adoption

Adoption Is Not Charity


A recurrent theme for adoptees is the notion we should be grateful to our adopters and to whatever private organization procured us from our families of origin and delivered us to our adoptive parents. I have been thinking about this a lot of late, and the new leader of the Conservative Party of Canada reminded me of it yet again in his recent acceptance speech when he referenced his own adoption and talked about how it was an example of the superiority of a private system based on charity as opposed to a government funded system. The latter was a bit odd. There is the foster care system, and of course, there is Canada’s not all that long ago child snatching of Indigenous children in an attempt to annihilate their cultures. But the state merely regulates adoption. Adoption is largely a private industry, and it is in no way socialist or benevolent.

In my own family, my parents adopting four children was viewed as generous, loving, and even brave. Everything about the gushing my extended family has done in terms of praising my parents for adopting us is insulting and maddening. My adoptive parents were infertile. Adopting babies was the only cure available to them. There was nothing altruistic about what they did, and had they been able to have biological children, that’s what they would have done. They never would have adopted us at all.

Society’s reliance on adoption via agencies and private lawyers is a business model being utilized to avoid supporting women, children and families in general who are in great need. It’s basically the privatization of one aspect of public safety net.

When I was born in the early 1960s, there actually was a federal program that provided financial assistance to mothers and their children. Teenage girls and young women were not routinely told this was among their options when trying to decide what they wanted to do in terms of dealing with an unexpected pregnancy. My own mother desperately wanted to keep me but her family deliberately cut her off financially to force her to relinquish me for adoption. Two years later when she was pregnant again with my brother, and single again as her short, ill-advised marriage had ended in tatters, she knew far more about her options, and she didn’t allow a lack of money to force her into giving up another child even though her family, again, put pressure on her to do so.

Adoption agencies and lawyers, who handle private adoptions, are businesses. Babies are the commodities they acquire, market, and deliver. Adoptive parents are the customers. In this light, it’s really difficult to find heroes and saviours, which is why they re-frame this into a narrative designed to lift themselves up in the eyes of society and coerce gratitude from adoptees. Couple this with that fact that babies and young children have really no choice but to depend on the adoptive parents.

The dissonance for adoptees as they age, and begin to really think about what happened to them and their families of origin, leads to justification narratives and deciding that though some people have horrible adoption stories, they are the exception to the rule. In terms of adoption narratives the rule is that natural mothers were unfit is some way so relinquishment was in the best interest of the baby. However in reality, the rule is most natural mothers would have kept their babies and been fine parents if only they’d had the support they needed, which a systemically misogynistic society simply wasn’t interested in supplying.

Adopters need to believe that satisfying their desire to be parents is a no hurt no foul situation. The “where did I come from” stories they make up for their adopted children are fairy tales designed to pacify and bind someone else’s child to them while shoring up the narrative that the natural mother and her family were unfit.

I was discussing this with my adoptive mom the other day. I always knew I was adopted. She couldn’t remember when she told me, but she did so against the wishes of my adoptive dad, who felt it was better I didn’t know.

“You always asked a lot of questions,” she said. “Do you remember what I told you?”

I remembered a book from the library she would read to me about a girl named Ann, who was adopted. That book made many visits to our house. So many that when I discovered it as an older child of about 11, I was shocked to discover the little girl’s name was Barbara and not Ann.

My adoptive parents had a lot of information about my natural mother, her family, my natural father. They even knew her name and the name she gave me. My adoptive mom never told me much in comparison to what she knew. Superficial things and mostly the same narrative adoptee gets.

“She loved you, but she couldn’t take care of you. She wasn’t ready to be a parent.”

Of course, this wasn’t true. Not when my adoptive mom told me it and not when other adoptive parents tell similar things to their adoptive children. It’s a fiction adopters and the the adoption industry agreed upon because it promotes and serves their needs.

As a society, we should be looking at something better for pregnant teens and women in crisis than a system to steal their children from them and denies those children their origins. More of the same is only going to get us the rather unsatisfying and often damaging status quo we’ve had for decades. It doesn’t surprise me when conservative government and parties push for the status quo in glowing terms, but it should be called out for the bullshit it’s always been.

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.