Everything I thought I knew about life I learned in my mother’s womb. It’s true! Before I was born, I fed on the knowledge of my impending abandonment, the end of me. I ate the ambient awareness of my rejection through what kept me alive, what nourished me, the very substance of my mother, body, mind, and spirit. From her, I consumed a model of the world that didn’t include me, had no room for me. In short, I learned on a visceral level, before thought, that life is a double-bind: Eat shit or die, kid!

Adoption confirmed and amplified this message. As an adopted child, I ate my own erasure in order to survive as someone I was not. I lived without mirroring, without being seen or known, negated in the gaze of the very people I depended on for food, shelter, and a facsimile of belonging. I consumed the image of who they needed me to be and dutifully became that image. Beneath the image, I was no one, a displaced person, dislocated in the Nothing Place.

But life is not that! Push! Push!

I replicated this pattern in my life and relationships as an adult, believing that I had to remain invisible, hidden, a mirror of other people’s needs and wishes, a passive body to be acted upon, someone who is not supposed to be here in the first place. I attached myself to unavailable women who kept me on a leash of false hope, dangling the impossible before me, that one day, somewhere on the other side of the retreating horizon, they might love me for who I am at long last. But that day never came.

Conversely, I ran from the double-bind, the deep-down conviction that relationships demanded that I swallow my own negation and displacement. I built a fortress around myself, cultivated an identity in projecting an aura of self-sufficiency and independence, fled into wilderness, to monasteries and meditation centers, wagging my middle finger behind me: “Fuck you! I didn’t need you anyway!”

But life is not that! I have yet to be born! Push! Push!

Then I found the eyes that could see me, fellow adoptees who knew the double-bind of the annihilating knowledge we consumed to survive, the food that negated us before we even got to be someone. Eyes that reflect the torture chamber I endured, but are no longer bound to that womb-tomb experience.

Push! Push! The double-bind is not life. It is only what we lived and what we mistook for life because we didn’t know anything else, couldn’t know anything else. We were born into the destruction of the only ‘us’ we knew, mother and child in an unbounded unity until we were irrevocably severed—no ‘we’ no ‘I.’ But life is not that.

Push! Push! When we compassionately mirror one another and affirm our shared experience, our buried and disowned loss of self, we become the ‘us’ we’ve been waiting for, just not the one we expected.

Push! Push! This is what birth really is, emerging into life beyond the double-bind. We give life to one another in communicating, deeper than words, “I see you. I know you’re suffering. I am here with you. We are not alone.”

Push! Push! This is what life really is, a labor of generative, nourishing love in the mutuality of giving and receiving. We know that now. The double-bind is behind us. The joy and the miracle of the fruit of our labor far outweigh the pain.

Welcome to the world.