renée audubon

This came up after a training at work on microaggressions. I’m not a person of color. I am, however, female, adopted, an only child and divorced. I have weathered my share of micro- (and macro-) aggressions on each of those fronts.

It took me five-and-a-half decades to realize that I’m supposed to be ashamed that I was adopted at birth. That the A word is a bad thing. Randall* and I missed the memo for so long.

Sure, there were hints circa 1970. The look of empathy and/or pity on the stranger’s face when I would say proudly, before I knew what it meant, that I was adopted, after she had said something unsolicited along the lines of “You look just like your mom! You have her eyes!”

Her line of inquiry would eventually get around to whether I had siblings.

“Nope!” I would declaim, again with unwarranted confidence.

Poor me, her expression would say. Not only adopted but an only.

It happened a lot.

I was chosen, special and loved, I wanted to yell when it happened in my teen years because that is what I was told by my amazing, two-in-a-million parents, and what I know to be true.

Others? Not so much.

Take BlowoutGate, for example. My hair was only one-third dry when my new stylist, we'll call her Savannah, revealed her true colors.

We'd been making small talk as first-time clients and stylists do. Stylists are admittedly like therapists or bartenders, yes? You have 40 – 60 minutes in the chair to not be that self-important person on your phone. You strive to be present, relaxed, connected during your sliver of self-care. Thus, the instant rapport and manufactured, unearned intimacy.

Situated squarely in a purple county, we talked jobs, kids and politics-lite, carefully avoiding the subject of Trump.

We had established common ground as moms in second marriages when she allowed, “My daughter is a freshman in high school; she’s with her dad half-time. She’s a great kid, but lately she has been hanging around this adopted girl. They always cause problems. I’m definitely discouraging that friendship.”

“Huh,” was my trenchant riposte.

Her logorrhea had driven us directly into a conversational cul-de-sac.

Call me naïve, but the Adopted Kids Are Bad Apples trope was in fact a news flash to me. It was like she was letting me in on something I should have known all along: this is how bio-fams really see adopted people. This is their lens.

I regret not getting up and walking out of the salon in the fetching black nylon smock with Bride of Frankenstein hair.

Instead, because I was blindsided, unprepared and evidently lacked agency, my only recourse (to my mind) was to not tip.

I considered a subsequent call to the manager then thought better of it.

After all, I now have Savannah to thank for reigniting my interest in an implicit bias that I had not consciously registered.

I started listening for the spoken or unspoken A word. It didn't take long to hear it.

A few days later I'm tuned into the Unblocking Us podcast while on my road bike and Brene Brown is laughing too loudly at her guest’s jokes. Chris Heuertz is an author whose book is ironically called “The Enneagram of Belonging.” (Emphasis mine.) My husband refers to his currency as psycho-babble — the kind that categorizes you by number, 1 through 9, based on personality traits. People pay a lot of money to be pigeonholed, pegged and yes, seen, understood and accepted for who they are, flaws and all.

The 7s are popular and extroverted, for example, but the the 8s, he guffawed (I'm paraphrasing and might be off on the numbers because I could not downplay the episode when I went back to find it), are like the adopted kids in the family! Hilarity!

Brene didn’t miss a beat. I imagined her throwing her head back as she laughed in attunement and agreement before effortlessly segueing into her next question about the 9s.

She apparently didn’t hear his not-so-veiled slight. His words behind the words. So UN-Brene of her! I thought, making a mental note to email her to point out her missed opportunity to stand up for adopted people everywhere.

Sure enough, it happened again a week later. We were taking a tour of my office building when a coworker said to our incoming executive director, with apology, “We are like the adopted children over here!” She meant we are not physically part of the main office. We are more like an annex, separate in proximity, but still an integral and equal part of the team. Instead she went with adopted children. Everyone nodded by way of echo: “Understood!”

Some slights are more subtle, like when someone from my husband's past wrote in a sympathy card (after his sister died): “We are both from big families – we appreciate the importance of family,” or some such sentiment to remind him of their long-lost connection. She might have been more direct with the undermining wedge. Something along the lines of: “She’s an only, adopted child so can’t possibly get it, or us in times like this!”

I remember watching with keen interest Colin Kaepernick’s mother's smackdown of an insensitive reporter who made the mistake of distinguishing Colin, whom she and her husband adopted, from their bio-children. “He is our child, exactly like our other children,” she said. She packed a punch, did not equivocate and extracted an apology from the chastened reporter. I wanted to reach through the screen to hug her. And Colin. To date, Colin has rebuffed efforts by his birth mother to meet him. His choice.

I found mine. My choice. My parents — the ones who raised me — instilled in me the true-ism that there is always plenty of love to go around, with or without my bio-parents in the picture. And that finding them would answer my questions but in no way diminish my parents’ love for me or mine for them.

It didn't — it strengthened my love for them, God rest their sweet souls.

Turns out that every child, bio B-word or adopted A-word, has a story. Let us start by not assuming one is more or less worthy than the other.

In the meantime, choose your words wisely, especially if you are Brene Brown’s podcast guest. She can move mountains and reveal biases like no other. Maybe I will email her after all.

**This is Us* ref. You get it.

The insufferable Marin Power Mom, bedecked in high-end technical fabrics and $200 running shoes, is doing plyometrics while barking orders at her two sons playing their iteration of something approximating bocce ball. Rather than play with them or join them in the merrymaking, she does burpees, cardio kicks and squat-knee-slap jumps (there's no doubt a better descriptor), demarcating her Self-Care. This exorbitantly overpriced 48 hours is her time too! Her Apple Watch and premium Fitbit Versa securely adorn her wrists, measuring her steps, her successes, her self-worth. She monitors her metrics more than her children, one senses, not just now but most hours of most days.

"Yes, Bryce!" she shrieks (oblivious to the post-vaccinated person, namely me, 30 feet behind her on a patio attempting in vain to meditate, having carved out a corner of should-be silence in a sublime setting at 7:30a for the first time in what feels like ... eleven months). "That's a great strategy -- you want to knock his ball away from the yellow** ball, so your ball is closer!"

It's never too soon -- her boys appear to be four and six -- in this privileged pocket of the world to foster an unhealthy sense of competition. To show who's who is boss. Ignoring the gyrating mother's coach/control/ing, the boys eventually start throwing the balls at one another. I'm admittedly pleased enough with this inevitable turn of events to pause my Insight Timer so I don't miss the teaching moment (for the mother of course, not the boys). With this development, however, she is perturbed, not because they aren't properly mastering the sport by heeding her helpful tips but because she has to cut her workout short.

Stomping through the wet grass, she grabs the older one's sleeve and frog marches them to the resort office where she loads up on "complimentary" coffee, continuing to fill the hole that is her soul with something outside herself, having long since cordoned off the funny, engaging chi within -- along with the perfectly imperfect human that created these two beautiful children.

**She meant pallino ball.

#great/survival/strategy

/// Flip side ///

How's That Working For You?

She'd been up most of the night again, unable to quiet her monkey mind. Her younger son had crawled into bed with her at some point, a no-no at home but she was too exhausted on this, her first "vacation" as a single mom, to object. Instead, she stared at the ceiling, afraid to move lest she wake him up. Limbs akimbo. Frozen and fretting. After 10 years of sleeping/not sleeping with her sons' father, she was not yet accustomed to sleeping/not sleeping without him.

This weekend respite was designed to offer solace to her boys, to let them know they could and would be okay because mom could and would be okay. Her therapist had repeated the research findings gently -- if the mother tanks post-divorce, the children will follow suit. The word behind the words, that she was beginning to hear everywhere, was that the children of non-intact families irreversibly swerve off into some trajectory other than overachieving student athlete and this, too, would be her fault. Everything would be her fault.

Never mind that her soon-to-be ex had been depressed for ten years. Never mind that he had not initiated sex for the last two years of their ostensibly perfect union. He was too tired, too sad, too stressed, too ... self-absorbed. He could take it or leave it. She could not. Leave it, that is. She had her theories, including but not limited to his eggs having been scrambled by a controlling, nightmare-of-a-mother, whose addiction to painkillers and elder anorexia were topics not to be discussed. Ever. That his mother treated his father like a servant (a pattern he was destined to repeat in their marriage) was likewise off the table, even during their half-hearted attempts at couples counseling.

Last week during EMDR, she was instructed by her therapist to imagine him as a young boy, afraid and alone despite being the youngest of five brothers. Imagine being raised in a family incapable of conveying warmth, vulnerability. In the movie in her mind, they were the cast of Ordinary People.

This helped her feel compassion towards him for up to 24 hours, until he would invariably pull a prick move, like refusing to pay his half of their sons' therapy.

"You were the one who left," he texted, "You pay for the mess."

Her range of possible responses to that text were obsessively occupying her thoughts when her older son, Auden, who had just turned six, wandered into the bedroom from his assigned pull-out couch. It was before first light, but she again gave in. She felt like she'd been hit by a Mack truck, despite assiduously abstaining from alcohol and sugar -- which didn't mix well with her cocktail of antidepressants and psychotropics designed to drag newly divorced people through the morass that would be Their Lives for at least three years.

The only way she would survive this day as a single parent would be by way of a lot of caffeine and what had become her half-assed, pathetic workout, a kind of Jane-Fonda-meets-Richard-Simmons routine she was relegated to doing for 20 minutes while the boys, God willing, occupied themselves in a way that didn't involve turning household objects into weapons or someone losing an eye.

She managed to belt half a cup of truly horrific coffee, get the boys dressed and herd them out the door into the pristine resort property, replete with Buddha statues and olive trees. They sprinted to the bocce court before she could object. Yes, it was early, but this was yet another battle she would forgo that day, saving her limited stores of energy for later, when they would be hangry, overtired and overtly hostile, missing their father.

She was sure they were alone when, about halfway through her one-armed burpees, she noticed the pinched, older woman shooting daggers at her -- no small feat, given that she appeared to be meditating.

How's that working for you? her sardonic self wanted to ask.

Instead, she was formulating her apology when Auden pelted Bryce in the chest with a ball, point-blank range.

Glancing over her shoulder as she ushered them quickly to the office, having remembered the free life force that is more and better coffee awaited her there, she hoped to make a connection by way of contrition with the meditator, whose eyes were now covered with a sleep mask.

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