No Man Is An Island, But I Am

I came into the world in a somewhat unusual way. I was given up for adoption at birth, which at the turn of the 1960s meant that my birth mother was under general anesthesia. She didn’t see me born, and I was immediately taken away from her.

“Surrendered” with her consent of course. She’d signed papers. It was her idea and you’d think that after all of those months in utero, I would have figured out what was going to happen. She tried to dislodge me when I was just a tiny speck of a thing, by jumping off higher and higher surfaces. She told me as the story four decades later, when I met her. Met her again, technically.

Abortion was illegal in the US at the turn of the 1960s. She told me that she decided to reapply to get back into the college she had dropped out of, and if she got back in, she would obtain an illegal abortion. If she didn’t get back in, she would put me up for adoption. Needful to say, it was a top-notch college.

Spoiler: She didn’t get re-admitted. I owe my existence to the vagaries of a college admissions committee.

This gives me a complicated view of abortion rights. I’m pro-choice, but the irony is not lost on me.

The way I figure it, while I was in utero I just decided not to acknowledge that I wasn’t wanted. I clung to life with all my cells. I clung onto the uterine wall with my little shrimp-tail and my T. Rex flippers. I ignored the nonverbal go-away messages steeping the embryonic fluid of my home. And when I was still alive after four months and my hearing developed, I pretended not to listen when she cried and regretted and cursed the admissions committee and cried more, and then resigned herself to keeping me as long as she had to: until she went into labor and then into general-anesthesia twilight, mid-November.

So it was a surprise to me when, after that claustrophobic, arduous, terrifying journey from uterus to outside world, I was bundled up and whisked away from the only home I’d known. Not a loving home, but at least a living home.

The way I remember it, the air was unfamiliar and cold in my lungs and I used every milliliter to protest, to state my case, to go back to that home where I wasn’t wanted. Instead they took me to the hospital nursery where I became an island.

There were other newborns in the nursery, but they all got taken regularly to visit their mothers for comfort and reassurance that they weren’t alone in the word. I was alone. The nurses came by and patted little six-pound me, and one of them mentioned she was pleased that I was a full-term healthy white baby with blue eyes that would be easy to find a new home for.

I spent my first hours and days in the outside world solidifying the knowledge that started subconsciously in utero. I was all I had.

After four days in that noisy lonely nursery, I went into escrow for twelve more days. In New Jersey, twelve days was the period in which the birth mother could change her mind. Not that mine would. I was lucky enough not to go to the black-and-white orphanage that I found on YouTube, a film made in New York State in the late 1950s revealing the life of babies who were awaiting adoption. The film mentioned that blue-eyed white newborn girls were the most desirable babies, at the time. That sentence brought me to tears, decades later. Desirable was a terrible term for me and for the others.

I was transported instead to a foster mother who took babies for that twelve-day escrow period. I didn’t know at the time that it was a better fate than being in that black-and-white orphanage. I guess it was quieter.

Then I was adopted into the family that raised me, and my life got better. However, I came to that family as the well-established island of I.

Throughout my childhood my island was perfectly round, with vertical nonstick cliffs that protected me from any people who tried to become too close to me. I let some friends and some people in my family come somewhat near, as long as they stayed in their little boats as we shouted across the water and waved to one another. I was a perfectly protected island. No one could come fully ashore.

I was excited when in eleventh grade I heard we were going to read Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance” as part of a section on American transcendentalists. Turned out not to really be what I expected. I was looking for homage to my chosen way of life. Ah, it’s still a decent read.

As I negotiated young adulthood, I very, very gradually began to realize that being a perfectly cylindrical island might not result in the best of all lives. I lengthened my coastline by creating harbors and inlets.

By the way, It’s not that my island increased in land mass. A circle has the optimal (smallest) circumference-to-area ratio. So by lengthening my coastline I probably would have appeared smaller if Google Maps could measure such a thing. I sure hope they can’t.

As the decades passed I allowed some of the cliffs to assume a shallower angle. I permitted a beach or two. I extended a sandbar towards the mainland. There were times when I had to smooth out the coastline and destroy the beaches, but overall I moved forward.

These days I not only permit ferries to land now and then, but I’m seriously considering an actual bridge.

No man is an island, but I am. For now.

[Author's note: Don't be judgy about my birth mother. None of us would be our best selves pregnant at 21 years old. Like many of us, she improved tremendously with age, becoming truly interesting, smart, spectacular, insightful. I hope to publish some of her works here. Also, the photo is from Google Maps. It's Howland Island, 4.3 stars.]