The room was overheated and ugly in the way that only outdated governmental waiting rooms can be. We peered through green air as if in an old Polaroid, as if swimming under water. People laughed watery laughs and gesticulated bleary hands and drifted along rippling floors, swollen with adrenaline.

When the babies arrived efficiently in an almost ecclesiastical procession of nannies who seated themselves (in synchronized fashion) in the long row of chairs at the far side of the room, another unwanted wave of adrenaline sloshed through the room. K and I ran this first gauntlet—finding her in the line-up of twenty-three babies—winning a hollow victory. She looked nothing like the chubby, ruddy-cheeked baby in the pictures.

Propped on the Director’s lap she was sallow, all elbows and knees, her bald head covered in scabs. She stared at her fingers, rocking back and forth, seemingly unaware of the commotion. Well, everything. Seemingly unaware of everything. We passed a second test (the receiving of the child) with another unwanted victory of sorts—she did not scream, cry, squirm, flail, emit a sound, or make eye contact. She did not move; she did not turn her head, the back of which was too flat.

I too was unwell, having been at the International Clinic with a lovely, nectar-filled I.V. bunged in my arm the previous day. Our adventure had begun marvelously—enveloping airline chairs reclining flat, cozy with warm blankets, amusing slippers, nonsensically small tubes of tooth powder. If at thirty thousand over the Pacific a feral bird reeking of ambiguity and vulnerability landed heavily on my eye-masked head it didn’t matter. Slumped under its weight I buoyed myself by recalling the extensive preparations. If the unthinkable were to occur these cushions were life vests and I could swim.

Out of the crisp hotel in baking air we stared at beautiful strange things, our note-taking clerical: the briny-sour of grocery shops, the flat-slap of pedestrians, the pearl-smoothness of ancient statuary. We documented with photographs and video, reporting back to our stateside people. We read corrugated plastic signs and checked things off.

The Bird-of-Ambiguity-and-Vulnerability (TBAV, whom we named Frank and whose purple talons would not leave my head) wobbled annoyingly, limiting my view and fatiguing my neck. With Frank we purchased what we been instructed to purchase (jade, porcelain, shoes with lions on them). The rule about no lettuce Frank and I followed exactly, K less so. We three memorized culturally relevant facts. We three looked fixedly at things, day after day, in an increasingly stoically happy and interested manner in the stale August heat, looking fixedly until one afternoon little pieces of the world began to dissolve and I, always prone, curled into a flat black bench, sweating and crying, asking K to please give the baby a kiss for me and tell her I was so very sorry. Then smeary snapshots of a lengthy, circuitous ride in a pedicab which resembled nothing so much as the last fifty or so pages of Moby Dick.

Share

After the I.V. the flights were fine, the buses fine, the hotel room fine, the bed severe but flat. Flat was my favorite, next to motionless. And now here we were, the girl with the shark eyes, Frank, and I, on the hard, flat bed (which was fine), motionless excepting her occasional rocking, staring at each other, she thinking unknown thoughts, Frank occasionally pecking the furrows on my forehead.

Of course I knew many adopted children are withdrawn initially. I reminded myself we were only one night in, less than twenty-four hours from our introductions. I thought how Walt Disney (in unrepentant contrast to Dickens) told stories about orphans who were unrecognized princesses. There was something, though. Her lower leg-like appendages were previously unused, dollish in their floppiness. She solemnly vomited every time we put solid food in her mouth. The other girls recognized each other at breakfast and on the bus. The other girls ran up and down the hallway. The other girls were not suspended in a baffling fog, not with the unblinking button eyes of ghost children in Coraline’s Otherworld.

On our laptops K and I researched potential diagnoses. We said the word autism out loud, flatly but quietly, within the confines of our room. I emailed the thoughtful International Adoption doctor at the famous research hospital about our daughter whose head was not fine. K chatted up the other parents who had children with round heads. Out of the hotel room we remained stubbornly jolly as we continued to stare at things and take video, video which would one day represent the Before in the aftermath of a miracle.

The back of her head was hard to look at.

Heads. What can heads do? Heads can march in straight lines to solve Challenges. Heads can gather relevant facts and document incidents unequivocally. Heads can breathe while backstroking in chlorinated swimming pools. Heads cannot submerge themselves in murky water long enough to hit bottom and scrabble for ancient shipwreck coins. Heads cannot be flat.

The heads continued to go places and do things. The heads rode elevators and buses and wrote names on papers. Our heads stuffed large suitcases full of formula and diapers and checked out. Our heads wrestled multiple suitcases full of too-big clothes and unused toys and checked in. We pushed through touristy tours with elaborate cameras in front of our eyes. We slung the feather-light girl with shark eyes and together climbed up and down, in and out, over and through.

Frank shifts, comfortable in his elaborate nest in my hair. Together on the flat bed we stare into those dead shark eyes with as much joy as we can muster for as long as we can bear, finally resurfacing and gasping, sucking in thick unfamiliar air.

Subscribe now

Share

Most of the time I’m terribly, deeply offended when people say “Everything will be okay.”

We can debate details, but there are certainly many, m. people on this earth for whom life is not okay.

In fact, I spent a couple of hours this morning reading journal articles about how none of us are okay, because we all have deep-seated trauma and grief over the climate emergency that most of us can’t process. The pandemic didn’t help.

Seeing Trauma Here, There and Everywhere

I look at almost everything through a lens of possible trauma, having been traumatized since birth. I was 6 weeks premature, weighed 4 pounds, 12 ounces, and spent a good amount of time in an incubator with my under-developed lungs.

Those days there weren’t volunteer grannies to come into the NICU and hold you. No hand-knitted hats. There weren’t even NICUs. I was a newborn on my own.

A lens of trauma may sound like a bad thing, but it’s a way to gain more information, and to train myself to be more sensitive to other’s pain. Maybe a bit less judgmental. Perhaps a smidge kinder.

5 Common Behaviors That May Be Signaling Trauma

Busyness

Busyness is pretty common in many cultures in the 21st century. People are busy for many reasons, but too much busyness can signal dysfunction.

I have a friend who’s constantly busy – 4 kids, volunteering at school, food drives, church, she even managed to get herself elected president of the PTA in a place where that was a sign of power and prestige.

I met this friend in therapy. She grew up with an alcoholic father who moved her family every year.

And I know her busyness was to keep herself from thinking or feeling. I met at least 10 people in therapy who aggressively used busyness to avoid feeling their pain.

Dissociating

All 3 of my kids dissociated in different ways, and learning about their dissociation made me realize that my childhood of dedicated reading was trauma-based dissociation.

One child was diagnosed with ADHD inattentive type. My two adopted kids arrived in our family with their dissociative methods well worn. My youngest would hoard food and then hide and eat it.

The two people I know very well who self-injured were quiet, sweet and compassionate. My oldest self-injured as a way to dissociate. It was a shock when I found out.

I felt like a terrible mother.

Agitation or Aggression

If you’re with someone who becomes overwhelmingly agitated and you can’t see a reason why, it could be related to a trauma trigger.

This is sadly something it seems many police officers are not trained to recognize or provide trauma-informed care.

I was sexually abused by my first husband, and one time, with my second husband, right in the middle of the things that married people do, I got triggered and I completely shut down.

I was very agitated, and not able to talk calmly. My husband got freaked out and then angry, unintentionally (or intentionally) feeding the agitation.

It took weeks for me to come all the way back down.

Increased Sense of Fight-or-Flight

I’m sure you’ve seen videos of people who are easily startled, and while it may seem like fun, you may be re-traumatizing them.

One of my children was repeatedly “startled” in the bathroom by a couple of kids in 4th grade, one of the big reasons we decided to homeschool for the following two years.

It’s a power move for abusers to keep you off-balance, and startling can easily be brushed off as “just a joke.”

I would call it gaslighting, and I wouldn’t laugh.

Hypersensitivity

I come from a family of criers. My mom cried every time she heard certain songs including the National Anthem. I was annoyed by this all the way through high school. WTH, you know?

Then I got older and started doing it too. I was appalled.

Crying can be a way for your body to signal that something’s wrong, especially crying at odd times or crying much harder than a situation warrants.

When I see it, I think about possible trauma.

Minimizing Feelings to Make Yourself Feel Better

It’s hard for us to watch other people in pain. There is an urge to make things better, to soften the blow, to say they’ll be okay. There’s an urge to comfort, sometimes accompanied by an urge to do so as quickly as possible.

But sometimes saying “Everything will be okay” is unhelpful and possibly harmful. You may want it to be true, but is it?

When you are puzzled by someone’s response – too intense, not intense enough, surprising or out of character – let your kindness, compassion and curiosity take a look at the situation.

Hold Up a Mirror

Most of these behaviors are also very useful for understanding your own reactions. Does something feel much more uncomfortable than it should? Less uncomfortable? Probably a good reason for that.

Are you numb when it doesn’t make sense? Are you freaked out by something that wasn’t that big a deal? Did you suddenly need to Get. Out. Of. The. Room? Start asking yourself gentle questions.

Rather than being self-critical about over-reacting, accept your feelings and wonder about where they come from. Journal. Mind blank? Make up 10 reasons why someone might feel the way you do. Still nothing? Take a walk, talk to a friend, or forgive yourself for being weird about that thing, and then do something you love. But keep asking questions.

The Gift of Being a Misfit

Sometimes I refer to my little clan as a “family of misfits.” I don’t mean it in a cruel way. Our trauma reactions just seemed to be out and about more than other families.

Maybe I got trauma ESP from my own traumatic childhood. Maybe therapy taught me what to see.

It felt like a burden when my kids were young, but now, now it feels like a gift.

Subscribe now

Share

Being the Black Sheep of the family gifted me low self-esteem and low self-esteem gifted me perfectionism. The reason I was labeled Black Sheep was complicated and not my fault.

I ended up marrying a sociopathic narcissist.

My first husband was a guy from my church. He was also mentally, verbally and sexually abusive. We lived away from the family while he was in the Navy, and when he deployed I went back home and moved back in with my parents.

At home, with the mother and father who gifted me the low self-esteem, I realized I couldn't stay married to him. No one in my family had ever been divorced. Big family on both sides. Zero divorces. Ever.

When I made the decision to leave my abusive husband, my mother gave me a big long lecture about how terrible my father was and how she never left him. (He's a narcissist too.) And then I got called into church to be berated by a favorite uncle and aunt, and told that they knew people who had stayed married through infidelity and that I could too, if I would just try.

There were various other confrontations. His mother. My cousins. My sister. Even after I clearly had grounds for divorce (infidelity) that wasn't good enough for anyone.

Anyone but me.

As I processed my horrific marriage and got stalked by my estranged husband, I also lost most of my family. Not everyone. But a huge chunk. It's not easy to be the first person in your churchy family to ever get divorced.

Through all that I was forced to let people go. End relationships. Stand up for myself. It was hard. I wore all black and stopped eating and thought about not living.

It was a traumatic way to do it, but I learned to trust my gut. I learned to do whatever I needed to do to survive. Not unapologetically, but moving forward. A single friend went to my divorce hearing with me.

There was no one else to go. And that was okay. Because I knew I was doing the one thing that I needed most -- getting away from my abuser.

There was a lot of fallout. Years and years and years. I would DO IT ALL AGAIN. The guilt-inducing lectures and the months of crying and my mother screaming at me and my dad not caring and my sister condemning me to hell and my cousin (also my pastor) counseling me to go back.

Because I was worth it. And so are you.

Knowing your truth and living it out in front of everyone lets you know exactly where you stand. And then you begin to rebuild a new family of people who love and accept you. Because you deserve that and you have nurtured self-confidence, enough to do it.

All the love to you.