Step Adoptees

By Michèle Dawson Haber

I’m a step adoptee. I was raised by my mother and a stepfather who legally adopted me. For a long time, I didn’t identify as a step adoptee, but now I talk about it a lot. Why? It’s probably easiest to explain by telling my full story. After all, stories are the connective tissue that bind so much of our fragmentary experience in the world. In my experience, there were things I didn’t understand or accept about myself until I reached my fifties, when I started to explore how my step adoption impacted my identity. I was so blown away by what I discovered that I wanted to share it with others so that they too would understand how important it is to have a complete story of one’s origins.¹

My father died when I was a baby, and my mother subsequently remarried. Two years after they married, my stepfather legally adopted me. An adoption decree ordered that my last name be changed, my birth certificate be altered, and that I henceforth be considered “born as the issue of the marriage between” my mother and my adoptive stepfather. I was five, about to start school, and had a new half-brother. I never asked my parents why I needed to be adopted, but I can guess now at some of their motivations: my stepfather had known me my whole life, we had as secure a connection as anyone could hope for, they wanted to be a complete family unit that wasn’t divided along last names and past history, and they wanted to spare me the awkwardness of answering questions about my different last name once I started school. All reasonable motivations. But when they decided not to give me anything more than the most rudimentary information about the father I was genetically tied to, when they urged me to forget about the past and be grateful that my stepfather loved me enough to adopt me, when curiosity about my father was met with tears, tension, and refusal—they created an environment that encouraged me to deny the existence of any longing I might have.

Would anything have been different for me if my stepfather had not adopted me? Is my mid-life search for details about my father simply a delayed mourning for the loss of a parent that I never knew? Yes and no. There are lots of similarities between my experience and those who have lost a parent very young. But what step adoption does is legally switch one parent for another, thereby facilitating the erasure from history of that former parent through name change and document amendments. I can’t know for sure, and I can’t ask them now, but it seems that this was my parents’ objective, and it was buttressed by their refusal to provide me with any narrative history of my father. I learned not to ask; I got the message that it didn’t matter.

Yet despite their efforts and hopes, my origins could not be erased, especially because I looked like no one else in my family. I was the only dark haired, olive-complexioned child in my family of six, and, for most of my growing up years, I felt like an alien amongst them. I knew there was a past that I was connected to that no one was willing to talk about. While home life was mostly harmonious and I did my best to look toward the future, my parents’ withholding of information about my own history had an impact. Their silence created a narrative hole that left me feeling like a floater, and I didn’t consider myself as belonging wholly anywhere—not in my family, not in my social circles, and not even with myself (whoever that was). I adapted by trying to please everyone and doing what I thought was expected of me.

I didn’t understand any of this until recently. My “coming out of the fog”² event occurred when I heard the sound of my father’s voice decades after his death from an old tape reel recorded in 1963. Until that moment, I believed I wasn’t affected by my step adoption, and I didn’t think my pre-step adoption history was relevant. But hearing my father’s voice when I was fifty-three years old changed everything. I thought I understood about how my life had unfolded and how I became the person I am today. I suddenly realized I knew nothing about my early history and wanted to know more about this enigma of a man who made up half of my DNA. I embarked on a quest to uncover the details of his life and write the first chapter of mine.

My quest took three years. I was fortunate that the information I sought was discoverable. When I first filled in the gaps of my personal history, I experienced feelings of anger and loss—finally understanding the full import of what had happened and all that could have been that had not. But after a while, something more powerful overtook the negative emotions: a feeling of calm contentment. I finally had my origin story and, with it, a feeling of wholeness and self-acceptance that until that moment had eluded me. Although the loss will never go away, I now have a sense of continuity and belonging. The story I can tell of myself has some coherence where before it was disjointed and incomplete.

After this experience of searching and filling in my personal history, I started to wonder if there were other step adoptees out there like me who don’t know anything about one of their parents or who don’t even think that knowing might be important. I went looking for data on step adoptees and found very little information.

In the U.S., government reports do not track step adoption as a separate category,³ so whatever is known about step adoptees comes primarily from the few national surveys that identify step adoptees.⁴ According to these studies, it’s estimated that 23% to 25% of all adopted children are step adoptees. (One study conducted by the National Council for Adoption put the number as high as 50% based on data from nine states and the District of Columbia where the number of step adoptions is tracked.)⁵

Researchers who have studied step adoption posit that step adoptees are most likely to be a result of a birth outside of marriage rather than a divorce. In other words, a single mother gets married, and her new spouse adopts her child.⁶ Researchers further suggest that when the child is a product of a previous marriage, adoption by stepfathers of their stepchildren is most likely to occur when the first father is out of the picture for some reason, for example because of death, desertion, or having stopped visiting and paying child support.⁷ This makes intuitive sense since the process of getting the agreement or terminating the parental rights of a non-resident parent who is still in the child’s life after a divorce is viewed as neither easy nor desirable. The statistics within stepfamilies back this up: only 5% to 8% of all stepchildren are adopted by a stepparent.⁸

So, with these statistics and assumptions in hand, what can we say about the likelihood that these step adoptees are in the same position as I am of not having met and/or knowing very little about one of their natural parents? How many of these step adoptees grew up in families where the first father was a secret or never spoken about? How many of these step adoptees grew up with big gaps in their origin stories? I sure wish I knew—no such research exists.

While I may not know how many, I do know there are step adoptees out there who can answer “yes” to these questions. It is for them that I write about my experience. As it was for me, they may not even know they are called step adoptees. They may have never explored their feelings of disconnectedness and may have repressed their desire to learn anything about their absent fathers or personal histories. My hope is that my writing and these conversations will reach step adoptees who are, unknowingly, still in the fog. I want them to know that uncovering their origin stories, if possible, can be transformational. Even just acknowledging that each of us has a pre-step adoption history that rightfully belongs to us and is part of our personal narrative can subtly change a person’s perspective of themselves and how they carve out a space in the world.

I also hope to reach those who have been impacted by other types of severance from their genetic identities. Although each of our experiences are different in important ways, there is also overlap. Step adoptees who have never known one of their first parents and/or have little or no information about them can understand how it feels to have an identity formed by a deficient life narrative. I believe step adoptees can make meaningful contributions to conversations happening in the MPE community. More importantly, step adoptees, by virtue of their overlapping experience, are natural allies in the fight for legislative and societal reform. We need more voices to join the movement against secrecy, obstruction, and the denial of everyone’s right to know their genealogical origins.

And so, with these objectives in mind, I will continue to write about my experience and hope more research will be done on step adoption. If you’re a step adoptee or know a step adoptee, send me an email, I’d love to hear from you!

Notes

1. I am indebted to Michael Grand for first introducing me to the ideas of narrative theory (The Adoption Constellation: New Ways of Thinking About and Practicing Adoption). In addition to Dr. Grand’s writing, there is a solid amount of scholarship devoted to using narrative theory to examine the adoptee experience. I have written about this elsewhere in a little bit more detail—click here to read more.

2. “Coming out of the FOG” is both an expression and an acronym formed by the words fear, obligation and guilt. Amanda Medina of This Adoptee Life website and podcast provides a great definition: “…the process by which adoptees who have considered themselves unaffected by adoption, start looking to their past, their background, their origin and as a result start shifting their view on adoption, their own and in general, as well as the effects it may have had on their life.” The AdopteesOn episode with Lesli A. Johnson also has a great discussion of this expression.

3. Adoption researchers have mostly ignored step adoptees because of this lack of data. Step adoptees, if they are not tracked separately by states, are included in the category of “relative or kin adoption.” Step adoption is thought to comprise the largest group within this category. (From Susan D. Stewart, “The Characteristics and Well-Being of Adopted Stepchildren,” Family Relations 59 (December 2010): 558-571.)

4. In the three published academic papers that I could find on step adoptees (unfortunately all dated), the following survey instrument were used: The 2002 National Survey of America’s Families (NSAF), The 2007 National Survey of Adoptive Parents (NSAP) in combination with the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH).

5. National Council for Adoption, “Adoption by the Numbers, 2019-2020,” 2022.

6. Although step adoptions by stepmothers do exist, they are vastly outnumbered by stepfather adoptions. This is a function of mothers being 83% more likely (2004 data) to be awarded custody of children after a divorce. (Matthew D. Bramlett, (2010). “When Stepparents Adopt: Demographic, Health and Health Care Characteristics of Adopted Children, Stepchildren, and Adopted Stepchildren,” Adoption Quarterly, 13:305, 248-267.)

7. Susan D. Stewart, “Stepchildren Adopted by their Stepparents: Where do they fit?” Iowa State University, 2007. Susan D. Stewart, “The Characteristics and Well-Being of Adopted Stepchildren,” Family Relations 59 (December 2010): 558-571. It should also be noted that in the U.S., a child is not allowed to have more than two legal parents.

8. Stewart, 2007; Stewart, 2010, Bramlett, 2010.

Michèle Dawson Haber is a Canadian writer, potter, and union advocate. She lives in Toronto and is working on a memoir about family secrets, identity, and step adoption. She interviews memoirists for Hippocampus Magazine, and her writing has appeared Salon.com, Oldster Magazine, The Brevity Blog, and the Modern Love column of The New York Times.