Plastic Doll

I am a Plastic Doll

by adoptee peach

I struggle with muscle/joint pain a lot, and think that it may be related to the emotional journey I have taken. Sometimes I wonder if I had never searched/reunited if I would have "awakened" this part of myself which works so hard at "organizing" or "reorganizing" my reality ~ identity ~ family ~ life.

I would have missed out on a lot. But it may have been easier for me ~ maybe not.

Anyway, I was laying in bed this morning wishing I didn't feel like an old arthritic woman, and the thought came to me that it almost feels like the pains of transformation ~ it does hurt physically, and badly at times.

As if I was a plastic doll, frozen in place, no emotions or physical expressions ~ except a painted on smile. Suddenly infused with "realness", with life. The old, hard plastic I am made of (resiliant, strong, inflexible, controlled) must all of a sudden adjust to "real" existance, real "being", emotion, pain, joy, blood coursing through my veins, muscles stretching and moving and living ~ for the first time.

I can imagine the painted on smile moving slowly into a look of shock and awe ~ what is this? I am "real"? How can that be? I have always just existed in this one state ~ my adopted self. Certificate of authenticity and all. How does a "living" doll break out of this shell I have been in my whole life?
I don't know, but I am "real" now, and can't go back. It is so painful to stretch the joints and flesh that have stayed in one position, frozen in the mold that was used to define me, afraid to even imagine what I could be, impossible.

I am a plastic doll. The life was sucked out like a vacuum as I lay in the bassinet crying, crying for my Mother, who never appeared again. The cries carried with them the life I had shared with her ~ flying into the universe in search, to never return. So I slowly morphed into the doll I became. The one who laughed and talked and danced her little heart out for the girl who owned me. I was her doll and I was happy.

Until, ever so slowly, the cries that had relinquished my "realness" came back for me. They stayed away during childhood, like they knew. But as the doll began to crack and fray, and got bruised and torn through childhood antics; filled with history and stories, and dutifully fulfilling the dreams of the girl who owned her...... Well ~ I guess her batteries just plum wore out.

As if they had been watching from a distance, the cries came rushing back, the tears the worn plastic doll had once shed, the screams that had made her real at one time, but she had forgotten ~ found their way back, and she "knew". It had been so long that she was taken for surprise. Almost like it had been another life, not hers. But she remembered and she searched. She found ~ but she was now plastic. How could she fit in? She couldn't.

An unbearable pain ~ anger, saddness, grief ~ welled up in her and broke through the hardness, the frozen fakeness, the facade. It was as if the pain would snap those brittle, fragile arms and legs, feet and hands, head and heart ~ but she is alive. And she can feel. She must learn to be "real" in spite of the pain. She can, for the first time, feel the joy of realness, which makes some of the pain bearable. She walks stiffly, feeling like half-doll, half-person in the land of the living. Discovering humanity. Realizing that everyone paints on a smile at some point, and that maybe, just maybe, she is not as different as she seemed.