Behind Sails, Beneath Skin
A guest blog for the LGBTQIA+ and Adopted Series by Mickey Osthimer.
Trigger Warning: Sexual Abuse
My name is Mickey, he/him/his. I am a musician and writer based in Louisville, KY. I currently work in a kitchen and food delivery. I am 28 years old. I love all things related to Irish, Scottish, Peruvian, and Chilean history and culture, as these are the places where my biological relatives and ancestors come from. I love the outdoors and hike/camp regularly. You might be envisioning a long-haired, bearded guy with silver circle-frame glasses driving a Subaru along picturesque, winding mountain roads – you see me. Hello!
I was raised in a Catholic home.
I am a victim of childhood sexual abuse.
I am an adoptee.
I am queer.
Until recently, the links between my adoption and childhood sexual abuse were, in my mind, more or less coincidental. The two matters seemed...well, two matters. Loosely tethered like rotten cherries married to a single withering stem. As for the matter of my sexuality, this seemed even more distant still. Raised Catholic, it was already enough to be asking myself The Question in the first place, let alone drawing any connections.
I was relinquished at birth in May 1993 in a small Lake Erie town in northwest Ohio. My childhood included baseball and hockey, slip-n-slides, sledding, swimming, climbing trees, chasing dogs, Cedar Point, Pokémon, learning to play guitar, building forts in the woods, fishing with grandpa off the pontoon at the lake, and in general getting myself into situations that resulted in many cuts and bruises “the good way.” I was very active and usually outside, I had friends, and generally speaking was a very shy blue-eyed, blonde-haired boy. I even almost modeled for Huggies.
I find it important to note these things happened in my life simultaneously with the ones I am about to tell, because while trauma can certainly look like hurricanes, I believe it also often looks like the habit of locking yourself indoors on a sunny day. I find it important to note that my adoptive family is like many American families, very much caring and loving in some of the same ways they can be disjointed and dysfunctional.
As is the case with adoption, it’s never that simple.
It is never simple.
I was also, in childhood, the Fawner. A good kid. Well behaved. “Well adjusted.” I was seemingly beloved by my friends' parents, seldom experiencing the same skepticism of being guilty for whatever shenanigans we got into. By the time I graduated high school, I was closer with teachers and staff than kids my own age. I wasn't that much smarter, and certainly wasn't more rule-following, than my piers. I simply had it ingrained that the consequences - of being caught doing something stupid, or receiving poor grades, or especially questioning my sexuality - would be far greater. In short, I knew very well what adults wanted out of me, so I gave it to them, and was meticulous to cover what I knew they wouldn’t like.
Adopters, their friends, their supporters, their churches, their movies, their books, their charities, their businesses, their governments, and all of society that cherishes them as saviors see only what the skin shows. Adoptees who behave like this are enjoyable. They are gifts. They combat the woes of infertility. They answer the lost prayer’s call. They are “worth it.” They are "well adjusted."
I ask, adjusted to what?
I wonder, why is it the responsibility of children to do the adjusting?
The fear of disappointing adult figures in many adoptees’ lives might include something about acceptance and love, but regardless, it is with certainty about resources for survival. Considering the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn response is activated at a crucially vulnerable moment in every adoptee’s life – literally right out of the womb, in my case – I find it impossible for those who have not been through (are going through/will always go through) it to understand how this impacts every aspect of familial life. The brain’s chemical reprograming is simply something not feasible for non-adoptee’s to claim, and even more so is it degrading to attempt doing such through the privilege of one’s proximity to adoptees for one’s own sake. Since I have nearly always been the only adoptee in my social circles, especially as a child, impressing upon as many adults as possible was not about being seen as mature for my age (I was told this constantly), it was about establishing somewhere to go when the front door would be closed on me for the last time, once again.
The first time I envisioned that door closing happened as soon as I knew I wasn’t what my faithful adoptive family called “Normal.”
I stress that this was a moment of immense fear. If this realization was to be a new door opening, there weren’t rainbows in sight through the frame. I was taught the other side looked dark and cold, rigid and difficult, which is naturally what I saw. A dramatic shift from sunny ball games and summer fairs. My faithful adoptive family, whether they meant to or not, taught me that only an Ultimate Sinner steps through that door, and there would be no home for him here.
I had already been told I was adopted at this point, but I remember this moment vividly. I remember the tree I was in, the crisp autumn air, my (non-adopted) brother and the dog in the field below, parents walking up the drive to check on us, and the realization that I was exactly where I was – not quite at their level. Not with them. Not one of them. This was the first time in my life I didn’t just feel, but understood the ways in which I was wholly, emphatically, unequivocally alone.
But all I could consider was that I had to survive. I would not be the Ultimate Sinner. I translated being queer as both a direct threat to my survival, and similarly because my adoptive family would never accept such a thing, my distance from them meant this had to be
my fault.
All I considered was how to survive.
Thus, I behaved accordingly.
They could never know.
I believe adoptees are navigators. In some ways, I believe far too many of us are thrusted to the very extremities of what life on earth has to offer, blank map in hand, the seas we sail at a perpetual boil, the guiding stars guarded by billowing clouds, seeking a final puzzle piece we eventually realize was never cut to fit in the first place, if even it exists.
And to be grateful for this.
And to cherish how we embody god's true gift.
In light of the efforts of our saviors, we shall uplift.
Amen.
For a while, I carried on drowning the realization with my palms obediently pressed together in front of my chest, as I was expected to do. When asked what I did with the kids down the street, I told the truth: we played in the woods, we played video games, we played street hockey, we watched a movie, etc. We did do these things, and I was certain no one could read my mind, and if they could they would only see the light of god anyway. I was certain of it.
I was certain because it wasn’t queerness that ultimately interested one of the kids to want to be closer. I shared this with no one, because it was crucial for me to convince myself it wasn’t true, and if it was, I deserved the consequences. It was when he learned of my adoption that the dynamic changed. I remember the response:
“I never knew. You are good at keeping a secret.”
When what came next happened – “playing” in the woods, “playing” video games, “swimming parties,” “it’s hot out, let’s just go inside,” “wanna watch a movie?”, “no one needs to know,” “happy you’re here”, “why are you so worried?”, the lackluster asking, the lack of asking, the removal of asking, the absence of asking, the goal of not asking – it was too late.
I thought god would guide me out of this.
Too frequently was it pointed out how "lucky we were" my family “brought” me into the neighborhood. Little adopted me, the giver, a gift in my very existence, to be given.
"Otherwise, we would have never met," he said.
Otherwise, we would have never met...
When years of the act finally ended, I was sent to one or two sessions - I struggle to remember if they were intended to be therapy or collections of evidence - after which I heard one thing repeatedly from my Catholic family: "As long as you're not gay."
As if!
While they never denied how horrible the abuse was in all the ways it is for anyone, the primary goal was always ensuring I had not and will never catch The Gay. Ensuring I complete catechism, ensuring I complete first communion, ensuring the evils of sex and drugs and *gasp!* Harry Potter was implemented quickly and enforced firmly.
I would not be depressed.
I would not become "maladjusted".
I would not fail my classes.
I would not escape, run away, end my life.
And if any of these were to fall through, we would still find a way, because all of it was fine as long as
I
was
not
gay.
This only solidified that I was alone, it was my fault. I accepted the realization in that tree, thus as I was taught, the abuse and all to follow was my penance. I performed placing the hand head to chest to shoulder to shoulder out of a fearful need for uncertain protection. I kneeled at my bedside and focused on chewing my knuckles. I once tried to choke on a rosary and asked myself, would they blame me for this too?
I did come out of this. It began the first time I told someone I am an adoptee and they said,
“I’m sorry.”
That was it. That was all it took.
I could now accept that adoption is trauma, that queer is beautiful, that abuse is not the victim’s fault, that god did not have to be the solution, that I can survive, will survive, must survive.
Being queer will always be a frightening matter in a society driven by jesus, guns, and profit, adopted or not. How can we trust a society that raises Pride flags on June 1st to be promptly replaced a month later by the colonial stars and stripes? How can we know if the same parents who tell us we can, we should, be open with them about “anything at all” will hold the other end of the rainbow for us when we aren’t sure if we are safe carrying it alone? The extended layer of being adopted puts navigating through the maze of those same threats – abandonment, violence, persecution, murder – onto a permanent tilt.
Adoptees deserve to have this tilt corrected.
Queer people of all sorts deserve to have these harmful institutions destroyed.
I will never be severed from my relinquishment.
I am an adoptee.
But, I am no longer the Fawner.
I am a living queer adoptee.
I hope to find the rest of you there, some day, on the calmest shores.
Mickey Osthimer
July 2021
You can find Mickey on Twitter @manoftheforest7 .
You can also find his music on Bandcamp via this link.