Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘“Let’s Talk” Adoption Conference’

“In family life, love is the oil that eases friction, the cement that binds closer together, and the music that brings harmony.”
Eva Burrows

 

Last night I was sitting in the amber light of my bedroom, waiting for pain medication to kick in and belly ache to subside, becoming hypnotized by the rhythm of bullfrog snores from the adjacent room where three dogs and a man slept on the couch and a memory returned to me.  Lately my mind has been swimming with ideas of infants, children, and an imagined life resembling  ”family” as defined by the traditional history of the western world–including husband, dogs, and kids.  I never considered myself a traditionalist perse but I always felt warmed by the thought of family. 

 

The idea of starting some variety of lineage of my own lead me back to my own infancy.  An international adoptee I have been pondering my own early childhood the last week as I prepare for speaking this weekend (nothing like flight and speaking engagements to hasten surgery recovery) at the Let’s Talk Adoption Conference at Rutgers University in New Jersey. 

 

I am speaking on issues of adoptee trauma, trauma and the body, and yoga for adoptees, foster children, and caregivers.  I have been revisiting many thoughts of my own infancy, childhood, and memories of family growing up–what is that definition of filial love that makes us a part of a cohesive unit under one name and one roof with one another?  For me it wasn’t a matter of blood, biological or racial heritage, or anything so literal it was only a matter of love, unconditional love.  To this day I feel that, that is the best defining point of family and the essence of what we should share with those we love most in this world.

 

In this way, as an adoptee, I was given some liberation from the idea that this status and conception must be limited to those we share blood with or a name or even a roof.  I was, in some respects, given a freedom to define and find family where it organically grew from bonds of unconditional love and support and not because of sharing genetics.  I know many people, both as a therapist and in my personal life, who were bound to unhealthy love and unhealthy bonds with people they did share genetics with, but little more in abusive family relationships and neglectful or cruel childhood histories.  I always found myself reflecting on the fact that birth giving does not make a mother, a lifetime of nurturing, loving, and mothering earns that title–birthing is just that, a physical act. 

 

The relationships we have in our life that have forged their way through hardship and trials and come out with love intact are the ties that bind us.  And love that makes a family can come from every place–it is the same love that brings life partners together and keeps them together whatever comes and what brings friends back to each other after years and miles and life lived at distances, but hearts that remain faithful to the relationship. 

 

We are, in some ways, the makers of our own lives and the molders of our own family units.  What love and which relationships make up our world is ours to embrace or reject at every turn.  We must work to create love and must work one hundred times harder to maintain and care for that precious gift.

 

So, as I thought of all these things again, preparing for speaking, and thinking of my future and what my future family might look like it also brought me backwards–to an early moment of mine, a maternal flicker in time, and the moment I first fell in love with a baby girl named Seuhedi.

 

I was fifteen at most and she was only a few months old.  It had been the year following my mother’s most recent miscarriage (actually the stillbirth of a son named Christopher) and via family meeting we had made a decision to work with an organization called Healing the Children who paired families in the USA with children from third world countries in need of housing during major operations or medical care only available in the States.  It was sort of an international short-term foster care program.  Seuhedi was the third child we had sponsored who had come from the Dominican Republic and she suffered from spina bifida.

 

 

She had the most beautiful face, with soft olive skin and deep brown eyes filled with a quiet intensity far to powerful for her age.  She was gentle and never cried except at bedtime.  I think it was the only time, in the darkness and silence of night that she realized she was alone–foreign smells, strange sounds, and no face she knew. 

 

My parents urged me to go in, speak to her, hold her hand hoping maybe I could placate her.  I walked into the room with her soft sobs the only noise echoing through darkness and silence.  The hallway outside brought in the only brightness and her crib sat covered half in shadows and half in light.  I stood over her and she reached out her tiny fingers for some comfort.  I held her hand and spoke whispers of spanish into her crib and looked at her looking at me with deep brown eyes that were so familiar–as if I were looking into a picture of  my past, hovering over myself in some orphanage from years before. 

 

In those moment something linked us together, outside of words, outside of time, locked in a familiarity of loneliness where we both understood being in an in-between world.  Night after night I would go by her crib and speak softly in my limited spanish and look into the deep eyes that knew me as I knew them.  She would not sob and my heart would fill with light and tears: in those moments with her I fell deeply in love with her tiny soul, her open beautiful heart, and the honesty that resided in her never-ending brown eyes.  She trusted me completely for no reason besides a vague sense of familiarity and understanding.  I loved her completely for allowing me into share in that space in the in-between–to connect with a part of myself I had forgotten and to give something to her that I never had.

 

That first love of a child in that kind of unconditional way was something I never felt before, never could explain, and never fully understood except that it was pure and real and based on nothing but shared moments and unconditional love. 

 

So, in thinking could I ever love a child that much–the answer is yes.  Could I love so much it expands and breaks your heart all in the same second–the answer is yes.  Am I ready for the responsibility of that kind of a love sustained for a lifetime–that is the question.  But in remembering myself, my infancy, and that first love of a child with unconditional proportions I know that it is something I am capable of.   ”Am I ready?” is the only real question.

 

I share this story with you for a multitude of reasons, but I send it out there because I know that nearly everyone in their life has someone they love so much it both breaks and expands their heart in equal measure.  That kind of love is a gift and a blessing–the gift of family.  However we define it or create it, whether it be in a traditional context or one of our own making, love is love, and it is the essence of what binds us together.  I am glad that my journey through mind and memory brought me back to the blessing of knowing and loving Seuhedi–even for the brief time I knew her.

 

“What greater thing is there for human souls than to feel that they are joined for life – to be with each other in silent unspeakable memories.”

George Eliot

 

 

1  …My husband’s move to Florida. 

Dog care and maintainance issues aside, I miss him.  I miss shared dinners after a long day of work, I miss taking the dogs out or exploring something new.  I miss watching a movie side-by-side either inside in the warmth and on a couch or shivering amid chilly theatre air.  I am excited to explore Florida together and create new memories under palms and sun.  I am hoping to find time to take a short trip to Marco Island which sounds like a lovely place and I have been hearing great things about it as a place to take a quick reprieve–from what I’m not sure, we do live in Florida, but I would love to explore.

 

 

 

2  …The NARHA 2009 Conference! 

I am beginning an amazing new adventure involving complimentary therapies and horses and I am so excited.  One of the fantastic new avenues that has opened up due to postponing the yoga teacher training by two months is giving me the time to go to a three-day conference for specialized training in the area of Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy.  I will be beginning my first pilot program in late November and am so excited for where this new path will lead and how I can cross and blend multiple holistic approaches.  I may be incorporating some seated yoga on horseback during programming!  I am very excited about all these prospects.  If only I had a charitable financier to help afford all this here learnin’.  For now I will try to make it work any way I can because I know, somehow and in some deep place, that this new equine arena of study and practice is meant to be part of  a more cohesive therapeutic whole. 

 

 

 

 

3  …My upcoming speaking engagement at the “Let’s Talk” Adoption Conference at Rutgers University in New Jersey on November 7th. 

I will be speaking on Trauma and Yoga for adoptees, their caregivers, and for social service agencies working with adoptees and foster children.  I am so honored and happy to bring this information on mind/body healing to a large audience of people involved in the care of children who may find such great benefit from yoga.  I have purchased, via my good ol’ pal Amazon both of the following books to put out for attendees to flip through:  Babar’s Yoga For Elephants and My Daddy Is A Pretzel: Yoga for Parents and Kids.

 

 

 

4  …Christmas in Florida. 

My lovely sister will be coming to visit and so I cannot wait to show her my new home state and enjoy the Holiday Season sans dirty soot colored snow.  New memories, new visual delights, and a reason to decorate my home thematically and “hang stockings with care”–just for a moment though because I have a feeling in a three dog household they will be dismantled and removed with very little care and much expediency. 

 

5  …My first wedding anniversary this New Year’s Eve. 

 

6  …Beginning my yoga teacher training program.

Hopefully, I will have cultivated some added manner and method of contemplative practice, meditative mind, and calmed spirit before I even walk through the door on the ever-nerve-wracking First Day of School.  I have, in the spirit of that effort, gone my first week without any television whatsoever.  Now this used to be, once upon a twenty-year-old, a very easy endeavor but I fear I have gotten into the “plopper” practices I discussed earlier this week and have to work my way back to enjoying the silence with nothing surrounding me but the tapping rhythm of puppy nails on wood and crisp pages turning in a good book. 

 

7  …Learning how to let go. 

Let go of the illusion of controls.  Let go of the illusion of “knowing”.  And letting go the self that expects so much but explores so little of the internal space of my own inner spaces–a funny irony for a person who, as a therapist, spends my days delving into the psyches of others and encouraging their self exploration.  No more holding on and holding in–I am giving over to letting go.  Tiny step by tiny step. 

 

8  …I am looking forward to seeing where this writing exploration will lead. 

I feel that all my internal archeology both starts and ends with this writing I am doing.  I have always felt like I explored myself most honestly when I wrote.  This is first time I share that journey in an outward way.  This is the first time I take this inner archeological dig into a public forum.  I am hoping it brings a new ripened and raw dimension to the journey that both enriches my own path of discovery and helps another on their internal and external quests.

 

 

 

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things   that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Mark Twain