adoption

My Adopters


My adoption is about everyone but me. Or so it seems most days. I can hardly tweet, write about, or discuss it without someone having an opinion that centres them in the narrative. This doesn’t surprise me. In the context of adoption, babies are the merchandise. It’s society, the legal system, and the adults involved in the transaction who have a voice. Some have more agency than others, but ultimately, the baby is neglected.

And adoptees are babies in perpetuity. The legal system has seen to that. Our files, original birth certificates, the identities of our parents and their extended families, our heritage, and really the foundation of our identities are walled off from us. Largely because there is no room in the adoption scenario for an adoptee, who will one day be an adult. Even now, as I steadily approach my sixth decade, I am viewed as “the baby” when it comes to my adoption. My opinions, and even my lived experience, is dismissed because I am forever a baby in the eyes of the adoption industry and its proponents.

My adoptive parents, and though generally I refer to all my parents as “parents” without distinguishing them, so I will add the descriptors of “adoptive” and “natural” for the purpose of clarity, were not the worst parents. When I think about the era in which I grew up, the 1960s and 70s, and recall the parents in my extended family, those of neighbour kids and school friends, my adoptive parents were more or less typical. They were Silent Generation, who reached their near adulthood under the shadow of WWII. Adopted Dad joined the Navy as soon as he graduated from high school and caught the tail end of the war like many of his peers. Adopted Mom grew up, as he did, on a farm and in a big family. They had expectations that were typical of the time. Marriage. Suburbs. Kids. Hanging out with family and friends on the weekends. Basically your American Dream life stuff. They were not expecting infertility to upend what everyone took for granted.

To say that neither of my adoptive parents dealt with the trauma and grief of infertility would be vastly understating things. For my adoptive mom, adopting me and later my three siblings, allowed her to paper over the pain. She wasn’t really cut out for mothering a hoard of small people. At one point there were three of us under the age of four. It was overwhelming, lonely, and she really had enjoyed working outside the home, which the adoption agency forbid if they wanted to be eligible to adopt. Stay at home moms only was one of the Catholic Charities criteria of the time. I have always thought that had they just adopted me, she might have been okay, but adoption did nothing for my adoptive dad.

My adoptive dad’s upbringing was literally dirt poor. They were the poor relations. Tenant farmers as a result of a bank failure in the early 1920’s, and my adoptive Grandad’s being saddled with a very elderly father and having to support his three younger sisters. There was never much money, and the family eventually ended up living with my adoptive Grandmother’s father and farming his land. Dad came back from the Navy to a household in turmoil and immediately was handed the financial responsibilities in a way that his own father must of recognized from his own life. Consequently, he didn’t seriously date until he met Mom about eight years later. He just didn’t have the time or the resources to think about a life of his own.

It had to have been a huge disappointment, and then a life-altering shock, when they couldn’t get pregnant and then couldn’t stay pregnant when it manage to happen that one “magical” time my adoptive mom still talks about. All around them, family and friends were adding babies to the landscape, and they just couldn’t.

I have been through infertility myself, and let me just that as an adoptee, it’s quite the mind-fuck, so I have more than just passing sympathy for what my adoptive parents must have gone through. But in no way was I the preferred solution. And I know this because it took them seven long years of disappointment before my adoption finally made them parents. Had they struck baby at any point during that time, I would be somewhere else right now. As much as I was “chosen” I was never the one they wanted.

My adoptive father always blamed Mom for denying him biological children. As I told my natural father in my first email to him, my adoptive dad really never understood any of his children. It puzzled, disappointed, and even hurt him, that despite all his efforts to mould us to be more like him, we were all stubbornly the children of someone else.

The fact that we didn’t look like he or Mom ate at him. Not knowing what my natural parents looked like, he was convinced I was too fat from an early age and not near feminine enough. Consequently, there were many snide comments and allowing everyone from my pediatrician to our crackpot next door neighbour to put me on diets well before I even hit junior high. I was not smart enough because I had a learning disability that made math extremely difficult for me while it was like breathing to him. I was a effortlessly natural athlete, but I had no competitive drive, which made him insane. Unlike my younger adoptive brother, who rebelled wildly against them almost from birth, I was more subtle, and I won far more of my battles with my adoptive father than he would’ve ever admitted, and this angered him too.

This is not to say he didn’t love me. He did. It was one of those “in his own ways” sort of thing, but he did. He lived in terror of our natural parents coming back for us. In the summer, Mom would leave our bedroom windows cracked to let in air and he would sneak in during the night, close and lock them. Mom would find us in the morning, dripping with sweat, and was outraged he’d do this to us, but Dad persisted because he was sure if the windows weren’t locked, we would be stolen.

He had his moments when he really stepped up for us. Though many of them were reactions to outside forces. And at the end of his life, I think, he’d found some measure of peace with the fact that he’d raised other people’s children. It was likely his grandchildren that brought him to that place because he loved them to pieces in a way that was far more genuine and open than he’d ever been with us.

I haven’t forgiven him like I have my adoptive mother. He was the one who didn’t want to tell us we were adopted. That was one of her rare defiance, which was probably the best parenting move she ever made. He was the one who destroyed all of our identifying information because “they don’t need to know”. This included original birth certificates, adoption files and decrees, and any medical or family information that might have been available. Frankly, he deserves no forgiveness for this. The man had a memory like an elephant. He knew and deliberately kept everything from us. In fact, they both knew the name of my natural mother from the day they got me, and they both lied to my face about until I confronted my adoptive mom after doing an DNA test, and she finally confessed. Six years after my natural mom had died. And yes, I am still way salty.

It’s hard for me to say I don’t have an attachment to my adoptive parents because of course, I do. And I do love them. Though what choice does an adopted child really have in that regard? It’s not like we had any say or any opportunity to choose our own destiny. But I feel the loss of my natural parents keenly and probably more so now that I know who they are and what I lost when cultural norms robbed me of them.

My adoptive parents did not see themselves as saviours. Though I know many adoptive parents do because it helps them justify helping themselves to someone else’s child. Mom and Dad just wanted children like everyone else they knew. It was really always that simple for them in a situation that was always to complex for them to have even navigated on their own.

But at the end of the day, do I wish my natural mother had been given the assistance she needed to keep me? Yes, I do. I will never be okay with the fact she was forced to give me to strangers.

The One Where I Really Discuss My Adoption


I have written about being adopted a few times before. Most recently, I wrote a tldr synposis about the finding of my original self and learning who my natural parents are. At the time, I was fairly new into what they call the “reunion” process, and there was a lot of players I hadn’t met and information I didn’t know. I know a lot now. As Little Red Riding said so well, “Isn’t it nice to know a lot? And a little bit not.”

The pandemic really interrupted my quest to discover the whereabouts of my natural father but my natural mother’s family did their damnedest to muddle things too. I suspect my Uncle and his wife are the not the out of the loop bystanders in the drama that led to my being relinquished that they claim to be and getting my dad’s name out of them was a months long odyessey that did not endear them to me at all.

In the end, it was good old Facebook that revealed my paternal family to me thanks to a group started by the peer group my mom grew up and went to school with. I joined the group hoping to find someone who knew her but ended up discovering someone who knew my dad through the motorcycle clubs that flourished in the early 60s in their hometown. I would remark to my dad later that their teenage years sounded a lot like the move, American Graffitti, and he replied, “It really kind of was.”

I saw a post about motorcycles and I knew my dad was very into motorcycles around the time of my birth because it was one of the “non-identifying” pieces of information they adoption agency shared with me when I contacted them. When I saw his name pop up in a conversation about the motorcycle clubs, I reached out to the gentleman who had posted the information.

And here is where fate intervened. The gentleman told me that his neighbour was my bio dad’s younger brother, and he would be happy to contact my uncle and have him contact my dad.

My dad’s reply was less than an auspicious start to what would become a relationship of sorts. He told his brother that my mother “had other boyfriends” and that I could easily be someone else’s child too.

So I thought, “well fuck you too, dad” and let it go. I knew he was my dad. I had no proof at that point but I am a very good researcher. All roads led to him. And then I let it go until about a year later when my nephew by my dad’s daughter from his first marriage turned up as a match on Ancestry. I knew who the young man was instantly. Most people (even now) don’t understand how easily Facebook can be used to track them down. I knew all my siblings’ names, where they lived, and even had pictures. A guest on the podcast The Making of Me, said recently that adoption research makes adoptees really good stalkers, and she isn’t terribly wrong.

As soon as my half-sister’s son turned up, I sent him a message and explained how we were related, and then I sat back and waited. It didn’t take my nephew long to contact his mother who went to the brothers who then confronted our dad. Dad folded like a chair.

My youngest half-brother acted as intermediary between us for several months but eventually, I got tired of waiting on Dad and sent him an email. In the email, I was pretty blunt and basically guilted him into initial contact. I regret nothing about doing that. The way I see it, he owed me. The same way my adoptive parents owed me the truth but withheld it anyway. The same way my mother owed me the bare minimum courtesy of reaching out to me when I became an adult and searches were possible through the agency I was placed with.

Searching shouldn’t be difficult. The onus should not be on the adoptee. We are genuinely the victims, if that’s even the right word, in this whole scenario. We didn’t ask to exist, be born, or traded like a commodity. We have a right to the basic information about how we came into the world and where we came from that is the same as those who are kept by their natural parents. Denying people their origins and heritage is criminal. I’ll never be convinced otherwise.

Do I know everything now? No. My maternal Uncle and his wife continue to evade when they aren’t straight up lying about the circumstances that led to my mother being exiled to a Catholic Charities home for unwed mothers. My dad is cagey about what he knew about my existence and when he knew it. The social worker in charge of post adoption searches at Catholic Charities literally has the whole story in a file that can’t give to me and it’s frustrating for both of us, but she has confirmed many things I have discovered through my persistence and my willingness to ask question and let people talk until they trip themselves up with facts.

One thing I have learned for certain though is I still have no real family aside from the one I have created myself. I have detached near completely from the adoptive substitute heritage adoption gave me to replace the one that was legally stolen from me but I have no personal attachment to the history I am learning because the people (though I look like them) are strangers I never met. My grandparents are dead. Aunts and uncles are mostly dead. My cousins and siblings are strangers I have no lived experiences growing up with. I am keenly aware that the “home” I was searching for was destroyed by my adoption. There is no way to build it again because it never got the chance to exist.

An adopted family is like the set of a family sitcom. It looks real until the camera rolls back and reveals it’s all a very clever illusion.

Literal Issues


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Rob calls me “literal girl” because sometime nuance escapes me. I have often wondered if there had been an Autism spectrum when I was a child if I would have been slotted somewhere along it.

I make assumptions about the virtual people I know based on what they post and where they post it. If we are Facebook acquaintances, and your feed is a healthy mix of the personal and self-promotion, I figure that no question is purely rhetorical even at the crossroads of religion and politics.

Apparently, I am wrong about this. One can shamelessly promote causes and career and still feel that status rants are sacrosanct.

A blogging acquaintance roared a bit about the recent abortion scuffle during the almost shutdown of the U.S. government, which I personally feel has little to do with “life” and everything to do with stripping women of the few rights we still possess, and basically called out those of us who believe that women’s healthcare should number abortion among its many faces.

Why not just admit that abortion is about killing children, she asked. I would respect you more if you would simply own that fact.

I thought about it. And responded.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have. The cheering section that followed her bluster was a clear indication that only those who believed as she did would be actually respected, but I responded.

Why? Because she asked for responses and because she’s wrong. Her position, grounded in motherhood and Christianity, presumes that those who support the ability to choose to abort a pregnancy think the fetus is a child or that life begins at conception or that the unborn have rights that supersede the woman’s before they are viable.

“You know it’s murder,” she responded.

But it’s not, in my opinion.

I don’t believe in any of that Christian nonsense.

Life doesn’t begin at conception. Existence does. And just existing doesn’t mean much. My late husband existed for months in a spastic body with a brain scoured clean of dura matter, taking in nothing, processing nothing and responding to nothing. That’s not life. The embryos left over from our 2nd IVF existed in cryo-storage for over three years before I gave permission for them to be discarded. Frozen potential but also not life.

I know the difference between life and existence. That’s the quibble and we are nowhere near ready to admit it or deal with it as a society.

But I also don’t think life is sacred. We are born and ,if the stars align properly, we live, happily or not so much, depending on a lot of circumstances of which a goodly number are not ours to control, and then we die. That which is me – truly me – continues on. Maybe my self is born again or maybe there is another plane of existence. I don’t know. But this one life, while I like it very much, is just a blip on a vast canvas and given what I have seen, read, watched and experienced in my short life, I have yet to be convinced that anything about physical life as we know it is all that special. We certainly don’t treat it as such on the whole if one excludes the moaning over potential life, which seems to attract far more interest than the real live children who suffer within walking distance of almost all of us every single day.

But the bottom line is that someone else’s religious beliefs shouldn’t carry more weight in the eyes of the law than my own where my internal works are concerned and forcing a woman to give birth (or to risk pregnancy because you don’t believe contraception is moral either) is wrong. Woman are more than potential incubators, which is what the pro-life movement reduces them to – slutty incubators with the maternal instincts of magpies. (And just as an aside, since when does using your vagina for sexual purposes automatically translate into allowing the government jurisdiction over anything that results?*)

And I said so. But that wasn’t, actually, where I messed up even though – according to someone who responded later – I was rude to have replied at all.

No, what I did was tread unwisely into the “why don’t women who don’t want their babies simply give them up for adoption because there are a lot of us out here who can’t have kids who could benefit from this.”

The unspoken companion fairy story spins off into the “win-win” weeds of how everyone gets what they want and a poor unwanted baby is loved and cherished.

I really hate it when it’s assumed that I was unwanted or that my birth mother was little more than a brood mare.

Being adopted, however, I take all sorts of issue with the idea that adoption is a panacea without consequences. There are oodles of studies supporting the fact that even newborns know their birth mothers, and how can anyone think that an infant separated from its mother and carted off by strangers doesn’t know it or that marks aren’t left as a result?

There is also the tip-toed about problem that, at its heart, adoption is a legal transaction that comes uncomfortably close to buying and selling a tiny human being, who will someday be an adult that the law still regards as a child where the adoption is concerned.

And finally, almost no one goes into adoption as a first choice. Unless you are Angelina Jolie, maybe, you likely adopted as a back up plan when biology failed you. There is nothing about this that makes you a bad person, but the disingenuous way many adoptive parents approach this obvious truth is insulting to adopted children. We know the truth. We only think less of you when you won’t admit it.

I am not a puppy. Here are my papers, bundle me up and take me home. Woof.

My birth mother was seventeen, Catholic and it was 1963. She had no choice but to put me up for adoption.

My parents were infertile. If they wanted a family, they had no choice but to adopt.

Kudos to my parents for never pretending I wasn’t adopted or that the reason for it wasn’t the fact that they couldn’t have biological children. It never mattered to me. I knew nothing else. I was torqued, however, when I found out as an adult that not only was I not entitled to contact my birth parents for a health history, but that my dad had torched all the papers the agency had given them that might have helped me find out the information I am entitled to.

Dad took that tongue-lashing with an uncharacteristic meekness, I might add.

What was annoying about the responses I received on my take on adoption (one I think I earn by being an adoptee and therefore knowing something of what I speak) is the consensus that I was “wrong” and “need help”.

Seriously?

Really?

“Aren’t you glad that your mother cared enough to give birth to you? Wouldn’t you just hate it had you been aborted?”

What kind of backward logic is that?

Being a fetus, or even an infant, is not something I can recall, so if I had been aborted, how could I possibly know or care about it?

And if I had been and being born was important to me, wouldn’t I have simply been born to someone else? Or what if simply being conceived was all I had to do to complete what assignment this go around had me down for? What if my only task had been to blink into existence and then cease to be in a cellular form. providing my birth mother with the opportunity to have an abortion, which was part of her life’s lesson plan?

Of course, I had a more active curriculum to complete and to help others with this time. Being adopted was part of that though I still feel it is just a slightly harder to justify form of the whole ownership thing we pretend doesn’t exist where our children are concerned anyway.

It’s too bad, I suppose, that abortions have to occur. They are no picnic for the women getting them either, and it’s incorrect to assume why women have abortions by stereotyping them in the same category as those who take established lives.  But life is hard. Choices can be hard, and abortion is one of the hardest and making it harder, or impossible, might make you feel like a good person but it doesn’t solve the issues that bring women to choose it now, does it?

*Ah ha, I hear the righteous squeal, then why do my tax dollars have to pay for STD and PG checks via Planned Parenthood? If you want privacy, take care of your own damn health. To which I reply, good point. And let’s add getting old to that because my tax dollars shouldn’t have to replace a knee or hip you didn’t take care of when you were young because you were too lazy to exercise, right? Or that heart by-pass or the diabetes you developed eating nothing but processed food. Or the cancer you have because you couldn’t suck it up for the hot flashes and took hormones for too long.

And while we are at it, shouldn’t you have to fund your own retirement? It’s not my problem you thought your house was an ATM or that your children need five star summer vacations, is it?

There are a lot of things that tax dollars cover. Bank bailouts. Sketchy military actions. Corporate welfare. The list of waste is long and shifts depending on your politics, faith system and socio-economic status.

Lighten up.