By Megan Culhane GalbraithOnce upon a time a little girl was born in a charity hospital in Hell’s Kitchen to an unwed mother.

Her name was Gabriella Herman and she was adopted about six months later. Her name was changed and her identity was erased. Her birth certificate was dated two years after she was born.

By the time she was six months old she’d had three mothers: a birth mother, a foster mother, and an adoptive mother.

_____

My reunification with my birth mother began via a letter from Catholic Charities followed by another by Air Mail from my birth mother. To me it felt like a new beginning. Perhaps then it is fitting that our relationship would end with a letter. This time it was sent 25 years later and by certified mail.

_____

The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book is my attempt at unwinding the story of my birth and identity through the lens of stories told to me by my birth mother. The book was accepted for publication on Mother’s Day 2020. The synchronicity was not lost on me. My debut! My first-born! My book baby! My mother—dead for decades—wasn’t here to celebrate my happy news, so I called my birth mother to tell her my book was about to be born.

She was excited for me on the phone. She mailed me a congratulatory card. Inside she wrote; “You did it! Congratulations on getting your book in print in 2021. How wonderful! XOX.”

She was fond of using the USPS and had a habit of sending me envelopes stuffed with news clippings, Harper’s articles she’d torn out of the magazine, and typed letters that contained sternly worded directives even though I hadn’t asked for her advice. I called these her “lectures.” I shrugged them off in the interest of maintaining a relationship with her. After all, she was the only mother I had left.

_____

I use dolls as a window into my story by recreating photos from my baby book in my dollhouse. Doing this allowed me some distance from my fears. By playing with dolls I could examine those fears through a different lens. Dolls are used to understand trauma in myriad ways—“show me where he touched you,” or “point to where it hurts” or “can you show me where she hit you?”

Memory born from trauma is full of dead ends. Shame is spring-loaded. My birth mother’s stories circled back on themselves: they were versions of a truth.

When I brought up the shame and the trauma I felt as an adoptee, she said they were useless emotions.

_____

As I dove into editing my book I sought permissions from my father, my siblings, and my birth mother to use various photos from my baby book or, in my birth mother’s case, from the album she’d given me titled “Our Family Album.” These were photos of her as a teenager, in her early 20s, and of our reunion in New York City, at a hotel just blocks away from The Guild of the Infant Saviour, the Catholic unwed mother’s home where she’d been sent to have me.

Dad gave his immediate approval: “No one can tell your story but you, honey,” he said. One of my siblings supported me; the other did not.

After weeks of unusual silence from my birth mother I became concerned. My follow-up emails were met with what felt like chilly silences. When she finally wrote back her tone was cold.

“I sent you a letter about permissions,” she said. “You need to go to your local post office to investigate.”

“Need” and “investigate.” Those words sent me into a spiral of anxiety.

In the early stages of my search for her I’d used the number on my birth certificate to compare with the numbers in the genealogical listings at the New York Public Library. It was an exhaustive and fruitless effort. Now, she was asking me to search again, but without a USPS tracking number I was at a loss. It was like I was setting out on another search but this time without even a number as a clue.

_____

I began thinking about silences. I re-read Silences, by Tillie Olsen.

THE BABY; THE GIRL-CHILD; THE GIRL; THE YOUNG WRITER-WOMAN

“We cannot speak of women writers in our century (we cannot speak of some in an area of recognized human
achievement) without speaking also of the invisible, the as-innately-capable: the born to the wrong circumstances—diminished, excluded, foundered, silenced,” writes Olsen.

“We who write are survivors . . .”

_____

Many emails later, my birth mother forwarded the USPS details to me. As I clicked through the tracking system I realized she’d sent me a certified letter. I was stunned. It had been undeliverable for nearly a month and was now on its way back to her marked, “Return to Sender.”

_____

re.turn  |  \ ri-ˈtərn
intransitive verb
1.     to go back or come back again //return home

transitive verb
2.     give, put, or send (something) back to a place or person

sent\ ‘sent\; sending
transitive verb
1.     to cause to go: such as
        a. to propel or throw in a particular direction
        b. DELIVER //sent a blow to the chin
2.     to cause to happen //whatever fate may send
3a:   to force to go: drive way
         b. to cause to assume a specified state //sent them into a rage

_____

A wise friend of mine told me her experience with book publishing was 90 percent wonderful and 10 percent “a blow to the head you never saw coming.” Here was my 10 percent. I felt physically sick for days. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I felt nauseated and deeply lonely. The two people most opposed to me using my voice were the two most closely connected to me by adoption.

Why a certified letter? Why such an abrupt change in tone? Why the long silence and sudden secrecy? What had changed in the days between our upbeat phone call, my birth mother’s congratulatory card, and this letter? Why couldn’t she have returned my phone calls?

“Can you please email me the contents of the letter?” I wrote.

“After two failed attempts by the U.S. Postal Service to deliver this May 22, 2020, certified letter to you, I have no choice but to send it by e-mail,” she wrote, copying my editor and the series editor.

Before she’d grant me permission to use the three photos she’d need to read, revise, and edit my entire manuscript, she said. She suggested there were inaccuracies. She requested her privacy.

“I hope that you will have the honesty and integrity to grant this request,” she wrote.

Was she trying to keep my book from being published? Why was she making this about her? I felt like she was trying to silence me just at the time I was finding my voice.

_____

The search for my birth mother began nearly 25 years ago via a letter from Catholic Charities that contained her “non-identifying information.” From those spare details, plus a search by my caseworker, I found her. She’d been willing to be found. We began a long-term relationship. She’d promised to be my open book. She’d said I could ask her anything. I listened to her stories and wrote a book about piecing together my identity via her memory, among other things.

She’d surrendered me when she was 19 years old. We’d done the hard work of knitting each other into our families. Now she was demanding I erase her from my narrative.

How could I choose a name for her that would signify this second erasure, this silencing?

_____

erased; erasing; erasure
transitive verb
1a.   to rub or scrape out //erase an error
b.     to remove written or drawn marks from //erase a blackboard
c.      to remove (recorded matter) from a magnetic medium //erase a videotape
d.      to delete from a computer storage //erase a file
2a.    to remove from existence or memory as if by erasing
          b. to nullify the effect or force of

_____

Fairy tales fascinate and annoy me because of the lack of agency of the female characters. The women are acted upon, locked away, shut up, and shut down (many times this involves a wicked stepmother.) They wait for permission to speak, or for a prince to rescue them.

In deciding on a pseudonym for my birth mother I was firm that I would not erase my birth name, or our shared last name. I’d had enough of the shame, secrets, and half-truths that burden us adoptees. The shame wasn’t mine to carry anymore. If she wanted to live in the shadows, so be it.

I’ll rename her in my book I told my editors, but I won’t erase myself in the process.

I chose the name Ursula. It reminds me of another tale; that of Ursula the Sea Witch in Hans Christian Anderson’s 1836 version of The Little Mermaid. Ursula demands the little mermaid’s voice in exchange for fulfilling her desires.

“But if you take away my voice,” said the little mermaid, “what is left for me?” goes the tale. … “Put out your little tongue that I may cut it off as my payment …” says Ursula.

_____

In his column for Catapult called “Love and Silence,” my friend and fellow adoptee Matt Salesses writes about how hard it is to tell a story the narrator is not supposed to tell.

He teaches Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior. He writes:
“. . . begins with a story the narrator is not supposed to tell. It is the story of her drowned aunt, who was erased by her family because her story is unacceptable: She became pregnant out of wedlock. In punishment, the townspeople burned the family’s crops and killed their livestock, and the next day, the aunt was found with her baby in a well. The narrator, Maxine, is told this story by her mother, on the day she gets her first period.

“Beware, the story implies, of desire. The narrator’s retelling of her mother’s story doesn’t censor desire, but explores it, wondering whether the baby was a result of rape or love, why the aunt did not abort it, why she jumped into the well with it—a kind of mercy? The retelling is an act of love. Maxine frees her aunt from erasure, by making the story-that-should-not-be-told (which is always only one story) into many stories, reinstating her aunt in the realm of imaginative possibility.”

The retelling is an act of love … in the realm of imaginative possibility.

_____

One of Ursula’s favorite books was Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale. I have the copy she gave me here in my lap. I’ve read the novel many times. It was Setterfield’s first published book.

The narrator is Margaret Lea—whose name is near perfectly similar to my birth mother’s. In the novel, Lea admits to feeling like half a person who is compelled to unwind the narrative threads and the secrets of a reclusive writer named Vida Winter. Winter tells her dark family story through Lea, who is not allowed to ask questions.

The epigraph of the novel reads:

“All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind, and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won’t is the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story.”
—Vida Winter, Thirteen Tales of Change and Desperation

The Thirteenth Tale is a story about endings as much as beginnings. It is structured to begin where it ends because, in the end, both characters confront the weight of family secrets, their pasts, and their intersecting stories. Its themes are identity, loss, reconciliation, and death.

I’m unsure what compelled me to pick up the book again except the vague memory that it was a book about a book about memory, and that it was significant to my birth mother. When I first read it years ago, I’d wondered if she was trying to tell me something. It felt like a harbinger. Just like the main character, Ursula had been telling me stories about my birth and her life for years. Many times she bristled at my questions and shut me down.

“The past is the past, just leave it there.”

“Whose memoir are you writing, mine or yours?”

The end always justifies the beginning.

_____

I have a poem by Lucille Clifton secured to my refrigerator titled, “why some people be mad at me sometimes” …
“they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering
mine.”

_____

Most fairy tales have a “happy ending,” but that rarely happens with adoption. Have we come to the end of our story? Is this what is meant by “coming full circle?”

I was born. I was surrendered. I was adopted.

We were reunited: lost and found and lost.

It’s been nearly a year of silence from her. My book will be born on almost the same day one year after she sent me that certified letter.

I must now be the one to surrender.

THE ENDMegan Culhane Galbraith is a writer and visual artist. Her work was a Notable Mention in Best American Essays 2017, has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, and has been published in Tupelo Quarterly, Redivider, Catapult, Hobart, Longreads, and Hotel America, among others. She is associate director of the Bennington Writing Seminars and the founding director of the Governor’s Institutes of Vermont Young Writers Institute. Look for her on Twitter, on Instagram here and here, and on Facebook here and here. Go here to buy signed copies of The Guild of the Infant Saviour and for information about events and interviews.

It’s not news to donor conceived individuals that they have feelings about the manner in which they were conceived—feelings that may never occur to, or be acknowledged by, others. According to a new study published in the Harvard Medical School Journal of Bioethics and discussed in a recent article in Psychology Today, not only do individuals experience significant distress upon learning they were donor conceived, but they also think about the means of their conception often.

The authors of the new study reviewed existing literature and recognized a dearth of research concerning how donor conceived people feel about learning of their status, about the ethics of assisted reproduction, how their sense of identity is affected, how they’ve coped, and more. Rennie Burke, Yvette Ollada Lavery, Gali Katznelson, Joshua North, and J. Wesley Boyd developed a survey about these issues and asked Dani Shapiro—who wrote about her own donor conception discovery in Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love—to help them recruit respondents. The response rate was 96.6%, with 143 demographically diverse respondents, most from the United States, the majority of whom were conceived through anonymous sperm donation.

Among the findings:

• 86.5% believed they were entitled to non-identifying information about their donors
• 84.6% experienced a “shift in their ‘sense of self’” after learning they were donor conceived
• 48.5% sought psychological support
• 74.8% wished they knew more about their ethnicity
• 63.6% wanted to know more about their biological parents’ identities”

Highlights of the researchers’ conclusions are that increased attention to counseling is important, anonymous donation should be discouraged, donor medical history should be provided to offspring, and the full potential implications of DNA testing should be considered before individuals proceed.

J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD, shared his thoughts about the research.

What instigated the undertaking of this study? What inspired it and what was your goal?

For the last six years I taught a course in the master’s degree program in Bioethics at Harvard Medical School called Contemporary Books in Bioethics. The course was amazing because we had authors come and present a public lecture about their books and also speak just to the class members, who’d already read and discussed the books prior to the authors’ arrival. Two years ago, one of the books that we read was Inheritance by Dani Shapiro. Three pages into my first reading of that book and I was rapt. It might be the only book I’ve read cover to cover in a single sitting—I couldn’t put it down. I’d never given much thought at all to the issues in that book—and the whole topic of gamete donation—prior to reading Inheritance. Needless to say, it was great meeting Dani when she came to talk about her book. In the middle of her class presentation I asked her if there were large-scale studies about how donor conceived individuals felt about the nature of their conception and she said no. Right then and there in class I said, “Then I’m going to conduct a study” and I asked if any students wanted to participate and several raised their hands.

Could you summarize the most significant finding of the research?    

When individuals discover later in life that they were conceived through donor technologies it can be earth shattering. Many of the folks we surveyed were dismayed and had their sense of self turned on its head. Additionally, many of our respondents thought about the nature of their conception every single day—a finding that is astounding given that most of us never give our conception much thought if any. Many ended up seeking psychological counseling as a result of their altered sense of self. Also, many were troubled to learn that money had been exchanged surrounding their conception.

The study states that there’s been little consideration to whether donor conceived people “have suffered psychologically because of the discovery of their conception.” Was there a distinction drawn between suffering because of the discovery of their conception and suffering because of the fact of their conception? In other words, were individuals sorry to have learned about their status or troubled by the reality of having been donor conceived and having been unaware of it?

My impression of our results is that folks were troubled at not knowing about the nature of their conception and about the deception therein. It’s one thing to know early in life about the nature of your conception and incorporate that into your sense of self throughout your life and quite another to discover later in life that so many things that have been the bedrock of your psyche and stability are not what you thought. The former is quite likely just part of growing up, but the latter can upend any sense of stability and grounding for a person. In the latter scenario, foundational parts of yourself can be ripped away and you can end up wondering who you really are and also feeling like your previous life was a lie in many respects.

Previous studies suggested that failure to disclose to offspring their donor-conceived status was no more likely than disclosure to cause harm. Can you discuss how your study compared in that regard? 

If our findings diverge from any previous findings, I assume that is because of the ways in which we solicited research subjects. Our participants were often members of support groups (such as on Facebook) of donor conceived individuals who might have joined those groups precisely because they were struggling with their discovery about the method of their conception. As such, our participants almost certainly differ from individuals who were informed early in their lives about the nature of their conception and had been able to assimilate and process that information into their sense of self over a period of decades. Additionally, if there are people who discover later in life that they were donor conceived and did not have much of a problem with that discovery, they might not feel compelled to join support groups, so would not have been among those we sampled.

What if anything surprised you about the findings? 

I was not surprised by much, believe it or not. Perhaps the reason I wasn’t surprised by what we discovered is that I’d already read Inheritance and therefore had already grappled with the plethora of thoughts and emotions individuals might have upon discovering they are donor conceived.

The study states: “We believe that it is impossible to know where technology will be in another 50 years and, as such, believe that there cannot be truly informed consent today for anyone involved, either the gamete donors or potential parents who utilize these reproductive technologies.” Of course, who knows what may come, but do you have any thoughts about what issues might arise?  

I am no expert in genetics, but I mostly only have a vague sense about the nefarious ways in which genetic technologies might be used to make predictions about future potential for any single individual which might result in blocking pathways for those deemed unfit based on their DNA (not unlike what we see in the movie “Gattaca”). I could imagine things like cloning and creating more than one being from a single genome and having various identical beings committing nefarious acts, wreaking havoc and chaos. Also there might be certain genetic traits and dispositions that will be able to be amplified and magnified—a taste for power, sadism, or who knows what—beyond anyone’s ability to reign it in, creating evil on a scale that we can’t really imagine. Also, many individuals might be deemed unfit to be biological parents due to their genetic makeup.

The study concludes that great thought ought to go into the decision about whether to take a DNA test. Can you talk about the considerations and how individuals can be helped to make that decision? 

If someone tests their own DNA, in my opinion they ought to assume that their genome will end up in a database that is fully, completely discoverable. This availability will not only make you readily available to biological relatives, but to insurance companies, intelligence agencies, and police forces, to name just a few. I assume entities like NSA and the CIA are already looking at our genome in hopes of making predictions about predilection toward crime, espionage, etc.

The study also calls for testing companies to promote greater awareness about the potential harms of DNA testing. In what way would you like to see that awareness expressed? 

The ways I’d like to see it expressed are contrary to their profit motive, so I don’t expect much change in their marketing, but instead of the ads we currently see with people happily making discoveries about their ancestry, I’d like to see overt depiction of individuals who are shocked by what they find when they test their DNA.

Based on your study findings, what advice, if any, would you have for individuals who have learned that they were donor-conceived in order to help them better cope? 

I’d offer advice similar to that which I offer anyone who is suffering or in pain. I’d encourage them to seek whatever kind of support or counseling they might need to process their discovery—whether informal or professional—and to let them know that they are not alone. I think that latter point is why support groups can be so beneficial.

What are the greatest needs for future research, and what further research, if any, do you plan to carry out? 

My colleagues in medical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine are planning to conduct a larger, grant-funded study of folks who have done at home genetic testing and discovered that they are not biologically related to (some of) their first-degree relatives. Given their proposed sampling method, if it goes forward their study will be much larger and more generalizable.

What, if anything, stands in the way of research or makes research of this kind challenging? 

This research is challenging because many folks who find out late in life that they were conceived through donor technologies are hurting and their sense of self has been turned on its head. Given the levels of pain and suffering so many people have experienced, you have to tread very lightly in order to not exacerbate their pain in any way.J. Wesley Boyd, MD, PhD, is a professor of psychiatry and medical ethics at Baylor College of Medicine. He is also a faculty member in the Harvard Medical School Center for Bioethics. He obtained an MA in philosophy and a PhD in religion and culture, along with his medical degree, at UNC Chapel Hill. He’s taught extensively in the humanities, bioethics, human rights, and psychiatry. His areas of interest include social justice, access to care, human rights, asylum and immigration, humanistic aspects of medicine, physician health and well-being, the pharmaceutical industry, mass incarceration, and substance use. Visit his website at jwesleyboyd.com and follow on Twitter @JWesleyBoydMD @BCMEthics @HMSBioethics. BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and Lori HoldenIf you’ve ever spent time in what is known as “Adoption Land”—various communities that exist to support people with emotions and struggles particular to adoptees, first/birth parents, and adoptive parents—you’ve likely noticed an array of fiercely held perspectives on adoption.

While Adoption Land helps normalize and heal, there can be a danger in looking at adoption dogmatically or in an echo chamber.

Adoptive parents who sing the praises of adoption tend to lead the narrative that’s most familiar in mainstream culture: adoption is a beautiful thing, children are gifts, adoptive parents are selfless, orphans and unwanted children abound, and the best way to help them is through adoption.

This perspective, which elevates adoptive parents to saint-like status, misses the profound nuances of adoption and excludes important perspectives from other key players—adoptees and first/birth families (for simplicity, from here on referenced as birth families)—whose voices are critical to serving the adoption community.

Adult adoptees who speak out often focus on the trauma of adoption. Losing a mother is one of the greatest separations imaginable, and yet adoptee mother loss is often diminished, ignored, or equated with other kinds of losses. Adoptee pain is not the happy “positive” story of adoption that mainstream culture usually takes interest in, but it is scientifically proven: from the moment of relinquishment, adoptee brains are wired to protect from further loss. This can manifest as people-pleasing, perfectionism, anxiety, aggression, depression, addiction, suicidal ideation, or other self-harm. These are critical, life-saving dynamics to shed light upon, and it’s important that adoptees continue to speak up about the effects of attachment loss.

But while unpacking the emotional turmoil that goes hand-in-hand with adoption, adoptees can get stuck in darkness and hopelessness. It’s easy to lose the “forest for the trees,” straying into the “Trauma Olympics,” or forgetting about the plasticity of the human brain and our enormous capacity for resilience. What’s more, over time adoptees may disengage with, or even block, adoptive parents, together with a large swath of society, after becoming fatigued or retraumatized by constant microaggressions, gaslighting, and flawed information. But engage they must—especially if they feel a calling to support other generations of adoptees and work toward industry reform.

Birth parents’ voices are still desperately needed in Adoption Land. When birth parents remain silent, adoptees miss out on their perspectives, which can serve as a balm for the scars of relinquishment. Also, when birth parents remain quiet, adoptive parents may be prone to carry on as if first bonds don’t matter (out of sight/out of mind), when those first roots are deeply significant to most, if not all, adoptees and must be honored for everyone’s emotional health.

That said, it’s no secret that there’s a power dynamic that contributes to shaming and silencing birth parents. Adoptive parents, because they, unlike the birth parents, are actually parenting the children, naturally are in a superior position. Birth parents, observing from the shadows, are typically waiting for the moment they can join in. Some birth parents, so engulfed by the shame of their placement, are nowhere to be found. Entombed by the layers of their trauma and feelings of unworthiness, speaking out could be the last thing on their minds. Additionally, speaking out means talking about the present time as well as the past. An open adoption arrangement can be greatly affected by what birth parents choose to say. The consequences for speaking out could be dramatic: the difference between seeing your child or not, in visits or even just pictures.

This is why it’s important for birth parents to feel an invitation to enter Adoption Land—both from its participants and generally from adoptive parents—and why that invitation must be shame-free and punishment-free.

Working Together for True Change

Change happens when people work together. Although progress has been made, a greater evolution is still needed for the betterment of the 100 million families affected by adoption. We all benefit when we empathize with others and are willing to look within for what we can do.

Toward that goal, three women living in adoption share three different perspectives on working with others from within the adoption constellation. We’ll start with the adopted person for two reasons: first, this is the person in the “triad” who had no voice or choice in their relinquishment and adoption, and second, adoption practices are supposed to be about the “best interests of child”—a child who may at first seem readily adaptable, but grows to have her own independent views and voice.

Sara Easterly, Adult Adoptee

I recently met another mom, and as we talked, she learned that I was an author and adoptee. She asked about my memoir (Searching for Mom), and within minutes the conversation turned to her friends who were adoptive parents and might want to read my book. I nodded, momentarily basking in flattery … though it was rather short-lived. In the same breath, this mom started telling me about how awful these adopted children of her friends were: out-of-control, acting up, wreaking havoc on their families, and destroying their adoptive parents’ marriages.

I confess that I made an immediate, judgmental assessment of the adoptive parents without knowing them or understanding the situations further. Inside, I felt pretty irked by the double-standard: how culture loves to pretend adoption is about saving needy, powerless children, but when adoption gets hard or doesn’t add up to beautiful, it becomes about blaming the kids—no longer seen as needy and powerless. Instead, it’s their parents who are victims, overlooking the fact that they chose adoption and have benefitted from it too.

Thankfully, this mom was a long-winded talker, which gave me time for a lot of deep breaths that stopped me from speaking out of my anger. As she continued, I remembered the cultural lack of awareness when it comes to human attachment dynamics and how losses manifest, particularly for adoptees. Most people don’t even consider that adoption is rooted in loss.

I also thought about how hard parenting is when our children don’t behave as we’ve hoped and when we feel like we are failing them. As a mom, I’m aware that parenting has its pain points. I reflected on how difficult it is to admit that what we’re doing as parents isn’t working, and how much easier it is to blame our children and circumstances, rather than face ourselves or a situation we’ve had a hand in—a defense mechanism employed to protect us from pain. As an adoptee, too, I know about defense mechanisms. Noticing all of these commonalities was my path toward empathy for these adoptive parents and out of the “othering” line of thinking that could have propelled me to defend, attack, or shut down. I thought of my adoptive mom and what she might have said to her closest friends. I know I wasn’t always easy to parent either.

My adoption took place before there was much awareness or sharing of the effects of relinquishment. My parents, like so many others, were instructed to take me home and pretend as if my adoption made no difference in my life. With this as an unspoken rule, I grew up playing the same pretending game … but the long-term result was that I became an enigma to my parents. From most outward appearances, I seemed to be thriving. But my parents had no idea of the incredible grief, secret mother-fantasies, and flight from vulnerable feelings that boiled inside of me. My growth, as well as a deep attachment to my adoptive parents, was hindered by a lack of unity and information-sharing between all parties. How I wish my parents had had access to adult adoptees when I was a child and had been open to hearing perspectives from birth parents too! It may not have made parenting me a cakewalk, but I’m certain more awareness would have gone a long way for us all.

I don’t want to see other adoptees and families (both adoptive and birth families) getting unnecessarily stuck too. That’s why I continue to write and speak about my experiences now. It’s also why I listen—even when it’s hard, like it was when this mom shared about her friends’ adopted children. It can take effort, but it helps to see their perspectives as a gift. For one thing, their sharing helps me, as an adoptee advocate, see where more progress is needed. There’s a personal benefit too: an opportunity to continue my healing journey, with a less-personal window into parents’ struggles and needs. Similarly, by being in community with adoptive and birth parents, I know I am offering a gift: helping them understand the often-misunderstood hearts of adoptees.

Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Birth Mom

Birth parents who speak about their adoption experiences are more often birth mothers than birth fathers. From this perspective, birth moms who speak out typically fall into one of two groups.

First are those who speak from the traumatizing circumstances surrounding their placement that has left an open wound. The circumstances that have deeply affected them could have been any number of events, but most often they have either been forced or coerced to place their children or they have heavy regret about their decisions. In more recent times, many birth moms are speaking out because promises that were made to uphold an open adoption were broken.

Second are the birth mothers who are relatively fresh out of their placements and aim to testify about their experience for inspirational purposes. They typically tell their stories while parroting the extremely positive rhetoric taught to them from whomever facilitated their adoption. Most often, these are women whose adoptions were open to some degree. Perhaps they are looking for some sort of redeeming value in what was an almost unbearably painful chapter in their lives. This may explain why some become adoption cheerleaders early in their post-placement journeys.

Each group of birth moms is aware of the other; they often find themselves in stark opposition one another, clinging to their rigid perspectives of how adoption has affected their lives. Both groups have more in common than they know, even in their different experiences, levels of openness, and trauma sources. It’s highly likely that both groups were told a sugar-sweet tale of how the adoption process would be. Some adoption professionals stash away critical information that would be useful to educate birth mothers on the after-effects of placing their children for adoption. This decision by adoption professionals—to conceal from birth mothers the inevitable mental and emotional outcomes of adoption—is likely made from fear of “negatively” influencing their adoption decisions, thus causing the professionals to lose thousands of dollars, damage their reputations, and erode the trust of their client: the prospective adoptive parents.

It’s no surprise that when a baby leaves the arms of one of these birth moms, all of the rah-rah rhetoric that has set the birth mom upon a high heroic pedestal vanishes and leaves her to fall a long way back down to earth. The fall from adoption glory is a hard one. I, myself, have experienced the terror of the plunge. It was as though I walked out of the hospital and into a sea of “tell us your inspiring story of redemption!” Redemption? What do I need to be redeemed of? The pressure of turning our stories of relinquishment into a flowery fairy tale is an extension of the shame placed upon single pregnant women. It took me some time to confront my faulty ideals of adoption, but with each milestone of understanding, I chipped away at the conflict within myself and parted ways with the shame surrounding my adoption and pregnancy. More important, this prepares me to one day have real and honest answers to the questions my child will ask. My imperfections and those in my story are not to be hidden away or crafted into a phony fable; facing the ugly head-on is healing in the long run.

I speak up to demystify the less familiar and often unavailable birth mom perspective. To keep our voices clear and audible, we must continuously protect our paper from presumptive pens. Every time we disappoint society’s craving for a fairy-tale ending, we dismantle the shame and free other birth mothers from the captivity of a dishonest narrative. Through listening to each other and speaking in truth, we can remove the barricades to deeper relationships with our children.

Lori Holden, Adoptive Mom

Many (not all) adoptive parents come to domestic infant adoption after enduring the indignities and grief of infertility. Like fertility treatments, the process to adopt can be invasive, uncertain, and fraught with emotion. By the time new parents finally bring home a baby, it’s no wonder they might end up thinking the whole process was “worth it,” “meant to be,” and that all their troubles are behind them. That neither they, nor their beloved babies, will ever need to worry about anything adoption-related again.

It’s a short leap to “adoption is wonderful. Just look at us as proof!”

I’m not just speaking about others. That was me. I joined the ranks of insufferable new adoptive parents back in my early days of adopting my daughter and my son. In the time before social media, when parents gathered in online bulletin boards and forums, I went in proclaiming my amazing! experience! as the truth of everyone in adoption. After all, I felt it so fully it must be The Truth!

It didn’t take long to find out just how wrong I was.

I got called out on a forum for my exuberance and audacity—rightly so. Though it hurt, I began to listen—especially to adult adoptees and birth moms who explained to me situations similar to those Sara and Kelsey have shared here. I began to understand the complexities and nuances of adoption. I began to gain a wider array of perspectives that helped me become a more attuned and empathetic mom to my children. I am grateful for the adoptees, birth parents, and other adoptive parents who have helped me to see beyond the “adoption is wonderful” narrative.

Listening to, much less engaging with, people who are less-than-positive about adoption can seem scary. You’re positive, they’re negative. What could a Negative Nancy possibly have to say worth listening to? Turns out, a lot, if we listen from a place of openness. When we can actually understand practices that have harmed the Saras and the Kelseys (and even the Loris) of Adoption Land, we can then make different and better decisions. For example, once I began hearing the common lament from adoptees that splitting their loyalty between their adoptive parents and birth parents was painful for them, I began embracing a Both/And heart set, which replaced the prevailing Either/Or mindset. My daughter and son are better off for that.

What a fortunate time to be in, to have access to varied voices through the Internet. Instead of shying away from possible conflict, we should be taking advantage of these spaces that enable us to grow beyond our comfort zones.

Yet I also want to caution that there can be too much of a good thing. You can collect all of the insight from all of the voices and still not know what to do with it—much of it may even be conflicting. In addition to listening outside you, I also encourage you to listen within, to discern what is true for you and your situation. Find a balance between letting in other voices and tuning in to your own. In this way, you can cultivate confidence in how you approach adoption both in your own life and with others online. But not just confidence; confidence with compassion.

Leaps and Strides

It’s almost funny to consider how we, as a culture, took a leap to the “adoption is beautiful” fairytale when in reality it’s built on a foundation of loss, pain, and heartache. Perhaps this is a reflection of society as a whole, showing its fear of the dark and our existential human longing for an easy, breezy, happy ending.

Ironically, we can only make strides toward a satisfying ending when we embrace the full, real, messy aspects of adoption too. When we make proper room for all that is hard, there’s more space for the light. There can certainly be a lot of light in adoption—of course! But Adoption Land has historically spent decades tucking away the darker, harder parts, and it’s time to acknowledge that it’s complicated and look beyond our perspectives.

Perhaps this is the challenge for each group in Adoption Land: to recognize that each of us is carrying pain. The adoptee has the pain of separation. Birth parents have the pain of relinquishment and shame. Adoptive parents have the pain of insecurity and sometimes grief from previous losses. Seeing each other’s pain is what gives us empathy for one another.

With empathy as the baseline, the second challenge is to listen to each other. Listening to others’ perspectives can be hard and may sometimes seem like a tall order. Until we feel solid in our own beliefs, we might find others’ views threatening or stifling. But once we find our confidence, listening is where significant growth can unfold. If we listen only to voices that come from our perspectives in the triad, or to people with whom we already agree, we won’t discover information that may help us become better versions of ourselves. We can get stuck. Being open to others’ perspectives not only can help us make better decisions at the personal level, but can also improve Adoption Land by advocating for practices and policies that more effectively serve us all.Sara Easterly is an award-winning author of books and essays. Her spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the 2020 Illumination Book Awards, among many other awards and honors. Easterly’s adoption-focused articles and essays have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Feminine Collective, Godspace, Her View From Home, and Severance Magazine, to name a few. Follow her on Facebook, on Twitter @saraeasterly, and on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor.Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard is the director of advocacy and policy at AdoptMatch. She’s a birth mother who is passionate about greatly raising the standards in adoption to better serve the children, mothers, and families affected by family separation. Ranyard has worked at various agencies and law firms in the adoption field and can often be found fervently and frequently begging the question, “How do we fix this?” She is also a co-host of the birth mom podcast,Twisted Sisterhood. Follow her on Instagram @fromanothamotha.Lori Holden writes at LavenderLuz.com and hosts the podcast Adoption: The Long View. She’s the author of The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole, written with her daughter’s birth mom and acclaimed by people in all parts of the adoption constellation. She has keynoted and presented at adoption conferences around the US, and her work has appeared in magazines such as Parenting and Adoptive Families. Follow her on Facebook, on Instagram @Lavluz, and Twitter @Lavluz.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Cindy FlemingGrowing up as an adoptee, I frequently fielded questions from friends and strangers alike. “Do you know who your real mother is?” “Do you think you look like your parents?” “What [ethnicity] are you?” The first two questions were easy to answer: My mother is my real mother. No, I don’t look like either of them. But the third question hounded me my whole life. It speaks to a universal quest to identify with a group. And it speaks to the need of others to figure out who we are. For an adoptee, another question swirls around in the mix: Are we valid?

On one hand, our identity is who we believe we are, and on the other it’s who others believe us to be. In essence, the identity question is two-part: ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Who do you think I am?’ Adopted or not, we work to reconcile our personal vision of who we are versus who others believe we are. Yet when you’re adopted, there’s an added layer. For me, and I imagine for many adoptees, there’s a struggle to answer the question ‘Who are you?’ When others challenge our identity because of our adoption status, it’s difficult enough; but it’s further complicated by the fact that we have incomplete information about our genetic roots and, therefore, we can’t answer. And even when we get that information, we’re still left wondering how others view us.

I was adopted at birth and didn’t know my birth ethnicity until I was an adult. Of course, I had the ethnicity of my adoptive family, but even that was muddled. Muddled, in part, because my parents were somewhat non-traditional in the way they raised me—without strong traditions, based on ethnicity or religion. My parents were raised Jewish, but did not consider themselves religiously Jewish. My mother explained that while we were not religiously Jewish, we were “ethnically Jewish.” What does that mean exactly? I love brisket and knishes. I know what a seder is (a Baptist friend corrected me on a few details). I picked up some Yiddish words listening to conversations between my grandmother and her friends. But does that make me Jewish? From a religious standpoint, it does not. In fact, according to Jewish law, adoption alone doesn’t make you the religion of your adoptive mother. As an adult I learned that my birth mother is Protestant, and children born to non-Jews and adopted by Jewish parents must go through rituals of conversion before they are considered Jewish. I did not.

Inasmuch as being Jewish could be part of my identity—religious or ethnic, I didn’t need to wait until adulthood to know I wasn’t a real Jew. This was established by some of my relatives. Jewish preteens typically prepare for a bar- or bat-mitzvah to be welcomed into the adult Jewish world. When I was about 11, I overheard a relative question another as to why I wasn’t preparing. The answer dismissed me—and my entry into the Jewish adult world—with but one sentence, “She’s not a real Jew.” I remember feeling like an imposter. From then on, despite my mother telling us that we were “ethnically” Jewish, I felt increasingly detached, especially around holiday gatherings. Years later, my non-Jewish status was confirmed by my own mother! I had received a threatening letter from an anti-Semitic group, and before forwarding it to the Southern Poverty Law Center, I showed it to my mother. She waved it away, saying what I’d already heard—“but you’re not really Jewish.”

So, if I can’t claim a Jewish identity— ethnic or religious—then by the same logic, I can’t claim my grandparents’ Ukrainian, Lithuanian, and Austrian ethnic backgrounds either. Back to the drawing board.

No doubt, adoptees have all sorts of reasons for discovering their birth or genetic backgrounds. I actually don’t know what compelled me to seek my birth certificate or to make contact with my birth mother. Even though I’d struggled as a kid to fit in as Jewish, it didn’t occur to me at the time to search for any other ethnic identity. It wasn’t until I was a new mom that I started giving real thought to my birth story. When I requested my records from Maine, I spent several years contemplating whether to write to the woman who brought me into this world. Eventually I did. I projected her need to know about the baby she’d given up, basing that assumption only on my own feelings toward my children—trying to imagine how a woman could part with her child. I thought perhaps she might want to know that I’d had a good life. Or perhaps wondered if she’d want a relationship with me. She did not. But another motivation for my search was to learn of an ethnic identity that I could claim as part of my own. When my birth mother declined contact, I felt like she had denied me a bit of that ethnic identity.

My need to discover more details about my genetic identity waxed and waned after the initial contact with my birth family. Then something clicked. I’m not sure whether it was because the Census questioned my response to the ethnicity question (it changed my response ‘American’ to ‘refused to answer’) or if curiosity finally got the better of me. I ordered a kit from AncestryDNA and within weeks had a breakdown of my genetic heritage.

So what have I done with these results? Besides connecting with half-siblings I never knew I had (that’s another story), I’ve had fun exploring the traditions and places where my DNA originated. At Christmas, I baked and cooked my way through the traditional foods of my genetic ancestors. And I’m hoping to visit or re-visit the countries represented by my DNA. And yet, despite doing these things, I’m still left wondering, does any of it give me a true ethnic identity? Does baking beautiful lussekatter make me Swedish? Does mulling a warm glühwein make me German? When I step off the plane in Scotland, will they recognize their native daughter? Will I feel a part of these places or these people? Or will I still be an imposter?

In our melting pot country, we place so much emphasis on our ethnic heritage: We’re not American, but Irish-American, Chinese-American, Italian-American. Even the Census forces you to record some ethnicity other than American. When you’re adopted, however, it’s complicated. I sometimes wonder why it’s important, but I know that it is. We want to belong. We want to know where we came from. No matter how grounded we are, we yearn to have connections to others. But when you’re adopted these connections can feel tenuous. And I, for one, am still left asking, “Who am I?” and “Who do you think I am?”Fleming lives in New Hampshire, where she’s a writer. She’s known all her life that she’s an adoptee, but only recently embarked on a journey of discovery. Through searching and genetic testing, she’s connected with new family members, and in joining the adoption conversation has found new opportunities for personal growth and reflection. You can connect with her via Twitter @cidkfleming.BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles and essays about NPEs, adoptees, and genetic genealogy.

• Please leave a comment below and share your thoughts.
• Let us know what you want to see in Severance. Send a message to bkjax@icloud.com.
• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
• If you’re an NPE, adoptee, or donor conceived person; a sibling of someone in one of these groups; or a helping professional (for example, a therapist or genetic genealogist) you’re welcome to join our private Facebook group.
• Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @Severancemag.