Loss, Side Effects May Include

In Bulgaria, where I am born and live until the age of five, I lose my life.

You never hear it referred to in such a melodramatic way, but that is what it feels like to be adopted at an age you remember. 

You look out a window and see a mountain or the boy who lives in the flat beside yours. The following week, there is a different mountain, a different boy. 

In truth, I lose the only life I know a year and a half before, when my mother dies.

We were close throughout my infancy, my mother and I, but I do not attend her funeral. 

Instead, I hold tight to her memory, with a hope familiar to grief, that remembering can keep her alive or, at the very least, lessen the pain of loss. 

In America, some thirty years later, I say yes to my boyfriend of roughly one year when he asks me to marry him on the bow of a sailboat.

I am thirty-two.

It is the eve of the anniversary of my arrival to the United States, but I do not mention this, figuring too much has happened in the last twenty-four hours, anyway. 

The day before, I receive notice to vacate what was my last foothold in the neighborhood where I spent the majority of my adulthood becoming who I am — the office where I moved my private therapy practice the month before I met him. 

The following Monday, my therapist of twelve years announces that he is retiring.

I am five again. 

In the three months it takes for me to learn English, I forget Bulgarian.

My new mother says she can’t compete with an angel, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t forget the mother who died, so I do not invoke her memory in the presence of my new mother, who is also jealous that I have taken to my new father instead of her.

My visa expires, my passport expires, my grandmother who adopted me just after my birth parents died expires.

My secret grief is the tattered manila envelope full of pictures I keep hidden beneath my bed and the red three-ringed binder full of documents encased in plastic I pore over when no one is looking. 

Some thirty years later, my boyfriend and I move in together three weeks before the world shuts down. I don’t plan to give up my apartment in case things don’t work out, but when we are forced to return early from a trip to Ireland, I empty what is left of my belongings to keep and take the rest to Goodwill. 

I become obsessed with home fitness, donate to the blog of the trainer whose classes I used to take, look for him on drives to collect mail at the office in my old neighborhood. 

Months later, I still look to find familiar faces when I drive through my old neighborhood, but never do. I long to see someone I recognize, be someone I recognize. 

I wonder why, if I have everything I want, I am so angry and ambivalent about my relationship.

I am five again.

In my new family, I make my bed and wipe the hardwood floors with Windex of my own volition, terrified that I will be returned to a life that no longer exists if I can’t find my place. 

I laugh when my new mom lifts my hair from my face and asks if anyone is in there. 

I try not to forget that in Bulgaria I placed first out of hundreds on the admissions exam to an elite preschool ordinarily reserved for the children of state dignitaries — although I often do. I forget a lot.

In homage to my new mother’s heritage, I joke that I am from the south of Sweden, so deeply blonde that I am brunette, and this pleases my mother, who is looking to make dumb blonde jokes. 

The engagement ring is striking and so unlike what I want. It is also two sizes too big. 

I nod and smile when at Christmas, two weeks after we get engaged, my sister-in-law holds up my hand to take a better look and tells me that I did good. 

Dad suggests a fishing trip so the men in my family can celebrate, then jokes that I should plan a spa day with Mom, who is wheelchair bound, with limited capacity to speak, due to a neurodegenerative disease.

“They don’t treat the women in my family very well,” I say on our drive home, to which my fiancé responds, “I don’t understand why you can’t just be happy for me.”

In the whiter than white community in which I am raised, I straighten my hair and accompany friends to the tanning salon, even though I am already tan. 

I am close with Dad.

He tells me that despite knowing he shouldn’t have favorites, I am his.

I graduate early from high school and late from college when life proves in its own dispassionate way that surviving one family trauma does not protect me from facing others.

The first time I meet my therapist, angry and bereft, I call a boring life aspirational.

I arrange a visit to the bridal salon to look at wedding dresses with Mom. She insists on bringing Dad, cries a deep and guttural wail when Dad and I both refuse. I become acutely aware that it is possible to grieve both what was and what never was, though she is not the mother I prefer on this day, in particular. 

We fire our couples therapist when she references Brené Brown in session. 

When my computer crashes repeatedly, rendering me unable to complete the introductory questionnaire from our new couples therapist until the very last minute, I realize my relationship is objectively good despite long-held reservations that make me want to throw my laptop against a wall — apparently vulnerability is part of the package.

At twenty-four, I run a half marathon, even though I do not like to run, then keep running anyway.

At twenty-five, the photojournalist tells me I have more in common with the people he takes photos of than with him or his friends while breaking up with me and I believe him — not what he says, but what he means.

At thirty, I decide I’ll be my own hero when I become a licensed therapist, then reconnect with a long-lost love from college I spent over a decade pining over.

I am watching tv when it occurs to me that I am still angry about the long-lost love.

My fiancé trusts me to contact him, to tie up loose ends — and I do.

I tell my new therapist about how the only other person I put on such a high pedestal was my mother. I don’t ask if she thinks there is a connection.

A city block, lined with trees, me pulling a doll in a stroller in the ancient city of my birth looks a lot like the city block lined with trees in the neighborhood where I am living my best life when I meet my fiancé less than two weeks after it doesn’t work with the long-lost love. 

It occurs to me that loving him wouldn’t have brought her back anyway.

So I recommit to marriage.

And now, instead of being angry and ambivalent, I am just angry, but a little less so. 

Left alone with this tectonic kind of grief, which is too painful to touch without fighting with my fiancé or becoming obsessed with astrology, carpentry, exercise, gardening and nutrition. 

I tell my new therapist that I think this focus on self-work is reinforcing the notion that I am not good enough and decide to step away.

The ring begins to fall apart and I finally work up the courage to tell my betrothed that I think it has too many diamonds and that too many other women are wearing the exact same ring— even if we can’t return it, at least he knows.

I am looking at an old picture. I notice an altar to my dead mother. So I build an altar in the cubby of the new closet system we install in our bedroom. 

It’s nothing fancy. A wooden icon, a hexagonal wood jewelry box decorated with traditional Bulgarian pyrography and my mother’s photo — the photo my grandmother let me pick out myself for her death notice. 

The week of the wedding, I hire a medium. I want to ask my mother if she thinks I’m making the right decision.

After the reading, I let myself remember this little piggy, Nutella on toast with the sun streaming in through the kitchen windows, how when she put on lipstick it made me feel beautiful, too. 

I wonder, who I would be without my grief?

Would I care whether or not the bed was made, whether I’ve exercised, or read enough?

Would I feel more certain about my love?

The week following our wedding, on her death day, on our honeymoon, I realize I have been trying to get back to my mother for exactly thirty years.

I probably won’t stop. At least now I know.