From Right to Know‘s Kara Rubinstein Deyerin, My Re-Birthday Book is an ingenious workbook for adoptees, NPEs (not parent expected), and donor-conceived people—anyone who’s had a DNA surprise or a shift in understanding about family ties. As a birthday book celebrates a new life and forms a record of identity, this Re-Birthday book does the same for those who’ve had to reimagine their families and their identities after experiencing a shocking disconnect. It’s a space to process the changes and challenges and record the journey—a creative means of affirming and documenting a profound transformation. Filling in the pages is certain to be an exercise in deep reflection, leading to a richer self-understanding. For people who may have felt as if life had rewritten their stories, this workbook is a tool they can use to take the narrative into their own hands and rewrite their own stories.

By Sara Easterly

As an adoptee-author whose work involves explaining behaviors to people who often misunderstand us, I love a good backstory. Gregory Maguire’s Wicked enchanted me, and an interest in understanding the developmental journeys for Darth Vader, Voldemort, and The Grinch led me to watching, with great anticipation, their longer character arcs unfold in various Hollywood adaptations. Even in fantasy literature and films, it’s engaging to ask questions like those posed by Oprah Winfrey and Bruce D. Perry in their bestselling book on trauma, What Happened to You?, to empathize with iconic characters’ early-in-life wounding and see them as well-rounded, hurting humans on a hero’s journey rather than one-dimensional figures used to propel the plot forward.

For these reasons, I was particularly excited to catch Warner Bros. Pictures’ Wonka and consider the mysterious chocolatier and his inner circle in new ways. Even though I enjoyed the film, I left the theater with more questions than answers and more frustration than sentimentality. That’s because, as is common in holiday stories ranging from Dickens to Hallmark creations, Wonka employed the orphan trope, along with a stereotypical happy ending with a mother-and-long-lost-child reunion—both of which lacked substance and depth.

In the movie, “Noodle” is a young orphan who befriends Willy Wonka while they’re held captive by Mrs. Scrubitt in a launderette. Within minutes of Noodle’s on-screen appearance, she’s labeled as suffering from “orphan syndrome.” Having just released Adoption Unfiltered, a book I co-authored in which I write extensively about the lifelong effects of separation trauma, I was interested in whether the movie might explore this further, beyond the insinuation that anyone separated from their parents is broken. I felt a momentary glimmer of hope when Wonka tells Noodle it’s her “orphan syndrome” making her mistrust others. Would we get to see her work through some of her natural emotional struggles? Would we get a sense of her guarded heart softening? But the opportunity to delve deeper into what might be going on for Noodle never came. Somehow, despite losing her parents as an infant, Noodle presents as perfectly adapted, the only emotional residue of orphanhood: yearning for her parents. But where was her anxiety? Her alarm? Her frustration? How could she so readily give her heart to Wonka—and others, without crippling fear that she might lose those she dared to love, as were her formative experiences as an infant? Why didn’t she feel abandoned or deeply rejected by Wonka after he left town without saying goodbye? This isn’t to pathologize Noodle or anyone else separated from their families of origin with “orphan syndrome,” but these are common emotional side effects of unbearable separation due to adoption or infant loss of a mother—left completely unaddressed in Wonka.

While Wonka is the main character, his relationship with Noodle is an important one, so the lack of depth to Noodle’s backstory is striking, making her merely an accessory—as so often happens when orphans or adoptees are presented in mainstream film and literature. That’s because orphans and adoptees are often used as caricature baddies or to serve as touching plot devices—especially when there’s a heartwarming reunion to look forward to in the end.

Wonka doesn’t disappoint in this plot promise, alluded to through the Annie-like locket Noodle wears around her neck and various clues about her origin story. But the film did disappoint by treating the mother-daughter reunification in the shallow way of most on-screen portrayals. As if decades or more time apart doesn’t create any awkwardness at all. As if mother will recognize her grown daughter, even though all the memories she’s held close are of the infant she last saw. As if daughter is comfortable with a mother she’s not seen since infancy—who, despite a genetic connection and meaningful in-utero bonding, feels like a stranger—suddenly intimately embracing and kissing her. As if they can reclaim all those lost years and pick up as if they hadn’t happened. Spoiler alert from experiencing my own reunion and listening to over a thousand adoptee stories in the Adoptee Voices writing groups I run: they can’t. Years and years of missed “firsts” and an evolution of personality unfolding separately for both mother and child can never be replicated or fully repaired. For this reason, reunion often comes with a heavy dose of disappointment and grief for all parties—made all the worse when films such as Wonka set up lofty expectations that cannot be matched.

Please, stop using those of us separated from our first families as plot devices. Just like anyone else, we’re complex humans with a nuanced life story and struggles. Unrealistic cultural stories further marginalize us and cause significant damage to our emotional health by perpetuating myths that we’re merely means to an end, that later-in-life reunion is all it takes to erase our life’s losses. Our stories deserve to be portrayed with depth and care because we’re anything but one-dimensional. We’re not the golden ticket for a movie’s happy ending. Our backstories matter, too.

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Sara Easterly is an award-winning author of essays and books that include her spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom (Heart Voices, 2019), and her forthcoming book, Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024). She is the founder of Adoptee Voices and is a trained course facilitator with the Neufeld Institute. 

By Andrew Perry

In 1912, German meteorologist Alfred Wegener published The Origin of Continents and Oceans, in which he proposed the world’s continents had once been joined in a single landmass that he named Pangaea. Wegener grounded his argument in the agreeable shape of continental coastlines, which look like puzzle pieces asking to be fit back together, and unlikely deposits in the fossil record of similar plants and animals separated by oceans too vast to swim.

Wegener’s proposal was visually intuitive and supported by a body of physical evidence, and it should have found a home among professional geologists at the time, but they rejected the idea and abandoned it for five decades. Wegener was a meteorologist, after all. Geologists didn’t consider him part of their family.

Wegener raised the single continent theory in the public mind and named it, but the idea was not his. It was the brainchild of Frank Taylor, an amateur geologist in the United States. Continental geologists might have considered Taylor a distant cousin at the time.

Neither Wegener nor Taylor could say what caused the single landmass to break apart and send the continents traveling in opposite directions. That task fell to British geologist, Arthur Holmes, who in 1944 was wise to the currents of heat and rock being exchanged underground and imaginative enough to speculate that continents move about because heated plates of rock are pushing and shoving against each other below the surface.

Today we’re accustomed to monitoring this pushing and shoving with a seismograph; the familiar instrument that diligently scrawls an uncertain pencil line through the middle of a scroll of paper until some traumatic event prompts its spidery arm to jump and scribble its alarm. The most violent pushing and shoving underground causes an earthquake, which, in movies and television, is often depicted by an equally violent seismograph line. English scientist John Milne developed the seismograph in 1893, well before we understood what caused the shaking it records. Astonishingly, the world had to wait until 1935 for American seismologists Charles Richter and Beno Gutenberg to formulate their popular scale for comparing earthquake data.

The Richter Scale assigns a number to the seismograph’s movement to measure the energy released by an earthquake. That number is helpful for comparing earthquakes, but it tells us nothing about the earthquake’s effect on the people who experience it. Only the lesser-known Mercalli Intensity Scale considers the earthquake’s effect on the people involved.

Giuseppe Mercalli was an Italian volcanologist and Catholic priest who proposed his scale to measure the effects of an earthquake on its victims. Before we infer too much about a man of the cloth placing people at the center of his scale, we should know that Mercalli adopted this approach from two men of science, Michele Stefano Conte de Rossi and François-Alphonse Forel.

Adoption is a Monster with a Long Tail

Picture a seismograph and a Mercalli scale attuned to adoption; a sensitive device to monitor adoption’s traumatic consequences and a person-centered scale to quantify its effects.

I offer this image as a way to reify adoption and externalize it; to make the experience and its consequences obvious to others. Scientific instruments and graduated scales produce an observable reality and the seismograph’s shaky line makes adoption’s trajectory visible by tediously illustrating the prolonged consequences of a preverbal memory—adoption’s long tail.

The instrument’s fragile line with its record of unseen tensions, visible eruptions, and scribbled chaos, appears to recount the faults and foibles that I am condemned to live with as an adoptee. I see myself in a line that appears to hesitate before it moves forward on an uncertain path; I feel akin to a line that gushes frantic, confidently drawn peaks and valleys when a hidden tension tries to resolve itself; and I feel especially close to a line that abruptly resumes a more economical and humble posture after such outbursts, as if embarrassed by its assertiveness and now penitent.

The chronicle that materializes in the seismograph’s measured output helps me relate the reach of adoption to non-adoptees, but the handy analogy ends here. Identifying adoption’s effects is a valuable, clinical exercise, but the machine’s protracted and linear narrative fails to articulate how it feels to live with these consequences. The emotionally charged episodes that characterize my adopted life are diluted, and their significance is muted when they appear on a timeline separated by empty space. Isolation diminishes the relatedness of these events and calls their common origin into question, undermining my ability make sense of them, and consequently myself.

The seismograph’s timely march forward also requires that events be assigned to the past, fostering a mistaken belief that events are left behind, when it is more likely they will accompany the adoptee uninvited into the future, creating a cumulative present.

Even grading these experiences on a person-centered scale has a clinical air about it. It’s like explaining that force is equal to mass multiplied by acceleration to someone who has just hammered their thumb.

A Dandelion Seed Aloft

The consequences of adoption are compounding and forever concurrent, and I experience them like my reflection in a mirror that has been smashed. Multiple images of me are displayed simultaneously from different and unusual perspectives. The resulting montage is intense and overwhelming, and it forces me to see unfamiliar selves. The fragments may constitute a new composite image, but like adoption, the damage has made an accurate picture of me impossible. The integrity of the mirror has been lost and cannot be restored. Shattered mirrors cannot be repaired; they must be replaced. If they cannot be replaced, they must be lived with.

The montage made from slivers and debris is normalized by necessity. The composite reflection is distorted but fixed, and this imperfect image becomes my only point of self-reference. My consolation is knowing the mirror has been smashed and the image is not accurate, but the price is persistent confusion and self-doubt. I have no confidence in this image that I know isn’t accurate, and no point of comparison to measure its inaccuracy.

Propelled forward by a fear of abandonment, a relentless need for acceptance, or perhaps a ghost in my DNA, I am unable to distinguish a spontaneous impulse from a calculated act of compliance for the sake of survival. I can’t differentiate between a genuine self and a false self. There is no test for self, no criteria to apply, no means to bring it forward from a blurred background. I’ve assumed the habits and words of my adopted family, my friends, and coworkers, uncritically and without regard to fit or comfort. Anything to help me overcome my sense of otherness has been hastily sewn into a busy patchwork self with no discernable pattern.

This peculiar consequence of adoption is experienced in perfect isolation and cannot be shared with the non-adoptees in my life. Similar to the unwelcome dreams I have at night, this is a private encounter, and I am irretrievably alone with it. My spouse sleeps inches away from me in our bed at night, but she does not experience my dreams with me. She cannot. Likewise, my splintered self-image and the uncertainty that results from it are mine alone.

Denied a complete and accurate picture of myself, I examine each fragment in the smashed mirror independently; not in isolation but separate from its siblings and away from their influence. I’m searching for something familiar, hoping it will comfort me with an affirmation, and confirm that a part of me is real. I stand perfectly still before the mirror and try to distinguish the accurate reflections from those distorted by the mirror’s fragmentation. I’m struggling to separate my authentic self from an image altered by the mirror. I stand perfectly still and try to disentangle myself from the consequences of adoption.

Unsuccessful, I begin to question that I have an innate self. Perhaps my self was stillborn or smothered at birth. Perhaps it was never there at all, like the biological child my adoptive parents failed to conceive. As a stand-in for their absent dream child, I am no more than an assortment of adoption’s consequences, with a self no more significant than a dandelion seed aloft.

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Andrew Perry is an adoptee who was born in Jacksonville, Florida. A husband and father, he’s grateful for the fellowship of his backyard chickens.