Adopting parents, 

adapting child, 

“coming out of the fog,” 

You carried and left me there. What if I never had to enter the haze?

Can I ever understand the permanent, perfect impact this has? 

It is you, us, together, apart. 

The need to create our own dictionary of new words to explain, defend, diffuse…

”Why?” we ask. “Why?”

If I am coming out of this phrase, did I even have to shelter there? 

Was this a cryonics experiment of my heart to protect how chaotic the results would appear day, week, month, year after year? 

How a birthday is like an exploding cake…once a good idea, feels like a mistake. 

There is an implosion of thoughts, 

feelings that simultaneously recognize the gift in being alive

and the severing that slowly took place,

like surgery with a dull knife. 

Don’t worry, we survive, 

but the anesthesia stays with you; for many, over a lifetime. 

Then when the “coast is clear,”  

you thaw out, 

your numbing starts to fade, feelings overload your mind. 

Can’t eat. Can’t sleep. 

Coming to, you see everything differently, 

not loving less, 

just letting together happen or unapologetically distancing. 

For most, birthdays are cake and ice-cream, 

but for me it was never just that simple. 

There was mist at my birthday, 

a presence of all that was never said. 

Yes, there was a party, a meal, family unrelated to me. 

We celebrated.

I appreciated the efforts. It mattered. 

If adoption is this beautiful answer to a question,

I don’t understand, 

why do I have to “come out” of the cloudy day in my life?

I never chose to be separated, isolated. 

Why can’t you come to me? I am not coming out of a haze. 

I am doing what has always been hard for me, 

just be me in this world, 

as soon as I learn to be bilingual in adoption vernacular.

Most days there is a language barrier.

I carry the weight of all the indescribable emotions that now I am writing. 

The pen allows for my mixed-up perspective to spill out, inviting in the hard truths. 

So I can light a candle, smelling the vanilla, 

reminding myself that I am both my mothers’ daughter. 

Cutting roses from the aptly named “Grit-n-Grace” thorny stems,

for my Mother of memory,

who is no longer alive. 

Yearning to share, ask, chat, shed tears, and laugh, 

to stare in the face of my mirrored mother who remains ghostly in life. 

I wonder what she is doing right now. 

If adoptees arrive “out of the fog,” 

where do birth mothers come from?