By Hannah Andrews
My glasses weren’t rose-colored, but they were the wrong prescription. I see adoption more clearly now, and in previously overlooked places–often hiding in plain sight.
I recently rewatched “The Truman Show,” a 1998 film lauded for its artsy take on free will, privacy, and our perception of reality. It both predicted and parodied the reality TV explosion. It also was a subtle, if unintentional, jab at the closed adoption system. The lead character, Truman Burbank (Jim Carey), is an adoptee. Truman was “chosen” pre-birth from a pool of unplanned pregnancies and legally adopted by a corporation (the TV studio). His entire life was fabricated and filmed—fake parents, a fake town, and a fake world that is actually an enormous domed production studio. As cracks work their way into the facade, Truman begins to question, and quest for truth (True Man) ensues.
You see it, right? Chosen. Adopted. Fabricated. Search for truth.
Yeah, I missed all that for over two decades.
In my defense, adoption was not the focus of the movie. I suspect it was just a handy plot device. (Adoption so often is, but that’s another essay. ) Maybe the writer was typing up the tale and thought, “How could this character have zero clue about his real identity his whole life? Ooh—I will make him adopted!” The audience doesn’t learn of the adoption until well into the film. It’s a catch-all explanation.
Like Truman, I’m an adoptee. Mine was never a secret, but other truths eluded me, and I was mostly okay with that.
“I’ve always known I was adopted but never wanted to search.”
This was my mantra, repeated with an eye roll for nearly fifty years. Mostly, I just wanted control of the narrative. Long before DNA tests were a thing, people—friends, relatives, random strangers—constantly questioned my lack of search, my ethnicity, and sometimes even my lack of questions. I accepted my false reality. The identity quest wasn’t for me, but if other adoptees felt the need to search, I didn’t criticize. At least, not out loud.
Unless you count my older brother, who found his family of origin when we were in our twenties. His green eyes sparkled as he described meeting his biological sister and how she looked like him. “Can you imagine?” he gushed.
I seethed. Imagine was all I could ever do.
“I’m your sister, not her,” I hissed, and watched him deflate. I cringe at the memory.
I’d grown up with two older brothers, also adopted––related by paper and proximity, but not blood. We were the living, breathing products of the “Baby Scoop” era, that not-so-sweet spot between WWII and Roe, when upwards of 1.5 million unwed women, some still girls, were secretly shipped off to maternity homes. Coerced, shamed, and sometimes forced by their families and society to surrender their babies to strangers that “deserved” them.
Original birth certificates (OBCs) were sealed. New records erased maternity hospitals and replaced the names of birth parents with the names of adoptive parents. As if we’d been born to them. As if our original mothers and our original names had never existed. That secrecy was all-encompassing.
Birth mothers rarely knew where their babies ended up, and adoptive families often knew little of their children’s origins. We adoptees knew only what our new parents told us. Some weren’t even told of their adoption. Others were told “too young” and “loved you so much she gave you away” stories, equating supreme love with abandonment. Some of us internalized that message. I did.
Adoption didn’t guarantee a better life, just a different one, and mine was pretty decent. My new brothers and I clung tightly to each other and our invented family. Our parents were loving and kind. They encouraged questions and conversation, but we three generally opted out of both. I imagine our parents sighed secret relief and told themselves all was well.
The thing is, we didn’t even speak to each other about “it.” Toddler through teen, I cannot recall one sibling chat about adoption. No one told us not to speak of it, yet somehow we’d internalized that message. Maybe we’d digested the poison directed at our first mothers. Had their maternity homes sprinkled shame salt on their dinners? Perhaps we were just afraid to rock the boat, of losing another home. In any case, not a word until my brother’s real sister materialized. I hadn’t even known he was searching. My anger at his perceived betrayal was another consequence of secrets and severance.
I’d caught snippets of similar reunions a few years earlier. Birthmothers and adoptees had begun speaking out by my teen years, the 1980s, but I ignored them. I changed the channel when Donahue and subsequent shows dared speak of adoption, or worse, reunion.
If Donahue and Oprah couldn’t win me over, my brother didn’t stand a chance.
I see the parallel now. It’s as if the world was trying to clue me in, the same way random people would sneak onto the set (the set within the storyline, not the actual movie set) of the Truman show. Characters that screamed, “Truman, you’re on TV,” were whisked away by plainclothes security. My brain had its own built-in security force, ready to deflect all things adoption. Like Truman, though, I finally wised up.
(Spoiler alert for a twenty-five-year-old movie: Truman defies his unreal reality and sneaks away. The TV producer, enraged, screams, “Cue the sun!” not to show Truman the way, as the metaphor would suggest, but to find and capture him. Truman eludes everyone and sails off through a massive storm to the end of the world, but since his world is a TV studio, he crashes into a literal wall. Deflated, but not defeated, he wanders about until he finds the exit, smirks at the camera, takes a final bow, and leaves. )
In 2018, I smashed into my own sunset.
A writer’s’ convention I almost skipped and a snippet of memoir read by a 1960s-era birthmother. I couldn’t change the channel. I didn’t tune out. She was a beacon. I listened, then began furiously searching for everything I’d ignored, including my own beginnings.
I wanted every answer to every question I ever buried inside myself. After a lifetime of avoiding the truth, it is all I crave. I have some new questions too.
Why should I have to SEARCH for my own information?
Why are our birth certificates sealed and falsified with new ones? Still! Why can I now have my real record of birth, but other adoptees can’t? Why are adoptees still at the mercy of archaic laws that erase our identities? How is this legal? How is this still a thing?
I don’t know.
What I do know is:
Mother-child separation is undeniably traumatic.
NICU units have special incubators with little holes for parents to safely touch their preemie babies. I call them mommy sleeves. The babies have just spent nine months hearing their mothers’ voices, sharing nutrients. Infants recognize their mothers. I wasn’t a preemie, but I’d have benefitted from a mommy sleeve. Instead, I got a heaping dose of pre-verbal trauma.
Identity erasure compounded that trauma. The state legally disappeared me, then created a whole new identity and origin in the form of a new, official, fake birth certificate. More than 50 years later, this is still the norm, not the exception. Open adoption is more theory than practice, and not legally enforceable.
Searching, which was my decision, both broke and healed me.
It was rife with rabbit holes and red herrings and led to painful discoveries. My biological mother died three months before Illinois changed its OBC access law. It was another decade before I knew the law changed and before I searched, but that fact still stings. I also found out she looked for me, which brings both comfort and pain. Worse, for a time, we unknowingly lived exactly two blocks from each other. This haunts me every single day.
I met my half-brother and my mother’s long-time best friend. They’re wonderful. Despite numerous DNA tests and partial records, my birth father remains a mystery. My maternal biological grandmother will not speak of or to me. My adoptive parents are deceased, so I can’t even tell them that I finally found some answers, that I finally asked some questions, and that I finally have some peace.
I wish I’d looked years earlier when both of my mothers were still living. I long to visit the parallel universe where my birth mother never had to surrender me, or maybe one where I met her during my teens or twenties. I love the family in which I was dropped, and fate dealt me a better hand than many adoptees. Still, I long for all the scenes that adoption deleted from my life’s movie, the songs erased from my playlist. Most of all, I wish if adoption had to be, that at least my identity hadn’t been stolen.
I believe in every human’s right to their identity. Adoptees are the only Americans legally denied their original records of birth in the United States. I believe this information should be ours from breath one, and restricting access is developmentally harmful. At the very least, we should have unfettered access to the entirety of our birth and medical records as adults. This is available for adoptees in only 11 states.
I also understand that as difficult as it was for me to obtain information, it’s more complex, sometimes impossible, for others, especially transnational adoptees. I respect that some adoptees have zero interest in their origins. Were records readily available, that percentage might increase. There are many things wrong with adoption, but the loss of identity is one of the most glaring and overlooked. Identity is a basic human right.
Don’t make us beg for it.
Don’t make us hide in the dark searching for ourselves.
Cue the sun.
Hannah Andrews was relinquished and adopted as an infant during the Baby Scoop Era. She began defogging, searching, and immersing herself in the adoptee community in 2019. Her writing has been featured onstage in LaJolla, CA for the San Diego Memoir Showcase and has been selected for publication in “Shaking The Tree: Short Memoir” Anthologies. And she recently joined the board of Adoption Knowledge Affiliates. Find her on Facebook and Twitter.