The In-Between People
On adoption, connection, and the life of the mermaids: writings toward a forthcoming book project by Ali Maaxa
Lost at Sea
In the water of my birth mother’s womb, there was music, and I was home. We were mermaids. This is what I know.
Flung from my beautiful, musical bathysphere, out into the territory of the landlubbers, a woman who had adopted me from some nuns in Newark pulled a tattered sheet of notebook paper from a box in the bedroom closet. I was seven. Maybe I had asked.
She treated the paper as she treated her adopted daughter. Foreign, but somehow hers to manage. Imbued with magic, but not the kind she could understand. Notes she said she had taken when she got the call from Catholic Charities that they had a baby to giver her: someone else’s baby. Dad was somewhere else, as always.
1984. The woman huffed at the scribbles on the half-sheet of torn paper: perfect Catholic-school loops of writing, but rendered manically and without rhythm or meaning. Her hands shook. She was weeks away from being hospitalized for what I would later recognize as a psychotic break. There were to be many.
I never got to hold the paper myself; I don’t know what of the story was actually written there, or what was apocryphal. It was all out of my hands. Before that night, I had known I was adopted, but very little else. This is the story she told:
All we wanted was a baby,
and we tried and couldn’t have one,
and we went to the nuns, and asked them to help us.
When you were two weeks old, we got a phone call and I was OVERJOYED.
Two days later, we packed a little suitcase with clothes for you, and a little comb and diapers and pajamas, and we drove from Saddle Brook all the way to Newark, where the nuns led us to a back room and opened the door.
And there you were, smiling, with one eye opened and one eye closed. And I knew you were mine.
The first wound for adoptees is the primal wound. It is called relinquishment trauma: the terror that comes from being torn from your mother’s voice, her heartbeat, her rhythms of sleep and activity, her way of moving through the world.
‘The Mother’ was poor
she was from a good Catholic family, but she was young and unmarried
she wanted you to have a nice life with a nice married couple who could not have a baby of their own
She gave you up right away after you were born,
and she decided not to even hold you.
She handed you to the nuns and they took you away.
And they named you “Colleen” because you had green eyes, and you looked Irish.
And that is your middle name now.
The second wound is called genealogical bewilderment: you can’t make sense of being in your body and mind. You talk too fast, your hair is too tangly, your growth too explosive and too awkward. They gawk at you, look at those strange long legs. Why are you so bad at basketball? What can’t you get married and own a nice car like your cousin?
‘The father’ was a hippie, he had long hair and played the drums.
‘The Mother’ was a singer and played the piano.
She told the nuns that if you ever wanted to study music, we should encourage you.
Maybe her mother didn’t let her study music, I don’t know, but that’s what she told the nuns to tell me.
The third wound is estrangement in the adoptive family. When they pick you up, they are dislocating you in two ways: removing you from what you know, and then dislocating you from amongst themselves as well, like magnets stuck together with the wrong polarity, crooked and uncomfortable. They did you this favor, and you bear their name, and that is that. They do not know that she sang to you.
I have never really been able to recognize myself in the mirror. It doesn’t add up, the parts look different from day to day. People describe me, and that seems to make sense, until I find myself looking back from the bathroom wall, unable to trace my own contours. So tall, redhead, so odd. Half person, half something else. Stranger, moving through the world without an anchor.
But there had once been a home in the water, and when I heard my mother sing, I could feel my swimming start to stir, and to grow fins. This piece of paper was a magical portal to an amniotic home; it saturated the room and warmed and soaked my parched baby bones. The longing. Maybe I felt a little flutter of some ancient gills, pumping and flapping for air, preparing for what was to be a very long journey. I swear I could hear her singing to me.
***
Every night as a child, and every day still now, I would fill the bathtub up to my neck and hide in its folds, with the radio on. All my life, the song of sea pulls me toward it. The people who took me drove me from the Atlantic coast to Iowa, but as soon as I could, I began to fling myself back to the sea: Huntington, San Francisco, Dakar, Virginia Beach, Alicante, Ocracoke, Portland. I dream of water. The water, where we begin, without weight, without worry, immersed in sound and sensation, beckons to us.
I began writing this book in the days after my younger brother took his own life. He was also adopted a few years behind me, from other another mom with other nuns. Adoptees are four times more likely to die by suicide than their peers. Four times.
After that call, I knew that I was lost, and I dreamed of mermaids. In my grieving, I sought you out. I took the genetic test and I found you. You were waiting for me. In our first conversation, you told me that you sang me sea shanties when I was in your womb. In fact, songs are your life: like me, you are a professional folklorist who has spent her life recording, singing, and amplifying the songs of the sea and beyond. You called me “darling” once, and then again: I was counting.
The third “darling” was the next time we talked, when I told you how much it had meant to me. You looked at me and called me darling again, and I forgot to breathe. You saw me, and you said it was okay to cry. I covered my face; I am not used to anyone seeing me at all. I do not know what I look like. I do not know how to be held, but you are showing me.
Like you, I have spent my entire adult life researching the songs of others, working out my need for belonging by collecting wild creative things, binding them with theories of culture and music, archiving them to preserve their power. When I am afraid to be seen, I hide behind stacks of cultural theory books. It’s an institutionally-approved way to ask the big questions at the core of our being. If you do it right, they will even give you funding to travel the world, seeking.
Cultural theorist Stuart Hall tells us that people do not have an identity. We are not born with one in our DNA, just a collection of possibilities. Although we are placed amongst our identities by name, checked boxes on the census, the way we are seen and called, they are simply one cultural or interpersonal or familial story brushed upon another.
We navigate many, conflicting, lifelong processes of identification. We tangle with them, throw them off, work them out. We avoid the traps and seek the ones that make us safe or that set us free. We hunger for what Caribbean theorist Edouard Glissant called a “poetics of relation”: when we connect with the world in a way that makes sense, and that connection resonates within us, we start to belong. Our identities are not static: they are in flux, and require constant seeking and circulation. You and I sought each other out, coast to coast.
In the great experiment, now coming to an end, that was the adoption wave of the 20th century, we never talked about identification, and we took belonging for granted. But identity and belonging are essential. I have always needed to belong to someone. We all want to be imprinted, to be called.
***
The nuns told the people who took me that you chose not to hold me after you gave birth to me. That you did not want to bond with me so that you could more easily give me up. That was the best possible outcome.
You told me otherwise, in between the first two times you called me darling.
In the maternity ward in Newark in 1976, the women who surrounded you, poor women, immigrant women, women of color, most of them single moms, like you. The mothers told you not to listen to the nuns, to disobey them, and to hold me. That was the best possible outcome.
You held me, you held me for three days, and you sang me the Irish songs of the sea. You left a watermark. I swear I remember your voice as you sang me sea shanties in your arms. You must have called me darling. I identify as darling.
You tell me you are not surprised that we are both folklorists, each of us spending our lives trying to understand the ways that voices connect people and places and stories together. You tell me that you had asked the nuns to promise to give me to musicians and found out later that they lied to you. You apologize for losing me. I tell you I am writing a book about mermaids and you take a breath.
“Ali,” you say. “I know you can’t see my lower half, but it is covered in scales and ends in a fishtail.”
We fall into laughter and our big white front teeth and soft Irish cheeks flash across the continent, like beacons. Nerds, bleeding hearts, funny girls, sisters, mothers, nun-fighters. Holders and be-helders. Laugh-too-louders.
You call me darling one more time. What do I call you? Your water was my home, and there was music there. The water holds a space for us in-between people. We are tied together.
***
This is a book for the in-between people: those of us whose lives on land only make half sense. For many of us, our last safe place was in the womb. For others, the water calls us to swim across channels, and to cross oceans to find a way of belonging.
Mermaids don’t walk a linear path: we traverse the water in any direction at any time, with music as our wayfinder. This book is called Mermaid Music, and this is why I am writing it. I am a storyteller and a praise singer, descended from storytellers and praise singers, immersed in the oceanic possibilities that come from growing up groundless, from endless seeking, from the music that lives in the womb.
This is a story of two intertwined quests: a search for my mother, and a celebration of mermaids and other halfway people. In these pages, I sing the praises of a world full of mermaid deities, of moms and wombs, of the sirens beckoning us out to sea, of the freedom that comes with untethering ourselves from the mast, diving through the waves, leaving nuns in our wake.
Note: This substack is an effort to share and fund original research on global mermaid folklore (I am a PhD folklorist and anthropologist), and in-between people, like adoptees, globally-dispersed communities, and people in-between conventional understandings of race, gender, age, sexuality, ability and social difference. Please subscribe if you’d like to support my manuscript development.