Vein’s way in
Carolin Meyer
The vernaculars of the royal kin then, were the only way in.
How else to become part of what you are not, but what you are nevertheless a part of – through adoption, through interracial adoption. That which separates you then also becomes a lifeline, to adapt fully, to surrogate the thing just out of reach, the one that the baby’s paws claw for. Reaching out to be held, loved, and accepted.
Adoption is adaption.
“We don’t call it Toillette.” That’s how you belong here. “We call it Klo.” Toillette is ‘spießig’. You suckle hard on that way in, the way of language and words that make or break you. It’s a trial within a trial that they say does not exist.
“I don’t see your black body hair. You are just like the other children.” But what if I’m not. I am not. Do we deny each other our individuality? Is that how we belong? Does it frighten us so to see difference? You already know the answer. More so, you feel and live the answer.
Does it frighten us to leave the mould? Shun into the exile of an untethered reality. It would be so cosy where your nest was. Where you have learned to fit perfectly into their mould, with your edges cut off, neatly out of sight. Out of your sight.
To be still and shed your skin. To shut your outside out. To condone racism, sexism, misogyny, to laugh at your own expense, knowing full well that you are alone because you are brown and not White. Because you are not one of them.
But how to know we are different when you are trying so hard to fit into that predestined mould? How to spill over the edges when you try so hard to be contained? Within that small frame that has been laid out for you. Home is where the shape of your heart has been pre-formed. Before your arrival.
Home, thick home.
We all search for a home, and don’t we all deserve one? Are some people better than others because they know the vernaculars of your royal kin? “No, we are all the same.” But why do we eat from silver spoons? Why did you cry so much when your family silver was taken from you? Rationally, of course I understand why - cry more, dare I say, ask, probe, than when your child is in pain? But rationality has little to no say when the womb weeps. Or have we not been your children to begin with? Just an object in the closet? To be looked at, polished, stripped off spots and blemishes, from a life unlived, to be hid, put neatly into the velvet case of your ancestry? Next to the other knives and forks with YOUR family’s crest?
Why do we have a book with all the names? Why do we receive Christmas cards with everyone’s blonde children and read letters of those children’s paths as if the paths had not already been made for them? Why do we spend OUR time on OTHER people’s successes? Christmas is for us, is it not? For family? Or is Christmas just the time that we spend together because all other families are spending it together and we still look at what the other – better? unblemished? – children do.
We still compare our wares. The silver in their plush velvet caskets that is there to be used, you say. Whilst scolding us for putting the knives in the dishwasher. For mixing up the non-silver with the silverware, yes, the one with your family’s crest, the one that matters. What matters more is family, but is it family or is it tradition and staying in that lane?
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, too, did the good deed and adopted children, however, I can’t help but think that Angelina looks happiest with her biological children on her arm. The resemblance of those tall-grown swans adorning her side.
“They say they don’t have money, but then they buy so many Christmas decorations.”, the lady of the castle scolds. It makes you angry, this ignorant talk. You can’t quite put your finger on it. They do make a difference, don’t they? They do not understand, or do they?
It is within you, too. But staying still in the velvet mould that was laid out for your unruly, so-foreign-but-not beating heart, would mean your own decimation. A still birth at that. Being buried alive behind a façade that looks just right, as much as one can, being brown and hairy and round.
Nature vs. nurture – you have seen it in your adopted brother’s white face. How he was plump when he arrived at 3 and tall and lanky when he was through the bootcamp of differing vernaculars. Is their nurture better? No. Is their nature better? No. Do they understand what makes a person? They protect their genes so much that it hurts. But your pain is less important than theirs. You curse the vernaculars of the invisible etiquette, the thin line between them and us. Who are they to determine who belongs to which side? Don’t you know yourself that where one’s consciousness awakes and in which body is so utterly, utterly arbitrary?
Bloodlines are thinning, in the way that all things cease to exist if these things are not allowed to be. It is not welcomed to be oneself if that self differs from the other silver knives and forks. Not even uttered were the words by another member of the ‘elegant world’ that she herself had been adopted. Yes, white – thank God. Easier, then, to keep up the façade. To trick even yourself and dissolve into their vernaculars for good. By dressing yourself with their lingo of Anti-Spießtum. But why was she so ashamed to admit that she herself was adopted? Uttering that she might have brought ‘bad genes’ into her carefully knit family?
The shame that is repressed feeds on itself and the people around you. It is that that connects us all. The shame of our repressed identities, so utterly alone and scared to be called out for our aloneness, our difference. For our undeserving presence at their hallowed tables of just the right kind of silverware, porcelain, ash tray.
Smoking can be so chic, can it not. But it can also not be and what does that depend on? Ah, yes, the right kind of silverware, house, and status of the surroundings in which the same cigarettes are smoked.
I curse your vernaculars because they have tried to thin me and press me into that invisible tight ship of a mould that you deny you are running and are yourself being run in. Cursing one’s vernaculars does not mean that one is spoiling one’s nest. Oh, but wasn’t it my blood that would spoil your blood, didn’t you say? Your blue blood. The one that is uncrossable in a world of pretence? In a world of scared inner children who are somehow, because of the tight vernaculars through which they are all wrought and wrangled, different to the others.
The others who spend their money on Christmas decorations, to make their damp house look nicer, to send a light into the night. To do anything as they damn please, with the money that they’ve got. The money they’ve worked for. The coins that are turned, upside and down, before they are spent on something, just some thing that can illuminate their faces in their lifetime.
To live in the here and now must be terrifying with all that inherited silver, all that guilt. Am I worthy? To utter these words in our isolated rib cages, our darkest moments that we are allowed to have. Are we worthy? It's funny, isn’t it, how something so thin and equally blue, like a vein can be a way in. Into a life lived here or there. It is arbitrary and irrelevant where we are born in relation to who we are. We are all worthy.
