Perhaps, I just really like Cellos
It may just be me.
Did you know that the cello was once considered an “obscene” instrument?
Maybe everyone knows this, or maybe only classical music geeks like myself know this. The cello was once verbotten, you know, how can you open your legs and receive an instrument in the shape of woman, the size of a woman and PLAY HER. Oh the seductively rich tones she emits, someone throw a burka on that thing already. There are bigger instruments, the Bass, there are smaller but still large the viola, and the most petite the violin. Still the earthy cello beats them all.
Okay, have I justified a reason to trot out my favorite, “No one handles Handel like you handle Handel”
Nevermind, that was just an excuse.
I may have posted this before, I have certainly thought of it before. I spend a lot of time in my car, I listen to this song and think it is amazing, although the video sucks.
I mean I really love this song. Unlike a lot of songs I love, like Vic Chesnutt’s “I Have Flirted With You All My Life” which I so relate to and thrill when it comes up on my disc player. The simple thud, thud of this version of “I wish you were here” also thrillls me.
I was listening to it though, awhile ago, and it occurred to me, “Did you exchange a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?
No. I did not.
My heros for ghosts, NO.
Oh I wish you here, we are just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year, running over the same old ground It strikes me that this could remind me of my mother. No, I don’t wish she was here though. If she could be here clearly, and not through some filter of self-protection, or why it is was okay to do the things she did to me, but she can’t, that is an impossibility for me. Why it all the rejection adds up to her loving me, it is her own new math. After all the grief I have experienced, I also reject the notion that I am a lost soul.
I see things.
I have seen things. I have lived with a tremendous amount of grief. I can’t really say I have come through it, I can’t really say I have accepted it.
I have my footing, I have my goals, I work toward everyday.
When I was 15, my amom got exasperated with me and asked me why I did the things I did. I told her that I didn’t want to meet my maker and have any excuses.
I don’t you konw, I tried really hard to have a good “reunion” I tried to be considerate, I tried to understand what it was like for my mom. What it was like for my siblings, what it was like for my step-father, my attempts were not met in kind.
Such is life, I wasn’t the first, I won’t be the last.
I wouldn’t lie though for their sake, and they very much wanted that.
I looked out at the dark road up North, flipped on my high-beams, changed the CD to
There is nothing I can do about what they have ever done, how they comfort themselves with their stories starring me as scapegoat, but oh fucking well.
DA DA DUM DA DUM
Being Given Away By Your Mother Is It’s Own Special Kind Of Hell
It really is.
Once when Tomtom was in highschool he got in trouble and started to cry, “It feels like the two people who are supposed to love me the most, don’t”
No, we just wanted him to go to fourth period.
Of course, he is not adopted.
Then it would be true.
Maybe it is the hair, but this video from 1:04 to 1:09 reminds me so much of me. And Kurt getting his ass kicked at 1;16. Maybe I just really miss him.
This video made me blame myself a lot less, which is considerable, because heaps of blame were lodged on me.
For being born.
And Yes, I deserved the best, but I sure as fuck didn’t get it.
Life Unexpected
I continue to be impressed by this t.v. show. I watched the second episode yesterday on the computer.
It is still candy-coated, friendly, and funny. Still all put together it sings for me.
It brings up the real fact that put out for adoption does not mean “better life” necessarily.
The “Christian the Lion” Leitmotif of the first episode was in perfect pitch.
Last night the line where the other girl from the girls home tells the natural mom, “and even if there had been some great people out there who wanted Lux, you have the one thing that they don’t. You are her mother and to people like us, that is everything”
People like us, human people.
There are other parts too, that don’t ring true to life, like that they would go through all the legal channels for emancipation and go back to the girls home if the judge said no.
Lots of kids are on their own successfully at that age. I was, and I didn’t ask permission.
Nevertheless. I love it and hope they don’t turn it into just a family centered sitcom but keep the adoption theme front and center.
Also I hope they talk about birth certificates and discrimination against adoptees.
I Never Thought This Would Happen
I never thought when I started this blog in 2006, that I would still be blogging now.
I had read a book about Buddhism and it encouraged me to look at the things I was afraid of looking at, and to stop, “self-improvement as it is a form of self-aggression”
I was kind of a self-improvement addict at the time. I did stop, although I can use a little self-aggression, it works for me. So I have found more of a balance with that now.
Okay so the first thing I didn’t think would last is this blog.
Then I never thought I would participate in a forum, much less be the admin on one. The Adoptee Fried Chickens are getting close to 1000 members. We have had over that, but we have had to purge some, ban some. Some adopted people are so damaged they cannot have even casual internet relationships with other adoptees because they have trust issues, they need to be special, unique and above. They attempt to write treatises instead of posts.
Others, like the one that says all adoptees should be shot in the back of the head, instead of being adopted, well that doesn’t really support our well-being, now does it?
I am in the fairly unusual position of knowing a hell of a lot about how adoption affects adoptees. I have become a respository of information about adoptees. People always try to malign adoptees too, like you can take our identities from us and we are not supposed to notice. If you do, you must be some sad sack that is indulging in invented drama.
Not really. We have business owners, PhD.s, musicians, mothers, wives, artists, writers, accountants, lawyers on the site. The number of 1000 is actually high enough to give a very real representation of how adoptees in a general way feel. I mean our stories are not the same, no two exactly, but there are patterns. The losses are real and profound. The pain is staggering.
Sometimes it is too much.
Sometimes I find myself thinking very superficial things out of self-preservation, sometimes I can’t stand one more story. I would have given my eye teeth though to have had that kind of support when I was a kid beginning reunion.
It is crazy.
One of the newer fried chickens discovered “The Adoption Show” yesterday and I listened to my show with Addie from 2007. Wow, a million or at least three years ago.
I really didn’t know where I was headed when I opened that laptop on my new kitchen table in 2006 and signed up for blogger.
I am very grateful though for the great friends I have made, for my hand-knit hat that arrived recently, for my new love of N.O. and Philly. It is so crazy, and February is lined up to be crazier. Plus it is Valentines and I love Valentines and also my sh will be so surprised at my incredibly romantic gift for him.
I generally suck as a girlfriend so am very proud of myself…
Now must go back to my fashion magazines…
So Please
I deal with suicidal adoptees every month.
So please if I see one more freaking comment from a so called friend of mine explaining about how adoption can sometimes be for the best interest of the mother.
Understand if I lack sympathy.
Dog Fish
Dogfish
Mary Oliver
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?
*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?
Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story – - -
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
*
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.
The adoptee song, I know I am all up in the dramatics, but get off my case, only a non-adoptee would give me shit about it.
It is a New Year and I am Already Late
I can’t believe I let this get passed me, I am such a lover of a new year, better than a star ontop of a Christmas tree, or even what we put on my tree, a Dory-Angel, the patron angel of adoptees everywhere, complete with great hair. Don’t have one? Ask me how you can purchase one, proceeds go to the protest.
New Years is way better in fact (except for the Dory-Angel), the going out and being involved with all kinds of people like we do in the holiday season, followed by the introspective act of where you want to focus your own singular life.
1. Avoid Way Too Triggering People
The thing that is so fantastic about having adoption be a triggering event in your life. I know some people think trigger is a reductive word, it is and when I am triggered I feel reduced. Is adoption is everywhere being celebrated. Or being a plot device esp. in a crappy t.v. show. We have it all, as has been said before, we are sexy, we have mystery, angst, drama, just by showing up.
I say things.
I was reviewing some of my very expressive missives all around the internet— all over. I may win an award for being the most obnoxious person on the interwebs, and no, I am not bragging. Feel chagrined about the whole thing.
The funny thing is, I am not that different in real life. I don’t have a lot of fights with people in real life though. Strangely, I am often described as very sweet. It has a lot to do with my delivery however, that doesn’t translate. My batting of softness that my voice and persona exude in real life just doesn’t come through in the typing.
My kid has been embarrassed by it for sure. He likes to bring up a meeting about money we were in, and some guy went on about this and that and fairness and what he had contributed, and suddenly I busted out with “you’re lying” I have no idea what made me say it, but I did. I was right. My kid would rather have let this fellow get away with a peccadillo than have his mother shout out “You are lying!”
My willingness to open my big fat mouth hasn’t always been bad. I went to highschool with a lot of Asian kids, some of them were being picked on by this ghastly boy for “looking funny” I told him he looked like something out of the hobbit, I don’t even know what the Hobbit is, I really had no idea but he quit. Directly becuase of my counter-attack.
My friend Molly and I would not let anyone pick on the burn-victim in our school because we both said stuff. All we had to do was show up when that poor girl was being harrassed because she was in a horrible accident. We also saved another boy from being held down and beat by three others, because we didn’t just walk by like the other kids.
Those feelings, only stronger develop in me when I see a child given up carelessly, or an entitlement from adoptive parents, only it is worse because it is coupled with knowing the life-long trauma and difficulty that it will create for the child. I deal with it personally, I deal with it on a friendship level, I have talked to literally over 1000 adoptees, I have no idea how many. Even in the best of situations there is difficulty. I am not anti-adoption, although I understand the sentiment.
Sometimes, it really is the best situation. The thing for me is adoption includes an investment that guardianship does not. I am grateful for my aparents investment in me, although it came at quite a price. Identity and whatnot.
I know I am more fortunate than a lot of adoptees adopted in my era in regard to adoptive parents being willing to be open to my adoption issues. Shoot, I am luckier than lots of modern day adoptees.
Still, how to make peace with being a big mouth and wanting to protect children. I mean I suppose it is none of my business, is a practice I consider abusive none of my business?
No.
At the same time, I have limited resources, I must concentrate on taking care of myself, not a small job, and doing what I can do, instead of spitting in the wind about things people could care less about.
Also, it drives home how very traumatic this is for me, which I can still drift out of association believing that I have it handled or it is manageable or whatnot.
Brother, number 1. sounds like a life long deal.
okay
2. Have the most fabulous Valentines for my sweetie ever as he has been really incredible and I have no way to show him how much this means to me.
3. Go snowboarding, even though I am feeling very afraid at this moment and not wanting to spend the money
4. Care more about my debts
5. Go out more, I live in a wonderful place and don’t take advantage as much as I could.
6. Start exhibiting again. I have had that on hold since I started my blog.
7. Secret, that some of my good internet friends can know about by March and April
8. Become even more self-absorbed than I already am, let go of my need of my dreams of belonging to a family. Love the family I have in all of its shatterdness, from a distance
9-11
Be very late to appointments, gain weight and smoke twice as much.
Those I don’t really want, but since all the years of promising to resolve those issues haven’t worked, am trying reverse psychology on myself. Maybe this will be the year.
Why I Believe That Someone Actually Would Get Pregnant and Give Away Their Baby to be on MTV
Cindy.
This girl I knew in highschool. She wore polo shirts and tucked them into jeans with track shoes. Every day.
Her hair was —awful. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t not friends either. I mean I didn’t shun her even though most people did. She was the kind of girl that boys just didn’t like. I have no idea why really, she wasn’t necessarily bad looking, she just had this vibe.
When I was about 14 and she was 16, she confessed to me that she was an alcoholic, I didn’t believe her.
So I quizzed her.
“Where do you get all this alcohol?”
I don’t remember what she told me but the next question I do remember, “Where do you keep all this alcohol”
She answered, “I went out into the football field and dug a perfectly square hole and put the grass back down perfectly on top of it and I keep it there”
I didn’t say anything to her, but I did say something to my very good friend who lived on the same street as Cindy. His name was Eric. Eric was the fair-haired son of a prominent physician. He actually introduced me to the father of my child. Eric and I were wonderfully close, we promised each other that we would grow up and have a hamster farm together, and possibly butterfly farm, but we would sell the butterflies for their meat because I was afraid of butterflies. Which I wasn’t, we just said stupid stuff like that all the time and then laughed really hard and talked on the phone until 2:00 am. You know those kinds of friends?
So time passes, and then drama occurs. I was just a witness in this one.
Cindy’s parents came to Eric’s parents and told them that Eric had impregnated Cindy. She was “Only 16″
Eric swore up and down that he had never touched her.
His parents didn’t believe him. Even I doubted him. I knew he didn’t really care for Cindy, but you know what they say about teenage boys. He certainly wasn’t getting any from me, he was certainly interested in girls. I thought, well maybe she was just down the street and he was ahem “lonely” and thought well no one has to know…
I didn’t challenge him though because he was my friend and he was really upset. It is a good thing too, because after everyone got really upset over at Eric’s house, at Cindy’s house—-
Her now concerned parents took her for a prenatal visit. Turns out she not only wasn’t pregnant, never had been and never even slept with a boy.
See? Some people will do anything.
I miss Eric, the last time I talked to him was not long after I got married. I was feeling really down and said I didn’t see why my husband married me, it seemed like a real bad idea on his part.
Eric said, “I would have married you” Which was so moving and sweet. My husband didn’t really like me talking to other men until 2:00 in the am though…
What is grosser than gross?
I am taking away the link, because I really let my anger get the best of me. I just feel totally exploited by a scammer.
Although probably her MTV handlers are as manipulative as the best adoption agency people. After all they need closure and drama for the show.
Am still totally sicked out.
