Living in Adoption's Emotional Aftermath

April 17, 2023 2:08 PM

From the New Yorker: "Adoptees reckon with corruption in orphanages, hidden birth certificates, and the urge to search for their birth parents".. Includes discussion on issues with international and transracial adoption and effects on adoptees' mental health; profiles three adults who were adopted and their journies in searching for their birth families.
posted by bearette (31 comments total)

I just read The Baby Thief, about Georgia Tann (kind of the founder of modern adoption. Also probably a psychopath). A very good book about some very bad things.
posted by anshuman at 3:00 PM on April 17, 2023 [3 favorites]

Since it's paywalled, I don't know if this article mentions Nicole Chung's recent transracial/international adoptee memoir, All You Can Ever Know.
posted by praemunire at 3:11 PM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

Sorry it's paywalled! It's allowing me to read even though I'm not logged in.
posted by bearette at 3:19 PM on April 17, 2023

What really struck me about the article is the strong dissonance between all the complicated feelings and heartbreak and ...
Amy Coney Fucking Barrett.

Here is an unpaywall.
posted by bitslayer at 3:52 PM on April 17, 2023 [5 favorites]

This was very heavy, and very good. I have two close relatives who are adopted (and a spouse) and I never really thought very hard about adoption as a concept until I read this book (which broke my heart, over and over.) It can be a very complicated situation, and this article explores a lot of themes I was familiar with from that.

It's sort of mind-blowing when you think about an adopted person having a child - and that child being that person's first relationship with a blood relative. Only one of the three adoptees that I mention above has a relationship with a birth parent.
posted by 41swans at 3:53 PM on April 17, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was adopted, pre-Roe v Wade, as a 10 day old infant. I have a complicated relationship with that, but not complicated enough that I want to dig up birth parents and add yet more complications. My family is my family, although as I get older I do realize that I really have nobody else I can talk to about genetics and diseases.

I've known three adopted people who have located birth family. All of them before the whole genetic field of suddenly-revealed-relatives started. For two of them, it was a disaster, causing conflict and entanglements they wish they had never gotten into. For the third, it went okay but more in a "I've met them and we send holiday cards" kind of way.

I have a letter on record with my adoption state that if my birth mother is ever looking for me, it's okay for her to find me. I'm not sure, given the time and place, that the father would have even known that I exist.
posted by hippybear at 4:04 PM on April 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

praemunire - it doesn't mention that memoir but it certainly touches on similar topics to hers. It's a great book and this is also quite an article.
posted by montag2k at 4:25 PM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

It's sort of mind-blowing when you think about an adopted person having a child - and that child being that person's first relationship with a blood relative. Only one of the three adoptees that I mention above has a relationship with a birth parent.

I’ve never thought about it that way. My father is adopted. My generation there is one spouse who is adopted, and next generation two adopted children, and a couple of children who have one “no show” parent and have become family by marriage to one of my siblings. My father never wanted to meet his birth mother, which is probably more common for his generation, but the rest of us are all pretty fluid and open with ideas of ‘family.’ I’ve suspected that the diverse mix of parental statuses helps in our situation. I’m betting it’s easier to feel ok when 30% of the people at the holiday table - 3 generations worth - don’t have a ‘nuclear family’ pedigree.

Reading the article - we got lucky.
posted by Silvery Fish at 4:58 PM on April 17, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is an excellent article. I can relate to so many of the feelings expressed by fellow adoptees. I was adopted as an infant over 70 years ago and had an interest in learning about my birth parents probably since my early teens. My adoptive parents claimed they didn't know anything, but I'm pretty certain they simply didn't want to share any information with me. It was frustrating, and the yearning increased after the births of my two children.

Over the past 6 years, I was able to discover the identities of both birth parents through DNA matches and with the help of a search angel (volunteer genealogist)—sadly, long past the opportunity to meet them. However, I've been welcomed by my birth father's family, including my younger (half) sister in early 2019. My sister and other close relatives are certain my birth father didn't know of my existence. While covid threw a bit of a monkey-wrench into being able to have a lot of face-to-face time, I was able to attend my nephew's wedding in May 2019 and will celebrate the birth of his baby in July.

I'm aware that I'm very fortunate to have this experience. While I was searching, more than one person suggested that I might not be happy with what I might find. I'm grateful I didn't let this deter me.
posted by Scout405 at 8:32 PM on April 17, 2023 [12 favorites]

A bunch of the names in the article are people I know - I think I'm name-checked in the book mentioned. I spent a long while as an adoptive parent part of a complicated open adoption, and then a couple of years back had it confirmed that my dad is my social dad, and I have an unknown biological dad out there who probably knows I exist but is not interested in contact. It's a little weird to spend a long time on one side of the triangle and then slide over to the other side too and have no answers.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 7:31 AM on April 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

I wanted to share this with the community because it seems so important and I think thr author did a great job with the profiles and nuances.

I've thought of adopting, and now, after reading the article, if I ever did I would try to do an open adoption of possible for sure.

The issue of trans-racial and trans-cultural adoption is really tough too. It was interesting that an adoption agency in Indiana of all places looked into whether potential adopters really lived in diverse communities. I hope more agencies follow suit.
posted by bearette at 8:56 AM on April 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

My grade school BFF has a brother who was adopted from Korea. It was an interracial adoption, and they were supportive about it and got a couple of books about Korea for him when he was a kid, but he wasn't really into them; our town was kind of, er, racially homogenous, and he was the only Asian kid in my younger brother's class for most of our childhoods. His family and mine were in each others' pockets a lot and I don't really ever recall hearing anything about him getting hassled for the racial difference, fortunately, but it still was a bit of a mind trip for him.

He's now living in North Carolina and is a reporter for the Charlotte Observer; and sometime in the middle of last year he finally started to explore the whole "I'm adopted, what does that mean" thing and ended up doing a column about it a few months later.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 12:07 PM on April 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Having considered adopting I wonder if there will be a followup with the adoptive parents. All I can think of is what a soul crushing blow to them: 'everything you did for me wasn't good enough and because you adopted me my life is ruined'.
posted by kjs3 at 12:34 PM on April 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

All I can think of is what a soul crushing blow to them: 'everything you did for me wasn't good enough and because you adopted me my life is ruined'.

If you can't bring yourself to acceptance that ultimately it has to be the adoptee who decides whether their adoption was successful or not, you probably shouldn't adopt. Which is not to say that adoptive parents aren't allowed complicated feelings, too, but the point of adoption is to benefit the child, not the parents, so they probably should not be dropping classic BPD lines if they learn that the adoptee doesn't regard the action as universally beneficient.
posted by praemunire at 1:13 PM on April 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

It's borderline personality disorder (classic BPD...none of that new fangled stuff) for adoptive parents to think they're stakeholders in an adoption and have feelings about how things turned out. I suppose if you're gaslighting people emotions and want to make sure you're doing it right you need to go beyond "let me drag in a lot of stuff you didn't say and then excoriate you for hearing you say them in my head" and add a hook like "literally mentally ill".
posted by kjs3 at 1:50 PM on April 18, 2023

You turned difficult stories of total strangers having complicated feelings having been adopted into a projection onto their parents of "everything you did for me wasn't good enough and because you adopted me my life is ruined." And now you're talking about gaslighting when I didn't make any factual statements about your experiences at all. OK.
posted by praemunire at 2:29 PM on April 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Adoptive parents' feelings are already way too centered in conversations about adoption. It's time to listen to adoptees and their families of origin.
posted by lampoil at 2:51 PM on April 18, 2023 [10 favorites]

Thank you for sharing this article! I've read and watched a lot about the topic but this is definitely the best one out there that I've seen. A hard topic and important conversation; I'm still thinking about it all.
posted by smorgasbord at 4:36 PM on April 18, 2023

I wonder how many birth moms never wanted contact because they don’t want to hear “How could you do this to me/abandon me/give me to strangers” or variations thereof. I know I would sure hate it. I hope no adoptee has ever sprung a guilt trip on the birth mom.
posted by BostonTerrier at 5:41 PM on April 18, 2023

And so, and an addendum to my earlier comment, I'm completely addicted to those shows where they trace people's history, like Finding Your Roots on PBS and other such shows.

I guess I entertain a fantasy where I could find out information without involving the other people. Like, I think I was likely some woman's spring break fling based on the little information I have. She birthed me and gave me up, likely unseen, and my parents picked me up ten days later and that's all I've ever known.

Would it be fair for me to insert myself into her life over half a century later? Would it be fair to anyone else in her life since then for me to suddenly appear?

Would it, likewise, be fair for me to gain the information about all these people I might stem from, while also having them not knowing some stranger was poking about in their background?

The people on this show... they're doing things that feel like they're just things waiting to be uncovered, like items in a chest in an attic someplace. These aren't skeletons they're digging up, necessarily. They're just forgotten items in the library of one's back catalog, so to speak.

But, for me... this would be an invasion of privacy. Whether that privacy was wanted at the time or not, there's been this wall erected across literally decades and I don't think it's my right to tear any of that down.

My parents have offered more than once to pay for me to get 23 And Me or some such. My adopted sister (no relation) has done this, and I guess she's found some cousins or something. I keep refusing. No matter my curiosity, it just feels too intrusive, too forceful.
posted by hippybear at 7:32 PM on April 18, 2023 [3 favorites]

I'm an adoptee. I'm a closed-record baby scoop era domestic adoptee, in happy reunion with my biological father and in secondary rejection with my biological mother. I was sent this article by my therapist, who is also an adoptee, and who was thrilled that it was such a well-researched and thoughtful article about a very complex topic. It's the best article I've seen out there for covering this subject. I was excited to see it talked about here. And it was also very discouraging to come to Metafilter to read the discussion of this article and to see non-adoptees speculating about adoptees springing guilt trips or not being grateful enough. It's always astonishing to me to watch people who have no lived experience as one of us still feel that they have the right to comment on the way we process our own lives and our reactions to the things that were done to us.
posted by terridrawsstuff at 7:36 PM on April 18, 2023 [15 favorites]

They are relating how they would feel if they had to give up a child for adoption, as a hypothetical.
Like the reason they might use one of those firehall anonymous dropoffs.
posted by Iax at 10:18 PM on April 18, 2023

So? Hypotheticals are plain rude when there are people with lived experience in the conversation.

Part of adoption silence is I think also ageism - children are not seen as full humans and adoptees are defined even as adults to a child status when it comes to adoption. Nor the parents are given this binary open/closed saint/sinner status often as well. Reality is much messier and changing than the usual ideas.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 4:27 AM on April 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

A "hypothetical" in this case is another name for a display of prejudice, applied in ignorance to a minority group. Adoptees are 2% of the population, an unusually diverse diaspora of people from all races and all nationalities, and we have a variety of reasons why other people have done the things that they have done to us. But one uniting thing that we have all faced are reactionary judgments from people who are NOT adopted that have changed the course of our lives. Nothing that was done to us was done with our consultation or consent, and for many of us, the decisions of others hold sway over our lives until our deaths. In my case, I did not look for my biological parents until the lack of any family medical records almost resulted in my death as an adult; only the advent of DNA testing allowed me to find out any medical information. Are our lives somehow less valuable than those of you who were kept by your parents? How dare you apply a "hypothetical" to the removal of our civil rights and our resulting endangerment.
posted by terridrawsstuff at 6:51 AM on April 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also, thank you, dorothyisunderwood, you are exactly correct.
posted by terridrawsstuff at 7:03 AM on April 19, 2023

Mod note: No comments deleted, just a gentle reminder that adoption is a complicated subject so it would be good to listen to people who have lived experience about it in and avoid hypotheticals.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:04 AM on April 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

Adoptions are a triangle of lived experiences, and they don’t just affect the children, or the children’s feelings. The feelings of the birth parents (and especially the birth mothers) also matter here - and I found the article really interesting how heavily it landed on the side of the kids’ right to know against the mothers’ not wanting to be known. To stalk someone and show up unannounced with someone taking video of you? I found that really shocking, and was really glad that that story had a good ending.

But the third leg of the triangle are the adoptive parents. And I think it’s telling that no one is stepping up in this conversation from that lived perspective- not when someone in the shoes of a potential adoptive parent was so completely put down here. While I’m not aware of the other posters’ motives or situations, and I wholeheartedly agree that lived experience takes precedence over baseless "what if" scenarios, hypothetical thoughts about adoption aren’t always someone playing devil’s advocate. Sometimes they’re people who are in the process of weighing their own role.

Most adoptive parents come to adoption because of infertility. Adopting a child isn’t easy to do for a number of reasons, but society’s answer to the heartbreak of infertility is often “you can always adopt” - which simply isn’t true. The article briefly goes into how difficult the process can be in the US, which is what gave rise to many of the terrible issues that the piece explores (foreign adoptions, adoptions of kids who weren’t actually orphans, culturally inappropriate matches) because those practices made it possible for parents who couldn’t afford or couldn’t get approved to adopt (rejected because of their age or marital status or income or sexuality). And I think everyone can agree that it's a good thing that those practices seem to have largely stopped. But it doesn’t change that it makes it harder for people who want a family but are unable to conceive (or bring a baby to term) to have one. Added to that, there’s still the perception that adopting a child is also in the child’s best interests - because they need a family. But the more I read pieces like this, the clearer it seems that the most outspoken advocates on behalf of adoptees are painting adoptive parents as not interested in what’s best for the kids, as only adopting for selfish reasons, as the biggest part of the problem. I’m seeing traces of it here. Without the acknowledgment that a likely equal percentage of non-adoptive people also believe that about their biological parents. They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

But it doesn’t change the fact that if you’re suffering from infertility, there’s also real pain involved. Adoption gives hope. It should be beneficial for everyone involved, assuming the birth parents weren’t coerced into giving up a wanted child. If the takeaway is that adoptees will never feel whole, will never feel adequately parented, or worst of all, will see their adoptive parents, just by the act of adopting them in the first place, as part of the reason they feel broken - where does that leave the parents, seeing yet one more window closed on them? Their pain also matters here. It’s a different story, and many of you will say it's a lesser story (and I won't argue with you), but it does. They - we - are reading this story just as hungrily, also looking for answers. Accounts like this were one of the biggest reasons my husband and I chose not to pursue adoption after multiple miscarriages and failed IVFs. It's not BPD to worry that you can pour all your love into a child you want as your own, who will never see themselves as your own. It's insulting to say that it is. But that hurt can go both ways. It doesn't negate your pain as adopted children. It doesn't mean the hurt of what you never had the chance to have - or worse, was stolen from you - isn't an enormous, aching tragedy. But it's also one side of a triangle of pain here.

And at the heart of all of this, the number of potential parents who are desperate to adopt isn’t going down. But conversations like these, that make adoption less and less easy for parents, in and of itself creates a motive for the anti-abortion camp to make sure more unwanted babies are born. With plenty of “crisis pregnancy centers” set up to ease the transfer and likely discourage open adoption since it’s messier to young moms who didn’t want the pregnancy in the first place and may have been railroaded into the decision. But that’s a separate, and wholly hypothetical, conversation.
posted by my left sock at 10:12 AM on April 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I had to log in for this one...
My mum was adopted as an infant (8 days old). Her bio mum was a New Zealander whose name Mum eventually found out, her bio dad was we think probably Irish, we have a surname and a nickname and 'oh little Ngaio has Ned's eyes' from mum's bio grandma who she met once when she was my age and I was an infant, and that's it. I look like my dad but I have the eyes of a random stranger who is also my grandfather and who is probably dead now anyway (no idea, no way of finding out).
Mum had to get a lawyer to help her get her original birth certificate, after that was made legal in 1986 (before that, you could get nothing. After it, you can apply for a copy of your original birth certificate when you turn 20, in a complete departure from New Zealand's usual data privacy laws where you can have access to any information any government agency holds about you at any time for any reason including sheer curiosity). She wasn't allowed to read it herself or handle it, but she got to sit in a room with a 'licensed counselor' who held a folder of all her paperwork and responded to questions with either tiny snippets of information or [careful scanning of documents, tiny smirk] 'no, I can't tell you that'.
Mum's adoptive brother was sold (I am using this word so very deliberately) to their adoptive parents as 'probably got some Arabic heritage, looks exotic'. He's Māori. Doesn't know what iwi. In New Zealand knowing your iwi, if you have one, is a huge deal and that was taken from him.
We lived five miles from my bio grandma (in England, where she eventually ended up) for a few years when I was a teenager. Mum wrote to her and said hi we live in the area and I am doing okay and married with kids. She wrote back and said fuck off. She was quite explicit that she saw Mum and Mum's bio sister as teenaged mistakes that should have gone away, and she's since married and had other children who don't know about her previous kids and she doesn't want them to.
Mum was recently diagnosed with CPTSD from a lot of this.
On my dad's side I know where I came from for about twelve generations in all directions. On my mum's side, nada.

Adoption doesn't like, go away after one generation.
posted by ngaiotonga at 1:53 PM on April 19, 2023 [6 favorites]

My best friend whom I've known since age 13 or so found out he was adopted in his late 20s. It was a serious fuck-up for him.

I've known I was adopted all my life. That was never kept from me. My parents really wanted children and I got to be raised by them. Same for my sister. That's awesome. I'm glad for this.
posted by hippybear at 7:19 PM on April 19, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm an adoptive parent. I think centering adoptees and birth parents is currently a crucial first step for adoptive parents wanting to engage openly with the other triad. Adoptive parents overwhelmingly make up the mainstream press and writers of modern (ie 1920s-onwards) adoption-related materials. It's only in the past 10-20 years that adoptees and behind them, biological parents, are being published and heard. Our job right now is to step back and support other voices until the conversation is truly diverse.

The supply of healthy infants for adoptive parents has plummeted due to support for single parents increasing plus contraception and abortion access. This is a good thing, even though it absolutely does suck when you are infertile.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 8:02 AM on April 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was adopted at birth in the closed adoption era and always wondered about my biological family's background, interested and intensely curious is I guess how I would call it. Like hippybear I never wanted to break down a wall of privacy that might be there as self protection for my biological mother. But after my wife and I couldn't conceive we were incredibly fortunate to adopt two amazing baby girls, at birth as well. These are very open adoptions and we are quite tight with the birth family, especially their lovely birth mom. Open adoption was so very much beneficial for us all, birth family, ourselves and our amazing girls.

Re: about the hypotheticals kerfuffle above, I didn't find the original item about how soul crushing it might be for adoptive parents to be rejected to be problematic. As a person on both side as an adoptee and adopter, it would be soul crushing if our daughters rejected us. My left sock said this much better and more coherently than I possibly could so I want to wholehearted second their comment!

And of course as with any complex and fraught issue YMMV, no judging by me there.
posted by WatTylerJr at 10:06 AM on April 25, 2023