By Rebecca Cheek

I saw a baby bird on my walk recently: long legs, tiny body, fluffy feathers, and barely moving. It had fallen from its nest on the sidewalk, frantically chirping for its mother. I watched it for some time. As I bent down to pick it up and put it to safety, it hopped closer to the tree’s edge, hiding in the monkey grass. The mother bird finally chirped back, calling out to her baby. I left it alone since she knew where it was, safe in the monkey grass, camouflaged from predators.

My oldest child, Noah, just started sixth grade, which is middle school where we live. At the prospect of this occasion, I have had myriad of emotions since the beginning of this year. I could not name what it was, but now I know: it is fear. I am scared for Noah, much like the mama bird who was chirping for her baby, hoping it was close by and away from danger. Noah’s strong, extroverted personality will not allow him to stay hidden.

Middle school scarred me, as it does with most. The taunts and ridicule for being an adopted Korean made my middle school experience hell with no fire. I stuck out in my mostly White middle school in Alabama with no chance to blend in, although that is what I desperately wanted.

Noah and I approach life in the same way. However, whereas I was completely unprepared for middle school,  Noah was ready for sixth grade and has been for the past couple of years. Even through the COVID-19 pandemic school years, he showed signs that he was prepared academically and mentally for whatever challenges middle school would bring. For instance, Noah reads on a Lexile Level for college and career readiness and is also learning Spanish and Korean. In 1996, I was not ready for middle school, and I am the one who is not

ready now.

With many of my parental moments, there is a mix of joy and sorrow. Joy because Noah has made it to 11 in one piece, and sorrow because my circle of influence is much smaller than it used to be. I am losing him bit by bit with each passing day as he forms his own sense of self and the person he is growing to be.

Parenting in general is a challenging adventure. Parenting as an adoptee brings another layer of complexity that I did not foresee as a newlywed dreaming of the prospect of motherhood. I did not realize that many of the struggles I faced as a child, such as identity and belonging, would be issues my own children would face too but in different ways.

I am not one of those mothers who cries with each achievement: cutting teeth, crawling, toddling, walking, talking, potty training, starting preschool or elementary school. I was happy to put each of these occasions behind me because I knew once achieved, something new would take its place. But Noah starting middle school has made me cry multiple times, which has surprised me.

Sadly, I do not have a mother, birth or adoptive, to call and ask, Is this reaction normal? To feel this scared? To feel this ill equipped? Melancholy mixed with a side of bittersweet makes me wonder if my birth mother ever longed to see what I have accomplished. Or does she view me as a forever baby trapped in 1985? Was there a “before” time, before I was a problem or a burden, and an “after” time when I was no longer there that chronicles her life and keeps her trapped too?

The adoptive mother who chose me did not pattern healthy love, so I am doing my damnedest to break that cycle of hurt, hopelessness, and pain. It is a choice I can make to protect myself and my children. I am grieving one mother who, for whatever reason, could not keep me and another one who “loved” me to the point that she suffocated me with control and manipulation. This complicated adoptee grief, starting from my relinquishment at birth and enduring to today when I am an adult in my late 30s, has been hard coded into who I am. Grief flows into my body like blood, vitally important to live but messy when it gushes out.

Like all child-rearing milestones, the start of middle school has come, and another will soon take its place. I will figure it out like I normally do and handle my fear with deep breaths and long sighs. I will tell Noah, “I’m new to being a parent to a middle schooler like you’re new to being a sixth grader. But I’m here for you, I love you, and I’m already so beeping proud of you. Not because of your academic achievements or cunning wit, but because you are you.” That is what I would have wanted to hear when I was in middle school.

Later I walked by the same tree where I found the baby bird. I looked in the monkey grass, but it was not there. I hope it is safe with its mama, up high in the tree, where it will grow and fly away as it was meant to.

Rebecca Cheek (she/her/hers) is a transracial International Korean American adoptee living in South Carolina. She has a bachelor of science degree in chemistry from the University of Alabama in Huntsville with a background in manufacturing of drug delivery systems and quality assurance management in chemical manufacturing. However, she’s taking a pause in her professional career to raise her children and try to figure out what she wants to do when she (really) grows up. In the meantime, she’s actively volunteering through multiple organizations. She’s a peace seeker, who strives to live her life yogically.

Jan Beatty’s American Bastard, winner of the 2019 Red Hen Nonfiction Award, is a blistering, take no prisoners account of adoption that may leave non-adoptees astonished and many adoptees shaking their heads in recognition.

A domestic adoptee from the Baby Scoop Era, Beatty was born in the Roselia Asylum and Maternity Hospital in Pittsburgh, adopted into a working-class family, and told when she was young that she’d been adopted. She writes about the emotional life of an adopted child—the longing, yearning, the feeling of erasure and brokenness—and her fractured encounters with the birth parents she discovered after years battling the bureaucratic gatekeepers of adoption information.

Beatty’s lyrical prose sparks like a live wire. For anyone taken from a parent, her words will resonate, at times landing like a punch to the gut and other times like a balm. Adoptees will feel seen, and those who were not adopted may see adoptees for the first time after reading the memoir.

American Bastard punctures the rose-colored vision of adoption that poses the practice as a strategy for social betterment. In its place she offers the reality: “I had assembled huge walls of protection over the years as a way to stay alive. An adoptee needs to have a strategy from a young age, whether conscious or not—a way to manage this hole of abandonment, loss, and grief. It’s too much for a child to handle. The loss of identity, the complete erasure of history, the floating in the world without a name. The original loss of being taken from the mother at birth, and then the adoptive parents pretending that they are your parents. The primary lifelong trauma.”

Beatty blasts away the whitewashed fantasy that casts adopters as saviors and children as rescued. She offers an unflinching picture of the damage adoption can inflict, the lifelong pain of abandonment it leaves in its wake, the lies and the effacement of identity.  She shatters the myths from the very first page, slaying every erroneous belief held by those who think they know what adoption is. “Maybe you are saying, ‘I’ve felt that way—I always thought I was adopted.’ Please, let me stop you. You weren’t.” She disintegrates argument after argument, makes sawdust of all the well-meaning responses adoptees hear all their lives, like those from people who think they understand because their mothers died when they were young. To one after another she says, “Please, let me stop you.” And sets the reader straight. “This is not about measuring sorrow. But this one’s about you—how you can’t seem to imagine, not even for a second, how it might be for someone who doesn’t know who they are—without boomeranging back to your own life. Try it. Try staying with the foreign idea that a baby is born, then sold to another person. Stay with it. There is the physical trauma of the broken bond. There is the erasure of the baby’s entire history. There are these hands that have a different smell, a different DNA—reaching for the baby, calling it theirs. Stay with that for a while. No talking.”

It’s devastating right from the start. And Beatty, in a letter to adopters, offers this brutal assessment—a startling, uncomfortable, and wholly welcome honesty: “What are you thinking? That you could tie it all up with a bow? You’ve erased a baby human to make yourself happy, to fill a hole, to do a good deed—at least own it: it’s for you.”

In no way a traditional memoir, Beatty’s poetic account mixes lyricism, essayistic rambling, fantasy, and stream of consciousness. It drifts back and forth across time and space, circling its subjects, diverting, and circling back. It breaks down, comes apart, and weaves back together. In a structure like no other, it dips and drops readers into the center of scenes and makes them work to get their balance. At times her words seem to dance on a knife’s edge—language that’s painful and raw and beautiful and ugly and insists on every page that you do not look away.—BKJ

By Charles K. Youeli.
I am sitting on a giant red rock. All around me as far as I can see are more red rocks and red dirt. The sky is brilliant blue. There is no one else around, at least not that I can see from where I sit. All I can hear is the wind. I do not know where I am, but the scenery burns itself into my memory forever. I am 18 months old.

ii.
There’s a tree growing next to the fence in the far corner of the back yard, next to a swing set and a sandbox which no one in our family uses anymore. One summer day, I haul some scrap lumber, a hammer, and some nails out of my dad’s basement workshop. I’ve cut up five boards that used to be part of a picket fence, and I nail them to the tree to make a ladder that gets me just far enough up to reach a branch that I can use to climb higher into the tree. I tie one end of a rope around a stack of boards and tie the other end around my waist. I put the hammer through a belt loop, fill my pockets with nails, and climb up into the tree to a spot where three large branches come to a fork. I haul the boards up with the rope and use them to build a simple, sturdy tripod. I haul up more boards the same way and build a small platform on that tripod, just big enough to sit on.

My dad comes home from work to find me sitting 30 feet off the ground in a tree. He is not happy that I didn’t ask permission to build the platform—something that I fully anticipated, and also the reason that I didn’t ask him. But he says that it seems sturdy enough and does not make me take it down, although he does insist that I take off the lowest of my ladder boards so that my little brother, who is three years old, can’t reach it.

That summer and the summer that follows, I will spend hours sitting on that platform, high above a world that I don’t feel like I belong in, can’t make any sense of, and don’t have much interest in fitting into. Mostly, I read science fiction paperbacks: Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Larry Niven, Piers Anthony, and other authors I’ve long since forgotten.

I’m as happy as I’ve ever been. I am 10 years old.

iii.
I wake up on the floor of a small church in a reservation town called Towoac in Colorado. Everyone else in the church youth group I’m here with is still asleep. We arrived the night before after two straight days on a bus and basically slept where we fell. I rub my eyes and tiptoe around sleeping bodies until I find the stairs, and, ultimately, a door that leads outside.

I step through it and look out across 40-some miles of desert at Shiprock. It’s hard to miss, because it’s incredibly huge and also because it’s literally the only thing to see. The Navajo call it Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or “winged rock,” hearkening back to the legend of the great bird that brought them from the north to the desert.

I am overcome by my smallness and insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe and history. And this feeling is surprisingly comforting and reassuring because everything else about my life seems uncertain and unnerving and one bad day away from falling apart completely. I am 18 years old.

iv.
Later that same year, my parents and I make the 500-mile trip from St. Louis, Missouri to Saint Paul, Minnesota, where I’m going to college. We arrive at my dorm and carry my suitcases to my room, along with my most important possessions. These consist of my bass guitar, my stereo, and boxes of records, cassette tapes, and CDs.

I am supposed to have a roommate, but he hasn’t arrived yet. We talk for a few minutes, but they are as anxious to be on their way as I am for them to be gone. The door closes behind them, and I sit down on the bed closest to the door, which I’ve chosen to be mine. It feels like a tremendous weight has been lifted off of me, as if I’ve been holding breath for a very long time, as long as I can stand. It feels like I’ve been waiting my entire life for this moment, the moment when I’m finally on my own.

v.
I am standing on the edge of a cliff that overlooks the vast, barren, and seemingly endless expanse of the Badlands in South Dakota. There’s so much to see that it’s impossible to take it in all at once. It’s early in the morning, and I am the only person in this part of the park.

In a few days, I will pull into the driveway of a small house on the Missouri River in the town of Craig, Montana. The driveway leads down a short, steep and uneven hill, and I will drive down it at what must look like a comically slow speed to Jeff, who is waiting for me at the bottom. Jeff and his twin brother, Jerry, are my older brothers. Well, two of them. As it turns out, it’s a long, complicated story.

We were born five years apart to the same mother, but we have different fathers, and we are meeting in person for the first time. I will get out of the car, we’ll give each other a long hug, and I will say, “Sorry it took me so long,” which is not a great joke but in this instance works on a number of levels. And we will walk inside to start a conversation that somehow feels like the continuation of one that we’ve been having for years, maybe even all of our lives.

But none of that has happened yet, and I am standing on what feels like another planet, a beautiful alien landscape that somehow also feels like home. All I can hear is the wind. And for a few perfect moments, I am the only person in the world.Youel is a writer and creative director. Born, adopted, and raised in St. Louis, he lives and works in Minneapolis with his wife, two dogs, and a frequently fluctuating number of bicycles. He regularly shares words, ideas, photos, and questionable advice on Instagram and Twitter. In what used to be his spare time, he also manages ARTCRANK, a pop-art show and online shop dedicated to bike-inspired poster art.

By matthew charlesAs a transracial adoptee raised by a white family in a small racist town in Oregon, I’ve always known that being Black meant being different. My Black body was both a cocoon and a womb, working overtime to birth and metamorphosize my self.

I used to long for my father. The one whose seed impregnated the woman I was told I looked like—the woman whose picture I’d never seen.

Looking like a ghost can be a kind of curse.

As a child, I fantasized that my Black body was a descendant of African royalty. That one day, a man with skin like the soil would knock on the door of my adopters’ home and tell them he’d come for me. He’d tell them flowers grow best in the soil and most eagerly when they are watered. He’d tell my adopters that he was my soil and he wanted to be my water, too.

Being a Black boy without a Black father is a common experience, but it hits different when the Black child is a transracial adoptee and lives in a town with almost no other Black people. Adoption scholars call this phenomenon “a lack of racial mirrors.”

How was I to imagine who I was? Who I could be? Who I might desire to be—without a robust intimacy with Black people?

My three most enduring and long-standing relationships with Black people are myself, my twin (with whom I was adopted), and Hip-Hop.

I discovered Hip-Hop at 12. Before that, I’d heard friends rave about Eminem, but I was so disconnected that when Eminem was at the height of his career between ’05 and ‘10 and I heard people talking about him, I thought they meant the M&M’s from the candy commercials were putting out albums. I couldn’t fathom why anybody would be interested in music made by animated candy. I mean, really!

Eventually I’d discover that Eminem was, in fact, a real human. I never connected with his music but it inspired me to probe Hip-Hop. As a West Coast kid, that meant I discovered folks like Snoop Dogg, NWA, and Tupac. Coming into contact with their music was the first time I was experiencing Blackness or Black cultural productions. Even though I couldn’t relate to their stories of gangbanging, drug dealing, partying, and hood life, the kinds of pressure the music placed on me was immediate and life altering. These gangsta rappers became my stand-ins for the Black father I longed for.

As I let myself be fathered by them, I changed the way I dressed, talked, and behaved to be more like them. To be more like the only image of Blackness I was presented with.

I call this my first identity crisis. I was 12. And I had no one to talk to about what I was going through—the invasive and ever crippling doubt that I wasn’t and could never be “Black” enough. This was reinforced in the schools I attended by white classmates who would chastise me for my intelligence by saying, “you’re so white” and who would reward me for performing the kinds of Blackness I learned from Gangsta Rap by remarking, “you’re the Blackest person I know,” even though they only knew a handful of us.

None of us knew what Blackness was except for what mass media and music told us.

Back in the day, I used to use LimeWire to pirate music, and somehow in that journey I discovered Lupe Fiasco. He presented a different kind of Blackness. One that, sometimes, I could relate to. Nowhere was this more evident than in his song “He Say She Say,” about a single mother and a fatherless child. For the first time, I was seen.

And then I discovered B.o.B.

Mixtape era B.o.B was different. He was a trailblazer. A genius. A Black man who was actively trying to be different, a breath of fresh air in a stagnant industry—an Andre 3k throwback.

When I started rapping at 12 the first thing I did was try to remake “I’ll Be In The Sky” myself, exchanging words and phrases so that B.o.B’s story would be mine as well.

As my Hip-Hop tastes evolved, so too did my ideas of Blackness. And as my perceptions of what Black people could be expanded, like our universe did when the Creator big-banged us into existence, I began to fathom that I might have permission to be different, too.

But I was still isolated. Marooned in a sea of Whiteness. I still had to contend daily with how Whiteness policed my body and behavior. At the end of the day, for survival’s sake, I could only be as “Black” as Whiteness and my adoptive family permitted me—and their permission was filtered through their own (mis)understandings of what Blackness might be.

I was told the reason there is a higher percentage of Black people in prison than white people is because Black people are a more criminal race.

How can a Black body that is both womb and cocoon birth and metamorphosize a self that is not criminally malformed when it is laden with expectations like that?

I was pimping myself before I ever heard of Kendrick Lamar. Tryna figure out how to sell myself to a people who were in the market for a pre-prescribed Blackness that was self-destructive. And as a transracial adoptee raised in racial isolation, this pimping was a survival skill, and a violence inflicted on myself.matthew charles is the host of little did u know, a podcast that centers the lived experiences—the learned and inherited wisdom—of transracial adoptees. He is also a poet, and his debut poetry collection, You Can Not Burn The Sun (2020), is sold out, so you can’t buy a copy. But you can eagerly anticipate book2. And you should definitely listen to his podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @CantBurnTheSun or Instagram @matthewcharlespoet.Severance Magazine is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo, @matthewcharlespoet

By Kristen SteinhilberI had just moved, with only a couple weeks in my new apartment under my belt. I had very recently begun to emerge from the fog, so as you might imagine, this particular moving process was my most hectic yet. Reunion with my biological mother had fallen through about five years prior, and she hadn’t spoken to me since. But I knew, with the new insight I’d gained about the impact adoption has had on me, that I had to write her a letter.

First, with every muscle in my body clenched so hard it hurt, I wrote to push her away; to tell her every horrible thing that had ever happened to me, and to vehemently convey that it was all her fault. I finished a few interpretations of that letter, each time with my finger hovering above the send button, unable to press down. I didn’t understand; I’d thought about the closure sending it would bring me for a while. But then I remembered the time The Dixie Chicks’ Wide Open Spaces came on the radio and we sang along together and how her embrace felt like home. And I realized I didn’t want to push her away. I finally admitted to myself that not only did I need her, but I also wanted her in my life. I finally admitted to myself that she is my mother.

I went back to the drawing board; this time with hope and a sense of relaxation in my shoulders. I started to write the letter that I just knew would fix everything and get me my mother back.

Dear Ava,*

I don’t know how to let you know about a lifetime’s worth of feelings without bombarding you. So I’m resorting to doing just that. Please try to keep in mind that I only intend to help you hear, acknowledge, and understand me, and that I entirely lack the intention to attack, shame, or berate you.

I don’t know if you think that I’m the same as a peer or another family member with whom you have a more conventional and grounded relationship. Or that disagreements followed by years of radio silence is fine. But I’m not a peer or a family member who always knew you. I’m the daughter who was raised in a family that wasn’t my own because of bad timing and circumstance.

I acknowledge all of what you had to weigh and that the decision you made was pure, out of love, and made in order to give me the best chance at the best life possible. I’ve had admiration and respect in multitudes for it. But I had no choice other than to accept and forgive since the day I was born. As I got old enough to decide for myself, I still chose to accept and forgive. The moment I was given a chance to meet you, I chose to accept your presence in my life. Eventually, I chose to give you pieces of myself, and finally, I even chose to give you my trust. Acceptance and forgiveness regenerate with ease, but when your life starts the way mine did with a broken bond and no choice in the matter, it also starts with a massive deficit of trust. I actually never got out of the negative space; something always happens to keep me there. The amount I gave you, I got it on loan.

I have given more to you throughout the course of my life than I realized until all I got was your disregarding absence. That absence continues to further break something in me, and I don’t deserve it. Candidly, I’m running out of tape and glue.

I know you suffered an unimaginable loss when I was born and that a part of you died when you couldn’t take me home to raise in your family. I know that the very subject of me causes you pain and grief. I also know the world doesn’t make room for the particular kind of pain you’ve felt and that opportunities to talk about it freely and without filtering are rare. I know that causes the pain and grief to turn into anger, guilt, shame, and numbness.

I don’t know the lay of the landmine on your end, but I do understand that’s what it is. A landmine of 33 years’ worth of explosive affliction underfoot.

I know this because unimaginable loss was my birthright.

Again, I respect it. You were mature and capable beyond your years. You didn’t leave me on a doorstep with a note and an extra bottle. You placed me responsibly into the hands of professionals whom you knew had found me a home and fit parents. I think I remember hearing that I was physically healthy, so at some point you must even have started intaking more nutrients than the average teenager. You left your friends, your pom poms, the boyfriend who knocked you up, your home, your family, and everything else about your adolescent life behind to take care of me. You were up north at your aunt’s house preparing to give birth to a child you knew you might never meet while you should have been having senioritis.

You did good, Ava. Maybe it’s weird to say that I am proud of you, but I can’t think of a better way to say it. You did everything you could have. You didn’t just become a mother that day; you outdid yourself in your role as my mother.

The moment your role was to relinquish regimentation and have faith, I inherited a massive role and responsibility—to adapt. The world’s lack of acknowledgement that I experienced that unimaginable loss as well was what dismally became my inheritance.

Science shows that infants have instinctual awareness and memory. The loss of you was a trauma my brain doesn’t recall, but my body does. Apparently, I wasn’t knitting a sweater in there; I was bonding with you.

Fighting my biological awareness and memory of that broken bond as if it were natural was expected of me from the start. I was told losing everything with my first breath was something to be grateful for. I was saved. That never clicked with me as quite right, because it wasn’t. Now I know that attachment disruption is acknowledged as relinquishment trauma, and not being given a chance to grieve is acknowledged as adoption trauma. How well I adapted to surroundings that didn’t reflect me became how I understood my value and place in the world.

When I was in 3rd grade, my best friend who lived down the street was at my house and we were playing with sidewalk chalk. We were arguing about who gets to choose what game to draw and play. I went with the typical nine-year old’s stance: My house, my sidewalk chalk, my choice. Keep in mind that she was a sweet kid, just thoughtless in the moment (yet impressively calculated) with her rebuttal, “Yeah but your parents aren’t really your parents, so it’s not really your house or your sidewalk chalk.”

“What a relief, thank you for saying that out loud,” I remember thinking. “Now please do me a solid and go ask my mom to explain like, all of it and then come back and tell me what she said. Word for word. Do. Not. Paraphrase.”

Instead, I stormed away angry on behalf of my mother. On behalf of myself, I felt nothing but numb and confused. I knew that I was supposed to be mad, so I was. I stayed fake mad because it made my mom happy, and I thought maybe I would be mad mad if I tried hard enough. I couldn’t, which I felt guilty for. So much that I almost confessed to my mom so she could punish me appropriately. But I didn’t think telling her how I really felt was worth hurting her feelings, so I just made myself sick with shame. And to punish myself, I didn’t talk to my best friend for almost the entire school year. I caved on the last day of school. Self-sacrifice is a very strange instinct for a third-grader.

My whole life I’ve been consumed by trying and failing to maintain a sense of self because I’ve been trying to exist in two worlds; one that doesn’t accommodate my longing for the other, which is filled with mystery and ghosts. It’s relentless discomfort, anxiety, phantom pain, and hiding.

I was listening to a TED Talk by a social worker whose work focuses on adoption. It was about the unnecessary obstacle course along the path to reuniting with birth family and the need for change in this process. She said something that seemed to stop my heart for more than a few beats: my original birth certificate is state property, and I have no legal access to it. But if I were able to see it, I would see on the side of the document that it had been stamped with one of those ink stamps used to save time. Like the original birth certificates of adoptees in many states in the country, the document was stamped with the word “Void.”

What I have instead is an “amended birth certificate.”

I have always relied on the language of symbolic comparison as a way to explain and relate, and a stamp that invalidates my original identity is the most perfect symbol to explain why. I rely on anecdotal relatability because my access to a real sense of belonging is void. It’s never been tangible.

I am an amended version of myself, and that’s a very hard way to live. I am defined by the loss of you I didn’t grieve for, and the rest of me is made up of dissonance.

I have lived my whole life in fear of the fact that I could lose my seat at the table in an instant. I come by it honestly. I know you feel many of the things I feel and that the very subject of me causes you pain. But I finally am able to have compassion for myself after 33 years of thinking I’m not worth the trouble. Only now can I definitively say that your pain is not a good enough reason for you to treat me as if I’m unlovable. Your fears are not a good enough reason for me to let them amplify mine.

I thought reunion was supposed to fix me, but I’ve learned that isn’t how it works. I always enjoyed spending time with you all, but I think I just went through the motions and ended up feeling more alone. I know now reunion could never be that simple. Meeting you would not have repaired my traumatized brain, and it wouldn’t fix yours either. There’s absolutely no way you don’t have PTSD in some form as well. Giving up control over everything that will happen to a child that you gave birth to is unnatural and goes against every instinct a mother has. It’s not something you just move on from with only faith to hold you up.

As for me, I’ve blamed everyone and no one at the same time for the wreckage. I’ve gone down the list and been angry with pretty much everyone I know for at least a little while. Doctors who throughout my childhood attributed clear cut signs of manifested trauma to stress, but shrugged them off and said I was “just a little tightly wound.” The therapists and psychiatrists who misdiagnosed me after I spent countless hours on their couches. My parents, of course, for not helping me find my own truth, which would have helped me obtain a proper diagnosis a long time ago. I landed on “everything” for the most amount of time. The ignorant, narrow, and damaging speak surrounding the whole topic of adoption. A reductive narrative that takes a process where most everyone involved is either nobly intended or an innocent newborn, all of whom have lost something so significant that they will never be the same, and wrings it out until it’s a shitty, low-budget Hallmark film. I blamed the fucking thing it’s called. “Adopted.” If that was intended as some form of shorthand, they should not have been in charge of naming things. It’s too fucking short. It’s a denial of enormous grief, and erases everything except what goes on some legal documents that end up sitting in a file cabinet. It takes away the story and, more importantly, the voice of everyone involved in one way another.

As I said before, I don’t know the lay of the landmine on your end. But in the midst of all the anger I felt when trying to figure out who was to blame, it occurred to me that whoever named it the thing it’s called—“adopted”— it seems like it had to be a birth mother.

The whole thing about the adopted child being chosen by the loving adoptive family and saved by them to go live a happily ever after life—it sounds like a hopeful birth mother who felt she should keep herself out of it just in case it would cause her child pain. Or she was made to go away because of stigma, but requested that her child be told they are the main character in a real-life fairytale.

That got me thinking about what happened to you. The fact that you were expected to leave your home and move to a strange place to endure one of the most traumatic experiences a person could have, at 18 years old, because others might shame and stigmatize you instead of supporting you. I always recognized that as a load of fucking horseshit, but you had told me about those circumstances so casually that it never sunk in how horrible that really was. There is nothing about that you deserved, and it never should have happened. You never should have had to go through that. You never should have been burdened with shame and rejection on top of loss. You were a child.

I’m not convinced that the situation would be a whole lot different today. Definitely not as different as it should be. So that’s my answer. The only thing to blame is “the way things are.” I have never had goals or very much direction in life until now, but I know I want to help change this garbage version of “the way things are” for as many adoption triads as I can. I don’t know what that means yet, and I have a lot of work to do on myself before I can start to figure it out.

I don’t know who I am, but I do know what I stand for. I wholeheartedly believe everyone deserves to heal and that they should. Especially from the things they went through as kids. And I know there is no way that you have. Adoption-competent mental health professionals are like unicorns even today, so there is no way in your situation that you got the support you needed. The fact that we don’t speak is proof of that. And you have to stop pretending that the problem is me. I don’t deserve it at all.

I’m a good kid. I have a larger than life capacity to provide a safe space for people to feel their pain, especially the kind the world does not make room for. I have been through enough. I lost you before I could ever know you at the beginning of my life. I lost my mom before I could ever know her at the beginning of my coming of age story. All of that was so hard on me that I tried to die. Then immediately after that, as I was trying to want to live, I lost you again. Give me a damn break, man. Stop treating me as if I am the problem. I can help, and you can have some time, but this is the last time I will be reaching out.

I don’t trust easily, but I sure as shit don’t scare easily either. We are not a conventional mother and daughter. Our shit is very extra by nature. Trust me, I had a much different letter written just last week. I had a right to every teenage angst-influenced word, too. It’s natural to idealize your mother and be disappointed and furious and crushed by her when she doesn’t live up to that ideal. I have gone through a lifetime of emotions, naturally childlike, when it comes to you on a very strange and inconvenient timeline, and I have had to parent myself through every bit of it. I have reached an adult resolve without even writing emo song lyrics on my Converse with a Sharpie. I am a proud-ass mama.

You have a right to all your feelings too. I am hurt by open-ended silence, but I don’t think there’s anything you could say that I wouldn’t understand to some degree. I’m a subject that’s caused you 33 years’ worth of pain. You don’t need to slap a pink bow on that shit. You could have wished I was never born, and I would understand that.

Try me. I will absolutely surprise you. Just don’t deflect and avoid and leave me alone in the process. I can’t even act tough and stand up to it. I have never had the luxury of not knowing exactly how fragile I am every moment of my life. So, please. I deserve persistent acceptance and kindness.

Anyway, about everything else, I am a bit of a psychological breakdown junkie, and I have read a ton lately about the adoption triad in general. I am happy to send links and resources. And to listen.

Btw, seeking community has helped me a lot. There are plenty of online adoptee support groups, and I would imagine that there are also birth mother support groups out there. Hearing other people’s stories is healing, even if you don’t have the desire to interact with the group.

Xoxo, Kristen

It’s been 9 months, and she hasn’t sent any sort of response. I imagine this is still sitting there, swarming in on her, perceived at a glance to be the indictment of the ages. Misunderstood and avoided like bad news. My unsung apocalyptic longing weighing down her inbox.

*Name changed for privacy reasons Steinhilber is a private domestic adoptee with a passion for adoptee rights and mental health advocacy. You can follow me her on Instagram and Twitter: @girlxadapted Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo: @sandrafckingdee

By Kristen SteinhilberMy whole life, when everyone told me that biology doesn’t matter, I did everything I could to believe that they were right. I learned to ignore my gut and tirelessly struggled to silence my insides that grievously screamed otherwise. It took me more than three decades of fairytale-oriented platitudes and assumptions thrown like bombs my way about adoption to piece together one very relevant thread: everyone who told me that biology doesn’t matter—including both sides of my own adoptive family—had intact bloodlines and genetic histories. And that what they were really saying, whether they meant to or not, was that my biology doesn’t matter.

Before I finally understood this, my takeaway was hardly stretch, considering the message I was sent: if my biology doesn’t matter, then I do not really matter. That’s what I believed above all else.

After my adoptive mother died, I found out she knew exactly who and where my biological family was and had kept it a secret from me. She had even allowed certain biological family members to attend my gymnastics practices without my knowledge. These kinds of things—withholding and secrecy—are encouraged in the world of adoption when it comes to the biology of adoptees. In fact, withholding and secrecy are legally enforced through sealed birth records. So when I found out, I assumed this was normal, understandable, or even maybe for my own good. My adoptive mother may have even believed that herself. Still, to know that there was nothing but a glass wall that separated me from the family I’d only daydreamed about as they watched me, or that maybe I’d accidentally brushed up against one of them on my way to get a drink from the water fountain, was a a mind fuck, even at the time. It just didn’t equate to anger the way it should have.

That’s what a person feels and should feel when they find out they have been lied to their entire lives by the person that raised them and who insisted that honesty is paramount. Anger. But since I’d always been told that adoption was such a gift, I didn’t feel I had the right to it. I pushed my own feelings away and suppressed what was in my gut. Of course, the lesson I took away from this is that my truth (or the truth in general) doesn’t hold much value. I’m not worthy or deserving of the truth; betrayals are to be immediately forgiven, no matter how all-encompassing. I applied this lesson to every aspect of my life without realizing, allowing others to manipulate me and believing them when they told me it was for my own good, telling lies myself and dismissing the feelings of those I’d wronged.

When I met my biological mother, I also found I had two sisters, one who is just four years younger than I am. Four years. So, my mother wasn’t an unfit parent, yet, through adoption, I was still legally severed from all ties having to do with her. My sisters got to grow up together, and I, an inherently and dangerously lonely only child without even the knowledge that they existed.

There is no way I at 18 (or anyone at any age for that matter) could possibly wrap my head around that thought all at once without exploding. That my mother gave me away and then had two more children, and that they all built a life that went on without me, and that the only thing that separated me from them and that life was four measly years. So I pushed it away and again, suppressed what was in my gut; the same method of self-protection I’d used my whole life. Your feelings don’t matter. Don’t have them. Biology doesn’t matter, and therefore all of the years you missed out on don’t matter either. Yes, you were the one who was given away but it doesn’t matter. You had a “better life.” Believe that, not yourself.

I had a beautiful reunion with them for years and “fit” naturally. Not in the same way that they fit with each other; that’s simply not possible when you miss out on all those years. I was also still under the thumb of the responsibility placed upon me to believe and feel they didn’t really matter. Not like the adoptive family who “saved” me. So I kept the feelings of everyone else protected and them at a distance.

Then one day they were gone. One fight was all it took. This is extremely common in biological reunion; many of our birth mothers have been both pressured to relinquish as well as shamed from every angle for relinquishing their children, not to mention having rarely been supported through their grieving process. So by the time we meet again, the combination of intense desire and fear of authentic connection often backfires, as do the reunions themselves.

During all of those years that I was included among them, I could never allow myself to be present with them. I never let myself dwell too much on the fact that my mannerisms and sense of humor are exactly like theirs and that I grew up without that. I didn’t dare admit to myself how good it felt to lay in the arms of my mother and sisters while we talked about everything under the sun and laughed in sync. I certainly never allowed myself to ask questions about my birth or the before and aftermath. I felt that would only cause upset and come across as ungrateful for the “gift” I’d always been told she had given me by giving me away. Like, “Did you ever regret your decision? Did anyone in the family want or try to keep me? Did anyone hold me or comfort me during the five days I spent in hospital nursery before I went home with my adoptive family? Did you name me? Can you tell me more about my father?”

And now, it’s too late.

After a lifetime of searching like Nancy Drew on the case of “Why am I like this?” Only now can I see my adoption trauma and maladaptive coping qualities through a lens of clarity. Because of the fairytale narrative that is everywhere and enforced by seemingly everyone who has ever seen a movie about adoption, my clarity has been systematically hidden from me. What I was conditioned to believe was self-preservation was actually self-abandonment.

The spiritual and psychological isolation of having two families but not belonging to either has ripped me from limb to limb, over and over, my entire life. My humanity has never once been seen by the adoption industry and the laws that bind, through which family ties and preservation are rendered unimportant. My voice and dignity have been robbed. Every memory of family I have is tainted either by lies or painstaking regret.

My story is not any other adoptee’s story. But the gist of it is not uncommon. These themes of diabolical dishonesty, betrayal, unbearable rejection, and hopelessness run through countless adoptees’ stories, and are begging not to be ignored.

Adoptee Rebecca Autumn Sansom made a film titled Reckoning with The Primal Wound that captures the complexities, forsaken years, and mirror smashing pain of adoption better than any other I’ve seen. My favorite part is the “Adoptee Army” featured in the credits. There’s a massive number of names listed, all those of adoptees who stand in solidarity for adoption reform. After a lifetime of feeling utterly alone, I was moved to tears seeing my name included with all of the rest.

We are the adoptee army, and our biology matters. It did all along. Steinhilber is a private domestic adoptee with a passion for adoptee rights and mental health advocacy. You can follow me her on Instagram and Twitter: @girlxadapted Severance is not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo: @sandrafckingdee

By Aimee Seiff ChristianMy hair is unusual. Thick, coarse, wavy, and curly all at once. Every stylist I’ve ever gone to marvels at it, fears it, or both. People tell me they envy my tresses, but for most of my life I did not appreciate their tenacious temperament. Step outside in the summer humidity and poof, I am a dandelion, a big frizzy, fuzzy one. I leave souvenirs of myself everywhere: little fuzzles of hair, reminders that I sat in that seat, used that pillow case, or borrowed that jacket. My hair listens to no one and wants everyone to know it.

I’m adopted; I am boring brown hair brown eyes white skin, but in the guess where Aimee’s from-from game, my hair is always a special contestant, and no one ever surmises its origin. Least of all me.

The first time we played the game it went like this:

Neighborhood kid: Where are you from?

Me: Here.

Kid: No, I mean where are you from?

Me: Here. Queens. Jackson Heights.

Kid: No, I mean, where are you from-from?

Me: Oh. Well. I don’t really know.

Kid: Wait, what?

My parents have garden variety Jewish hair. You know. Basic. Brown. Like mine, but not. Fine. Straight. Even if I passed as their biological kid a lot of the time, people looked at me quizzically, touching my hair without permission, saying you sure didn’t get your hair from them!

There are pictures of me as a toddler with my hair in rollers. The night before school photos my mother would furiously comb and set and trim my bangs. In every single elementary school photo, my bangs are a line graph plotting steady progress from where she started just above one eyebrow across a series of cowlicks to where she ended on the other side of my face, some two inches higher. By middle school, I refused to let her anywhere near me when a camera was about. In high school I stopped brushing it altogether.

My hair became a stand-in for the rest of me. In elementary school was when things with my mother began to go awry. In middle school, she and I stopped talking. By high school, well, shit was bad, and it was not just my hair, which was down to my waist. I was studying art history and I joked to everyone that soon I’d look like Mary Magdalene emerging from the forest. When I shaved my head in defiance of not even I knew what, people started to worry.

When I reunited with my birth mother at 26, I saw she too had thick brown hair. In a photo she gave me of herself as a teenager, her hair was shiny, lush, and smooth, brushed out long over her shoulders. She was salt and pepper by the time she was 45, like I am now, but her hair, while thick and wavy, was less wild than mine. It responded to blow outs, perms, and keratin treatments. She looked like she just came from the salon up until the day she died. On the other hand, I looked like I’d never set foot in a salon. But at that point I hadn’t. Box dye, crimpers, Aussie Sprunch Spray, bandanas, clips, and backcombing all made my hair even more impossible than it already was. Over time I vowed to embrace the curl and the thickness and the rest, learning to go natural thanks to my Black friends and the internet. But it was harder than I expected. I wanted to look like my birth mother. I did. But my hair didn’t.

Turns out, she too had been adopted. Generations of adoption, I learned, are not uncommon. But this left me not knowing anything more about where I’m from-from with my birth mother in my life than without her. After she died, I spat in a cup and discovered I was only 25% Ashkenazi Jew. The rest of me was Northern European. All British and Irish.

When I met my birth father, it was like looking at the definition of a recessive gene: blond hair closely cropped to his head, blue eyes, left-handed. All the things I was not. But then he emailed me later, apropos seemingly of nothing:

Do you need to buy your baseball caps at the extralargebaseballcaps.com online store?

I have never worn a baseball cap, I responded. And I hate hats in general. They don’t stay on my head. My hair is too thick.

Well, you got that from me, he replied with a laughing emoji. Try that store.

I investigated. They sold about three ugly caps, so no thank you. But when I looked at him closely, I could tell that his very short, now white hair was coarse and feral with cowlicks. I recalled the blurry high school yearbook photo my birth mother had given me years before: a teenaged, cranky expression and a bushy, blond bob that refused to obey, pointing this way and that. His adolescent hair was just like mine.

I never would have guessed that my wild mane came from these roots, but that’s the irony of not knowing the answers to the where are you from-from questions. Anything’s possible.

My birth parents created the perfect genetic storm for this riotous hair. They created me, this person with otherwise innocuous features and hair that no one could figure out. And now that I know where it came from, I’m kinda loving it. And now that I know where I came from, I’m kinda loving me too.—Christian is an adoptee who writes creative nonfiction, essays, and memoir about identity, adoption, parenting, and disability. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Independent, Cognoscenti, Pidgeonholes, Entropy, Hippocampus, the Brevity Blog, and more. She reads creative nonfiction for Hippocampus and is an instructor at GrubStreet and privately on her own website. Find out more about Christian at her website, find her on Twitter and Instagram, and see more of her work here. She is offering Writing Personhood: For Adoptees beginning Sunday January 9, 2022. Find information and register here. 

By Meredith KellerWhen a letter arrived in my mailbox saying, “I think you might be my grandma,” it dredged up shattering memories of a campus rape 52 years earlier. I threw the letter on the floor of my car and drove erratically in a state of high anxiety and angst. My body went rigid at the thought of reviving that story from my past. All would be revealed.

Would I want to go down that path? To relive scenes and open sores from episodes long buried, the chilling details of an incident that began with rape on a college campus in 1962?

How would this grandchild ever understand that repressive period I lived through after WW II and before the birth control pill? Society then held single unmarried pregnant women in their grip. Rape or unplanned sex led to blistering consequences as unplanned pregnancies made women face the scourge of what was labeled illegitimacy, undergo illegal and dangerous abortions, or carry a child to term only to sever that extraordinary bond between mother and child with separation. It’s estimated that as many as 4 million mothers in the United States surrendered newborn babies to adoption between 1940 and 1970.* I had had no choice but to carry my child to term.

At the time, thoughts of motherhood were tearing at my moral senses. After all, I’d been raised with the idea that motherhood within marriage was the shibboleth in our society. I was facing the dilemma of my life. Would I dare keep a child under these circumstances and bring shame on me and my family or allow the baby to be adopted?

Opting for adoption, I faced the deep sadness of that very moment you hand over your own child. That final act of severance between mother and child caused a quake deep in my soul. I can recall that moment with crystal clarity but mostly I keep it compartmentalized, forever afraid to revisit that devastating moment. The deep shame I felt should not have been mine but the rapist’s who drugged me and took me to his fraternity for his pleasure. After that sorrow of an unplanned pregnancy and what I had put my family through, the anger and resentment were knotted together and locked deep inside.

Returning to that letter in my hands, my emotions were jumbled thinking about the conflict of remembered pain and the promise of closure. I knew this letter was reopening wounds, but it was also exciting to think of learning what happened to my child after that sorrowful moment deeply etched in my soul.

Should I answer the letter?

How would I respond? I started to formulate a letter. What could I possibly say that would adequately explain my lifetime of secrecy and shame? They hadn’t lived through my restrictive times, that conservative era just before the bra-burning sixties and the new sexual freedoms.

What evolved from this request to be acknowledged was that I wrote a memoir. Through tear stained pages, I re-lived for my granddaughters and all young women every aspect of my journey when my self-esteem, ambition, certainty, and reputation were instantly erased and replaced by shame. I explained the hurdles I had to jump to restore my dignity.

So I well understand that not everyone wants to immediately meet their lost child. The pain of remembrance can be deep. The personal stories are wrenching. The reasons for relinquishing them can be quite complicated.

I did eventually meet my daughter and granddaughters in an awesome moment of pure joy, but it was writing the memoir and addressing that long journey that healed the pain.

Keller is reviewing her book, The Unraveling: The Price of Silence, in Zoom format conversation with her daughter Ann at the following Napa Bookmine event November 11. All are invited and it is free. Register here.

*The Baby Scoop Era Research Initiative.Meredith Keller honed her writing skills in a career as food editor of a leading restaurant magazine, copy writer for top advertising agencies, and publicist and marketing executive. All helped her articulate trauma and the emotional topography of rape and the blistering consequences. The Unraveling is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Find her on Instagram @theunraveling_9162.BEFORE YOU GO…

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Sonia Derory spent the first six months of her life in a hospital in a Parisian suburb while her parents reflected on whether they could raise a child with what they perceived as a disability. She was born in 1983 with dwarfism, a medical or genetic condition characterized by short stature. Ultimately, her parents concluded it would be too great a challenge to raise her and placed her for adoption. After spending another six months in a nursery, Derory was adopted by a couple from a small town in the St. Etienne region in center of France into a family with other children, some also adopted.

Derory had always known she’d been adopted—a fact that otherwise would have been evident because her Algerian heritage set her apart in appearance from her French Caucasian adoptive parents. But she always wanted to know who she looked like and where she came from. Early on, she was afraid to discuss with her adoptive parents her desire to know about her origins. “They weren’t particularly open-minded about my search,” she says, and she felt guilty and conflicted. But in 2006, when she was 23, she searched for her birthmother—not a challenge since her birth parents’ names and identities were listed on her birth certificate.

After several months, she located her birthmother, who at first seemed pleased by her appearance in her life. They were in contact for more than a year and a half, and Derory welcomed her mother into her home. She even wore an identity bracelet engraved on one side with her original birth name and on the other with her adoption name, to demonstrate the depth of her connection. “I did everything—in fact too much—in order to be acknowledged as her daughter because I had this deep-down need to build a relationship with this mother who could help me discover my cultural origins.” After those months, she says, her mother decided to cut ties and all contact, but by that time, Derory had already become very attached to her, so it was deeply difficult to accept—another devastating rupture.

“In her mind she had given me away as a baby many years ago and so felt nothing for me emotionally as an adult woman.” She didn’t want to have any type of relationship, and and they never met again. A few years later, Derory met her birthfather, who told her he’d searched for her when she was very small but was unsuccessful because her name had been changed. He, however, was also unwilling to engage in a relationship with his daughter.

Derory had grown up near her birthplace in Saint-Etienne in east-central France, where she went to high school and developed a love of theater. She took acting and circus classes and workshops but, daunted by the difficulty of earning a living as an actress, she turned to another career. For ten years she worked as a communications and media officer in Clermont-Ferrand, a city in Massif Central, a highland region in Southern France. But in 2014, drawn back to her love of theater, she boarded a train to Paris, intent on becoming an actress. She studied in a theater school and won some small roles in a few classical plays, a television show, and many short movies. She also nurtured an interest in directing and taught herself the necessary skills, learning from trial from trial and error and by being inquisitive on set. Soon she’d use those skills to tell her own story.

Derory had seen stories about people searching for their birth parents but thought they seemed unreal, like fairy tales. “I needed to give testimony about my own life and story that was realistic and true to what had actually occurred.” She particularly needed to address an entirely overlooked topic—adoption and disability. In her short film, “Encounters” [Recontre(s)], she tells the story of what happened during her reunion with her birthmother. Not a documentary, it relies on the participation of an actor who plays the role of her birthmother, and names and documents have been changed. The truth of the story, however, she says, is communicated in the voiceover. “I was faithful to the actual words of the protagonists through the voices—a choice, like the length, partly dictated by financial limitations. Bearing the costs of the film herself, she was restricted technically and materially, which is why the film is done in voiceover rather than with the actors speaking. She also made two shorter versions. One for the Nikon Film Festival, “Almost her Mother” (Je Suis Presque Sa Mere), with a running time of a little more than two minutes, tells the story from her mother’s perspective. And the 45-second “A Tear in the Heart” (La Larme Au Coeur), is from the perspective of a psychologist who mediates the reunion of mother and daughter. The longer story, “Encounters,” is from Durory’s perspective.

Her work is evidence of the importance of storytelling, both for personal healing and to raise awareness of the lived experience of adoptees. “I think everyone can testify on their own level to show their perspective on adoption and help advance the cause of adoptees.” It’s important, she believes, to counter stereotypes that paint adoptees as spoiled, special, or difficult children. “They’re like all other children who just need to be loved and to belong to a family. Sadly, they live all their lives with this wound of abandonment that is difficult to deal with in their social, personal, and emotional lives.”

“Today,” Derory says, “I’m at peace with my story. I can relate and talk openly about my life without feeling emotional, and I think I can say that it’s made me resilient and stronger. I’ve managed to reach many people all over the world who don’t know me and who in turn have been really touched and moved by my story.”

To learn more, look for Derory on Instagram here and here.

To view the films, visit https://www.carminos-production.com; https://www.facebook.com/Je.suis.presque.sa.mere/; https://www.facebook.com/La.larme.au.coeur/; and https://vimeo.com/carminosproduction.—BKJ

By Ande StanleyAll you had

To do

Instead of saying

I love you

Was to tell me

The truth

Trust is essential in relationships. Honesty is one of the foundations of ethical behavior. When we grow up with lies, when we are denied the ability to make informed decisions, when we are taught that our senses are untrustworthy, when our identities are erased and we are made invisible, the ability to be in true authentic relationship with others is greatly hindered or made impossible. This inability for intimacy to exist within a context of deception is true for everyone, not just for people like myself. Trust is the engine of society. We need to be able to trust ourselves and others in order to be mentally, emotionally and physically healthy. We need to trust to be successful socially and economically. What happens to a person whose trust is betrayed at a deep and foundational level?

The last thing my adoptive mom said to me was that I must believe how greatly I was loved. I want so very much to believe in what she was saying. I long for that connection. My chest hurts and my eyes burn just sitting here and thinking about what that would mean. To be seen. To be heard. To be real, in a deeply intimate relationship with my adoptive family. The problem is that I don’t believe her. I believe she loved what she needed me to be, what she needed to fill the void in her own ego, to assuage the pain of her own failures and rejections. She never loved me because she never knew me. She knew the fiction that she created when she insisted that I not know that I was adopted.

I grew up thinking there was something incredibly wrong with me. I had no other explanation for the sudden silences and the awkward responses. I tried and I tried but never seemed to be enough. My older sister and our dad had an ease of communication and a closeness that, no matter how much I desired to live in that space, was beyond my reach. My youngest brother and our mom existed in a give and take where his protection and nurturing seemed to take precedence over that of mine and my other younger brother. He and I were the odd ones. We looked different, sounded different, acted different. To look at pictures of the six of us together now, I can immediately see what strangers saw—that we did not belong.

I had no mirror. I still have no ability to conceive of how I appear to others. When I asked why I didn’t look like anyone else in the family, I was told that of course I did. A child needs to believe their parents. By insisting that I did look like people I did not resemble, my mother set in motion a mental process that required me to deny the evidence of my own eyes. What I perceived to be real was in doubt. I could not trust what my eyes could see.

My mental health suffered because of the lies. Because I was told that my senses were unreliable. I was over-imaginative, being dramatic, making up stories. Better that I be the crazy one, the identified patient, than to simply tell me the truth. I looked and acted and was different because we weren’t related. Funny how liars felt comfortable accusing me of lying when they set in motion a family system that constantly had to be reinforced with more lies. It’s no wonder I never felt close to my adoptive parents or to their children. When lying is the basis of a relationship, you live in fear of being caught out in your lies. The more lies you tell, the more lies you must remember. I can only imagine how exhausting and anxiety producing that must have been and how much easier that made keeping me at a distance. Keeping me Other.

My physical health suffered due to the lies. My mom was more comfortable accusing me of hypochondria than willing to be honest with me and say we were not genetically related. I was warned of health problems that ran in my adoptive parents’ families, went so far as to have tests done to rule out some of those possibilities, even considered mastectomy—all based on false health information. I went wrongly diagnosed for genetically heritable conditions because there was no history of them in “my” family.

Being lied to has emotional consequences as well. If you systematically deceive and manipulate a person for decades, and when they discover the truth they are devastated and enraged, do you have a right to accuse them of being unbalanced? When they begin to learn to name their emotions and establish necessary boundaries that change the family dynamics, is it okay for you to command them to stop being disruptive and upsetting the people who created the trauma? Do you have any business telling them that they are responsible for the mental health of the people who hurt them?

When the people who you are supposed to be able to trust most are the ones who betray you? I was taught to not trust myself. Then I was taught to not trust anyone else.

My mom said she would have told me about my adoption at some point. She was hurt when I said that I had no reason to think she actually would have done so. Even 20 years after I found out by accident about being adopted, she was still telling me lies. I think the habit was too ingrained by that point for her to do otherwise.

And then she died.

I wasn’t the only one who was the victim of my adoptive parents lies. Their natural children were also. I can’t imagine what it does to a child to be told that they must always be on guard around a sibling. They must always lie to that person and never let on what they know. The habit is ingrained in them as well. They cannot hear or see me. So we do not talk. I was tired of being invisible.

My own children have also been victims of the lies. They were already in school by the time I found out. Their identities changed as well, along with their ability to trust other people. They endured the years of watching their mom falling apart and trying to put herself together again. They suffered loss also, and it is hard to forgive my mom for that.

The lies robbed me of family—adoptive and my own. Robbed me through the process of making intimacy impossible with the people I grew up with and whose name I legally carry. Robbed me of the opportunity to reach out and connect with my first families because so much time had gone by before I was able to find them. Robbed my children and grandchildren of opportunity. Time that none of us can recover.

All they had to do was tell me the truth. Grant me my power, my autonomy, my ability to know and be myself. If they had done that, been honest, then they could have been themselves as well. We could have established relationships based on choice and openness and understanding. But that didn’t happen. It is too late for the majority of the relationships. Thankfully it is not too late for me and for my kids and for my grandkids to learn how to be in authentic relationship with ourselves and with others. I am not sure I will ever be able to fully trust anyone, but I hope to learn to trust myself. I want to know what it is to say I love you and know that I truly grasp what that means. I want to hear someone else say I love you to me and know that it is said by someone who knows me.

You taught me to hide

So I stayed hidden

You concealed me from myself

Called me a

Dreamer, a

Fabulist

I lived in paper towers

A broken

Rapunzel

You fed me on

Fairy tales

You created a

Fiction

Pressed hard

With your pencil

Wrote over the lines

You erased

With your lies

But,

Everything comes out

When the paper

Is held up

To the lightAnde Stanley—an international, stranger, closed adoption adoptee—discovered her adoptee status by accident when she was in her early thirties. A writer from an early age, in recent years she is learning to use her voice to speak out about the trauma caused by denying adoptees their identities and autonomy. She spends her days painting, writing, and harassing her husband of more than 30 years. Visit her blog The Adoption Files. Find her on Twitter @AndeStanley1.BEFORE YOU GO…

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By Lorah GeraldMy hand strokes the smooth white fur of the rug I am lying on. I move my hand slowly along it. It’s soft and soothing. I rub my face into the fur. My fingers dig into it and pull it close. It calms me and triggers Oxytocin—a hormone associated with pleasurable feelings—to be released by the pituitary gland. My breathing becomes slow and regular. The pain I’m feeling slowly subsides. I start regulating the mental turmoil in my mind. I draw on a memory of when I was happy. The sensation of the fur on my skin reminds me of the love I felt for my dog Brizzie. She was my everything. I spent as much time as I could with her, and I’d miss her when I was working or on vacation. I loved that dog with all of my heart. When she passed, my world crumbled.

I bought this rug to remember how I felt when I’d stroke her fur. She was unconditional love. I could feel it when I looked into her blue eyes. She’d look up at me, the world would fall away, and it would be just us. Our walks together were my happy place. Our connection was pure and uncomplicated. I felt she understood me; she could sense my pain and would come to my side. The love she gave flowed from her heart without pause. When she passed, I could still feel her beside me. Blump, blump, blump she would run up the stairs. I can still hear it. Her movement, her fur, her breath were all still alive in my thoughts but I could no longer reach out to touch her. I wanted to feel her again. I felt like a part of me died when she did.

As an adoptee, I’ve always felt closer to animals than humans. My childhood home was a farmhouse that was more than 100 hundred years old. My backyard had a barbed wire fence separating us from the farm behind it. The cows, horses, and ponies would lean their heads over the fence to eat grass out of the yard. Sometimes I’d gather vegetable scraps or handfuls of grass and hold out my hand to feed them. Their noses moved back and forth in my hand as they chewed the treat I held. They felt soft, like a rabbit’s ear. For a special treat, I asked my adoptive parents to buy sugar cubes for me to give to the horses. I’d slowly walk over to them and touch them, my hand softly stroking their hair. I looked into their gaze. Once I felt trust between us, I’d go to their side of the fence and play in their field. After years, I felt like we were friends. One day, I was told not to go into their field anymore. I understand then that the adults wanted to keep me safe, but it was devastating. I felt as if my friends had been taken away. I agreed to the rules but went into the field anyway when no one was looking. I’d already been taken away from my family, and I wasn’t going to let anyone take away my friends.

Being adopted, it was easier for me to have animals as friends. I loved the feeling of their fur, and I understand now that I was self-regulating my emotions when I petted them. I felt they loved me without complications. They helped heal my hidden pain. I loved all the animals and wanted to take care of them. Growing up, my menagerie consisted of cats, dogs, parakeets, fish, and turtles. My adoptive parents allowed one of my cats to have kittens so I could watch how birth happens. I thought it was gross but I loved those three kittens so much. One was white with a couple of gray spots. The others were tabby cats, one grey and one orange-striped. I was sad that we had to find them homes when they were old enough to be given away. It confused me. I knew my adoptive parents didn’t wait that long to get me. Was I given away too soon? I didn’t want to give them away. I felt heartbroken. It made me think about how I was given away. I knew my adoptive parents never talked to my birth mother. I wanted to know where the kittens were going. Why did my birth mother not ask who was taking me? I cared what was going to happen to my kittens. Why didn’t my birth mother care what happened to me?

Now I sit with my white fur rug, petting it and soothing myself. I remind myself that I am loved and I am worthy. The pain of being given away doesn’t go away. We learn to adapt to it.Lorah Gerald—adoptee, writer, intuitive, Kundalini yoga Instructor, reiki master and ordained minister—writes memoir, inspirational, educational, and opinion pieces and blogs on her website, LorahGerald.com, and as @theadoptedchameleon on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. She hopes to help others, adopted or not, heal their trauma by sharing her lived experiences as an adoptee, educating about breath work and energy healing, and using her natural intuitive abilities.

BEFORE YOU GO…

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By David Sanchez BrownI was not the dream son my adoptive parents envisioned I’d be. I was a clumsy, overweight kid with Coke-bottle thick glasses and learning disabilities who couldn’t seem to do anything right—couldn’t even throw a ball. Father-son relationships can be challenging enough in biological families, but I learned early that they’re even more complex for an adopted son.

I was adopted in 1956, but my adoption was a lifelong event. It was a closed adoption, meaning that all genetic connections were severed when a new birth certificate was issued. This separation from my birthmother was the first trauma I experienced, and it influenced every aspect of my life. It diminished my self-esteem, disrupted my identity, and left me unable to form secure and satisfactory attachments.

My adoptive parents made a crucial mistake in waiting until I was eight to tell me I was adopted. I have no idea why they waited so long. I had already established a strong bond with my them, and it confused and shattered me. When I said, “You’re not my real mother, then,” my mother’s face contorted. She looked possessed when she came at me and screamed in my face, “How dare you to question my motherhood, you selfish boy.” My father just stood there and let her rage. It took a moment, but the damage was permanent. I never trusted her after that. Not only had I lost my mother at birth, but now I had a mother who didn’t love or like me.

I’d bonded with my dad early on, but after the adoption talk, my relationship with him, too, changed. I had a younger brother, also adopted, and a younger sister—my parent’s biological child—but since I was the oldest son, there was more pressure on me. I was expected to be of blue-ribbon caliber. He forced me to play catch with him and he had no patience. “Pay attention and keep your eye on the ball,” he’d holler. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate, I always dropped the ball. When he and the kids on the block called me Charlie Brown, it stung.

My efforts to understand geometry were equally dismal. Late nights at the kitchen table with my dad doing homework, we were both stressed. He’d throw back another shot of Cutty Sark whiskey, yelling “pay attention” and cuffing my ears. I’d get debilitating stomach aches. I still hold those memories in my body, especially in my hunched shoulders. I felt broken and internalized the shame of not being enough for my dad.

An alcoholic with a violent temper, my dad was as unsafe as my mother was hot and cold emotionally. He would often say that how I turned out would reflect on him; I had to be perfect, and he was an unrelenting perfectionist. He needed me to be an extension of him, but  I couldn’t. I was the antithesis of him. Perhaps he felt I would become like him as if by osmosis.

It pained me that I couldn’t be more like my dad, but I couldn’t; I was another dad’s son. The more he pushed me, the more I shut down and retreated into my inner world of remote islands.

I didn’t look or act like anyone else in the family. I stuck out like a sore thumb and I became the family scapegoat. The more withdrawn I grew, the more my father would verbally and physically abuse me, especially after he’d been drinking. I reacted by dissociating, which only accelerated in my mid-teens. Alcohol became a way to numb my feelings, and later I’d rely on prescription drugs like Xanax. I stayed that hurt kid most of my life, and it prevented me from being an adult. Now I know dissociation was a trauma response.

When I finally left home, I was an empty shell—no identity, no personality. I didn’t know how to take care of myself and I drifted. My life up until then had been all about surviving from one day to the next. I believed I only deserved dysfunctional, toxic relationships, including those in work environments. But I never connected my feelings about myself with having been adopted. I thought I was a failure and unworthy of unconditional love.

In September 2006, while I was visiting my mother, she casually handed me my adoption documents. The first page contained the court decree. It stated that David Lee Carroll would now be known as David Raymond Brown. The shock of that news was a gut punch, and I threw up. I joined an adoption registry at adoption.com, but received no response. I didn’t aggressively search for my birth parents, and although DNA testing became available in 2012, I didn’t test. I was afraid to find birth family. I was afraid I wouldn’t be enough and that they, too, would be disappointed in me or might reject me—a secondary rejection.

But then I read Dani Shapiro’s “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love”—in which she discovers after taking a DNA test that her dad wasn’t her biological father and she searches for and finds the man who was. I’d always felt incomplete, so I put aside my fears of rejection and took a risk. I took an AncestryDNA test, but I didn’t consider the emotional impact of what I might find.

On July 27, 2019, while I was on the treadmill at the gym, I got a text from Ancestry DNA. My results were ready to view online. I got dizzy and almost fell; I hit the emergency stop cord and sat down. I had a first cousin match and I messaged her immediately. A couple of minutes later, she responded. There would be many phone calls and trading of pictures before I realized I’d struck gold. I was in a state of shock, and seeing pictures of my bio father I got the whole meaning of genetic mirroring for the first time. I could see myself in him, a genetic connection. But I didn’t know for sure if he was my father. My paternal first cousin put me in touch with someone I’d later learn is my half-sister, who agreed to take a DNA test. And five weeks later, Ancestry confirmed that we shared the same father. I also learned I have two other sisters. It was overwhelming; I had to walk away for a few weeks. I felt like I was coming apart at the seams.

So, who was this man? Who was my bio father, and was I like him? Did I have his traits?

As I came to know more about my paternal family, I discovered a history of addiction and mental health issues. Learning about this medical history gave me insight into my struggles. Knowing about it sooner might have saved me a lot of wear and tear.

I also learned my biological father was a fraternity party boy with a reputation for being a jokester in front of an audience. But he often was the butt of the jokes, which was painful to learn because I, too, had been laughed at when I thought I was the life of the party. My sister gave me a photograph of him wearing fluorescent orange shorts and holding a beach umbrella; I couldn’t accept it. It wasn’t what I wanted to remember and it was an unpleasant reminder of all the embarrassing pictures of me.

I also learned my biological father had been physically abusive toward one of my sisters, which made me physically sick. It hit a nerve because it reminded me of my painful past. I don’t think any of my sisters fully recovered, and I am only now able to live free of the traumatic memories of growing up.

Over the past two years, learning about my origins and my genetic inheritance has helped ground me. It’s been painful finding the truth, but I am no longer that hurt boy. I am the cycle breaker. I’m grateful I didn’t have children. I might have passed down the generational trauma. I couldn’t risk anyone else’s life. Honestly, I was hoping my bio father would be more, and maybe that’s like my adoptive dad wanting me to be more. I think all these desires were unrealistic.

I carry my ancestors inside me. I bear my biological father’s genes and the imprint of my adoptive father’s abuse and disappointment. But I am not either of my fathers. I am my own man.David Sanchez Brown is retired and living in San Jose, CA, with his partner. In 2019, he created a blog, My Refocused Life Adopted, to document his adoptee journey to find his lost identity. You can follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to read about his journey.Severance is  not monetized—no subscriptions, no ads, no donations—therefore, all content is generously shared by the writers. If you have the resources and would like to help support the work, you can tip the writer.

On Venmo: @David-Brown-0516BEFORE YOU GO…

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In 1961, a New York couple sent their seventeen-year-old daughter Margaret to Lakeview Maternity Home on Staten Island, where she gave birth to a boy she named Stephen. In love with her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, George, she was determined to keep the child, but was pressured by her parents as well as social workers at the home and the personnel of the Manhattan adoption agency—Louise Wise Services—to relinquish the baby for adoption. Margaret and George planned to marry, and during the many months when she was separated from Stephen, Margaret held out hope that she and George would prevail against a system that was cruelly stacked against them and regain custody of the child. Ultimately, she was coerced into giving up her parental rights. The boy was adopted and his name changed to David.

Margaret had been advised to move on, to forget about her baby. She never did. She went on to marry George and have a family, and all the while her son was never far from her thoughts. Through the years, as health problems emerged in her family, she contacted the Louise Wise agency to provide medical updates for the boy’s parents. The response was always curt. In the early 1980s, inspired by the rise of adoptee activism, Margaret began to search for her son, both for reassurance that he was well and also so he could know she’d never forgotten him and had always loved him. At one point, after her son’s 20th birthday, she gathered her courage, made elaborate preparations to make herself appear undeniably respectable, and knocked at the door of Louise Wise Services, hoping at most for information about her son, and at least for the opportunity to leave her contact information so that he could find her if he wanted to. Four times she rang the bell and tried to plead her case, and three times she was ignored. When she rang for the fourth time, the receptionist advised her that she’d call the police if Margaret didn’t leave. Devastated, Margaret collapsed to the floor and sobbed.

Meanwhile, David had been adopted by a loving couple, grew up, moved to Toronto and later Israel, finally settling in Portland, marrying and having children. By 2007, his health had deteriorated and he was undergoing dialysis, scheduled to receive a kidney donation from a friend. At the dialysis center in 2007, he met an investigative reporter, Gabrielle Glaser, who planned to write the feel-good story of the kidney donation. But it didn’t end there. In 2014, after having taken a DNA test, David reunited with Margaret shortly before he died. Glaser went on not only to tell their story, but also to exhaustively report on the rise of the adoption system in America, painting a sorrowful picture of an industry based on coercion, cruelty, and deception.

In this extraordinary, rigorously researched book, American Baby: A Mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, Margaret and David become the faces of the Baby Scoop Era, the period between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, when countless women were pressured to surrender their newborns, never to see them again. While Margaret and David’s fascinating story is the through line of the book, Glaser rips away the veil that hid decades of abuse and secrecy, detailing chillingly unethical practices that led to heartache for countless birth parents and adoptees.

Some of the practices and policies to which adoptees were subjected, which are nothing short of barbaric, exceed imagination. Glaser tells of babies subjected to “intelligence” tests conducted by Samuel Karelitz, a pediatrician who snapped newborns’ feet with rubber bands and declared crying to be the hallmark of a smart baby—a strategy he believed would help best match a baby to adoptive parents and which was carried out on babies for the first few months of their lives. She writes about a forensic anthropologist, Harry Shapiro, a one-time president of the American Eugenics Society, who was called upon to determine the race of babies, tasked with ensuring that dark-skinned babies were not placed with white families; about Viola Bernard, a Columbia University psychiatrist whose devious studies separated twins in an ethically dubious effort to study nature vs. nurture for the purposes of better matching babies to adoptive parents—an experiment that was the subject of the shocking documentary Three Identical Strangers; and the university-run “practice homes” where surrendered infants were housed and tended by a rotating group of home economic students so they could practice their mothering skills.

American Baby is an extraordinary achievement that destroys the notion of adoption as a win-win proposition for all members of the adoption triad. It’s an essential text for anyone wanting to learn the true history of adoption in America and understand the often-devastating consequences.

What was it about the Philomena Lee story, told in the book and biopic Philomena, that got under your skin? 

I saw the movie first and read the book later. I’d covered adoption as a beat, so I was aware that adoption begins with loss. That was my fundamental underlying understanding from the beginning, and it’s how I wound up interviewing David in the first place, because he was adopted. His story landed on my desk when was getting the kidney from his friend, because he didn’t have any family members who could give him one. He talked about hoping his birthmother would see the story, so he could learn more about his medical history for his three kids. A few years later, I thought about him a lot when I saw Philomena. I was really struck by the cold, moralistic Irish Catholic church—I’d seen the 2002 movie the Magdalene Sisters, and those stories ricocheted in my brain. Philomena’s portrayal by Judy Dench—the shame she had to endure at the hands of family, at the hands of the community, at hands of the church, but also the loss that she never recovered from—as a mother myself, it just dawned on me that this movie, with one of my favorite actresses, is about a woman’s life as a mother that was ruptured. And of course she didn’t forget her child. Of course she thought of her child every single day of her life. So that really drove it home for me what David’s birthmother’s experience may have been like.

What took you from that point to the point at which you realized you had to tell this story and why? 

David called to tell me he’d located Margaret and that, as he put it, she hadn’t wanted to give him up, that she loved him all of his life, that she married his birthfather, had gone on to have three more kids, and had done everything she could to maintain custody of him as a powerless teen in NYC in the early 60s. That revelation was such a profound reversal of this narrative that he’d been told, that he’d accepted. It was a narrative of many people from the Baby Scoop Era—the narrative adoption agencies wanted them to believe. What I heard in his voice about all those things was that they were so healing for him, and I imagine that it had to have been healing for Margaret to imagine that her son had had a good life with people who loved him very much. Of course, it was devasting that he had a terminal cancer and was very near death. But there was the power of learning that he’d been wanted, and the healing aspect for her to learn that he’d been loved. Then there was also the deceit that had been perpetrated on him, on adoptees, on birthmothers, and on adoptive families. The fictitious narratives that had abounded for everyone and had been allowed to continue for decades—that was just a shock. As someone who’s not adopted, I was intrigued and saddened and also outraged.

I thought I knew a lot about adoption before I read your book and I was shocked by so much, by the practice babies, and those passages where Margaret went and knocked on the door of Louise Wise Services—it was absolutely shattering.

It was shattering to get to learn about. I love her dearly. She’s an incredibly heroic and courageous woman. It’s astonishing how much she endured and is still standing. And that scene—we went to all those places together, she and I. Someone asked me if I’d fictionalized some details. I did not. She has a crystalline memory of the events that transpired, especially after we visited the sites. As we know, traumatic memories imprint in our brains in a very different way than ordinary stuff. You don’t remember what you bought at the grocery store six weeks ago. But you do remember a baby being taken away. You do remember trying desperately to fight for the right to keep the baby you bore and had been sent away to bear in secret. You remember walking up the steps of Louise Wise Services. You do remember what you wore and how you put on your eyeliner so you could be presentable to this elegant agency. And she was still trusting it up until that moment—she trusted it until she learned that David had never received any of the messages about his health conditions.

I’m amazed by the breadth and depth of the information you present. It’s remarkable that you were able to get access to some of it. What were the biggest obstacles or challenges in your research? Did anyone not want to share because some of the information reflected negatively on them?

The biggest disappointment was with the experiments about the rubber band babies [the Karelitz studies]. I did everything I could—and you may have seen this in the notes—to try to uncover what the motivation was for those studies, what the grant proposals looked like. I wondered if I would be able to uncover documents that had any of the names of the babies, surrendered for adoption and in agency custody, who were part of those experiments. But after 20 years, the federal government destroys grant proposals or studies that do not further scientific inquiry or lead to cures. I went to the National Archives. I think there were nine or ten studies the government paid for, those “induced crying” studies. I contacted all of those journals and asked if it was possible to obtain documentation surrounding those experiments. I got either non-responses or brush-offs from each and every one. And I don’t believe that all [research materials] were “destroyed.” I also flew to Florida to meet face to face with the surviving research psychologist who participated in those studies. On the phone, she’d been forthcoming. I got to her office in a strip mall but she’d clearly lawyered up by the time I got there. I’m an experienced reporter, and I know how to help guide people who want to speak their conscience. I thought that was what would happen. But in person she just absolutely shut down. Interestingly, she had a big rubber band ball on her desk and was tossing it back and forth between one hand and the other. My editor and I weighed whether to put her in the book, but there were so many villains already and she’d been a young 24-year old PhD. She claimed she just crunched the numbers. Induced crying! Really? She had no idea what the research was all about? She clearly had been coached to say that, so that was a little disappointing….

Most of the people who would have wanted to stand in my way are dead. Louise Wise is bankrupt. Karelitz is long dead, Viola Bernard and Harry Shapiro were long dead. What surprised me was the lionization of these people in real time. Nobody was looking behind the curtain about what was happening at that time. Nobody. I was shocked by that—even up until now, even Karelitz’s research on crying is still cited—without so much an asterisk about the brutality of it.

And you mentioned Dr. Joyce Brothers—someone so many in this country at a certain time looked up to, and it seemed as if she hadn’t done any due diligence.

She also parroted the Karelitz studies and promoted them as a useful tool for worried mothers who wrote in to her and said “I’ve got baby who’s a crier.” And she said, “Don’t worry, your baby is going to be smart. According to Dr. Karelitz, who does these rubber band studies, your baby will be smart.” Nobody even raised an eyebrow as far as I can tell.

You weren’t a newcomer to the topic. You had already covered a beat of related issues. Still, did you have an inkling of the full scope of abuse, hypocrisy, and deceit before you’d delved deeply into research?

I had no idea. I didn’t really know the breadth and the depth of the treachery and the deceit. As much as I understood from the very beginning—and I’ll get to this—from the very beginning of the first story I ever did about adoption, I just had no idea of the massive transactional history of it. I had no idea of the fact that it was an industry. It was an industry—one that took babies for a fee and placed them with families who weren’t their own. Like in all long projects, you don’t automatically start out knowing everything. It’s a layering process of understanding, and only when you finished and step back and say wow, okay, this is not just a story or a book about adoption, it’s really about our society. It’s about sexuality. It’s about policing women’s bodies. It’s about the paternalism of medicine. It’s about the conservative postwar mores that allowed this to flourish.

Is there any one thing more than any other that surprised or shocked you during your investigation? 

The experiments on ten-minute old babies, the prolonged time in foster care decades after it had been well established that infants needed to be able to rely for their own safety and development in the world on a steady caregiver who was going to be there for them. And the institutionalized cruelty of it.

A recent New York Times piece on your book was titled “Adoption Used to Be Hush-Hush.” Is it fair to say it still is in some ways? A lot has changed, but it still is legalized deception, isn’t it? I believe four-fifths of people don’t have access to their records and it’s still transactional.

No, you’re 1000% correct. And as much as I may have thought things were improved, since the publication of this book, I’ve been deluged with stories of fraud; deceit; current transactional, flat-out sale of babies; and I’m going to need to find a home for some of this stuff I’m uncovering. It’s ongoing. Yet adoption is still celebrated. We see these celebrity adoptions, and people say “Look how wonderful it is, Hoda may adopt a third child!” Remember that viral video of a little boy who’d been adopted and he’d invited the whole kindergarten class to come to his finalization celebration? And everyone said, “Oh, what a heartwarming story!” But whoa, wait a minute! What about what that little boy lost? Okay, great that he has a family now that’s going to care for him and love him and cherish him in the manner all children deserve, but we just run right over that initial foundational truth, which is he lost something. He lost his kin. That’s the title of your magazine. It’s a rupture.

And I wanted to throw a zucchini at the screen of Three Identical Strangers. I hated it. The other day I watched a talk about the movie by Harvard psychologists and psychiatrists and I was so dismayed that they didn’t raise any of the questions that any sentient person would raise after watching that film. They didn’t even broach the meaning of the original trauma. Greg Luce, founder of Adoptee Rights Law Center, was also observing the talk. He texted me halfway through and said, “I can’t watch this. They’re talking about adoptees as if we’re just subjects.” He and the adoptee community have opened my eyes to the ongoing infantilization of adoptees and the prurient interest in them as subjects. It’s outrageous.

Does the adoption industry remain predatory in any way? Is it still an industry? Does coercion remain a factor at all or is that a thing of the past?

Oh, absolutely. I’ve got several stories I’m trying to pursue and even some lawsuits that are being filed on trying to stop these predatory, coercive fraudulent promises made to families in the name of open domestic adoption. Such arrangements are rarely legally enforceable, and promises are made that are not kept. It all depends on the good will and intention of the adoptive parent, and in some cases, birthparents, too. I’ve heard from birth families who are told by adoptive parents, “Sure, of course we’re going to be able to get together.” But then they move to another state, or even another country, and the birth families never see their children again.

Adoption is widely described in our culture as a selfless act of love and generosity. Do you believe most Americans at this time have a realistic view of past or present-day adoption practices?

I do believe the narrative we have is the one we’ve always had, that this is the best solution for everyone involved and everyone ends up happy, happier. It’s very difficult to present a counter narrative. The first story I ever wrote about adoption was the early 2000s, and I had seen in my coffee shop in Portland, where I lived at the time, a flier of what appeared to be a racist depiction—stick figures filled in with yellow highlighter with Asian features and straight black hair, and I thought “What’s this? How can this be in socially conscious Portland?” Then I looked up and saw the words,  “Are you an angry Korean American adoptee? So are we!” I called the number on the tear-off sheet, and became aware of the history of HOLT International, which was founded in Oregon and was the first adoption agency to facilitate international transracial adoptions on a big level. I spent some time learning about the agency’s roots in Cold War politics, and interviewed four women who’d been adopted through Holt. My editor at the time was a really smart intuitive guy who had his own history in this realm—his Black serviceman father had married his Japanese mother in Japan after the war—and so he’d lived through a lot of similar experiences growing up in rural Oregon after coming from Japan at an early age, being orphaned and then raised by white foster parents. So we just had the voices of these adoptees, and I didn’t get in the way—the story was in their own words, like what you and I are doing, with moving portraits of them. And it was before social media, so no one posted it, but my email was at the bottom of every story, and the next morning I was deluged with responses from transracial international adoptees and from adoptive parents. The response from adoptees was, “This is my experience, appreciate this.” But the adoptive parents were furious. “How dare they! How dare you? We rescued these kids. These ingrates!”

That piece is what really changed my entire view of adoption. It was David’s experience, of course, that prompted me to write this book. But my background came from that original story. It’s been almost 20 years, and I don’t think that much has changed. Do you?

I don’t see the change. I’m neither adopted nor the scholar you are, but I don’t see any evidence of it. I just still see a lot of pain. I’m not even sure—I guess it remains to be seen—how well open adoption works.

There’s no regulation. And there’s still resistance to the idea that it’s traumatic. An academic with personal experience with adoption once told me he didn’t believe there was evidence that birthmothers suffer. “Where’s the evidence/ Show me the evidence?” Which I presented.

This was recent?

Yes, four years ago. My internal response was, well, show me the evidence that people in Middle Passage suffered. We can’t interview them, but of course they suffered. I didn’t say that, but it was my knee jerk reaction. I did present the evidence.

There was a Cyprus-born British researcher, Sir John Triseliotis, who studied adoption for decades, and his research shows that among women who had reunited with their children there was an enormous sense of relief and decreased feelings of guilt, and for adoptees there was an enormous reduction in anxiety and depression.

Many readers are likely to be shocked by much of what they read in American Baby. And many will think much of what shocked them either no longer exists or, if it in fact no longer exists, could never happen again. How would you respond to them? 

We’re still battling this ongoing rubric with which we see this social engineering experiment.

In what way do the lessons of American Baby pertain to, or serve as a cautionary tale to, the artificial reproduction industry, which remains almost entirely unregulated?

This is just another realm of the unregulated creation of new families, and, if you want my honest opinion, maybe one of the reasons people don’t want to look too deeply at adoption is because they may be consumers or future consumers of artificial reproductive technology, so they’ve got their heads down, they’re not interested.

So much of your subject matter is heartbreaking, traumatic, and rage-inducing. I imagine it could be overwhelming and deeply disturbing. Can you tell us about your own emotional journey in writing this?

Thank you for asking that question. I had a lot of anger. On one hand, I could channel it onto the page, but the weight of it was great. Sometimes after a day with Margaret, I’d sob in the car on the way home.

You began this project as a reporter. Do you now consider yourself an advocate or do you see that as a conflict?

No, once I became aware of the duplicity, the lying, the experimentation—it’s an impossibility as far as I’m concerned to look at this and remain unmoved or objective. It’s wrong, and yes, I’m a journalist, but in this case, I have a duty and a moral right to speak out and draw attention. Someone referred to me as an activist, which I’m not, but I am an advocate. One of my first jobs was as a reporter at the Associated Press in Baltimore, and if you reported on something you had to get a critic from the other side—and I didn’t really find critics—how could you be supportive of experiments on ten-minute old babies? How could you be supportive of adult men and women not having access to their original documents? Their own history? How could you be supportive of that?

What would you most hope could come out of having told this story? 

I would hope the larger public recognizes this hidden chapter in social history is still happening, still in plain sight. The legacy of secret or closed adoptions persists today for so many people and their families, and not just the adopted men and women—also their birth and adoptive parents; their spouses; their children; their siblings. At the end of the day—not even at the end of the day—family matters, who you are matters, your kin matters. That’s why we have DNA testing, why genealogy is the second most trafficked realm of the Internet, after porn. There’s a natural curiosity to know where you come from, what your origin story is, what your first days were like.Gabrielle Glaser is a New York Times bestselling author and journalist whose work on mental health, medicine, and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, and many other publications. BEFORE YOU GO…

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

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It’s not hyperbole to say I’ve never seen a book quite like Megan Culhane Galbraith’s extraordinary hybrid work of creative nonfiction, The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book. Experimental in form and structure, it’s memoir, but at the same time a striking visual art project, an intellectual inquiry into the nature of memory, and a frightful window on the failures and brutalities of the American system of adoption.

While each aspect is equally compelling, the emotional heart of the book is the origin story of a girl who had three mothers before she was half a year old and the experience of the woman she grew to be, who, only during her own pregnancy, was overwhelmed by need to know her history and learn about her first mother.

It’s written in a powerful voice that can veer from playful to mournful and lingers on wonder and curiosity. The language at turns is discursive, fragmented, stream of conscious, and deeply thoughtful. Although Galbraith expresses a unique sensibility, adoptees and others who have yearned to know about their origins will see themselves here. The author’s meditations on the nature of identity, her compulsion toward self-erasure, and her fear of abandonment likely will resonate.

Here, the author shares an excerpt from this exceptional book, which will be released on May 21, 2021. You can support Indie booksellers and pre-order The Guild of the Infant Saviour at bookshop.org.

BKJShe was nineteen when she gave birth to me. I’d lost my virginity when I was nineteen.

She was a Scorpio with brown hair, green/blue eyes, and fair/freckled skin. I’m a Scorpio with brown hair, green/blue eyes, and fair/freckled skin.

On the pages, in her halting and nearly unintelligible penmanship, I was struck by how much I identified with her. Even her handwriting resembled mine.

TALENTS, HOBBIES, SPECIAL INTERESTS
very organized
good singing voice
interest in the arts, dancing (ballet + modern)
acting, writing poetry, reading

FUTURE ASPIRATIONS
To be a magazine editor

———

It is incredible how few concrete details I needed to feel connected across time. We shared a mutual love of books, music, and dance. I’d begged my parents to let me play the violin beginning in fourth grade. I’d danced with The Royal Academy of Dance up until high school, written poetry, fiction, and essays, and spent so much time reading in solitude that my adoptive mother once asked, “Honey, don’t you want to go outside and play?”

On my father’s side, she’d listed no age, just that he was Caucasian and English. He was more than six feet tall with blue eyes, blond hair, and fair skin. In the sections for his interests and aspirations she noted:

TALENTS, HOBBIES, INTERESTS: ?
FUTURE ASPIRATIONS: ?

I began to think about who I was at nineteen—a virgin for starters—and how incomprehensible it would have been to become a mother when my own future felt like it was just beginning.

———

MANNER IN WHICH PLANS FOR THE CHILD’S FUTURE WERE MADE BY THE PARENTS. REASONS FOR CHILD BEING PLACED FOR ADOPTION:

Since the birth mother is unwed, she is receiving no support from the birth father and thinks it best for the child to be adopted by a stable, loving family to best offer the child all the advantages she is unable to give.

———

She didn’t receive prenatal care until she was five months pregnant according to the paperwork. And he was no saint, but she also seemed forthright and unashamed.

———

DRUGS TAKEN DURING PREGNANCY

Alcohol:                                        AMOUNT: an occasional beer                                        HOW OFTEN: once/twice a week

Marijuana:                                    WHEN: first 4–5 months                                                 AMOUNT: total about 1 oz.

Cigarettes:                                   WHEN: throughout                                                          AMOUNT: 10–15/daily

———

She’d updated the paperwork within the last ten years. Her mother, my grandmother, had taken a drug called Diethylstilbestrol (DES) during her pregnancy. DES was a synthetic form of estrogen given to women between 1940 and 1971 to prevent miscarriage. The daughters of women who used DES were forty times more likely to develop cancers of the cervix and vagina.

Medical terminology deemed them “DES Daughters.”

The drug’s side effects were known to skip a generation, meaning, they may have affected me—or worse my unborn child. Late-onset and irregular periods were one side effect for DES granddaughters like me. I didn’t get my period until I was sixteen: my biological mother got hers at around eleven. Other risks included infertility, cancer, congenital disabilities, and “fewer live births.”

I worked myself into a frenzy about this. I called my doctor; I demanded they double-check the health of my baby. I went to the library and researched the effects and side effects of DES. After I’d calmed myself, what struck me most was that my birth mother had cared enough to update my file.

One of my biggest fears about finding her was that she wouldn’t want to be found. But here she’d left a medical clue in these papers that signaled she was thinking about me. She’d left a Hansel and Gretel-like trail of breadcrumbs through the woods, as if willing me to find her.

So I did.

Megan 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. 

Paul Kimball, a 58-year-old successful musician and actor, has wrestled throughout his life with feelings of abandonment after having been adopted. He was born to a young interracial couple, his father an Armenian immigrant from Iraq and his mother a professional cellist from California. His father wasn’t prepared to marry, and his mother may have been fearful of scandalizing her parents—this was the early 1960s, when having a baby out of wedlock was still taboo and interracial coupling still stigmatized—and they planned to abort the baby. It’s not clear what led to a change of heart, but they soon split up, and his mother relinquished Paul when he was one-week-old. He lived in foster care for the next four and a half months, and on his first birthday he was adopted by a loving couple.

To examine and give voice to his feelings, he’s written a memoir, We Are All Human Beings: An Adoptee Ponders. It’s an especially apt title because, like many adoptees, Kimball has more questions than answers. He explores the joys, heartbreaks, and complications of reuniting with his birth parents and grapples with the emotional consequences.

Here, he offers an excerpt, Chapter 12, which not only describes his initial connection with his birthmother, Wendy. It also expresses his passion for the cello, as evidenced by a tribute to the renowned cellist Jacqueline Du Pre. He wrote the tribute to Du Pre many years before he’d learned about his birthmother and before he’d discovered she, too, played the cello.

—BKJ

Excerpt from We Are All Human Beings

By Paul Kimball

For about a week I called the two numbers. As I recall, the New York number had a strange answering machine message. The L.A. number would just ring without any response. Try to imagine what this feels like. If she answers, I am going to speak with my birth mother for the first time. Perhaps this isn’t her, just a coincidence. I don’t know what to expect. I am so frightened. Once she answers there is no turning back. Both of our lives are changed in an instant. She has no idea that I am trying to contact her. I planned out my opening remarks carefully.

And then she answered.

It was the L.A. number. The one that kept ringing. This is how I remember the phone call. Luckily, I wrote this in my journal back in 2000.

Birthmother Wendy: “Hello.”

Me: “Hello. My name is Paul Kimball and I am with musicians local 189 in Stockton, California. I am looking for a professional cellist named Wendy Brennan.” With this information, she could hang up on me but always be able to find me.

Wendy: This is she. Later she told me that she thought that she was being asked to play chamber music.

Pause, pause, pause.

Me: “I don’t quite know how to say this but does the name Frank Novak mean anything to you?”

Pause.

Wendy: “It might.” It might? Does this mean that she knows who I am?

I don’t remember the next exchange.

Wendy: “Are you of Armenian descent?” She knows who I am, and I know who she is. No one but my birth mother would ask that question out of the blue.

Me: “Yes I am half Armenian.”

Wendy: “Oh my God. Where were you born?”

Me: “In Fort Bragg California, November of 1962. I think we both know who we are.”

We talked on the phone for three hours.

It was so friendly. I was ecstatic! I have never felt so complete in my entire life. A hole had been filled. I had a new friend. If that is how you describe being reunited! We were both classical musicians. We both played in orchestras. We were both nice and friendly. I had a birth sister who did not know of me. I was married with two daughters. She had performed in Carnegie Recital Hall as a soloist to good reviews. She had lived with Nadia Boulanger, the esteemed teacher of composers and studied cello with Paul Tortelier, the great cellist. She had been in the American Symphony under Leopold Stokowski and played in Broadway Pit Orchestras. I conduct orchestra pits for musicals. She had a New York accent. She split her time between L.A. and New York. I loved this woman. “The capacity for love had expanded.” She had a 31-year-old daughter who attended Juilliard as a child flute player and was involved as an actress in T.V., movies, and commercials. I act in plays and was even in a dopey local T.V. commercial in Stockton that aired constantly. People still talk about it on occasion.

We decided to meet as soon as possible. We had thought of a halfway point, but I wanted to drive down to her apartment in L.A.

I was teaching elementary music at T.C.K. at the time. I updated my fellow teachers on the story. I will always love them for their compassion.

The night before I left, I visited my adopted parents, Lorna and Bob. I held their hands and told them that I loved them. I didn’t want to hurt them, but I had to do this. They assured me that it was okay. Mom said that she didn’t feel threatened. From my journal in 2000. “I love them so much! They are my best friends. I tell them everything. I never want to lose them, and I get scared I might. I also don’t want to lose Wendy and Raya (birth sister). Both families are very important to me as are the Mullers (In-laws). I need all of them. I love Jeanette, Seth and Amy. I love Dominee, Alyssa and Ashley. These are my family members and I love them.”

It was time to drive to L.A. That week I had been only getting about 4 hours of sleep a night. The evening before the drive I went to bed at 11:45 p.m. and woke up at 3:30 a.m. I copied down my story of Scream as well as a tribute to Jacqueline Du Pre that I had put in my journal in 1987. This was 13 years before meeting Wendy. When I wrote this, Jacqueline Du Pre had just passed away. I had no clue that my birth mother was a cellist.

The following was written 32 years earlier.

Reflections on Jacqueline Du Pre – October 23^rd, 1987

Jackie died on October 19^th of the ill fated disease, Multiple Sclerosis. She was 43, I believe. She has been and probably always will be my favorite musician, the one that I listen to more than anyone else. I consider her one of my teachers even though we never met.

I first heard of her when some fellow Berkeley High students were talking. They had seen and heard Schubert’s Trout Quintet on PBS. Jacky, Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zuckerman, Daniel Barenboim and Zubin Mehta were the players! Later when Rebecca (Strauss) and I were in the Berkeley Public Library we came across a Du Pre record and Becca said: “Paul. Check this out. I’ve never heard the record but you will love Du Pre.” When we listened to it I felt almost sick with emotion. I was struck by the absolute sincerity of her playing. She expressed so much that there was simply no way to miss it. Her tone is golden. It is her pure soul with nothing to disturb it. Every time I hear her, I am inspired, embarrassed by my own inhibitions in music, bewildered, determined, determined to not miss the wonders of life as I pass through it. Her second recording of the Elgar Cello Concerto is one of the greatest musical accomplishments. In some of my most emotional moments I have often felt them by reliving her performance of this piece. The opening theme after the great introduction represents so much painful longing. It reaches into space, searching, searching for something. To me it is so lonely. Perhaps I relate this to the loneliness I felt in college. I often remember going for long walks and thinking about this theme with her yearning tone and feeling sad, yet expressing the sadness, not just holding it in. Lorna would be proud!

In my own playing I hear her traits. Trying to achieve a personal tone, letting the wonderful stresses in phrases come alive, but most of all, trying to be absolutely free and deeply sincere in expression.

Thank you Jackie. I love you and am grateful for your greatness. May you rest in peace having lived a difficult but important life.

Little did I know that in a way, I was paying tribute to my lost birth mother; my original musician, cellist. I felt sick with emotion listening to Jacqueline Du Pre but didn’t know the full reason. How could I? I was remembering Wendy’s playing from before I was born.Paul Kimball is an active musician, choir teacher, French hornist, and actor in Stockton, California. As a baby, he lived in foster care and was eventually adopted by a liberal Berkeley family in the 1960s. He is married to Dr. Dominee Muller-Kimball. They have two daughters, Ashley and Alyssa. Look for his book here. BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles 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.

Searching for Mom, an award-winning memoir by Sara Easterly, pulls back the veil on adoption, revealing its harsher side—the primal wound that leaves a child desperate to feel worthy, to belong, to be good enough. Easterly was adopted at two days old, born to an adolescent girl coerced to relinquish her in a “grey-market” adoption. She had difficulty attaching to her adoptive mother and struggled with feelings of abandonment by her birthmother, which spurred an impossible quest for perfection, a crisis of faith and trust, and a battle with overwhelming emotions. She felt broken and cast off, unwanted. To protect her adoptive mother’s feelings, she suppressed her deep longing for and curiosity about her birthmother, putting her own needs and desires last to keep a peace, until finally, when she was nearly 40, she admitted her desire to search. Her adoptive mother reacted with a cocktail of emotions including fear, anger, and defensiveness. And then everything changed, when she revealed that in fact Sara had been wanted by her birth mother, causing Sara to reevaluate everything she’d come to believe. In Searching for Mom, Easterly traces her search for, and reunion with, her birthmother, the strain it placed on her relationship with her adoptive mother, and the complicated bond she shared with both women. More than a search tale, it’s a story about love, faith, and spiritual transformation. Here, the author shares an excerpt from her compelling memoir—its first chapter.

—BKJ

Taking Flight

We who are strong have an obligation to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.

—Romans 15:1 (ESV)

Monday morning. I’d flown home to Seattle, back from Denver long enough to toss dirty clothes out of their suitcases and start a load of laundry. While my two daughters reacquainted with their dolls and Magna-Tiles, I recalled my mom’s response when I’d told her that I planned to return to Denver for another visit the following week.

“Oh. I’m not sure I’ll still be here then, Sara.” Mom started to say goodbye.

I cut her off.

“No. I’ll see you again.” I smiled, trying to pretend this was any other farewell. Trying to convince her—convince myself—that this wasn’t really The End. There was no way Mom was dying. I’d been fabricating this kind of confidence about her life for the last five years.

But goodbye was in Mom’s eyes. Goodbye was in her embrace, weak as it was, even though I’d grown accustomed to “air hugs”—lest I spread germs to her highly susceptible lungs and body.

Suddenly, I felt sure of nothing. I faked my way back to life-as-usual on the plane ride home, barely able to process anything my children were saying. I was Mama-on-Autopilot, dragging carseats off the plane, lugging weary bodies into the car and then inside the house, washing airplane crud off tiny hands. Not that any of this was unusual. Numbed-out mom dutifully attending to the needs of small people while furtively fixating on a swirling emotional storm was one of my specialties.

I needed to talk to someone so I called a close friend. Heather had been through this herself, when her mother died a few summers earlier.

“You’re back in Seattle?” she asked skeptically, confirming my unease.

“Yes, but I’ll go back to Denver again next week,” I said. “I told my mom I’m going to go back again next Monday.”

After an awkward pause, Heather said, “I hesitate to tell you this, but the end can go pretty fast.”

“Faster than a week?”

“I’m sure it’s different for everyone,” she said. “I just know it went really fast for my mom. I wasn’t prepared for that.”

Unsettled, I called my sister for reassurance.

“I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s been a change since you left,” Amy said.

Even though we’d been home for less than an hour, I moved full throttle, rebooking a flight back to Denver that would leave in two hours. After dropping Violet and Olive off at a friend’s house, I sped my way through childcare and scheduling plans while en route to the airport—calling my in-laws, the preschool teacher, babysitters, and my closest friends and neighbors.

For a moment, I paused from the grim matter at hand to applaud myself. As a new parent I’d learned about the importance of a support village—something often lacking in this isolating age without live-in grandparents or “aunties” next door, and thanks to a fleeing-from-church culture. Mindful of this, and in lieu of in-city grandparents and church-based community, I’d deliberately worked to surround my family with our own “village.” Look at those efforts pay off! I told myself.

All the week’s plans came together as I rounded my way into the parking garage at SeaTac airport. My husband Jeff, who’d been on a business trip, would land in Seattle within thirty minutes of my flight’s departure out of Seattle. That left just the right amount of overlap for me to hand him the car keys, tell him he’d find the car in row 5J of the parking garage, text him the week’s schedule for the kids, and kiss his stunned face on the cheek.

As an event planner by trade, I’d always been a master of logistics. But I usually spent months working on each event. This rushed effort surpassed anything I’d attempted before. Did I have help on my side? I wondered, and then caught a flit of an answer: Maybe this is the kindness God doles out when your mom is dying. In any case, the fact that everything lined up so effortlessly and would be so gentle on my daughters, made me think that I was flying in the right direction. I just hoped I’d get there in time.

More importantly, I hoped to be up for the challenge. Mom had been preparing for her death for the last four months, but that didn’t mean I had.

Sure, I’d read Final Gifts: Understanding the Special Awareness, Needs, and Communications of the Dying by Maggie Callanan and Patricia Kelley. I’d even bought copies for my dad, sister, aunt, and grandma. I’d read about a dying mother who kept appealing to her family with travel metaphors, but whose family didn’t grasp that her last request wasn’t literal, which created a lot of unnecessary anguish for everyone during her final days.1 As a writer and reader, looking for meaning was right in my wheelhouse. I figured I’d be equipped to decipher any metaphors Mom might employ.

I’d also found out that dying people often converse with someone significant from their past who has already died, and how upsetting it can be for them if they aren’t believed. According to Callanan and Kelley, family members are the most qualified to figure out any of the hidden messages that could come from one of these conversations.2

When I was in my twenties, my deceased grandfather visited me during a dream while I slept on the pull-out sofa at my grandma’s place. It was a comforting dream, but the intensity of it began to pull me from sleep. My adored Papa was right there, I knew, and I fervently wanted to see him again. As my eyes slowly opened, I watched Papa’s translucent shape, lying right next to mine, evaporate. The mystical moment, too, dissipated. For the next two days I pondered talking to Mom about it. I wanted her to help me understand this encounter I’d had with her father, but she was a self-described “fundamentalist Christian,” and I figured she’d judge my spiritual experience as “New Age nonsense.” When I finally worked up my courage and recounted the story, though, Mom urged me to call Grandma.

“She’s been waiting for a sign from Papa,” she said, “She’ll want to know he’s at peace.”

Mom had helped me decipher Papa’s hidden message, and I, in turn, planned to help her. Maybe there’s more mystery around death and dying than we realize. I planned to be open to it, anyway. As Callanan and Kelley had said, “We can best respond to people who experience the presence of someone not alive by expecting it to happen.”3

Expectant or not, this was mostly practical book learning—savory knowledge that fed my brain and my propensity as an adoptee to believe in far-fetched stories. My emaciated heart, meanwhile, beat with a hankering for more.

Because my heart knew that I’d been afraid to face the reality of Mom’s declining health. I’d been too scared to speak important things that needed saying. I passed over vulnerable opportunities with jokes, denial, indifference, feigned confidence, forced control. I’d locked my feelings in a thick protective casing so I wouldn’t have to deal with whatever I was supposed to feel when I thought about the rest of my life without my mom—while wrestling with memories of our last two tumultuous years.

Deep down, did I ever even accept her as my mother? I would miss her for sure. Perhaps more for my daughters, only four and five, who wouldn’t get a chance to truly know her. But would it profoundly affect me when she was gone?

I felt so detached as I stared at the grey clouds outside the airplane window. But I’d vowed to give Mom myfinal gift: the peaceful death she deserved, the death a Good Adoptee⁴ owed her, the death I felt I needed to give her to prove my appreciation and loyalty.

I reached under the seat for my laptop and began compiling family photos for her memorial slideshow. I planned to leverage my event-planning skills to pull together the funeral she never would have dared to dream up.

Turbulence began to agitate the plane—the tell-tale sign that the Rocky Mountains were behind us as we approached Denver. I gripped the arm rests of my seat as the plane jerked in the sky.

Pushing away my feelings to give Mom what she needed was my training ground for becoming a parent. Ignoring my needs helped me get the job done: Making dinner when I’d rather be lounging on the couch devouring a good book … setting aside my own upsets or fears in order to soothe equally intense ones for my girls … hiding my true feelings in the face of hopes and disappointments. This all served me as a mother, didn’t it?

When I dared to look at the truth, I knew it served me as a daughter, too. It’s how I’d learned to stay safe, keep Mom close. Dutifully choosing her needs over mine ensured that she’d never leave me. Surely that’s where everything went so wrong, where I’d messed it all up, with my first mother.

Only Mom was about to leave me, too.

Images of being severed from her approached as fast as the plane slammed onto the tarmac. I thought about the pictures I’d just looked at—Mom’s glowing face, delighting in me, proud of me. Would I ever exude that much love for my daughters, the way Mom overflowed with it for us? Could I be as present as she always seemed to be?

Remember her manipulation and lies, though, I reminded myself. Her jealousy. Her mean streak. The last two years of mother-daughter turmoil because I broke the silence, stopped pretending … Those all told a different story.

A story I didn’t want to end this way.

A story I didn’t want to end at all.

I didn’t want Mom to die, and I definitely didn’t want our “us” to conclude before I could find the words my heart longed to say. I wanted to grow, become the person I yearned to be. A daughter—and a mother—who didn’t act out of obligation, a girl whose heart wasn’t unflappable, a human who dared to feel.

If only it were that easy.

© 2019 by Sara Easterly. All rights reserved.Sara Easterly is an adoptee and award-winning author of books and essays. Her memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the Illumination Book Awards, among many other honors. Her essays and articles have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Red Letter Christians, Feminine Collective, Her View From Home, Godspace, and others. Find her online at saraeasterly.com, on Facebook, on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor, and on Twitter @saraeasterly.

Read her essay on Severance here.

By Brad EwellI’m just not sure where to start. I’m dumbfounded by feeling your presence, knowing you left this world 19 years before I knew you existed. When she handed me the angel you made from a hymnal, she said she didn’t have anything that had been yours, but she had something you’d made. It was hard for her to give up because it was crafted by your hands. She said when she felt the impulse to release it, her first thought was “come on, not that.” But the impulse only grew stronger, so she gave in. When she handed the angel to me, I had an urge to open it right away and see what hymn it was folded to. I have no idea why I felt compelled, but I did it. I opened it. Immediately I lost my breath and bearings. There in front of my eyes was a clear message from you: “Waiting and Watching” in bold at the top of the page. It felt like if I just knew the right spot to look, I’d see you staring down at me smiling. I know what you had to do left a hole in your heart for the rest of your life. My hope is that for the past 20 years you’ve been able to watch me grow as a husband, father, and man. I hope you know it’s OK and there’s nothing I hold against you. All I could do was carry the angel back to my car, look up, and say thank you. I felt a peace come over me, like being wrapped in a warm blanket. I believe one day we’ll see each other again and finally be able to embrace—the hole in both of our hearts gone forever. Until then, please just keep waiting and watching.Brad Ewell lives in Texas with his wife and three children. In 2019 he became a late discovery adoptee after taking a home DNA test. He feels like he’s still very much in the middle of this journey and enjoys writing to help organize his thoughts and better understand his own story.   BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles 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.
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By Brad EwellTwo days after I learned I’d been adopted, we met to talk about the secret you’d kept from me. Looking back, I was completely unprepared for that conversation. I was still in shock from learning you weren’t my biological parents and that you lied by omission about this my entire life. What follows is what I wish I’d have known to express then in that first conversation. I didn’t know then that would be our only conversation about this. Had I been able to say these things then, I think it would have made it easier on all of us.

I don’t regret being adopted. I’ve had a great life; in reality I’ve been spoiled. You did a good job raising me to be the man I am today. You made me feel loved and supported. You taught me the importance of hard work and perseverance. You showed me the simple pleasure gained from working with my hands. You also guided me toward an honest life where I stand up for what I believe in without worrying much about the personal costs. When I look at my life now, I don’t see how I would have ended up where I am today if you hadn’t adopted me. I’ve got a great wife, wonderful kids, and a life I love.

But none of this changes my need to know who I am and where I come from. Searching for and reuniting with my biological family hasn’t been something I did as a rejection of you or as a result of some failure in your parenting. No matter how much you ignore my need to know, it will never disappear from inside of me. I simply have to understand who I am, and because of adoption, there’s more to that story than who raised me.

As I trace my roots, I begin to understand why I am the way I am. I still see your hand in molding me, but I also see the biological foundation of my attitudes and behaviors. I also know where some of my struggles came from. You tried to shape me to be more outgoing; maintain outward appearances; and adopt a go-along-to-get along mindset at home, but biologically it wasn’t who I was, so we clashed over these expectations.

Discovering my lineage and meeting my biological relatives makes me feel more like a whole person than I ever have. I’ve seen myself reflected back to me in others—my rebelliousness and personal style; my difficulty in going with the flow; my mischievous sense of humor; and my deep introversion. Since I’ve met my biological father and heard stories about my biological mother, these traits all make sense to me now. Before, it just felt like I was doing something wrong.

While I’m not sorry I was adopted, I deeply regret that you kept my adoption secret from me for 48 years. Looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I can see the places where I was trying to force myself into a mold that was never meant for me. While for the most part I’ve made peace with the time and energy I invested trying to be someone I’m not, I likely will always have nagging questions about what might have been had I stayed truer to who I biologically was. It’s still hard to look back on the internal struggles I had—feeling like I’d failed in some way for not fitting into the family mold. It makes me sad to think about the fuller relationship I believe we could have had if I’d known the truth.

In the end, what I hope you understand is that my need to know where I come from has everything to do with me and nothing to do with you. It’s not a result of some failing on your part. No amount of extra love or attention would have made my need to know who I am go away. From talking to others in similar situations I’ve learned that the need to understand our heritage is an inescapable desire many of us feel. How ironic that you told me several times “blood is thicker than water,” yet here we are with you now wanting to ignore that. You’re still my parents; you’re the only parents I’ve ever known; but I still need a connection to my roots to feel intact .

I hope this will all make sense to you. Please understand there’s nothing about my search that threatens our relationship, and in the end all I hope to do is become a better person through the things I learn.

Your Son,

Brad

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By Lisa CollinsWhen you were but two years old, I came into being.

We were unaware of one another’s presence, but we co-existed.

Separated by a thousand miles, yet side by side on this planet, we grew.

We were born alone, no siblings with whom to form that unique bond.

We were given a name and assigned a family.

But somewhere out there, just beyond reach, the other was there.

I don’t know why we were allowed to live for more than 50 years without one another, and why we weren’t permitted the connection so many take for granted.

Were we somehow assigned the payment for sins of the fathers?

Why were we destined to miss out on the comfort, the familiarity, of another human connected by blood, intertwined for life?

We will never know. We will always wonder.

We will never get that time back.

But from this point forward, we now know.

There is another person, no longer unreachable and distant.

A person with whom we share blood, and genetics, and values.

Silly little things, like a preference for rice.

Difficulty swallowing.

And a dark, easy tan.

And big, important things,

like stubbornness and independence.

Fierce loyalty.

Refusal to follow illogical rules.

And a smartass sense of humor.

We will never again be without.

No one can ever take this away.

We have less time left to be siblings than we had to be without.

So I choose to acknowledge, honor, and place immense value on this fact:

For the rest of my time on this planet, I will be

Finally, and forever,

Your sister.

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By Chris WodickaIn a few weeks, it will be the 30th anniversary of my becoming a U.S. citizen. Even now, I can’t begin to tell you exactly what was required or how long it took. My adoptive parents successfully navigated that process for me when I was just a child, several years after my adoption from South Korea. We celebrated as a family afterward, but I didn’t understand what it all meant at the time. Today, I see more clearly how that piece of paper has shaped my life and what I have been allowed to take for granted. As a citizen, I have been able to vote in elections year after year my entire adult life. I have been able to work, get a U.S. passport, and receive federal financial aid. I have not lived in fear of deportation.

Other transnational adoptees have not been as fortunate. In many cases, the steps required for naturalization were not clearly communicated by the government or adoption agencies to adoptive parents. Today, it is estimated that thousands of adults who were adopted as children lack U.S. citizenship. These adoptees fall into a loophole from the Child Citizenship Act (CCA) that was signed into law in 2001. The CCA granted citizenship to many adoptees who were still minors at the time of enactment but excluded others, including adult adoptees born before 1983. The bipartisan Adoptee Citizenship Act of 2019, which would close much of the loophole, has been sponsored by Congressman Adam Smith of Washington and introduced in Congress, where it awaits committee action and a floor vote in the House. This legislation would grant citizenship to more than 50 deported adoptees and other adoptees without citizenship who are still in the U.S. It would also provide the citizenship that all intercountry adoptees are entitled to as the children of U.S. citizens, end the unequal treatment between adopted and biological children of U.S. citizens, and allow deported adoptees to come home, reunite with their families, and rebuild their lives.

Due to the widespread erasure of adoptee voices, many people’s understanding of adoption comes largely from the perspective of adoption agencies and adoptive parents. This mainstream, mostly positive narrative frames adoption around “families” and “love.” In contrast, for many adoptees, the experience is more complicated and often traumatic. These feelings can be acute and front of mind. In other cases, these traumas linger in the background, shaping how we perceive our place in the world: in our families, friendships, and sense of belonging. They can resurface without warning.

Even though I have been struggling with my own Korean American identity and adoptee experience, I was largely ignorant of the issue of adoptee citizenship. While I have supported other immigration measures in the past, I did not learn of the Adoptee Citizenship Act until earlier this year. Finally, I read and heard more stories of deported adoptees who’ve been forced to confront this other form of separation. As I’ve tried to learn more, I’ve come to better appreciate how U.S. policy falls far short. After all, many of our fellow Americans—both adoptees and other immigrants—cannot fully participate in U.S. life, even though this may be the only country they have known.

I believe issues of families and belonging are always paramount, and our current crises have only magnified this urgency. During this pandemic, we all probably know families who are struggling with forced time apart. Holidays, birthdays, and major life milestones are conducted via Zoom or FaceTime. For adoptees who have been deported, the uncertainty of not knowing when they will next see their loved ones has been the reality since even before COVID-19. Without the Adoptee Citizenship Act, deported adoptees will remain in unfamiliar countries, separated from their families and friends, and uprooted from their homes. For those who lack access to economic relief from their country of origin or from the U.S., where can they turn? When it comes to addressing policy failures that span years, we cannot completely atone for the injustices of the past. All we can do is act. With the bill expiring on December 10, it’s up to all of us to come together and demand our elected representatives in Congress pass the Adoptee Citizenship Act and finally provide internationally adopted Americans with the citizenship we were promised.Chris Wodicka is a transnational transracial Korean American adoptee. He is a member of Adoptees for Justice and lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Adoptees for Justice is an intercountry adoptee-led organization whose mission is to educate, empower, and organize transracial and transnational adoptee communities to achieve just and humane adoption, immigration, and restorative justice systems. Learn more about adoptee citizenship at adopteesforjustice.org. BEFORE YOU GO…

Look on our home page for more articles about adoptees, NPEs/MPEs, 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.