Introduction This project will not be linear. It will likely not make sense at points. It began (creatively) ten years ago and (personally) when I was nine years old and discovered that the family I had grown up in was not my family of origin. Writing about adoption has been a very unpredictable tide in my life. Sometimes I get close to the shore, and others I’m pulled out to sea. The spirit of this…
At first, I had the Trinity: three habits I treated with a sanctity warranted by the level of importance to my life. Write Read Spend time in nature Then I had the Core Four: Connect with others The list grew from the Sacred Seven to 11 to 12 to 15. I relied heavily on routines to accommodate the increasing behaviors I wanted to integrate into each day. My mornings were synchronized to an app designed…
In her sermon titled We Shall Go Forth, Reverend Lo from the Unitarian Universalist Church in Eugene speaks of wanting to build a wall of lamentation, a place to help with “the inlay of compounded fractures and compounded grief in our lives. There’s something about that ritual of writing down one’s prayers or wishes, or even the things one wishes to let go of or release, and placing them in the cracks of a wall.…
Begin the day by landing it My morning begins with the vibration on my wrist. 4:45 am my watch gently shakes me from sleep. It will not stop until I tap it. Usually, I do so with my eyes mostly still closed. I am not awake enough for ritual. This is instinct, this is habit. This is routine. 4:50 and the moon starts to glow on my nightstand. Not the literal moon. A lamp I’ve…
Like a convention of drunks, we weave our way from car door to church door, navigating islands of relative dryness among seas of sunken grass and slippery clay. The women struggle with sinking heels, even while working hard to maintain the appearance of not working hard at all. I remind myself to care about staying clean, to quell the impulse to puddle jump and become one with the filth. Mamita’s tight grip on my upper arm reinforces the reminder.
and guns and moving the furniture in front of the peg-board wall displaying his collection of knives. With the green recliner creating a barricade in front of the bayonets and machetes, she stops in the hallway and stands there, not moving but not quite still either. Like she’s part of a cadre of soldiers on the battlefield nervously staring each other down, waiting for the signal that sets chaos into motion. Only whatever enemy she is facing, it’s not visible on the field.
The woman from the island has called again. She has visions of me, arms outstretched, barely one, smiling and teetering toward my father.
I am marked.
She calls again: My father dressed in uniform in the Korean jungles. My father boxing for the Army.
He is marked.
It took some time after we moved in with Frances for me to get used to being watched. When school started back up, I was dropped off and picked up, often by Frances’ teenage daughter. On occasions when I couldn’t be picked up right away, arrangements were made for me to stay at a friend’s house with her and her parents until Dad or Frances could get me. And my evenings on the roof were replaced by Frances turning off my bedroom light, telling me to sleep tight, and closing my bedroom door. It was strange and made me feel like running.
The first house we moved into together was at the end of a red clay road. When it rained, as it did every summer afternoon, the clay became slick and fast and far more fun than a slip and slide. Frances, who I would be calling mom soon, made it clear that girls didn’t get dirty. But that glorious clay was irresistible, and I knew I wasn’t meant to be categorized as a girl. So I learned how to hose off after practicing my best slide moves and hearing that imaginary crowd roar as the also imaginary ump yelled, “safe!” Technically, I wasn’t dirty. For whatever reason, Frances didn’t push the issue and that clay became my haven.
From the moment my father returned from his trip and discovered that I had been abandoned, I was shuffled from family member to family member like a hot potato with everyone praying that the music did not stop. It was clear that I was different from my family, although I did not yet know why. With my freckled skin and hair that fell somewhere from reddish blonde to chlorinated-pool blonde, I stood out among my…