If you’re a regular reader of this bloggity-blog, you know that I decided to do as my fifteen year-old begged, wheedled and cajoled me to do and join him in the NanoWriMo challenge to write a novel—in my case, a memoir—during the month of November. I should clarify: the stated goal is fifty thousand words. The stated goal is not a complete work, but a write-as-fast-as-you-can draft, because that’s what you can do in thirty days. You also know I said I wasn’t sure how the blog might suffer or whether I’d pull pieces from my frenzied writing project and post them or at least offer a progress report or two.
Yesterday, I crossed the halfway mark (by word count). It seemed a good moment to let you know how it’s going, besides, obviously, quickly. I’m not sure you’ll believe me when I say that within about two days, I felt much less invested in reaching the goal than the process of trying to tell this story about the beginnings of an open adoption (ours). I am sure you’ll believe me when I say that once I let myself begin, words pretty much poured out (that’s also obvious, right?).
The reason that I agreed to try—keeping my stage-managing, high school attending fifteen year-old company, since he signed up too, hoping to beat his last year’s fifteen-thousand-word effort—was that my essays about adoption often feel like a suitcase that’s overstuffed. Travelling with sweater arms hanging out, that’s not so nice, and that’s a little bit what my essays felt like. They were jammed, because there were details—so many of them, so many of them important—and I couldn’t (can’t) always figure out how to tell enough for the specific essay. So, the essays are overstuffed and yet editors have said to me that they want more, but more doesn’t fit in just one essay. It did seem, really, there’s a larger whole I need to commit to paper (well, computer).
I think the reason the words are bursting forth is this: I’m not trying to decide what to say and not to say. This draft is really about process and about saying it all back to myself so I can see it and remember it (not always easy, in fact not easy) and then figure out what is important and what I’m wanting to say about our experience and about open adoption.
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When I write about our experience with adoption, the tagline that surfaces and resurfaces, my guiding principle really, is this: more love is more love. Sure as heck, that feeling is all over the pages. If I were to give a sneak peek about what else I’m wrestling with, honestly, the other piece is harder for me to admit to and harder for me to imagine how to write about with the right words: it’s feeling that Saskia really did wind up in the right place.
Adoption, if you think about it—and I have been, especially hard for over three years—it’s an imperfect construct. Letting a tiny person out of one’s life, that’s such a huge thing to do. The sadness is immeasurable, and it seems to me, through our experience and reading about and being in contact with other first mothers, surprising. You know this is going to be sad and hard and impossible, but the sadness is incalculable. Maybe some of that is for reasons beyond the child him or herself (in fact, of course that’s the case). Sadness doesn’t necessarily override feeling it’s the right or better choice, but I think its scale is just somehow more than anyone exactly envisions. And while the corollary is also true; it seems adoptive parents feel infinitely grateful and fortunate, that imbalance remains.
That feels much less simple than more love is more love.
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On the one hand, what I’m endeavoring to do—major and intensely emotional writing project in the midst of everything else and that everything includes about as busy a month as I’ve ever had—is purely nuts. I am exhausted, nerve-and-bone tired. On the other hand, I’m watching road crews try to finish up work before hard frosts and the leaves are being raked all around me and yesterday the tree guy came to clear out what was unsafe from my next-door neighbor’s yard, and it’s such a perfect (if, in the case of the trees, loud) accompaniment: necessary work sometimes happens in a flurry and on a deadline, however inconvenient.
Even partway through, nerve-and-bone tired, I’m relieved that I’m scurrying in this way. I will look at my leafy word pile, rearrange it, toss it, or do whatever it is I do with all those ideas and memories and images, but I’ll be glad I raked. I’ll be glad I wrote. I’ll be even gladder I let myself remember and feel.
