What I Know About Dismemberment

Four Julys ago, a few hundred feet from the Puget Sound, while I was still raw and aching over a rupture in one of my maternal relationships, I sat on the wooden floor of an old chapel while Bhanu Kapil led a guided meditation.

Driftwood on the beach at Fort Worden in Port Townsend, Washington. In the distance, a sailboat is illuminated by an orange setting sun.

First, she asked us to close our eyes and imagine a net. When we saw a clear image of it, we were supposed to allow something to occupy the net. The object that appeared would be a representation of what we most needed on our journey, as well as the universe’s gift to us. I waited for something to appear, but nothing did. Eventually, my mind drifted to the feeling of free-fall I’d been experiencing in the weeks and months leading up to that moment, and I realized the net itself was what I needed.

Something to keep me from falling into the abyss. Something to help me feel held.

Next, Bhanu instructed us to imagine we were sitting alongside a river, in the middle of a charnal ground.

“Tell me what you know about dismemberment,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what a charnal ground was, so when I closed my eyes, I envisioned charred ground. Amongst the burned-out coals, I noticed three glowing-red chunks. I didn’t need to get close to them to know they were the three biggest pieces of my heart.

She asked us another question:

Who was it that made your mother suffer?

While I was meditating on the glowing embers of my heart, wondering if I would ever find a way to piece its fragments back together, a woman with an Irish accent walked through the front door of the chapel. Bhanu padded across the floor and explained in a quiet, smooth voice, that we were in the middle of a meditation. I could feel the woman pausing to watch us before she turned to go, and in that moment of hesitation, Bhanu gave the woman the opportunity to contemplate the same question she asked us:

Who was it that made your mother suffer?

She told us we’d be leaving the chapel to walk through a small forested labyrinth next, and as we rolled onto our knees and pressed ourselves skyward, she told us we should conjure the energy of someone to bring with us on our journey, and also that as we left the chapel, we should throw something—anything that wasn’t serving us—in the bin.

After the session outside was over, I skipped dinner to write this:

I am in the jungle now, but I’ve forgotten the question. What was the question? Was there a question? There was an answer—the answer was “Nothing, no one.” The answer was “Nothing, no one,” but what was the question? 

I am in the jungle now, and all I can think about is what I just threw away. Did I really throw it away? Was the bin large enough for that need to justify myself? The need to explain why I am not difficult and too much and not enough and incomplete? I put it in the bin and now I am enough. But I’ve forgotten the question. There was a question, wasn’t there? Am I enough now? That wasn’t the question. 

I am in the jungle now, and the world is shifting under my weight. The pine cones crack like too-stiff knees and I take careful steps as though I, too, am arthritic. What was the question? Was I supposed to bring someone with me? I come to another threshold and the jungle disappears. “No, no, turn back,” I say. I have to find the question. 

I am in the jungle again now, and I see the shimmering threads of a spider web stretched between rigid green leaves like those of a magnolia tree. Magnolias remind me of Louisiana, where I was born, where their sultry scent saturates the hot, wet air. I feel Carolynne’s joy radiating from the space beside me. Her smile warms my face. “Wouldja look at that?” she says with a sigh. Soft breezes blow through and the spider hanging in her web rides them like waves. Carolynne nudges me towards the other side of the bush and I forget I’ve forgotten the question. 

We are in the jungle now, on the other side of the bush, and I see another web, another spider. The sun is hitting all the strands and her home looks like a dryer sheet—mottled with transparent and opaque specks. Carolynne pushes me closer. What was the question? The spider says: “The one thing you need to know about me is that my father left when I was six. All I ever wanted was a family.” I close my eyes—this is the only way I’ve been able to see Eleanor lately. Instead of the woman with veiny hands and a slightly stooped back, I see a little girl with curly red hair and coke-bottle glasses. I remember the question: Who was it that made my mother suffer?

Which one?

I am next to the river, and there are shards of bone and dark ash all around me. I exhale and the air from my lungs rekindles, turns red, three coals. I lean closer. The red chunks are throbbing in sync with the pounding in my eardrums. I touch my hand to my chest and the coals feel comforted. I look closer. The blazing, beating chunks are flesh. Are mine. Let me tell you what I know about dismemberment: When you become her child, your mother takes your heart in her hands and, if she can, vows to protect it. That’s why, if and when your heart is ripped away from her, she holds on tight. So tight that some of it—chunks of red flesh or gooey pink residue—get left behind.

I have three mothers. They all held tight.

We are in the jungle now, and they whisper through the leaves that there is a third spider, a third mother. I see her hiding under the brown velvet shade. She is darker than the others. Brooding. People tell me I will never understand life until I create a new human myself, and this makes me angry, makes me hear another iteration of “you are not enough.” But I threw that in the bin. I am one month from the age she was when she and her husband conceived me in their minds and in her womb, and I think I am beginning to understand the question. 

We are in the jungle now, and a smaller spider, a white one, is traveling between the leaves, unspooling a thread. The first spider taught her to be joyful. The second spider taught her to be gentle. The third spider taught her to sew a story. She is learning a new stitch.

A year ago, having not seen Bhanu in the three years since she led that meditation, I walked from my apartment in London—the place from which Bhanu departed years before to immigrate to the place from which I emigrated years later—to see her perform “an installation, performance, poetry reading or ritual called How to Wash a Heart” at the Institute of Contemporary Art.

I first caught sight of her at the entrance. She stood just inside the doorway, holding a bowl full of pink ice cubes, which she placed, without explanation or comment, into the cupped hands of everyone who passed over the threshold. The heat of our hands melted the ice, which dripped pink droplets onto the floor. On the stage, Bhanu produced an intact ice heart, which, over the course of the event, she maimed. When the house lights re-illuminated the space, what remained was a bowl full of mostly-melted heart-juice, which she carried out to the Mall and dumped in the road leading to Buckingham Palace, “the asshole of empire.”

Bhanu Kapil standing in the middle of the Mall, spitting rose petals atop a puddle of melting hot pink ice cubes.

A few weeks ago, I saw Bhanu again—this time through a screen, while she read from her new book, which shares a name with our most recent encounter. In the time since I last saw her, I’d begun to approach my experience of adoption from new angles. A news article about a little boy who was taken from his home country by a couple who paraded him in front of their followers, collecting gold stars for their selflessness, until he didn’t fit their idea of a son and they decided to “rehome” him, led me to an online community of adoptees. I’ve never felt like I fit in with other adoptees because I’ve always known the main characters in my story—I don’t have the same mountains to climb in terms of searching for my biological family and not having access to my original birth certificate. What I found through this community was that feeling isolated and out of place is itself common among adoptees. People spoke of adoption as having some of the same symptoms of other forms of displacement after incurring the primal wound of being separated from their biological mothers—the pressure to assimilate; the requirement of gratefulness at having been rescued and taken into the new home, coupled with the threat of losing “home” if, by choice or by nature, the adoptee didn’t live according to the script or within the parameters of the adoptive parents; the indelible stain of otherness.

A thumbnail of Bhanu Kapil lighting a candle at the beginning of her reading of “How to Wash a Heart,” alongside the Zoom nameplate for Will Harris.

Bhanu read alongside Will Harris, whose essay Mixed-Race Superman, probed another sort of not-fitting -in-ness—that of being mixed race in a society which is constantly looking for ways to categorize everyone and everything. Interwoven with his own experiences, he wrote about Keanu Reeves and President Obama, noting a difference between them was that Keanu Reeves can shape-shift and is often seen as enigmatic, while Obama, like Harris, can’t choose how to be seen. An identity is placed on them before they open their mouths. He also said when he emphasizes one part of himself, he feels like he is “erasing the other.”

“I feel too few and too many.”

-Will Harris

As a white American-Canadian living in the UK on an Ancestry Visa, I’m aware my immigrant experience is more privileged than most. When people ask me where I’m from, it’s usually from a place of curiosity, rather than derision or xenophobia, and it is only ever based on my accent—never my skin color. I am also never told, and it is never insinuated, I don’t belong in the country in which I was born. Still, these ideas of being too few and too many, of not belonging anywhere, of feeling the precariousness of having one’s security conditioned on compliance, are baked into my being.

I was only able to find a way to move here when I let go of my attempts to make the parents who raised me forget I came from someone else (my visa is through my Scottish biological maternal grandmother, and was obtained through a familial cooperative endeavor completely separate from my adoptive parents). When I’m asked whether I have siblings, I hesitate, because either true answer (yes, I have two biological brothers, and no, because I grew up as an only child within my adoptive family) feels unable to contain the whole truth of my being. When I’m asked where my parents live, I can give an easy answer and say they live in Tanzania/Florida (referring to the parents who raised me), or I can list where each of my three moms live, which will require me to spin out a story most people don’t want to hear when they’re making small talk.

It wasn’t until I heard Bhanu reading the poems—set within a home in which a citizen host (with an adopted child the host/mother calls an “Asian Refugee”) has taken in an immigrant guest with “a precarious visa situation” and proceeded to attempt to micro-manage the guest to fit her desires while projecting a saintly image of herself to her friends—that my mind flashed back to the blocks of ice-heart and the chunks of my throbbing heart-embers.

At the end of the reading, the moderator asked Bhanu and Will if they had any advice for the audience. Bhanu repeated the instruction that brings me back to my fragmented heart:

Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

After the reading, I went to the kitchen to make dinner and realized the beets from that week’s vegetable delivery needed to be eaten. As I chopped them, my hands took on the tinge of Bhanu’s blocks of ice.

While I was cooking, a friend posted a story about a time she tried to donate her hair and it returned to her several months later in an envelope, with the explanation it needed to be in a ponytail, not a braid, to be accepted. This story made me think about how when I was a little girl and asked for a short haircut, I was told I needed to keep my hair long, because my dad liked long hair. I remembered how exhilarated I felt, a few weeks before the meditation with Bhanu, when I disregarded the advice and preferences of the men around me and asked a stranger to chop my hair to my chin.

I thought about the definition of dismemberment:

noun: dismemberment; plural noun: dismemberments

1. the action of cutting off a person's or animal's limbs.

   "graphic pictures of torture and dismemberment"

2.  the action of partitioning or dividing up a territory or organization.

   "the dissolution and dismemberment of the British empire"

What I know about it is that my heart has been in pieces for as long as I can remember, and I don’t think I’ll ever be able to sew them back together.

What I know about it is that nothing I have experienced has been more painful than being excised from a family.

What I know about it is that sometimes, when you’re the one holding the knife, dismemberment can be freeing.

What I know about it is this:

It’s exhausting to be a guest
In somebody else’s house
Forever.
Even though the host invites
The guest to say
Whatever it is they want to say,
The guest knows that host logic
Is variable.
Prick me.
And I will cut off the energy
To your life.

-Bhanu Kapil

This has become much longer than I anticipated, perhaps because I don’t know how to end this. A few years ago, someone told me, when I said I wasn’t sure how one person could have a place within three disconnected family trees, that perhaps I was my own root, or a new sort of tree, grafted together from different types. I’ve ruminated over what that might mean for a long time.

Like Harris, I am “perpetually confused.” I feel alone in my particular experience, but reminders that others are also forging their identities “in the confusing space between” gives me the comforting feeling of community. I don’t think I’ll ever fit my identity into any group or essay or place, but I do think I’m starting to know myself in spite of myself. I am learning “to embody contradiction,” rather than carve out the parts which don’t fit.

Choices

Tired from my second red-eye in three nights and from months of accumulated stress, I arrived in Zanzibar yesterday morning. As the passengers around me unclipped their seatbelts, stretched their legs and unsealed overhead compartments, I thought about the big red backpack I would need to hoist down and onto my shoulders before I could walk off the plane and into the green heat.

I’d brought the backpack, rather than checking a roller-bag, because I wanted to prove to myself I could figure out how to get myself across the island using dala-dalas, the (very cheap, very crowded) Tanzanian form of public transport, instead of taking a taxi, which would cost about the same as a cab ride across London and which would be seamless and simple. I do this sometimes—set myself inconvenient challenges to prove my self-sufficiency.

This summer, life felt easy and smooth, and with deep sincerity, I told my therapist I was worried I was getting soft, that I was losing my edge, and that this scared me. I used to have this thing where I tried not to cry in therapy, because I didn’t want to waste precious minutes that could be spent spilling out a bucket-full of loose memory-beads and trying to find a pattern in which to string them together before the clock ran out, but when my therapist asked why I needed to have an edge, my voice broke. Sniffling and blinking and looking at the ceiling, I tried to explain that I’d become convinced, very early on, that if I could be chosen, I could be unchosen, so I needed to be prepared for the people and structures around me to disappear or crumble. “When my world blows up, as it tends to do, I need to be ready for it—I can’t run or fight or do whatever it is I need to do if I’m lounging around, believing in some fairytale life where no one leaves and everything goes smoothly. I’m not a comfort-zone person,” I said. She asked if I really wasn’t a comfort-zone person, or if I just didn’t know what a comfort-zone felt like. She challenged me to try to lean into comfort, to try to work through the discomfort I felt about making myself vulnerable in this way.

I tried to focus on the joy I got from taking care of 46 plants on my balcony, becoming a weekend-regular at a vegan restaurant nearby and being good at my job, but I still felt anxious about not feeling anxious enough. At the end of the summer, to make sure I still had it, I took myself, by myself, on a four-and-a-half-day, 96.8-mile hike through western Scotland, carrying everything I needed in this same red backpack. I pressed through knee pain and climbed something called “The Devil’s Staircase” alone in the dark, and by the end, I felt reassured that I was indeed strong, and this made me feel safe.

A few days after crossing the finish line in Scotland, I rolled into my first adoptive mom’s driveway in Louisiana. I texted her to let her know I had arrived, and when she didn’t respond for several minutes, I called. The phone rang and rang, so I hung up, took some deep breaths and walked towards the front door. I didn’t ring the bell because I was afraid of her dog, a Rottweiler who had lunged and snapped at me the last time I’d visited, transporting me into the mind of my four-year-old self, who had been knocked over and chased by a big dog and was afraid anything that barked would tackle me and tear off my face. I peered through the glass beside the door, trying to be noticed while also trying not to be.

My mom jumped up from her chair when she saw me, and the dog barked. I took another deep breath while she latched her finger under the dog’s collar and guided her towards the back door, into the yard. Last year when I visited, she told me her memory was starting to feel “thin,” and I dismissed her, as much to comfort myself as her—reminding her she’d always been a little spacey and telling her not to worry. When she came back to greet me, I felt a new weight to our embrace, but I didn’t realize how much had changed in the year since I’d seen her, how much more of her I had already lost.

Three days ago, on the first morning of my seven-week writing trip, I sat down for breakfast in Doha with one of my brothers. I have two older brothers, whom I have known my whole life, and we share the same biological parents, but I was adopted and they were not. I’ve read a lot of adoption stories, seeking parallels, seeking solidarity, but they never quite tick all the boxes, and I usually end up feeling more isolated. Most adoptees who write about their experiences focus on the empty space at the beginning of their lives. The Blank First Chapter. Because my adoption was open, I haven’t struggled to supplement a dearth of information; rather, my challenge has been parsing through the abundance of (often conflicting) information and the cacophony of voices which have chimed in to tell me who I am.

Near the end of breakfast, after I’d explained why I no longer identified as Christian and rattled on about how I had been giving my job everything I had, but was struggling with feeling a lack of purpose at work, my brother set his hands on the table. “Alright, I’m going to get really deep with you.” He asked if I felt any anger towards my birth father over my adoption. Whether I was resentful that I’d been given away, when my brothers had been kept. My instant response was the same it’s always been—I said I’ve never wished I wasn’t adopted; it was my adoptive parents’ divorce and what felt like abandonment by my first adoptive mother when I was two that I believed was my deepest wound and what I thought was the source of my anxious attachment style. There were things that I was sensitive about, like people referring to rehoming shelter animals interchangeably as “rescuing” or “adopting,” or having to take a few seconds to decide how to answer when someone asked me a simple biographical question like whether I had siblings, but overall, I didn’t think being adopted was one of the things that messed with my head. He sat back in his chair and the conversation drifted.

My flight from Doha to Zanzibar took off at 2:20am, and after spending hours wandering the duty free shops with my growing pack strapped to my back, I thought I would fall asleep immediately. Instead, I found myself flipping through the new releases and hovering over one featuring Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore. The tagline described a fraught relationship between one beautiful white woman who ran an orphanage in India and another who ran a company in New York. It seemed like it might be white-savior-y, but I watched the trailer anyway, and I stayed up for two of the six hours of the flight watching the film. (Spoiler alert—it’s about adoption.) Because my open adoption doesn’t fit the narratives we usually hear about adopted children, I’ve spent most of my life thinking my brain was wired differently to both the non-adopted people in my world and other adoptees, and feeling isolated from both, but even though the story on the screen was drastically different to mine, I felt my heart jumping and aching at certain parallel points. I also felt annoyed at and disappointed by certain stereotypes, like the birth mother everyone seemed to think it was alright to criticize for choosing to leave a child she couldn’t take care of at 18.

Once I made it through customs and immigration, I didn’t have the mental or physical energy for the dala-dala challenge, so I hitched myself to the first taxi driver to approach me in the arrivals hall. He drove quickly, and soon I was on the beach, taking intermittent naps and journaling about my conversation with my brother, my thoughts on the film and my questions about how being adopted actually had affected me.

My plan for today was to take a kite-surfing lesson, have a FaceTime therapy session and read something else, but a sudden downpour prompted me to check the weather and I saw the storms were going to continue until evening. Because my brother’s question and my quick response kept floating to the front of my mind, I decided it was the day to read “You Don’t Look Adopted,” by Anne Heffron. A few days before leaving London, I had not heard of this book, but while I was making last minute psychology-book purchases to read while working on my own book, an algorithm recommended it to me. The reviews said it was necessary reading for every adopted person, and even though I felt skeptical, I decided to bring it along, in case in my writing I found it necessary to understand how other adopted people felt, so I could show how different I was—how even among a class of people widely considered misfits, I didn’t fit.

I expected Heffron’s book to dwell on this aspect that made me feel different and alone, but instead, I found myself underlining the first sentence: Most of my life I have felt both real and not real. A few years ago, during an intense episode of dissociation, I begged my partner at the time to assure me I was real, because I really didn’t know. I flashed back to the hours I spent propped on the sink in our downstairs bathroom, staring at myself in the mirror and saying, over and over, “You aren’t real. You are a robot. You aren't real.” I’d found myself in that position over and over, whenever I felt myself slipping from reality, and I’d never associated that practice with having been adopted, but in Heffron’s book, she talks about how adopted kids stare in the mirror because they are searching for themselves.

I kept underlining, and when the time came for my therapy session, I excitedly read paragraph after paragraph to her, including these, which I’d surrounded in stars and heavy lines:

You will hear all sorts of things that, the speaker will most likely claim, have nothing to do with adoption.

But children born to their parents were created while adoptees were chosen, and the problem there is that in order to be chosen we first had to be unchosen. The fact of the matter is that it’s hard not to take being given up by your mother personally.

Becoming your own person sounds like a wonderful thing, and it did to me, too. But overshadowing that desire is a greater fear of separation. The fear that becoming your own person equals losing your parents equals losing safety equals dying. I think this is the glitch in the brain many adopted children have that the world at large doesn’t understand. It happens quickly and it doesn't get talked about, but it is there. Remember, the moment the baby is born, everything he knew for nine months disappears suddenly. This baby has a pre-verbal thinking mind, and I believe it stores this sensory memory, and some people—I don’t know why it affects some people more than others—spend the rest of their lives waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the world as they know it to disappear yet again, and so they develop all sorts of defense mechanisms to prevent this from happening. The inability to attach in a healthy manner to another human being is a popular one. I’ve basically perfected it and have therefore spent my adult life pushing love away as vigorously as I have searched for it.

It wasn’t just about being adopted. It was about feeling okay about being yourself after experiencing any kind of trauma when your brain was constantly telling you there was danger ahead and that, at any moment, the other shoe was about to drop and you were going to be in deep shit.

As I read to my therapist, I felt like I had found some sort of key, but there weren’t any answers—just shared thoughts and feelings, like I’d shared a brain with someone who also knew what “the gaping yawn of loss” felt like. I connected with the fragmentary style of Heffron’s writing, the way each shard of memory or reflection felt slightly different and important, how each seemingly unrelated piece had to be present in order to make the whole. It wasn’t about how adoption affected one aspect of her life, but about how the hunger it created bit into every slice—her work, her relationship with her parents, her parenting, her relationships to food and her body, her romantic life, the challenges she set for herself. I didn't feel excited that she had gone through so much pain because she felt disposable and unreal, but I felt grateful to read that someone else had felt that way, too. It was also encouraging to see that some of the methods I’ve started to use to work through trauma helped her—learning to inhabit her body, exposing herself to her fears rather than guarding against them, choosing to say yes to things that build up her real self (not the selves she creates for other people). Heffron wrote that she wanted to write a book about adoption—it was the one thing she knew she would regret not doing before she died, and it seems that by figuring out how to face herself and use her voice, she started to find ways to value herself and rewrite some of the narratives that her young mind had determined were logical.

This started as a comment in an Instagram story about being grateful for the rainy day that gave me time to read this book. I had more to say, so it evolved into a post, and when that started to get lengthy, I decided it was worth taking my laptop out of the safe to write up some of the thoughts and feelings I’ve been having over the last few days on this topic. I don’t feel like any of this has changed my answer to my brother’s question—and the trauma of losing my first adoptive mom through the custody battle probably is my deepest wound, because she was my mom during the years I was learning how to interact with the outside world, and we were torn away from each other—but I’m grateful for the opportunity to look more closely at this aspect of my story, and grateful to Heffron for writing hers.

Reflection Point

I wasn’t thinking about the date this morning as I stood in front of the wardrobe, absently fingering the fabrics inside and staring out beyond the rows of chimneys stretching from here to Vauxhall Bridge Road. The sky was a clear blue sheet, marked only by a wide white contrail. I let my mind drift as I watched it slowly erase itself before turning to the task of choosing something to wear.

I am the type of person who pulls out my summer clothes at the first hint of a crescendo in temperatures (a vestigial habit picked up by growing up in North Dakota, where the winters are fierce and every warm day must be treasured and celebrated). Since Spring has been teasing us here in London for the past couple months—two days ago, on a long walk through the countryside, I felt chilled wearing black jeans, a flannel and a rain jacket; yesterday I wrote my morning pages on the balcony in a slip dress—my closet currently holds a mixture of multi-colored skirts and dark turtlenecks. Without bothering to check the forecast for today, but feeling optimistic because of the blue-and-white sky, I decided to give my blue-and-white gingham dress its inaugural wear for the year. After zipping it, tying a bow around my waist and shaving my legs in the bathroom sink, I hurried through the rest of my pre-commute rituals.

Just before heading out the door, I pushed my headphones into my ears and pressed Play on a “Hidden Brain” podcast episode called “For Sale, By Owner,” about “repugnant transactions,” a term coined by the economist Alvin Roth to describe “taboo exchanges” ranging from the sale of one’s organs to the attempt to pay a host of a dinner party what the provided meal would have cost in a restaurant. Midway through my sideways ride along the underground rails, the discussion turned to surrogacy, and I heard the voice of Mary Beth Whitehead, a woman who, in the mid-1980s, entered into a surrogacy contract with Mr. and Mrs. Stern, a couple for whom a traditional pregnancy was medically discouraged. Ms. Whitehead was inseminated with Mr. Stern’s sperm and carried the pregnancy to term before releasing the newborn into the couple’s care. Shortly after giving birth, the mother changed her mind, and a custody battle ensued. Known as the “Baby M case,” the litigation surrounding the custody of the child influenced the invalidation of surrogacy contracts in New Jersey and a number of other states.

Making my way up the stairs to street level, I wondered what that experience must have been like for Ms. Whitehead, for Baby M and for the couple. It seemed the quintessential example of a no-win situation—if custody was given to the biological mother, the biological father would be separated from his offspring and the woman whose motherhood wasn’t genetically sourced would also suffer a deep loss. If the court granted custody to the couple, the unique bond between the woman whose body provided the child’s first home and the child would be severed, causing both of them pain. It seemed like a mess they’d gotten themselves into, and it was tempting to think they shouldn’t have done it, but there were questions and rebuttals that nipped at the heels of that idea—if they hadn’t been able to pursue this nontraditional route to parenthood, would the couple’s sorrow about not being able to have a child be any less severe than this pain? If the couple and the woman hadn’t entered into this contract, a real, live human who has surely contributed something to society wouldn’t exist—didn’t that make it all worth it? Does the fact that love is always more complex than we anticipate mean we shouldn’t pursue it?

I was still ruminating about the lack of easy answers for other people, while somehow not registering the parallels with my own non-traditional family and adoption, when I found myself in the sunlight again. I caught my reflection in a shop window, and at the sight of my dress, my mind opened a flip-book of memories, stretching back to the day I bought it—May 12, 2017.

The only thing I remember about that morning was that it was uneventful. I must have woken up on my mattress on the floor in my DC apartment before dressing in something conducive to the spring weather and riding the N4 bus down Massachusetts Avenue, past all the embassies, and disembarking just south of Dupont Circle. I must have walked east for several blocks before arriving at the office building where I worked, passing through the granite lobby and riding the mirrored elevator upstairs. I must have sat at my desk, alternating between reviewing the documents on the computer screens in front of me and the phone screen in my hand. I must have taken a lunch break.

I think I was probably conscious of the fact that the next day was the first day I would be eligible to use my newly-minted UK Ancestry Visa, for which I was eligible through my Canadian biological mother and her Scottish mother. When I applied for the visa, I was asked for a preferred start date. I could choose any date and I chose May 13, 2017, because I mistakenly calculated (I was a year off) that as the date I would be exactly the same age as my biological mother had been on the day I was born, and I’d given myself the arbitrary deadline of completing the third draft of my book before then. I had been working towards obtaining the right to live and work in the UK for several years at that point, but when I chose that date, it was more about matriarchal symbolism and arbitrary writing deadlines than any firm intention to uproot my life that spring.

Around midday, I refreshed my email inbox and found an offer to join a project as a contract lawyer in London, beginning the following Monday. It took me all of ten minutes to run around to my bosses (who knew I’d been waiting for an opportunity like this) to ask for and receive their permission to leave my project and the office—possibly for good. Soon, I was clocking out and hopping into the backseat of a cab, searching for same-day transatlantic flights on my phone and making a mental checklist of all the things I needed to do before I left. I cleared my desk at the co-working space where I’d worked towards my writing goals, stopped by my friend/landlord’s office to tell her I would be gone for I-wasn’t-sure-how-long and took another cab up to Friendship Heights to collect a bridesmaid’s dress I’d had altered for another friend’s upcoming October wedding. While I was in that area, I slipped into a few stores and broke my self-imposed clothing ban, buying several new spring pieces, including the blue-and-white gingham dress and the silk robe that has now become my most-used item of clothing. I hurried home, changed into the dress, threw a few other things into a suitcase and got into the back of another taxi—this one headed towards Dulles Airport. I posted a photo to my Instagram account of a wall of suitcases inside the terminal’s Starbucks and noted that the wall had become a sort of touchstone where I paused to take stock of my life and reflect on everything that had happened since I last saw the suitcases.

Today marks two years since the morning I landed at Heathrow and activated my visa. Today is also the day on which I am exactly one year older than my biological mother was when she gave me life.

When I gave myself the May 12, 2017 writing deadline, I was searching for an ending. I think I hoped that by reaching the age she was when she had me, I would understand my birth mother better, thereby potentially understanding myself. Our relationship has matured over the past two years and I feel grateful to have deep and unique relationships with all three of my moms, but what has helped me make the most sense of my childhood and the choices of the adults who shaped it is being a twenty-nine year old without any answers, because from here, I’m able to look at her twenty-eight year old self and understand that she couldn’t see any farther ahead of herself than I can. The only conclusion I’ve reached is that it is impossible to see into the future and futile to judge the past.

Flying Without Wings

Yesterday, I went to the ice rink at Alexandra Palace, in north London, with my friend Bob. I started to write about Bob almost two months ago, for what was meant to be a blog post (my first in almost a decade) about the Tate Modern’s exhibition “Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory,” which we attended together on the first Saturday in February (a day we had earmarked for birding, but which we decided was too windy and cold to stand outside), and about the following Saturday, which we spent traipsing through Elmley National Nature Reserve on the Isle of Sheppey. Bonnard’s paintings reminded me of photos I had taken of people I loved in quiet, sleepy moments, and his work evoked an imitative urge to pull out my paints and revisit with oils the limbs and folds of fabric that were stored as pixels in my phone’s memory. Our day at the nature reserve seemed like art even as we were living it, our bodies and the birds painting color against a gesso sky. The connection between the two days seemed obvious to me, but I couldn’t say why. Sitting in front of this screen, I looked for an articulable connection that wasn’t too forced or sentimental, but nothing came.

Instead of creating, I collected: books about Bonnard, reviews of the exhibition, postcards with prints of the paintings that gave me that inner-vibrating feeling that reminds me I’m alive, birding journals and maps of the Isle of Sheppey. I tried to keep my mind’s eye open to spot any deeper meanings that might emerge, but nothing came, and my blog post remained a photo and an ellipsis.

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From upper left: Pierre Bonnard: The Violet Fence (1923); Dining Room in the Country (1913); Coffee (1915); Large Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1934-5); Nude in an Interior (1935); Mirror Above a Washstand (1908); Bathing Woman, Seen from the Back (1919); The Bath (1925); and Nude in the Bath (1925)

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As a little girl, the main thing I took away from the film “Bambi” was the imperative “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” It would be even better, I remember my dad saying, if people kept their mouths shut until they had something smart to say, as well.

The point of this blog is to force myself to write, and to share my writing, even when I’m not so sure it’s smart or nice or figured-out.

Almost five years ago, I started a low-residency MFA program at Goddard College’s Port Townsend, Washington campus, where I set about trying to write a book about my relationships with my three mothers. Each residency was a week-and-a-half-long flurry of panels, workshops, adviser meetings, formal readings and informal, wine-fueled salons, to which people turned up early to squeeze their names onto the lists of readers. Coming off a stifling few years of legal training and a short-lived career as a lawyer in a large firm, my creative confidence was at an all-time low. I scribbled things in my notebook in response to writing prompts, submitted pages to be workshopped and spent a few hours each evening tapping out assignments to share with my adviser, but I was terrified of reading what I wrote in front of people. When I did finally get the nerve to put my name down and stand up in front of people, my voice quaked and the paper in my hands trembled.

I grew up under spotlights, performing and competing alone on the ice in front of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people from the time I was six until I went to university, so it seems strange, at first, that a small, dimly-lit room full of writers would give me stage fright. For almost as long as I have known how to skate, I have loved to write, and when my parents told me I needed a back-up plan in case I didn’t make it to the Olympics (I didn’t), my first idea was to be an artist, a writer. People’s names were lined up on shelves all around our house, and I didn’t see why mine shouldn’t be included.

In the sixth grade, when I was ten, I achieved one of my other life-long goals of playing the lead in a play (a role which required singing) at our 800-seat church. Around the same time, my best friend and I wrote ten songs and used my parents’ tape recorder to capture our voices singing them. We wore matching Lee Pipes jeans and yellow hoodies and took photos of each other for our album cover. When we felt satisfied with what we had created, we made copies of the tape and gave them to our mothers, suggesting they play them for their friends and offering to sell the other women their own copies if they couldn't get enough of our voices.

Where did that brazen girl go?

I think the shame appeared, as it does for many girls, around the onset of puberty. My period came two months after my twelfth birthday and my parents took me out to the restaurant of my choice (a Chinese buffet in Kirkwood Mall) to celebrate, so looking back, it seems we were on track for a healthy embrace of womanhood. I bled a few times, once leaving a rusty stain in the white lycra crotch of the sequined skating dress a designer had made for me to wear for my “Last of the Mohicans” long program, and then the bleeding stopped. My mom said it was probably because I exercised so much, skating at least four hours a day, six days a week, plus running and lifting weights. She said I should feel lucky, and I was grateful not to have to worry about embarrassing stains anymore. Then my chest started growing, and my hips widened. My weight spiked and my mom took me to Marshall Fields to pick out clothes from the Misses section, reasoning that if we bought ugly things I didn’t want to wear, I would feel motivated to eat more carefully and lose the weight. With my center of gravity shifted, I lost some of the jumps I had long before mastered. My skating coach mentioned that one of the older girls in the club had undergone a breast reduction surgery, and I begged my parents to let me at least speak with a plastic surgeon. I kept performing and competing, because skating was easier than walking, because I didn’t know who I was without my feet on the ice and because I thought I needed the affirmation winning gave me. But even though I didn’t abandon the ice, my jumps inched closer to the boards as I tried to hide who I was becoming, a dangerous as well as aesthetically unappealing trend which mystified my mom and my coach.

Skaters on an ice rink with a net hanging like a curtain in the foreground.

I was home-schooled from first grade until my junior year of high school, so there weren’t many opportunities for public speaking, but I played the flute in the nearby middle school’s band and the North Dakota Youth Symphony, as well as taking private lessons. In a group with other instrumentalists and in my teacher’s basement, I was happy to reach for high notes, but I dreaded the individual performances my teacher required of her students in recitals and juried festivals every few months. Without an audience, my timbre was clear and my vibrato was steady, but as soon as I saw people watching me open my mouth, my amygdala went into overdrive and I shook through the whole performance.

These things, like Bonnard and the birds, feel undeniably connected to me. One of the threads I think I see is that when my body began to change, I started trying to hide my voice—the one I used on the ice and the one meant to emerge from my throat and through my fingers, and I’ve been hiding behind that shame (only wearing a swimming suit when I’m under a certain weight, only writing when I’m sure I have something smart to say, only sharing what I’ve written when—well, not really sharing my writing much at all) for most of my post-pubescent life.

I flew back to the States recently to attend AWP, a big annual conference for writers, because I decided this was going to be the year my book finally left the nest. People from my program were going, and I wanted to see my friends, but I was also hoping I would wind up in some preternatural scenario in which I would somehow fall into conversation with just-the-right agent, and s/he/they would ask to read my manuscript, and I would say “I’ll get that to you right away,” and I would have something I was happy with to attach to an email and send to his/her/their inbox. Sitting in the departures lounge in Heathrow with weeks’ worth of revisions between me and that imagined draft, I knew my fantasy wasn’t going to happen on this trip, and I felt myself slipping into a bit of a shame-spiral as I pushed back my mental timeline for book-completion. Just before boarding, I checked my email, where I found a message from Bob, in which he wrote “I wish you wing strength for your flight, both in the air and on your inner journey.”

While I was in the States, another friend used a flight analogy when he told me my runway was behind me, and that now I needed to pull up, hard. It was time to stop collecting degrees and pre-essay-writing reading material and “inspiration." It was time to stop thinking about becoming and start being.

“How?”

Yesterday, I put my blade on the ice and remembered what being feels like. One stroke, even in an unfamiliar rink filled with strangers, and I know, without question, I belong. I spent the first fifteen minutes warming up and stretching muscles I never use anymore, and then, swerving around children on their spring break, I started marking out the Argentine Tango, the Rhumba and and Westminster Waltz. I did a few sit spins, laybacks and camel-change-camels in the middle of the rink. I’m not quite as familiar with my edges as I used to be, and my back-spin traveled about two feet, but the feeling of being on the ice—something I have tended to only do on my birthday in recent years—was glorious. Now that skating is no longer a load-bearing wall in the construct of my identity, I can appreciate it for what it is—a way to fly without wings. There’s a feeling of comfort that comes with mastery. Sometimes I feel hints of that when I write, when words serpentine through my mind and fall onto a page, but when I think about what it would take to reach my peak performance again on the ice, I know I’m due a lot of early mornings, hard falls and public embarrassment if I’m ever going to reach the standard I’m aiming for as a writer.

A clean stripe of ice in the wake of a Zamboni resurfacing the rink in Alexandra Palace.

When I stepped onto the rubber mats after an hour-long session, I sat on the bench in the box next to the ice and wiped the snow from my blades. I got really excited showing Bob my K-Pick, Pattern 99 blades, running my finger along the carefully engineered rocker and explaining that the triple-wide toe pick was meant to allow for more thrust on toe-assisted jumps. I continued walking him through the anatomy of my skates as I unlaced them, pausing to show him where I’d nicked the top layer of white leather off the right toe of my boot with my left toe pick, which crossed over my right foot when I wrapped myself into the tight helix necessary for fast rotations in the air. I told him about the array of blister pads I used to have to wear before getting these skates, which were molded to my feet. I’ve always thought of my skates as my friends (sort of like books), and I caught myself feeling the giddy rush of introducing two people I care about to each other.

“Maybe I should write an essay about my skates,” I said.

“You should write about everything you know and care about,” he said.

And so. A blog.

At the top, a black-and-white photo of a man in skates, leaping above the heads of women in winter hats. Below, two old-fashioned vending machines—one filled with snacks and the other with Coca-Cola.

Bonnard and Birds

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