No Strings

"No Strings Attached" is an historical term referring to the strings attached to puppets and means that there are no conditions or terms. Another "source" of the saying, though, could come from the cloth industry where from the cloth industry, where a small flaw in a fabric would be marked by a string so it could easily be spotted. This suggests a meaning of "without flaws." Also, and totally copied/pasted from Wiktionary, "in ancient times, documents that were written on parchment had strings that were used to tie them shut, after they were rolled up. The Babylonian Talmud in Tractate Bava Metzi'a[2] mentions an example of a man who gives his wife a get (bill of divorce) with a string attached, but holds on to the string, so that he can snatch it back (apparently because he is unwilling to actually give her a divorce). According to Jewish law, this is not a valid divorce, because the man has not properly delivered the get, by freely giving it to his wife." Whatever the etymology of the term, it is accepted that the general meaning is one of getting something with no conditions attached to it, be it flaws or control by others. It's a great term, often underused, I think.

I definitely came with some strings attached. Frank and I discussed some of the ways, just the other night, in which I came to this family flawed. A general mistrust of people, incurable insomnia (except in the case where cats puke in my hair in the middle of the night -- that's definitely not incurable insomnia but a far, far darker thing), and an ability to drop people at the least infraction and turn my back and walk away. These, to me, are the darker side of MY adoption and I have my feeling that I'm not the only adoptee who has felt this way. I've often wondered how a person can trust other and subsequent people in their life when the one person they should've been able to trust the most, was not able to provide it. For whatever reason, the voice we got to know over 9+ months was gone, or the person you knew as "mommy" would not show up for much-looked-forward to visitation. That disappearance of trust has been my biggest string attached.

I've also suffered lifelong insomnia because of my inability to trust mixed in with a healthy dose of being transferred from place to place sleeping. I would wake up in new places, abandoned or just going out to eat (it was still waking up in a new place with a non-existent trust system) and all of those times added up equaled the inability to sleep.

Lastly, I have the ability to just turn my back and walk away from things that hurt me. I close myself off to those things and "banish" them from my life. This is perhaps the one string I also consider a little of a gift. As long as it's there, I also know that I accept NOT to do that to my family...especially during the hardest of times when it would be easiest to just run away. The very thing that could take me away, I use to tie myself to them.

We all have our own flaws, our own conditions, and our own terms. We all allow some amount of control of our lives to be passed into the hands of others. It's what we do with those things that shows the quality of who we are.