by myself at junior high lunch tables. He writes, “nobody wanted to sit with me. I could sense it. I couldn’t see it, but I imagined their bodies turning away from me as if we were opposite magnets.”
Other stories took me back to high school keg parties, drinking till I blacked out, reminding me of the time I threw a beach party and 200 kids showed up. Even with everyone in my yard, I still doubted five kids there even knew my name. I credited the whole thing to the popularity of my then boyfriend, who I presumed would leave once he figured out what a loser I was. I’d never considered the possibility that he dated me because I was worthy of love. He’d ask me the next day why I drank so much. I’d tell him I had no idea.
As David recounted his teen years, he described the numbing so well, the not caring, the not mattering. Page after page, as David told his story, I saw my own, underlining passages such as:
- “I was never sure of when people would see through me, see the relinquished boy inside me who is scared and ashamed.”
- “It was so easy to access the world now and all you had to do was drink.”
- “I desperately wanted everybody to see the real me. No. I didn’t. I did. Parallel Universes.”
- “I still feel like an intruder showing up in those peoples’ [birth family] lives, but that is my life too. I have a right to it.”
- “What a strange place to be feeling like an intruder in your own life.”
- “I have to be careful. I have to wait for the doors to open wider for me first.”
- “How extraordinary it was that I shared a mother with a stranger.”
Other passages also touched me:
- “The reason he had to unlove her was me: at the time still just a question mark in her womb…”
- “There is no such thing as a self-aware addict in the throes of addiction.”
- “I was an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.”
SUNSETS
Today I have treated my anxiety with therapy, somatic modalities and medication, and it’s been a long while since I’ve drank more than I should, but looking back now, I see those ghosts clear as day. These days, having studied authenticity, and having read many books by Gabor Mate, I’ve begun to allow myself to cry when I need to cry. I’ve begun to name my feelings and allow them to teach me. I no longer pour a glass of wine to dull the pain, but sit with it and hold it. I show up for myself, realizing every move to mask the pain is a tiny abandonment of self — that realization alone has led to so much healing.
David’s book ushers all that wisdom home. It leads readers to step back and examine those teenage-, twenty-, thirty-something, even present-day selves. When I did, I could see how unaware I was, how my anxiety and adoption trauma compelled my behaviors all those years. Finding my roots was the first step in healing my adoption pain and setting my life on a course for healing. Likewise it was David’s search for his biological truth that helped heal his heart, understand the ghosts that chased him, and discover that his genetics played a huge part in driving his addiction. His mother had died as an alcoholic before he could meet her.
Like the sailboats dotting David’s life, “Parallel Universes” glides across the page, a sturdy hull gracefully parting the sea of his dark past, propelled by resilience, telltales of truth leading the way. A natural born storyteller, David’s prose washes the page with sobering detail. Like a tide, it ebbs and flows, navigating the jetties of his life. It splashes salty against the margins. Sometimes bobbing with gentle reflection, more often recalling the battering waves of addiction. No matter the course, we cling to each word riding the swells beside him. From start to finish, David takes us on a very human, very honest voyage, charting the waters home to self, the lifelines, the buoys, the capsizing to the depths, the gasping for air at the surface, and the climbing back aboard to help others set their sails toward their own safe and healing horizon.
CONSIDER JOINING US
In just a few weeks, I will be keynoting at the National Association of Adoptees and Parents Fall Retreat, and I am excited to say David will be among my fellow presenters. He will be presenting on “Blue Mind.” David is a student of Blue Mind science, an advocate for Blue Mind methods, and a practitioner of Blue Mind daily living techniques. He writes on his website, “There is no doubt in my mind and experience that proximity to, and engagement in water provides physical health, mental health, and spiritual/relational benefits that have been scientifically identified – and are essential in today’s stressful world.” I can’t wait for our roots to entangle again.
David also leads the Adoptees & Addiction Zoom Meeting, a weekly peer led support group where you don’t have to explain anything about being an adoptee, where you can talk about adoptee issues or addiction issues without fear of judgment.
