the smile sliding off my face

Last spring I noticed my face was sagging. I felt it, first. A heaviness around my cheeks that was dragging down all the skin around it. The muscles around my mouth felt loose and droopy. And when I looked in the mirror I saw it wasn't my imagination. Deep shadows had appeared either side of nose, down past my lips towards my chin.  

I took it to be a sign of ageing and I was a bit pissed about it. I didn't like the fact that I had aged seemingly overnight and in a way I hadn't expected. I could see the wrinkles coming on over the years, lines being etched across the smoothness, and I had been able to accept them. I was earning my stripes, and that was ok with me. I liked the wisdom I was gaining with every year and my body was welcome to come with me. 

But this was something else.

Then another symptom came that shed some light on what was happening. My mouth had become dry around the corners. The skin cracked slightly when I moved my lips. And now I remembered a woman I had worked with many years ago who had talked of the same thing. She had talked about it a lot, in fact. She would place her palms on her cheeks and pull her skin down and say look at this, what is this? I don't know what this is! And I had no idea what to say because it didn't look like anything to me, and I had no idea what she had looked like before anyway, and I didn't know why it was such a big deal. But she had found it such a big deal that she had taken her concerns about the droopiness and the attendant cracking of the skin, to her GP. Unsurprisingly to me he had found nothing wrong, and eventually she started using Blisteze on the cracked corners of her lips and she mentioned it no more.

That woman and I now had something in common that we didn't have then - trauma.

I won't say here what her trauma was, but it was to do with some harm that had come to her family. She spent a great deal of her time dealing with her family's trauma, either trying to help her children, or trying to get her children help. And it affected her in lots of ways, some of which I understood at the time, some of which I didn't, all of which I understand now.

Trauma is the stuff of adoptive families lives. My children spent over five years in an abusive and neglectful home before they were taken into care, and trauma swilled around inside them like an oil spillage on a rough sea, polluting and covering their inner world in a slick, smothering blackness. And there is no containing trauma. It leaks and it spreads and it poisons everything it comes into contact with - including other people. My family had been swimming in this toxic stuff for years, there was no part of our life that wasn't contaminated by it, and lately we'd been submerged, thrown under time and time again by the black waves of trauma. We were exhausted.

And that's what I now saw in my face. I saw the past year that had been full of serious conversations. Conversations with my children about their suffering, conversations with "professionals" about my children's suffering, conversations with friends about our mutual experience of our children's suffering.

I tried smiling, and I felt the effort of those underused facial muscles struggling to push the skin out of the way so my mouth could turn upwards. My cheek muscles quivered with the effort. I realised that my droopy face was the result of a lack of exercise. Not only did my life present me with few opportunities to crack open a smile or to laugh these days, but I didn't even talk much. If I wasn't trying to say the right thing to my children, or trying to convince someone to help my family, I rarely needed to talk. I didn't work outside the home. I couldn't fit in much of a social life. Neither my husband nor my children were great conversationalists. My face and voice had simply fallen slack through lack of use.

I was horrified. I am a sociable person. I enjoy the company of others. I love the art of conversation, everything from chatting, to deep conversations, to small talk. I am fluent in expressive language and whilst I was keeping my brain internally active in this area with my writing, and reading, and obsessive need to seek out psychologically intelligent TV dramas, verbally I had fallen way behind.     

When the children went back to school after the summer, which had fulfilled its prophecy to be a bad one, I insisted my husband and I went out for the day. We walked around a fine old house and gardens on one of those warm and quiet September days that tells you the intensity of summer is over, and our bodies started to remember what it was to be out of the dark, watery depths and to walk on land again. He forgot to talk to me at first, but when I pointed out another couple who were walking and talking, he remembered, and in no time he had me laughing again. He can make me laugh like no one else. The readiness with which my face responded completely surprised me. The ability to smile and laugh was not diminished at all, it had merely been the opportunity that had been lacking. 

After those few gentle hours I had a sense that my essential self had risen and become embodied, and with a few more hours invested since then in rediscovering the normal world, I feel stable enough to withstand the sea of trauma crashing around me. 

That's a lesson, isn't it? I will try and think of this the next time a Social Worker tells me that they "don't believe in respite", or some medical professional tells me I need to spend more time on the phone begging people to let us have access to essential services. I cannot help my family if I am drowning in trauma. But more than that, I do not have to drowned in trauma. I can get out.   

   

I should end the blog post there but I can't. I have to acknowledge that whilst I can get out, my children very often can't. I often see in their expressionless faces the same slackness that I experienced this year. Adopted children, I have noticed, are no where near as ready to smile and laugh as children who have not experienced such trauma and loss. My children's bodies cannot remember, as mine did, what it is like to be happy. They were never happy. Happy is something foreign to them, something still to be found and explored. And that's the whole God damn heartbreaking sadness of it all.