Water exists in three states: solid, liquid, and gas. It transforms easily. Steam condenses into liquid, which can be frozen to form ice, melted, and then heated back into a gaseous state.

My adoptive mother, a registered nurse, believed I should know how to swim, but early on I was terrified of water. I’m now grateful, but when I was around three or four and took my first swimming lesson, I was not happy.

Squealing with fear over my head going under water, I was the very last child in the class to allow it. And when I did, it wasn’t my mother who took the plunge with me. One of the other lady teachers had to hold me and dunk us both, after which I arose sputtering and crying, much like I’d been doing all day.

I’d made a scene and embarrassed us. Embarrassed her. This wouldn’t do. This little girl who didn’t seem to like her mother confused those around us. Everyone in the class sensed our unease. I needed to feel safe, and she couldn’t emotionally provide that. The tragedy is neither of us understood why. 

We assume that children are fluid and adaptable, like a river we will follow whatever path of least resistance lies before us. But along the way, we’ll collide into other objects and the friction causes stress. The loss of my first mother to adoption and being unable to bond with my second mother were two epic boulders in my path. 

My little nervous system had no words, and neither did my raising mother. “Just don’t embarrass her” became the only rule. Whatever I needed or deserved became secondary. 

As I grew, I became more solid and less liquid. Water was too uncertain and unpredictable. I needed to protect myself, so I grew cold and distant. Full of grit and determination, my icy exterior made me a survivor. Was this insecurity from my adoption? Who cared. It didn’t matter as long as no one could hurt me.

At the age of nineteen, I was in a terrible car accident. My boyfriend and I were both ejected from the vehicle, and my head and neck led the impact. I sustained a fracture of my C-2 vertebrae. The Christopher Reeves snap of the neck. Except, miraculously, mine held. By a sliver of bone the size of a toothpick, my spine survived the onslaught, preventing me from being instantly paralyzed from the neck down. I was astonishingly lucky.

It was very late at night and pitch black, but three men saw us and stopped, calling the EMTs who scooped me up off the pavement and transported me first to one, and then, to a second hospital. Doctors and nurses successfully gave me the right medical attention in the right way and helped me recover. I can walk, run, and leap, and am grateful for the people who helped me. Maybe some people are safe. Maybe I can trust just a little and allow a bit of a thaw to my hard edges. 

It’s lonely being a block of ice. When I married, I melted into the semi-warmth of water. Together, we reveled in a new phase of life, and love restored me. I flowed open and free, liquid once more.

Eventually I saw something else. A fog engulfed me and this state of being lasted for years. I needed it. It took my raising mother’s death for me to entertain another view of what adoption is, and what it made of her, of me.

The steam was thick, suffocating, and it took effort to do anything real. But it was also warm and comforting. Why leave? Outside the world was cold and unknown. The womb of the fog felt safe, or was that a false disguise?

Swiping away at this gaseous cloud, I forced the air to clear and condensed the fog back into water draining away at my feet. 

I was loved. I was wanted. I grew in the water of my first mother’s womb and, as we both screamed in pain at my delivery, the water and blood and tears of it all swallowed us. We made a scene. Embarrassed us both in the shame of it all.

I found my first mother, but she stays in the safety of the fog while I’ve wiped it away to see myself fully in the mirror. One mother lives in the heavens, while the other is unable, for now, to connect or have a relationship and let us flow like water. 

I swim on.