Being Adopted, Part I: An Incomplete Self

Charcoal drawing of a seated and smiling mother and child
Mother and Child, 2004.

I learned I was adopted when I was four years old. My parents didn’t mean to tell me yet, but someone else told me and I asked them about it. They did intend to tell me eventually, but I don’t know that they had decided when the perfect time would be.

Four was as good an age as any. The news wasn’t shocking or devastating. I understood the basic premise: my biological mother couldn’t care for me, and my birth parents couldn’t have children but wanted a child, so I became theirs. I thought it was kind of a cool story, something that made me special and different. As a four-year-old, I didn’t really have the emotional capacity to delve beneath the surface of this new information. Over the years, what it means to be adopted would gradually unfold, coloring all aspects of my life and personality. Thirty years later, I’m still learning how it affects me.

Read more

Being Adopted, Introduction: The Primal Wound

Photo of a statue of a woman holding a child

I haven’t written about it much here, so you may not know that I was adopted as an infant. I’m usually surprised when I find out that someone in my life doesn’t know this about me, because it’s a pretty damn big part of my identity.

For 30 years now, I’ve known I was adopted, and my feelings about that fact as well as the importance I’ve placed on it have varied quite a bit throughout my life. At times, I’ve thought and talked about it a lot, and at other times, I’ve treated it like it was no big deal. But I’m beginning to realize, with the help of a therapist, just how big of a deal it really is.

Read more

7 Big Benefits of Being Less Busy

Tablet, keyboard, and mug on picnic table in screened porch

From the time I was in middle school until my early thirties, it seemed I was always busy. My evenings and weekends were usually filled with organized activities. Often I was the one organizing them. At my tiny college, more than once I heard the comment that the same students were involved in all the organizations. If they did one thing, they did everything. I was one of those students. I managed to stay slightly less busy than some of my friends (particularly the ones who were also athletes), but my color-coded weekly schedule had little visible space.

All these organized activities were, on the whole, enjoyable. For the most part, they energized me and gave me a sense of purpose. They padded my resume and school applications. They formed the basis of my social life. When I moved to a new town, they were how I met people and kept from sitting at home by myself all the time and becoming lonely.

But they also caused me stress on a fairly frequent basis. They competed for my attention and pulled it away from other important things like my career and family. They kept me from reflecting and from doing the deep inner work that I needed to do. These constant obligations had a way of keeping me in a reactive mode, responding to others’ desires and priorities, rather than being intentional about how I wanted to use my precious time and how I wanted to spend my life. I was well-rounded, but unfocused.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing during a certain stage of life. The teen years and extended adolescence are meant for exploring, figuring out what we want, making mistakes and finding our way, at least as contemporary Americans conceive of that life phase. But at some point, I think it’s important to step back and unbusy ourselves so that we can be sure we have our priorities in order. That means figuring out what and who truly makes us shine from within and focusing our days and energy on those pursuits and people. Because both our days and our energy are, of course, limited, and we too often lose sight of the finite nature of our time.

The process of unbusying oneself isn’t as easy as it might seem. It isn’t just a simple matter of removing all your commitments and becoming lazy. When you’re used to a structured schedule and a million things to do, learning how best to use your now-free time can be a challenge. There’s a temptation to spend it doing busywork, catching up on all the chores, getting extra sleep, making up for missed workouts. Those choices can be beneficial, but if you aren’t careful, you’ll end up with a sparkling-clean house, well-groomed lawn, fit body, and still without the slightest idea of what’s really important to you or what you want to do with your life.

Then there’s the challenge of sitting quietly with your thoughts. When fewer tasks occupy your mind, you may find that your inner voice becomes louder. Sometimes that inner voice is saying things that are neither nice nor productive. So then you must choose between attempting to drown it out with new external obligations or instead figuring out a way to unpack what it’s saying, get to the source of those internalized beliefs, and reprogram that messaging.

Sometimes life events provide handy excuses for deobligating ourselves — a move, a new job, a baby. They can make it easier to let go of things that are no longer serving us. But to really transform our lives, we have to do it intentionally and consciously. Otherwise we’ll just end up re-filling the white space with more obligations brought about by our new circumstances. Saying no isn’t always easy. Walking away isn’t always easy. But if you make the decision to build more space into your weeks and remain steadfast in that decision, you will be free to say yes to the best opportunities, the ones that fully align with who you are now and where you want to go. You’ll have the time and space to craft a life in which you truly thrive.

Here are some of the things that happened when I freed up a significant amount of space in my schedule:

Read more

What I Learned from Tracking My Spending for a Month

Close-up of twenty-dollar bills

As I wrote at the end of the year, one of my resolutions for 2019 was to get a better grasp on my finances by tracking in a detailed way all of my discretionary spending for the month of January. It was a little tricky to do because of the way my husband and I separate our accounts and divide our expenses, but I analyzed the data as best I could. It was an eye-opening experiment.

Read more