My Love Language is Sabotage

By Hannah Andrews
“If you want a Vegas wedding or the chance to file a restraining order, date an adopted person, or—really what I am saying: me.”
(Anne Heffron in You Don't Look Adopted)

This month’s theme is “Love, Relationships, and Intimacy,” and lucky for you, dear reader, I’m pretty much an expert. Thanks to adoption, I gained valuable insight into the human condition. From day one, I learned excellent attachment skills, including and in no particular order: hang on for dear life, leave before they leave you, and if ever things are going “too well” or when in doubt (and I’m ALWAYS in doubt) throw a wrench in it all—ASAP.

Sabotage equals survival.

Yes, I’m being facetious. Kinda.

If you google adoptees and relationships, you’ll get a mixed bag. One site will insist there’s no evidence that adult adoptees have attachment, relationship, or intimacy issues. That same site might also state that there’s little evidence because there are so few studies, that is, published studies. I’m slow to trust, let alone trust a study. I do trust adoptee voices though. There’s a plethora of published (and podcasted) lived experiences out there now, that often touch on trust issues and relationship struggles in our community.

Not all adopted persons consider relationships difficult, but many do. I certainly always have, though I didn’t think it had anything to do with adoption until I read Anne Heffron’s 2016 memoir, You Don’t Look Adopted. I stumbled upon it in 2019, when I was 50 years old. It was the first adoptee-authored book I read. That quote above, the one about “if you want a Vegas wedding,” is just a few pages in.

I laughed. And then, I didn’t.

Wait, what did she just say? She went on to describe her typical relationship, the manic highs, the crashing lows, the devastation of the break-up. It all sounded way too familiar. How had this blonde woman crawled inside my head? Could those so-called “personality quirks” of mine instead be issues rooted in my surrender and subsequent adoption?

Hmmm I had a Vegas wedding, I thought. But lots of people do, I countered, and before I knew it, I was having a full-on debate with myself.

I got married at the drive-thru chapel when I was 25.

It seemed so fated, like we were so “in love” that we couldn’t wait one more day to wed. I thought that’s what love was supposed to be—irrational, crazy, an “I can’t breathe without you,” type of feeling. In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Who else might I have once thought I couldn’t breathe without? You guessed it—my birth mom.

I wonder now if my lonely baby brain programmed in messages… love is longing, love is abandonment, love is …

So despite very grounded adoptive parents, who by all accounts had a very stable marriage, the type of people that held hands when no one was around, the type that seldom argued and, then did so in a healthy way. No freezing each other out, no passive-aggressive barbs. Despite that amazing model of level-headed mutual respect, I chose mad love. Always. The madder, the better.

From my very first serious boyfriend (and they were all so very serious to me) in high school, I was all or nothing. Starry-eyed and suffocating on love, or once it was over, the polar opposite. It would be as if they never existed, their face forever scribbled out in my mind’s photo album. Dead to me.

But marriage. That was forever. Even if it started in a drive-thru wedding chapel, matching khaki cut-off shorts, heads out the sunroof, me with a “included with wedding package” bouquet in hand.

Of course my first marriage didn’t last. In fact, my husband roller-bladed away—that’s not a typo, and it’s okay to laugh. Even then, in my devastation, I found it a bit comical. He left me at a crappy motel in Tucson, AZ, about a year after our Vegascapade.

Of course, I got back together with him. Are you surprised? Did you miss the “hold on for dear life” part at the top? And then, he left again, this time in our own Midwestern city, but still with no note, no warning. Just poof. Gone.

For years that was the “worst breakup story.” The kind you tell at parties when people are five drinks in and slurring out their best worst confessions. I always won the worst breakup contest. A badge of honor.

A few years ago, I wrote a tragi-comic short memoir piece about that first marriage. I called it “Skateaway,” because I’m so clever. It placed in the top 10, chosen for stage performance with a real actor.

Everyone laughed. They were supposed to.

I’d always edited it that way. For laughs. I love laughter. At least when they’re laughing with me. It feels like love.

But here’s the part I left out:

After he left that other time (notice I didn’t say second as it was more like the third or fourth), I finally filed for divorce. I say finally like it was years of turmoil. We were together off and on (really mostly off) for a total of less than two years, but it felt like forever. The final time he disappeared, I filed. Not knowing where he was, I had to file a “notice to appear” in the local paper. Nobody really read that page of the Peoria Journal Star, even back then, when people did read newspapers, but still, I was mortified.

Despite notice, he didn’t appear, so I stood before the judge alone.

“I’m granting you this divorce on the grounds of gross mental abuse,” the judge said.

“Oh no, your honor, he wasn’t abusive. He just left.”

And then the judge said something I never forgot, but that didn’t click until decades later—about the time of that Heffron book.

“Young lady, didn’t you say he left without a note, a call, and that he’s done this before?”

I nodded.

“Abandonment IS mental abuse,” he said.

I didn’t argue. After all, he was a judge. I gathered up my divorce decree and my pummeled pride and went home. I thought I’d never get over it, but eventually I did. Deep inside, part of me knew I could get over anything.

Here’s the thing. I mean, if the judge said it was mental abuse to leave a grown woman with no word of warning, no see ya later, doesn’t it seem logical that leaving a screaming infant was mental abuse, too?

That’s a rabbit hole I don’t feel like bounding down today. And certainly didn’t back then. That’s a hole I’m still digging my way out of.

Maybe that first husband stirred up my abandonment issues. Or maybe they were perpetually stirred, a big cauldron of bubbling mal-attachment stew.

I know adoptees that have had long, successful relationships. My brother is one, though he spent his first two years with his birth mother, so maybe that wired him differently. Of the adopted people I know, listen to, or read, it seems to me, more have struggled than not. They’ve either stayed in unhappy, even abusive relationships, or were perpetual cut and runners. Seems many of us either stay too long at the fair or leave when no one’s looking.

Still, I won’t attempt to speak for anyone but myself.

Love, Relationships, Intimacy… It’s been pretty rocky for me.
I’m not going to put a bow on it.

Was there a second husband? Of course. I left him before he could leave me, which, in retrospect, he had no intention of doing. I’m sure I’d eventually have thrown enough wrenches, ensuring he’d have no alternative. I had to.

Sabotage is survival. Or at least, it used to be.

One of the best parts of this journey of discovery, of defogging, coming into consciousness, is finding other voices saying the things I couldn’t say for so long. The books, the podcasts, the plays. The friendship and fellowships of other adopted people. I even took writing classes with Anne Heffron. That blonde who wrote all those words as if she’d swum in my brain, is a friend of mine. I texted her earlier to tell her I was quoting her.

One of the worst things is discovering that so much of my story was untrue, built on smidges of identity, mixed with fairytales that couldn’t ever be real. What is real, though, are the millions of little pinpricks left behind by surrender, separation, and erasure.

But, I can tell you this. Sabotage is not survival. It’s just sabotage. I’m still working on my brain not viewing everything as survival dependant. Being comfortable in the world, with others, with myself. After all, that’s the most crucial relationship—the one we hold with ourselves.

Hindsight is both a gift and a curse. I can see my mistakes more clearly and avoid making them again. But I also mourn all the time I wasted in fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. It’s hard to look at. It’s easy to brush it off with a “don’t look back, just forward,” but I think retrospect is crucial. As is talking about it. I don’t want the generations that follow, to wander through life feeling like an alien, like I did for so long.

“For most of my life, I felt both real and not real,” is how Anne opened her book. I read that and my inner child, teen, and adult all screamed YES!! Thank you for saying that Anne. Thank you for sharing your words. I have so much love and gratitude for all the adopted people and parents telling their stories in whatever ways they can, be it through blogs, books, support groups, social media… All of it is so healing for so many.

Keep sharing your stories and thanks for reading,

About the author: Hannah Andrews lives and writes in San Diego. She’s a Baby Scoop Era adoptee and editor of AKA’s Blog. Her fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction have been featured onstage, in print, and on the internet. Her upcoming memoir, None of This is Yours will be finished and available one day, hopefully sooner than later.

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