A Black Hole

Until recently, my family history beyond my two parents was a black hole. They were both adopted and died knowing next to nothing about their origins. After more than 60 years of living, I know now what those origins are.

Most people KNOW who their parents are. Even a parent who abandons his family may still be a known entity to his child but not someone who was adopted. It is all unknown, unless it is a modern, more progressive and supportive adoption – which thankfully, many of them are beginning to be.

People don’t want to hear that you have no freakin’ clue to your identity. Not knowing is both painful and unusual in our society. It is associated with negative stereotypes such as “bastards” and “mistakes”. You hear about “those people” but you never expect to be talking to one in the flesh.

I recently read about the child of an adoptee who’s coping mechanism with that unknown was to tell everyone he was Cuban. Until recently, I used to tell everyone I was an “albino African” because I could have been. There was no one to tell me I wasn’t. Then, I got my DNA tested and finally knew I was Danish and Scottish and English and Irish, even a little Ashkenzai Jew and Neanderthal.

It is wonderful to now have a universe of genetic connections out there instead of being the product of a black hole.

In Memoriam

I am now reading a book titled – Lost Daughters: Writing Adoption From a Place of Empowerment and Peace. I read an essay yesterday by Susan Perry and felt such a connection with her that I was seeking to reach out to her and discovered sadly that she had died some years ago.

She is quoted as saying –

“Sealed record laws afford more rights to the dead than they do to the
living and they bind the adopted person to a lifetime restraining order.”
~ Susan Perry

Just like my paternal grandmother and paternal grandfather, she was the product of a married man and a woman not his wife. They were both of Danish ancestry, just as my paternal grandfather was. An immigrant, not yet a citizen, married to a woman 20+ years his senior.

Susan’s adoptive mother had no idea how often her interior thoughts had turned to her ancestors. Who were they, and what was her story ? My own mom had similar questions.

Mrs Perry did know that her adoptive parents truly loved her, and that love
and support helped to make her the person she was in life. I believe I can say the same about all of the adoptive parents in my own family’s lives.

Yet, our genes are some part of what makes us the person we each are as well.

It is only natural that any adoptee that reaches adulthood (if not sooner) will want to know who passed those genes down to them.

I have bumped up against sealed records in three states – Virginia, Arizona and California. I realize how incredibly fortunate I am to have uncovered ALL of my original grandparents. I have the DNA tests that no one saw the inexpensive cost and prevalence of even 20 years ago as well as the matching sites Ancestry.com and 23 and Me to thank for most of my own success.

So many adoptees are never that fortunate. Sealed records are unjust and damaging to so many people. They encourage unhealthy thinking, repression, and denial as the means for coping with life.

I wonder if, because of adoption, my own mom did not feel empowered to take charge of her own story, just as Susan wrote in her essay.

Even so, every adopted person’s journey is unique.

It is difficult for me, as the child of two adoptees, to understand why as a culture we continue to shackle adopted people to an institution that is governed by such archaic and repressive laws, when the data clearly shows that most original mothers are open to contact. Those who are not, can simply say “no”.

Once an adoptee becomes an adult – they do not need outside agents supervising their own, very personal business.

Repressive laws set the tone – either/or thinking. There is a belief that adoptees who search are expressing disloyalty to their adoptive parents, or that the adoptee should just “be grateful” and move on. Attitudes of this kind are hurtful and dismissive.

Here’s the TRUTH, adoptees have two sets of parents – and a unique mix of DNA and upbringing. It is belittling and unfair to tell adoptees that they are not entitled by law to access their own original birth certificates. Every other American citizen has no such restriction.

This is institutional discrimination and there is no really good reason it exists. Adoptee rights bills have accumulated plenty of evidence that they are beneficial for the majority of persons for whom adoption is some part of their personal story.

Always A Child

My Mom After Adoption

Children grow up into adults. That is their only real occupation through almost 20 years of life. Some children have to grow up early. My mom gave birth to me at the age of 16. I married at the age of 18 and had my first child at 19.

When I look at my 18 year old son, I can’t imagine him married with a child. He is intelligent and has an abundance of common sense but as his mother, he is still a bit of a child to me, though the maturing is obviously taking hold and he spends much of his daily waking life doing men’s work with his dad on our farm.

There is a subset of humanity that is never allowed to grow up – adoptees. Certainly, they pile on the years and mature, just like any other human being but society and governmental agencies treat them as though they were still a child.

Why do I say this ? Because they are denied rights that any other citizen takes for granted. When their adoption is decreed by a court of law, their identity is stolen away from them. Often, their name is changed and their original birth certificate is amended to make it appear that their adoptive parents actually gave birth to them. Sometimes, even the place where they were born is changed.

Then, when they become an adult at 18 or 21 years of age and because they know they were adopted (or for some who were never told the truth and take a DNA test and receive the unpleasant and sudden surprise that they do not derive their origins from the people they believed were the source), when they attempt to learn the truth of their identity, origins and heritage – they are denied the very normal and simple human right of knowing who they really are.

It is time for the LIES to end and for ALL states in this country (United States of America) to open their files to the adults who were once a child that was adopted by strangers to raise as their own.

Open Records And Abortion

Thankfully, I finally know mine. No thanks to Virginia, Arizona and California. If Tennessee had not been rocked by a baby stealing and selling scandal (Georgia Tann, the baby thief, of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society at Memphis), I would not have been able to get my mom’s adoption file and see a photo of my maternal grandmother.

I have DNA and the matching sites at Ancestry and 23 and Me to thank for my success. It really shouldn’t be so hard to know one’s hereditary origins.

I personally think the main impediment is bureaucratic laziness. However, there is also the strange argument that giving adoptees the same right to know where they come from that most everyone else on the planet has would somehow increase the number of abortions. Therefore, the closed and sealed records advocates (mostly adoptive parents who fear competition from the original parents) have enlisted the pro-Life contingent to help their cause.

The facts don’t support them. Case in point is the state of Oregon who was one of the first closed record states to open them back up (Alaska and Kansas always had open records). The rate of abortions actually decreased 25% after the state of Oregon passed its historic adoption law that restored to adult adoptees access to their original birth certificates.

Know this – just because you have taken a stand on abortion, does not automatically give you an understanding of everything you need to know about the issues related to adoption.

Preserving Stuff For The Future

My husband has a rare surname and before we had our oldest son the details of his family tree began to be filled in and he was able to trace his family back to the 1400s. I was a bit envious of that because I didn’t know my own. His mother took an interest in her husband’s grandmother receiving a gravestone because she was unmarked in a pauper’s grave. The result includes an oval image of her and a listing of genealogy. Our oldest son in named after her husband.

I suppose I value family heritage so much because my own was a black hole, a void, beyond my parents who were both adopted. After I was certain who all four of my original grandparents actually were, I wrote a family saga following their stories down to my parents and through a brief summary of my self and my sisters’ lives and children. Someday, I’ll complete honest family trees for myself on Ancestry.

My mom did some pretty complete family trees at Ancestry from the adoptive grandparents lines but she had to quit because it just wasn’t real to her. Ancestry is about DNA and our family does not have those families DNA. It once took several messages from me to finally convince a woman there that I wasn’t related to her, that yes he was my dad but no we were not related. He was adopted. I want to set the record straight in my lifetime.

When I wrote up and printed 10 copies of that family saga, I was in effect saying – “This is who I was, please remember me and know I loved you enough even before you were born to want this information accessible to you.” There is information about the ancestor’s family lines, important places and events as well as old family photos I have obtained from genetic cousins. I didn’t want our family history lost again, if I should pass away soon.

When we discover an honest connection to a genetic relation, like I found with my Aunt Deborah who died young, it is an exciting moment – or how my paternal grandfather loved the sea and fishing, just like my Pisces born dad who took his first breath at Ocean Beach CA and loved all those things too.

For much of an adult adoptees’ life, questions such as those posed to my parents about their own birth or earliest moments on Earth, can only be answered with “I don’t know, I’m adopted.” Before I knew anything, that is what I answered when medical history questions asked about my grandparents. “We don’t know, we were both adopted.” is how my mom answered me, when I asked what our heritage was – from what countries did our family descend ?

For most people, asking questions about appearance related to heredity or about various skills or interests are simply casual and thoughtless conversation starters but to an adoptee, each question of that sort is a reminder of what they don’t know about their own self.

An adoptee doesn’t know if something about their own self was learned from their adoptive parents, inherited from their original parents or is unique to them somehow – there is a huge chunk of information missing from the equation – if their adoption was closed and they have not yet reunited with original family.

Clueless Questions

Quite a long time ago, I learned not to ask potentially embarrassing questions. In fact, I rarely ask what could be defined as a “personal” question. If someone wants to tell me about whatever, it is their prerogative not my right.

So I was reading about some of the clueless questions adoptees sometimes receive –

Where are your real parents ?

Couldn’t your parents have their own kids ?

Are your adoptive parents angry you reunited ?

“Was your birth mother on drugs ?”

In the book The Declassified Adoptee, she gives those who just have to know better ways of asking these kinds of questions. She suggests that “Good questions are strengths first, person first. They consider the feelings of the person answering a question first, above the necessity for information.”

She adds “It is ALWAYS important to validate an adoptee’s membership within ALL of the families that she identifies with.”

As the child of two adoptees, who after 6 decades of life, has only recently discovered my biological, genetic relations (mostly cousins and one aunt), I get it. I love the adoptive families I grew up with and have shared life experiences with. I love that I now know people who share my DNA. I love them all, differently, for different reasons but love is love.

Abandoned Babies

Gary Gatwick

Today, I read the story about the baby that was abandoned in 1986 at the Gatwick Airport. He was later adopted, had a decent childhood and attempted to locate his birth family after having a child himself. He has been successful but much like my own mother, discovered that the woman who gave birth to him has died and thus, he’ll never get the answer to the question closest to his heart of “why?”.

Not that long ago, I also read a story titled The Foundling: The True Story of a Kidnapping, a Family Secret, and My Search for the Real Me by Paul Joseph Fronczak. His was also the story of a search for his authentic roots.

People who are not adopted or abandoned often do not understand why knowing one’s true identity is so important to some of us. A writer friend of mine once asked – “If the adoptive family was good, why does it matter?” As I talked to her about it, she came to understand how most people actually take such a deep knowing for granted. Indeed, many don’t really care about it at all until they are much older, if they ever do.

A piece in the Huffington Post some years ago realized that “this was a shared narrative with no fixed racial or cultural background: my own search for identity, though anchored in part by my own experiences, is part of something larger. It is a collective and contemporary identity crisis.”

Maybe this explains the popularity of DNA testing and the matching sites of Ancestry or 23 and Me. I also wonder, given the pushback on women’s rights taking place at the moment, if beyond threatening women’s health and autonomy, an unintended consequence could become more abandoned babies . . . and depending on where and when, may result in death.

Denying Reality

Our family had a very personal experience this week related to DNA that I won’t really go into with specifics here.

My point being that because of inexpensive DNA testing and the matching sites such as Ancestry or 23 and Me, pretending something that isn’t true is really a short sighted decision.

Because of my parents adoptions and this journey of discovery I have been upon, I have read more than one book about people who got unexpected and life-shattering discoveries when they had their DNA tested. Some of these persons had been adopted, one was believed to be the child who had been stolen from the hospital shortly after birth but was actually a child abandoned on a sidewalk. Another one had believed in a strong Jewish heritage from her father and discovered with feelings of betrayal that she was conceived by donor sperm.

Honesty is the best policy even when being honest is somewhat painful. That was something I learned from my own parents as a child.

I am also grateful for that inexpensive DNA testing. As I have uncovered genetic relatives who never knew about me or I them because both of my parents were adopted – our shared genetic heritage convinces them I am actually “who” I say I am.

It is a brave new world thanks to technology and families now can be created where they were impossible before. For that, I will always be grateful.

There Are Worse Things Than Adoption

Warning – this is not an easy story to contemplate.

38 years after the event, a combination of DNA and genetic genealogy located the woman who in some confused and frightened state, gave birth to a baby in her apartment, and then dumped the living baby with the placenta still attached into a ditch in freezing weather in Sioux Falls SD when she was 19 years old.

The baby was found about 24 hrs later by a man test driving a car. The coroner ruled that the boy lived for about two hours before freezing and bleeding to death.

The woman did go on to marry the baby’s father who seems to have been unaware of either her pregnancy or the birth. She and her husband have two living adult children.

Haunted by this story, I did think “there are worse things than having been adopted.” This man would have been 38 years old. What kind of life might he have had? Would the outcome have been different if this young, single mother had had the encouragement and support that would have made her willing to keep and raise the boy?

Why Anonymous Isn’t Anymore

There’s been a bit of controversy recently about assisted reproduction and the use of anonymous donors and previously created embryos. I’m quite familiar with the issues as it became a part of my own life.

I know of others who have gone down this path who I believe made foolish choices not to be truthful about what they did. There is a difference between not sharing private details publicly and not telling one’s own family members an important truth.

I have also been blessed by inexpensive DNA testing and the matching sites – Ancestry and 23 and Me – for revealing the truth that my parents were prevented from knowing due to closed adoptions and sealed records. It is hard to imagine being forced to live a false identity so that strangers can claim you as their own (changing birth names and certificates to fit a manufactured reality).

I am grateful we followed a path of our own making and have been honest about the details with our sons. We’ve not lied to them – ever. We’ve also not made a big deal about how their conception was different than the more common method. We are pioneers in a brave new world.