"Our law emphasizes
the right of the child. It demands that children be told
the truth, that they are adopted. Sometimes we think it
cruel to tell a person the truth (first as a child,
later as an adult). But that view reflects a colonialist
attitude. Only the colonizer refuses to respect the
identity of the colonized." (Graciela Fernandez Meijide,
member of the Argentine Congress, on the 1997 law making
it mandatory that adopted children be told they are
adopted. From Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of
the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of
Argentina, p. 156, University of California Press,
1999.)
The email message
I received tonight was not unusual. In the months since
I started the Late Discovery Adoptee List on the
Internet, I get at least one such post a week. The man
who wrote me had just discovered that he was adopted and
was grateful to communicate with someone like himself.
Like many Late Discovery Adoptees, his story was very
similar to mine. I remember when I first found out I
was adopted, I felt like I was the only fool on earth
who hadn’t known, and possibly the only person to find
out they were adopted when they were grown.
I discovered I was
adopted when I was 36, shortly after the death of my
mother. My father had passed away a few months before,
and as their only child it was up to me to make her
funeral arrangements and clean out her home. While
sorting through family photographs, letters, and
official papers, I found the documents that first
informed me of my adoption.
I felt as if the
ground opened up beneath my feet and I was falling into
an abyss. This free-fall lasted for two- and-a-half
years. Who was I? Why had the people who were supposed
to love me and protect me lied to me my entire life? I
had to meet many other adoptees, adoptive parents, and
birth-parents before I could begin to answer these
questions.
There are many
books available on adopting, on adoption, on being
adopted. There is plenty of advice to prospective
adoptive parents about when to tell their children they
were adopted. Although there is a great deal of
discussion about when to tell your children they are
adopted, very few touch on why you should tell them in
the first place. It is assumed to be a given. It is as
if the choice not to tell is so wrong it is taboo to
even speak about it. I’ve learned that the things which
cannot be spoken of become very powerful.
When I finally
reached out to other adoptees through a local support
group, I found we had much in common such as the longing
for grounding in our identity and the questioning of our
“official” stories. I found the emphasis on search in
this group, and others I contacted at that time,
confusing and frightening. I wasn’t ready to search. As
a friend remarked to me when I told him I wasn’t even
considering locating my birth family at that time, “Who
needs more people to resent?”
Isolated, I
simmered in my anger and resentment. I finally met
another like me, online, and we shared war stories
through email. Slowly, through posting my story on the
Internet use-net group, alt.adoption, I found six or
seven more. Shea Grimm of Bastard Nation asked me if I
would like to make a presentation about the experiences
of adoptees like me at the First Annual BN Conference. I
accepted reluctantly because I had no credentials
relevant to the subject other than my own life story. I
sent out a questionnaire to the adoptees with whom I
corresponded, and from the dozen responses I forged some
general observations about us.
I found that
writing the presentation, “Late Discovery Adoptees: Are
You Adopted? Are You Sure?” was a crucial turning point
for me. For one thing, it exhausted the rage I had held
for years against my parents. Not only was I able to
place myself in an understandable context, but my
adoptive parents as well. I went back to the place I had
left them when I read the first adoption document with
my name on it, and I returned to mourning them.
Over the last
eight years I’ve been in contact with hundreds of people
like me — people who found out their true history as
adults. If I’ve met so many, how many more are out
there? How many more have yet to discover? When I was
adopted back in the ’50s, adoption was still deeply
wrapped in shame. Shame of illegitimacy, shame of
infertility. My parents’ decision not to tell me has a
certain dysfunctional logic. Many of the stigmas that
stained past attitudes about adoption have been lifted,
but members of the triad still face many conflicting
attitudes and social prejudices. Adoption as a means of
forming a family still suffers by being “different.”
The temptation to sidestep the pressures of “difference”
by denying the reality of a child’s adoption is still
compelling to some.
I enjoy speaking
with groups of prospective adoptive parents. I usually
meet them in pre-adoptive classes, where I give them the
benefit of my own experience. However, the adoptive
families who listen attentively in parenting classes,
meet in support groups, or keep abreast of adoption
issues in newsletters are the ones who need to hear my
message the least. The parents who manage to rearrange
their entire lives around the fiction their children are
not adopted stay far away from such counsel. They are
instead out there pretending to be “normal.”
The quote at the
beginning of this article intrigues me. It rings true to
me, yet is dissonant with the memories of my parents’
love for me. Can we be colonized by those entrusted to
love and care for us without condition? Of course we
can, and the lie that creates Late Discovery Adoptees is
only one remarkable motif in a discordant symphony of
family dysfunction. I feel the only resolution to this
contradiction is to bear witness, and encourage all the
others who have had their truth stolen from them to come
out of the shadows.