It’s been almost 8 months since I got the text that held the information containing my birth mother’s name and phone number. Eight months of conversations with old friends and new acquaintances about the circumstances surrounding my adoption and the in between I’ve found myself wading through. I still haven’t reached out and to be honest I haven’t even saved the number into my phone. This newsletter is more of an update non-update, because the information that might solve the puzzle of the missing pieces of my life sits dormant in a 23andme inbox (which I recently found out I am locked out of and now I’m wondering if that email I ignored about a threat actor invading my account had something to do with it.)
For the last 8 months I have perfected the script that runs these conversations about me and the recent developments surrounding my adoption and they go something exactly like this: “well you see I’m adopted… and actually I am in the process of looking for my birth mother right now” (little pause for reaction) “and well actually I did find her… well not her, but I have her information but I haven’t reached out yet.” What follows these sentences is the same reaction every time, facial gestures falling slightly down in defeat upon the realization that the story doesn’t have the ending or punch they’re expecting. The next part of the conversation gets worse when I reveal the reasoning is less the fear of reaching out and more the reality of my parent’s health declining and the fear of losing them. The next part of the story is sad and dark and has nothing to do with the exciting anticipation of me texting my birthparents but everything to do with the sad state my dad and my younger brother are in. The sudden realization that the gap between me and a simple text is actually a sinkhole of sick family members and the lack of resources we’re afforded to house and help sick adults. The conversation always starts hopeful then ends in the sighs of wishing we lived in a society with affordable services and housing for adults with special needs.
The space between me and the text should be occupied with the usual fears of just being an adoptee. I’ve written about this in detail but how heavy I’ve carried the weight of rejection as an unknowing result of being adopted- that us adoptees are constantly in a struggle to “earn our worth” and are people pleasers because of the part of our biology. That my hesitancy to text should be fueled by this fear of rejection, something created in me and other adoptees the moment as infants we were separated from our birth parents. A flashier term for it is relinquishment trauma, which is defined by this article here on the subject:
When an infant is not with their first mother day after day, the infant can become anxious and confused, causing the infant’s body to release stress hormones. Even newborns that are placed with the adoptive parent within days of their birth can feel the terror of their mother missing. Babies know their mother is missing and they are being cared for by strangers. Common sentiments expressed by adoptees are that they feel like something is missing, they have a hole inside of them, or their connections feel fragile and insecure.
Truthfully, I’ve never really felt like I have a hole inside of me. I’ve been very lucky to live a life full of love and being loved by so many people. I’ve never lacked in that but I have very much felt the weight of those connections possibly being fractured or suddenly disappearing. That every loving connection I gain there is also this dark nature to it unraveling out of nowhere. I never understood this phenomenon in my relationships until fully dealing with my adoption. It’s made me feel much more sane on the matter and ultimately does pull me in the direction of reunification to my birth family.
I love to tell a story, I get excited to recount an experience to people and there’s nothing I love more than sharing some hot goss in a group setting. Part of me wishes I was a bystander to this story because I would love to know the ending. I feel like I’m waiting to meet myself at a party so I can finally hear the ending. I want to know more than anyone I know, I think about it all the time but I’m also scared because I’m not talking to a person at a party- I am living the reality of it and the one having to face the good or bad consequences that arise from it (but I am excited for the day I can finally be the person at a party that has the ending the people deserve).
Even right now as I’m writing this I have the urge to grab my phone, send the text and then throw my phone across the room. It’s like texting a new crush- send the message and then immediately do anything to avoid looking at the phone anticipating the damage awaiting you. Except this time the message I’m waiting for isn’t from some dumb boy but from part of my DNA. I can’t numb the damage with a Taylor Swift song, I can only breathe through it and enter the next chapter.
Also adoption being so secretive intensifies the plot surrounding the access to your information. Imagine having to perform a nation wide scavenger hunt, one that several laws over the last century have been enacted to prevent, in order to simply find out information about your own body and history. And all I really want is to not be so much of an “actually” anymore. I have said the word “actually” in reference to myself hundreds and hundreds of times. It is my top descriptor of anything to do with me and haunts most of my conversations (especially first dates). “Where are your parents from?” “Well actually I’m not from the same place.” How many siblings do you have? “Four but actually none of us have the same parents.” What is your moon/rising sign? “Well actually my birth time is complicated.” It both begins and infiltrates every getting to know sentence I respond to because without it I feel like a liar. It’s the bridge between information about me and the information I do not know about me. I wish sometimes I could just say I’m this and be done with it without having to fire off a bunch of addendums in a casual getting to know you conversation while yelling trying to compete with a bar’s volume.
Recently The Atlantic published a piece about adoption and the need to allow more access to adoptees who want to find out about their origins. Seeing this article pop up felt both kismet and dizzying, since the timeliness felt a bit too on the nose. The author has a similar timeline as me- being young and not really caring to find their birth families to growing older and having their interest piqued and ultimately facing head on something they were actively avoiding their whole life. He began his search while adopting a child of his own and through the process realized how important it was for him to be able to know where he came from as well. (Also a very fun side note to this article is that after reading it, I wanted to email the author and let him know how much it resonated with me and that I am in a very similar circumstance. When I scrolled up to see who this person was I was surprised to find out it was famed NPR host Steve Inskeep, and not some random man from the midwest that The Atlantic was giving a platform to.)
The article goes on to list the many roadblocks us adoptees have in trying to figure out something as simple as our birth times or medical history (and yes a lot of it does link to abortion rights of course). It details the history of holding back information from adoptees who then feel the weight of having to hold back the information from the parents that raised them. Anytime I’ve spoken with my mom in the last 8 months I’ve felt like I’ve been carrying some dirty secret. Far worse than telling my very Christian mom I’m not a virgin anymore, or that I drink and have done my fair share of drugs. I hate that I hide this, but also know this sort of information might make my mom feel less like my mom and since she’s become a full time caretaker to both my dad and brother, the last thing she needs is to feel less than about our relationship.
But I am inching closer to saying the word actually less and sending a text (sorry I won’t even entertain the possibility of cold calling). The process has been slow but I’m feeling ready to finally put some momentum behind it. And truthfully I am always nervous she somehow has found her way to this newsletter since of course I was gifted with an incredibly unique name making me an extremely easy google search. So if you are her and you are reading this…. can I just email you instead? Just kidding! But seriously…