As much as I'd like to avoid writing this entry so that I can make cheddar biscuits and eat some lentil soup, the fact of the matter is, I'm drinking wine and I'll get drunker if I don't fill my stomach with wholesome food. Another reason is that, believe it or not, sometimes I have a tough time organizing my thoughts so that they are clear and flow well and make sense, even though that's completely inorganic and not how things 'should' be. (I'm very concerned with how things should be, in case you hadn't noticed.)
On Thursday night, I got high and then started drinking before my high came down, so I'm not sure where being high stopped and being drunk started, but somewhere in there, in a fit of intoxication and ill judgment, I gave my friend Adam the link to my blog. Very few people I know outside of the blog itself have access to it, and there's a very good reason for that, a reason that would reintroduce itself within the next 24 hours.
On Friday night, I hung out with Adam, and he immediately felt he should tell me about my blog. About what he thought, about what it meant, about how he felt about me because of it. All these things that, frankly, I didn't really care about it. But he was Adamant (haha Adamant! I die!), and I'm always down for a good cockfight, so I went with it. With HBO droning in the background, Cachaça in Miller Lite glasses, and a dying game of Scrabble, Adam told me all of these things about me and all of these things about adoption and statistics and his happy little life at the University of Chicago.
It turns out, according to his expert analysis, that because I find flaws with adoption, that doesn't make it inherently bad (and is therefore somehow inherently good?), that I am angry that I'm not sure if my parents love me unconditionally, and it doesn't matter the statistics I report or the fact that I actually do feel a certain way, I am flat out wrong and he could never date someone who doesn't love movies.
I think about 8,000 times during the course of my visit, Adam told me that I don't allow myself to be vulnerable (Gee. Ya don't say, fuckhead.), that he doesn't "understand anything about [me]", that the fact that I talk about how pretty and smart I am all the time has led him to believe that I am a very insecure person (Now, I don't know why he felt the need to tell me this given that I am well aware of my insecurities and actually aim to make light of them by blatantly acting in an opposite fashion.), and, again, it would be impossible to date me.
No, it would be impossible to date me because your inseam is 12" shorter than mine and I'm pretty sure you're 21 years old because you have a sports-themed shower curtain that coordinates nicely with your football soapdish and your baseball soap dispenser and your quarterback bathmat. It would also be impossible because you have beer bottles lined up like fuckin' Heisman trophies on your kitchen counter. I will let the X-Box go because rules of etiquette state that you can play video games until you're 25, but after that, you have to stop doing that and you have to start sending thank you notes and you have to stop getting so drunk that you throw up.
(Among other things.)
Around 10 or 11 or I don't even know, I got up to pee, put my coat on when I came back, and stood by the door for another half an hour or so arguing and nearly crying several times. I almost cried because (at the time) I was feeling very belittled, and I felt like no matter what I said, he wasn't going to get it, and it wasn't that fact that was frustrating, it was that fact combined with the fact that he was positive that he did get it and was very right about that fact. There was no convincing him otherwise, he was right, I was wrong, end of story, grow the fuck up and get over it.
I left and did more crying than I probably should have over such a matter, and especially for how cold it was, but I cried and since I don't often allow myself that luxury, it caused me little feeze to have done so. The more I cried though, the more I stared bleary-eyed into the sky, the more I allowed myself to feel (another uncommon 'luxury'), the more I realized how right Adam was. It is impossible for anyone to understand anything about me.
It is impossible and not just in that broad sense of 'I am a special little snowflake and therefore completely incomprehensible', because that's just not true. You can understand many things about many people, but clearly not everything. Contrarily though, I think it's difficult if not impossible for people to understand most things about me, and I attribute a lot of that (read: not all, just most) to adoption.
I attribute it partially to the fact that I cannot readily understand myself and the complexity of my emotions. I attribute it to the fact that the origin of my life in both the sense of the opposing physicality of death and the origin of my life as I have
It made me more aware of my sense of unbelonging and surfaced several realizations for me. I feel alone because I am alone. I want to be alone because being with other people only reinforces exactly how alone I am. I do not want to be around people because it reminds me of how different I am, how different I will always be, and the difficulties that it's going to present me with. I'm not sure how this is going to impact me finding a husband. I know it's going to impact my relationships with my respective children, though I hope it's only in a way where I hold them in the crook of my arm and say, "I dreamed of you for years and I wrote about you and I want to show you what I wrote because it is so important to me for you to know how much I wanted you and how much you mean to me and the fact that I will choose no one over you, I will never leave you and that I would choose death over letting you down however inadvertently. You are the only thing I have ever wanted, and I have waited so long for you, and I want to thank you for showing up. I love you." And then, then we'll touch noses and snuggle deeper under the duvet and I'll forget about everything fucked up that ever happened to me and relish in knowing, in fucking knowing that at the very least, at the most minimal, I have and always will love my children in a way that all children
But really. Mea culpa. Back to my misery!
I thought about my relationship with my parents, the one that I tend to once a week with a phone call that normally ends with my dad (never, never ever my mom) saying, "Well, I don't have anything else to talk about," and how that always disappoints the hell out of me because I'm supposedly your child and love should conquer all and shouldn't you want to know everything about me at all times of every day?
This is not an argument that people who aren't adopted have all of that, and if you think that, I recommend the jaws of life and some Clorox disinfecting wipes.
My argument is that there is a very definite limit to how much I care about my parents and their lives, and I'm pretty sure they experience those same limits. It's why I see them once a year for a few days, and it's a very forced thing. In the meantime though, I'm calculating for them a very expensive Christmas gift so that I can ensure that the love me, even though it may not be unconditional, and I can be assured that they're never going to leave me, if not because they love me, then because I have the warranty information they need should something disastrous happen. (Everything is so...conditional.)
Imagine a crossword puzzle, in English, that's all filled in with French answers that happen to coincide and correspond. Every block is filled, every answer accounted for, but such an anomaly defies intrinsic logic, and, in that fact alone will never, ever make sense.
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