Small Epiphanies: December 26
I got a phone call from the adoption agency today and I foolishly thought I was going to be given information of some sort.
As it turns out, a guy that works there was calling to tell me that a letter I’d sent–ages ago, I couldn’t even remember exactly when–needs to be notarized before the agency can answer my questions. For my own protection, of course. Ha.
One wonders why someone could not have called when they first received the letter to say it has to be notarized, instead of waiting for month, nearly a year, to respond at all. Feels like more “for my protection” nonsense.
After a lot of virtual (and fruitless) digging around on my hard drive, I found a copy of the letter that I emailed to myself, from my office computer, on March 27, 2011. Here is what it says:
Thank you for speaking with me on the telephone this morning. As we discussed, I am sending you this letter asking for some additional information regarding my adoption, which took place on 6/29/69.
In 1994, I wrote to Angel Guardian asking for non-identifying information. The letter I received, a copy of which I have attached, said that my birthfather’s ethnic background was Indian-German. I am wondering whether the terminology, “Indian,” as used in 1967, would have referred to American Indian or Native American, or perhaps Indian, of Middle Eastern descent. Is there any additional information in my file that might clarify this part of my background?
Thank you for any information you can provide.
The question is now, after the DNA wrinkle, probably moo (a cow’s opinion) but I still want to know what Angel Guardian thought it was telling me, if that makes any sense. I am not assuming anything they tell me will be the truth.
And that brings me to today’s question: Why do I say, “I am adopted,” and not “I was adopted”? Being adopted is not like being Italian, or being British, or being of Middle Eastern descent, as the case may be. It is, presumably, a completed act. Right? I don’t know. Am I implying that it’s part of my very being, my DNA, somehow? A permanent condition?
During my dissertation defense, one of my readers asked, “What if we just said you’re not adopted?” He was asking, I think, what if that category just didn’t exist? What if it’s just a discourse, language that was made up to differentiate something that really doesn’t need to be different? He said, “You were born. You have parents. They raised you. Who cares how you got them?”
At the time I was adopted, in the late 1960s, it was all about matching–about creating “natural” families out of the two social problems of unwed mothers and infertile married couples. If the child matched the adoptive parent, the adoption could be invisible.
I’ve argued in my dissertation and elsewhere that our adoption story was so good as to make my adoption seem like a fairy tale, like an incidental part of the story of how we became a family. It so naturalized our family that it removed, for me, the need for questions at all. We were meant to be a family. And we are.
This is one way, perhaps, of thinking about my reader’s question. But other families, I think, took that in another direction and actually hid the fact of the adoption, and the hiding makes it seem somehow wrong and sinister.
Both, though, silence the fact of the adoption, regardless of the intention.
What if we abolished, somehow, the distinction? Or, can we abolish the . . . I don’t know. . . the difference the distinction implies? And do we want to?
I guess it would be a beautiful thing if how you became a family was invisible–if the how didn’t matter. Kind of like if skin color became invisible, and we stopped identifying as one thing or another, and just were.
But wouldn’t it be just as beautiful a thing if how you became a family was totally visible, and always celebrated, in all its myriad facets? And I think today that’s the more likely scenario. Or else I’m very naive. And that just might well be the case.
I think I’ve gotten away from the discourse part of this discussion, though. What does it say about our ideologies of family and blood and genetics and unwed mothers that we make this distinction? Is it separate but equal? Can it be?
What does how we write and talk about adoption tell us about just how this social practice fits into our values and beliefs about families? Can the very fact of the distinction between “adopted” and “born to” be innocuous and benign?
This is Not My Narrative 