I Should Want to Write About the Roe v. Wade Decision, but I Think My Heart is Too Broken.

When I was growing up, my mom used to sit me down with my baby books. I now know that ruminating, racing, intrusive thoughts I struggled with since early childhood were just the ADHD I was diagnosed with as an adult. At the time, it was thrown around very loosely that this may be the case, but nothing formal came about until later on. So back then, I used to come to my Umma with a distressed look on my face, and hold my hands over my ears; “I can’t get my brain to stop. It sounds like big noises in my head over and over.”

Looking back, I would imagine that some of that was complex trauma from the grief and loss of adoption. Kids don’t know what that looks like, so it comes out as literal as can be at times. Big noises in my brain, ruminating thoughts, distress, physical discomfort. Colonialism is a bitch.

She had a look of concern, not panic. She had been a mom to three kids before me, afterall, and had probably really heard. It. All. So she stood there silently, and sized up my complaint. Then she guided me to a large, brown covered scrapbook, and a plastic tupperware full of old school papers and art projects I’d done over the years in preschool and gradeschool.

“Here you go. This will calm you down. Just look through it quietly.”

I sat in the basement, or the living room, over and over, paging through the scrapbooks, the old art projects, worksheets, and sequential errors and…