Adoptee Fog. The Lie They Made You Live.

 

Adoptee Fog. The Lie They Made You Live.

Adoptees often speak about being in ‘the fog’ or ‘coming out of the fog’. The term is used often in adoptee communities, and its origin seems to be lost in the, er, fog. The meaning of ‘adoptee fog’ to adoptees is clear, but only when you’ve actually managed to get your head above the cloud of it, even if only briefly. Let me explain.

Being relinquished at birth or shortly afterwards, being separated permanently from the mother, in the mammalian world of which we are a part, means almost certain death. Birth isn’t just any old time in a life, it’s the most supremely sensitive time for imprinting, bonding, for survival. To be born, and to feel like you are going to die…what a trajectory to begin a life on. Nature has designed mothers and babies to be a dyad, that is one thing composed of two parts. Each part needs the other to be whole. The loss of the person inside of whom you have lived your whole existence thus far, is utterly devastating.

So much energy and time goes in to growing a new human, and the care of a human baby is so intensive and all-consuming that nature has designed the bonding and early new born stage with careful precision. Every cell, every system of the new human’s physiology and biology fully expects to recover from the rigours of birth in the familiar aura of the mother’s body. Her voice, her smell, her vibration, her taste, the sound of her heartbeat, is all they have ever known and is home.

She is home, she is safety, from here we can recover, we can begin to live, and thrive and grow.

Imagine yourself just the other side of something huge, an accident, or surgery perhaps. When your doctor says you’re well enough to recover at home, you’re in total agreement that your cosy lovely place, the familiarity of loved ones and your totems and possessions that make life nicer, is where you’ll recover best. But when you get home, it isn’t your home. The person you wake up next to, isn’t your loved one. Maybe they’re a nice person, maybe they’re not; you are completely dependent upon them for your life. You feel depleted, vulnerable and in need of comfort, but this person is a total stranger. They do not have what you need.

Now imagine that everyone in your brand new home and existence pretends that your loss of everything that is familiar, comforting and precious isn’t relevant. Maybe they pretend it didn’t even happen. In fact, it’s quite important that no-one mentions your devastating loss, or acknowledges that you are grieving and in shock. Maybe you imagined it all. Probably the fault lies in you (maybe that’s why she gave you away) and maybe you’re a bit mad. So it’s best for everyone if you just act like you are the luckiest person in the world, and if you should forget this, don’t worry because everyone around you will remind you of it. For the rest of your life.

So you grow, slowly, because your nervous system is in fight or flight and this impacts the ability to thrive. You look around you at these people who don’t smell like you, don’t look like you, aren’t ‘of you’. You don’t yet have language, so you can’t explain this feeling of wrongness to yourself, let alone anyone else. Everyone you encounter appears convinced of a truth that doesn’t resonate for you, that seems counter to reality, it seems like madness itself. You are the only one who feels this way. You’re the odd one out.

Unacknowledged and unexpressed shock and grief, combined with the dread of what might come next (my actual mother left me, these new people could easily do the same) consumes most of your bandwidth. Nobody in your life reflects your extreme and abhorrent situation back to you. The only acceptable truth is that you were chosen, you are lucky, you are special. Your biological mother suffered and if you whine about losing her you’re somehow making it worse for her. You’re disrespecting her. In fact, you have a very important purpose in your life, which is to make two childless people complete. You’re the second best option, obviously, because they wanted their own child, so you must be respectful of their grief and aware that you are a poor second. But you must make them happy, fulfil their dreams, and if you don’t…well, you know what happens, because you’ve been there once before. There is no safe container for your own all-consuming and excruciating truth, in fact your own truth threatens to destroy the fragile home that you have, so you step in to the culturally acceptable lie.

This lie is otherwise known as ‘the fog’.

The fog can look like nothing ever went wrong, and that you are grateful for your adoptive parents and your life and that of course you can’t remember your beginnings so it doesn’t matter.

But you might struggle with trust, and friendships. The thought of your birthday looming might bring inexplicable feelings of anger, sorrow and a wish for the day to be over. You struggle with taking up space in life, and with an underlying feeling that you shouldn’t be here. You survive, but you don’t really grow, or thrive. Any reference to finding your biological family makes you insist that you’re happy and have no wish to search or to know. Those are the only words that will come out of your mouth because the rest, the truth, has been pushed down so far and is so unspeakably terrifying and hurtful that you can’t acknowledge its existence even in the privacy of your own thoughts.

That’s a big old fog right there.

It can also look like anxiety, depression, panic attacks, terror, stomach and eating problems, sleep problems, difficulty with relationships, relating to people, being shut down, sad, nervous system and emotional dysregulation, living from day to day with no plan ahead, and health problems in general.

How do you put your head above the clouds and see the fog for what it is?

I can only answer that from my own experience, as each person’s wake up will be individual to them. I was 47 when my moment came, and it wasn’t anything I read, or even anything anyone said. It was seeing a guy on TV being interviewed about something or another, and the interviewer asking about his childhood.

The chatty and cheery man went quiet. His eyes, as they suddenly filled with tears, took on a look that I instantly recognised.

“I was adopted as a baby,” he said.

I had, and to this day, have no single word to describe the complex and layered story that I saw and felt in the core of my being, looking at that moment at the TV screen, into that man’s eyes.

I had never seen that look before, but I instantly knew it as well as I knew anything. It conveyed simultaneously the most heart wrenching sorrow, and for me, the most gloriously truthful thing I had ever seen. It was like coming home. It was like someone had seen me, really seen me for the first time, even though I was the one doing the seeing, watching the TV, looking at a stranger whose eyes could have been mine.

I had finally seen myself.

I knew from that moment that I too had suffered a devastating loss and that my life had mainly been filled with coping with this and the slow recovery from it.

Beyond “I was adopted as a baby,” the man on the TV hadn’t even said a word. He didn’t need to, because that kind of devastation happens pre-language, yet I felt that a lifetime’s story had been communicated to me in that surprise moment of seeing the man’s soul through his eyes.

I finally saw my truth after 47 years, and the witnessing of it allowed me to realise that I was in the fog, and to start finding my way out of it. I hope that as I write my story, my words can be a lantern for other souls in this grey and cold place.

I want to acknowledge my birth mum for her love and loss and my sire and my dear mum and dad who gave the latter part of their lives to me. They gave me a safe and loving home and never made me feel second best. But as we are learning, the damage was done before they got there.