PLEASE, I THOUGHT, DO NOT ADOPT ME. I told myself to stop it. That’s ridiculous. Just go in like a blank slate. What did I know? I had to think about it, though. My family saga somewhat dominated my life but then some people I knew might say that they didn’t know. I didn’t even know. I was tied to something that I didn’t understand, that I didn’t want. I had a different family than the one I started with, and when people asked a simple question about my family, it provoked a strangely revealing, if not funny, response.
“Which one?”
So, before we even begin, this is about identity.
My parents didn’t exist anymore by this point. “My mother is a teacher…” when she wasn’t originally. Mexican, even. She called my first mother, whose real nickname is Dr. J, “Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians.”
This was all beginning to dawn on me since my problems didn’t exactly go away though today, as a totally different human being, so I don’t even know what to say about that sentence. What problems? People could get attached to mine. My last family mirrored the first touch too closely, but I couldn’t grasp it, as if awareness were more of a layered experience. We might even inhabit different times at once, in fact, but in the end, I had to question everything I thought I knew to be true. Okay… here we go, I said something weird about time again, because my story also brought “gurus” into my life, a wiseman, as this is a Christmas story, who heard the first sentence of my life: my mother gave me away to a total stranger when I was four, and suddenly, I was getting “help” that’s not helping me, again, but I’m supposed to be grateful, the only one at fault, the only one in a relationship, and I’m hearing things like “You are Carl Jung.”
I was “special,” in short, because I came from an otherworldly story; I do not know; maybe it was exclusively my good looks, though I don’t tend to present myself as an attractive woman as I wasn’t always treated like one. But I came from “an otherworldly story,” so I became “magical.” I was basically Tinkerbelle. Or something. I don’t know. It depends on who you talk to.
At the window, in Paris, France, I had to think about going back, and looking back, I feel like I’m speaking from several different points at once, speaking of time, how we recall, as we start getting older. This was one of these moments that set me into the next decade of my life, which I almost didn’t survive.
This draft, this book, would mark the end of a life that began at four “if not before” which became the joke in this draft and my life because it changed unimaginably when I was four years old. I lived in a Brazilian-Jewish household for four years, beginning then because my mother, Dr. J, told her that my father was a child molester, rapist, and a beater, generally.
The saga that continued isn’t the subject of this story. This epic, this very Greek epic though Naples is its own specific character, is the story of where I ended up toward the big 30 mark, and going into that decade, as this story took ten years to make my way out of. “My Way,” by Frank Sinatra, a Christmas carol in these parts; this is what Christmas is about to us. Not Silent Night, not happening here. We don’t understand…silence.
I made the decision to go back to Naples to go through this story one more time to learn why it never ended, more so than wanting to reconnect with my roots at first. I loved Naples so much, and I longed to return but I never could because of what happened, but then, it’s hard to say.
I don’t know what I was aware of and what I wasn’t at that time as my whole understanding of my childhood shifted so deeply in these ten years. I don’t fully know what even happened anymore. And you will understand me.
It didn’t go with Christmas, my story, and trust me on this one, already, since I experienced “oh, she’s probably exaggerating,” too many times. Just too many times. It didn’t. The story itself posed me with more obstacles, it seemed, than the actual experience that I went through. Usually, once I started talking, it usually came with a lot attached that…that I didn’t really want, and I can say that now, it was partially how I approached it, and you know what they say, you can’t change the world you can only change yourself, it’s just the way it goes.
I was stuck.
It wasn’t the type of story that people listened to and said, “Oh, okay. " It always came with questions, which I welcomed, though I didn’t have to. People had such strong reactions to my childhood, so I thought that meant there was a deeper chord that the story struck, especially Dr. J, my mother. J stands for Joyce. Call it an inheritance. Another problem.
I felt on some level that I had a duty to tell it due to the larger themes it touched, questions such as “do you think she knew what she was doing?” My mother. “Do you think she knew?” And all I heard was the justice system. “Do you think she knew what she was doing?” Having stepped my foot into, hm, a weird area. Speaking of the subject of awareness. Not everyone gets that benefit of that doubt, which people know, too, but not in every context. My mother was severely mentally ill. That took 30 years. And you will be surprised that it took me that long. But, the audience, I must admit, was a beast.
I was a bit obsessed with learning back then. I was here “to learn” even though this story: a sport, like I had to put myself through this. But if I was going to go back, the questions were coming, that I knew. That’s all I knew, at the time. The questions were coming. I couldn’t lie, either, because of the catastrophic lying that passed between my both my parents.
And due to where I was at, I had to — out the window. Think. I lived in Alexander McQueen’s old apartment in Paris just off Places des Vosges. It was, at 30 years old, a new dawn. My father recently died. I was free. And now, I’m in a hostel in Thailand in a cute dress somehow, almost 40. I totally restarted.
At the time, I wondered, why hadn’t these “problems” gone away? Looking at the phone, at my current adopted family, my brother who confessed his love to me, etc. It didn’t go away, what happened, in fact? I got adopted more like taken into different families? What? I was at the dawn of another waking up, and it felt like that, a series of revelations to get here. This old narrative was just beginning to surface into the foreground — I was sort of adopted but I wasn’t. I had this adopted narrative, and it never made sense in English let alone a language I didn’t know. Perfect.