The Best Time I Didn’t Friend My Mother on Facebook

by Melissa Chandler

Recently, my former adoptive mother tried to friend me on Facebook. I hadn’t spoken to her since I was a kid.

When my brother and I were taken out of our adoptive home of six years, I at 15 and he at 17, we were placed back into state custody. We were foster kids again, which hey, was fine because in the past we’d had some pretty good foster times with some pretty nice foster folk. We had to testify in court against our adoptive parents, though.

Among the most memorable things they had done:

1. Told my brother he wasn’t allowed to eat for three days, and that they’d be doing surprise checks at the school cafeteria.
2. Hit us with creative things (well maybe those things were not inherently creative, just creative as child-hitting tools?) such as blow-dryers.
3. Dug food out of the garbage disposal, because we had not been given permission to clear our plates, replaced the food on said plates, and made us eat it.

It wasn’t all bad, however. The man and woman who’d adopted us valued education and travel and hard work and sports. I got to hug Clyde Drexler once, at a Blazers Camp they’d sent me to when I was 10.

Our adoptive father was a child abuser, but he was also a man who loved to fish, and woke us early to take us along. I loved being in the woods while the sun was rising, loved surprising him sometimes when I caught a fish, reeled it in patiently, gently enough to avoid breaking the line. In the truck on the way to and from, he’d play Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams” on repeat, which, if you think about it, may have been more damaging to our young minds than the physical abuse, but he sang it like an anthem, and sometimes I swear I saw his eyes tearing up while he did. I don’t really know what his deal was.

One thing I know and am glad to know, after living with my adoptive parents, is that nothing is ever black and white. This may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people think in black and white when confrontation arises. It’s easier, I guess.

Our adoptive mother was a woman who would take me shopping for the best of the best running shoes, and then stop off at McDonald’s to surprise my brother with a prank-worthy load of cheeseburgers, giggling all the way home in anticipation of the look on his face.

Yet, this was the same woman who tore through our bedrooms like a cyclone if even one small object was out of its place. After all, we were told to clean, and if we needed to see every one of our belongings ripped out of closets and drawers and tossed into a massive pile in the center of our rooms, if that was what it took to learn, then so be it.

I remember one day while she was cycloning around my bedroom, she reached to the top of the dresser for a porcelain ballerina windup music box I’d received as a birthday gift from my biological mother.

I can still feel the absolute fury, the venom that my veins, fists, and eyes filled up with, while her hand hovered near that ballerina. “That’s MINE. Don’t. Touch. It.” I can’t recall, before or since, feeling anything near that kind of anger. Her eyes met mine and her hand sort of groped the air and then dropped. She walked out of the room, her feet making their signature heavy plods across the wood floor, and I was left to pick through my fresh cyclone of a room.

But that was before we got away. Later, we were free of them, my brother and I. The court annulled the adoption, we went other places, saw other things, went to college, made lives for ourselves, lives that were all leading up to an era when we could finally depict them cleverly on Facebook.

And so, you know, years down the road, I get a message: “Cyclone/Mommy Dearest lady wants to be friends on Facebook! Click to confirm her as a friend!” or whatever.

She must have Googled me. Life is like 10 times funnier now than it was back when Googling hadn’t been discovered.

I love my friends. They’re so creative, and sometimes I get to see their artwork on Facebook or photos from the trip they took to Nepal, or fancy things they’ve cooked. I post stuff too, like a photo from last night: These people were testing their jellyfish art installation in Dolores Park, and they needed volunteers to hold up the glowing jellyfish they’d made out of beautiful flowing translucent material and light bulbs and electric tentacles. There were 25 of us jellyfish running around, and it made passersby really happy. We were giant, beautiful jellies dancing in a park after dark, and if that doesn’t make you happy, I don’t know what does. Maybe try Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams.”

Anyway, I didn’t friend my adoptive mother on Facebook, because as much as we all hate to admit to such a thing, a lot of what’s on there actually represents my life — my big messy, happy, not-a-kid-anymore-you-can’t-tell-me-what-to-do-lol life, and so yeah Cyclone lady, um, again:

MINE. Don’t. Touch. It.

Melissa Chandler lives and writes in San Francisco. You can come visit, but don’t touch anything.