adoption

Q&A with Rebecca Autumn Sansom Nancy Verrier, LMFT, became so deeply intrigued by her adoptive daughter’s response to having been relinquished that she earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology and wrote her thesis about what she called the primal wound—the trauma of separating a child from its mother. Her book, The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child, published in 1993, is in its 15th printing and has been translated into seven languages. Its message resonated with filmmaker and adoptee Rebecca Autumn Sansom who, along with her biological mother, Jill Hawkins, PhD, have produced a powerful documentary starring its author and exploring the theory that the trauma of relinquishment must be acknowledged before healing can occur and examining the cultural shift the book kickstarted. Reckoning with the Primal Wound is the first feature-length documentary about relinquishment trauma that explores the perspective of both adoptee and biological mother and features, in addition to Verrier, psychologists David Brodzinsky, PhD, and Amanda Baden, PhD.  In September 2022, the film premiered at The Catalina Film Festival in Long Beach, California. It’s since been seen in dozens of screenings to enthusiastic audiences of adoptees and others, has been accepted into 20 film festivals. Here, we talk with the filmmaker about the genesis of the film, it’s creation, and its reception. Click image to read more.

By Hannah Andrews My glasses weren’t rose-colored, but they were the wrong prescription. I see adoption more clearly now, and in previously overlooked places–often hiding in plain sight. I recently rewatched “The Truman Show,” a 1998 film lauded for its artsy take on free will, privacy, and our perception of reality. It both predicted and parodied the reality TV explosion. It also was a subtle, if unintentional, jab at the closed adoption system. The lead character, Truman Burbank (Jim Carey), is an adoptee. Truman was “chosen” pre-birth from a pool of unplanned pregnancies and legally adopted by a corporation (the TV studio). His entire life was fabricated and filmed—fake parents, a fake town, and a fake world that is actually an enormous domed production studio. As cracks work their way into the facade, Truman begins to question, and quest for truth (True Man) ensues. You see it, right? Chosen. Adopted. Fabricated. Search for truth. Yeah, I missed all that for over two decades. In my defense, adoption was not the focus of the movie. I suspect it was just a handy plot device. (Adoption so often is, but that’s another essay. ) Maybe the writer was typing up the tale and thought, “How could this character have zero clue about his real identity his whole life? Ooh—I will make him adopted!” The audience doesn’t learn of the adoption until well into the film. It’s a catch-all explanation. Like Truman, I’m an adoptee. Mine was never a secret, but other truths eluded me, and I was mostly okay with that. “I’ve always known I was adopted but never wanted to search.”  This was my mantra, repeated with an eye roll for nearly fifty years. Mostly, I just wanted control of the narrative. Long before DNA tests were a thing, people—friends, relatives, random strangers—constantly questioned my lack of search, my ethnicity, and sometimes even my lack of questions. I accepted my false reality. The identity quest wasn’t for me, but if other adoptees felt the need to search, I didn’t criticize. At least, not out loud. Unless you count my older brother, who found his family of origin when we were in our twenties. His green eyes sparkled as he described meeting his biological sister and how she looked like him. “Can you imagine?” he gushed. I seethed. Imagine was all I could ever do.

Lisa “LC” Coppola, a domestic adoptee through the department of children and family, is a mental health counselor who has years of expertise counseling adult adoptees and others touched in any way by adoption. A heartfelt advocate for those relinquished, she’s also a therapist and, in collaboration with Boston Post Adoption Resources, is the creator of the Voices Unheard: Real Adoptee Stories speaker and writing workshop series. A writer from the Boston area, she often explores themes concerning relinquishment and addiction. Now, she’s created a resource to guide therapists and peers who work with adoptees. Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees is a 52-week journal with prompts based on core themes that emerge in therapy and a script to help group facilitators. The journal can be used by adult adoptees on their own or under the care of a therapist, by therapists as a tool in their practice, and by peer-led support group moderators. How would you describe this journal and what makes it unique? The book is a guided journal, yes, but it is so much more than this. It offers 52 guided writing prompts based on common themes in adoption that we see clinically at Boston Post Adoption Resources, a nonprofit mental health agency. But the prompts are framed with resources including a post adoption vocabulary section and suggested reading, so the individual writer has access to knowledge if they want to do a deeper dive of study. The combination of prompts and resources also assists mental health professionals who might not be well versed in adoption-related challenges or therapies. Most graduate-level programs only spend eight minutes on the topic of adoption, believe it or not. So therapists can use this journal to become more informed about adoption loss and then as an aid to guide adoptees out of the fog—meaning out of the denial of the complex trauma of their adoptee experience. Probably the part I am most excited about is where I include detailed instructions for adoptee volunteers—peers who might want to coordinate peer-led support groups. The instructions cover how to establish a group and how to organize weekly meetings using the journal prompts as themes and assignments, and even include a script to make the idea of running a meeting less daunting and more do-able.

Adoption is a psychological barrier. Not knowing how or why you got there, it feels like you are forced to live your life in a bubble, chained to the ground that belongs to someone else. Inside your head, your brain feels like it’s being restricted, with a thick invisible fog that’s anchored at the base of your skull with an axe. Physically your voice has been stolen from you by society and held to ransom. Your heart feels crushed with grief and loss. Your perception of life is skewed into one that others expect you to have. Your abilities and life skills are severely hampered, distorted, and delayed. Your identity is confused. When you finally see a way out, it’s like you’ve been drugged; your consciousness stumbles out of the fog while your body and your abilities hit against every obstacle imaginable. The only way out usually means walking through your adoptive family’s collective heart. Bloodied guilt drags behind you like a constant reminder of where you’ve come from. Waves of pain and guilt hold on to you, trying to pull you back in. The light ahead is blissful yet I feel lost, not knowing where to go or what to do next or even how to do it. The unknown is frightening but I feel compelled to breathe like it’s my first breath and take each step one at a time in hope that I will eventually find myself, wherever that may be.

At the end of each Wednesday evening writing class, the instructor gives us a prompt to write on for the following week. She instructs us to write for 20 minutes and limit editing. We need to have the piece ready to read at the next class gathering. The last prompt was to write about “a lie I told.” I’ve never been good at telling a lie, so this was a hard assignment. When I was a kid, I got caught whenever I told even a little white lie. There wasn’t any point in lying, so I stopped. It took me a few days after getting the assignment to remember a lie I had told. I needed a passport because I was planning to go to Cancun, Mexico in September 2005.  I applied and later received a letter in the mail saying my application was denied because I hadn’t submitted documentation to explain why my birth certificate was filed 14 months after my birth. The first call I made was to my mother to tell her my passport had been denied and ask if she knew why my birth certificate was filed so long after my birth. She said it must have been a clerical error and hung up. I called the town clerk’s office in the state where I’d been born. The person who took my call couldn’t help and advised me to contact the probate court. I called the court and was told to write a letter to the judge stating dates of the trip to Mexico, including the passport application denial and the reason for the denial. I was hoping the court could actually find the documentation explaining that reason. I wrote and mailed the letter the next day After this experience, I began to wonder if I was adopted, so I left some messages on adoption reunion boards with basic information, such as the year and location of my birth, hoping to connect with someone who might have some information about me. At that point, I was willing to try anything. I just wanted an answer to this mystery. I’d mentioned to my family that I might take a day off from work and go sit at the Probate court to see if I could get an answer to my letter. Then I had an idea. I’ve always gotten my medical care at the clinic in our town—the clinic where I’ve worked for years—so it occurred to me to go to the medical records department and review my chart. I spent my lunch break on August 22, 2005 reading my medical records. The first line of the last page in my chart—essentially the first page documenting my life with the Sheas—said “Adopted Baby, 4 lbs 4 oz.”  Finally, I had confirmation that I’d been adopted.

In 2016, I was living a great life, newly retired after a 35-year career in the corporate world and enjoying the extra time to indulge in travel with my beloved husband. That spring, on a whim, we decided to submit DNA tests to Ancestry.com. Privately I hoped for a miracle. I had a secret. In 1967, I’d given birth to my first-born child in an unwed mothers maternity home in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had been a typical 17-year-old high school senior with plans for the future that evaporated overnight. In the sixties, it was considered close to criminal for a girl to become pregnant with no ring on her finger. The father of my child had joined the Army, preferring Vietnam to fatherhood. After my parents discovered my shameful secret, I was covertly hurried away and placed in an institution for five months. There, I was expected to relinquish my baby immediately after giving birth to closed adoption and I was repeatedly assured my child would have a better life without me. After his birth, I was allowed to hold my son three times. My heart was permanently damaged when I handed him over the final time. The home allowed one concession—I could give my baby a crib name. I named him Jamie. *** For decades I privately grieved my son but never spoke of him. Many times, I furtively searched for Jamie but always hit a brick wall. Adoption records were still sealed in Louisiana, continuing the archaic shadow of secrecy. In October 2016, while out walking my dogs one evening, a message ‘Parent/Child Match’ popped up on my iPhone causing me to stop me in my tracts as my knees gave out from under me. After 49 long years, Jamie had found me. Who was he? Where was he? Would he hate me? How would this affect my life? My family? His family?

Louise Browne and Sarah Reinhardt created The Making of Me as a platform for conversations about all aspects of adoption. But it’s a podcast with a twist. In each episode, the hosts and their guests discuss a book about adoption. In the first season they tackled Nancy Verrier’s The Primal Wound, and now just a few episodes into their second season, they’re exploring another classic, Journey of the Adopted Self, by Betty Jean Lifton. Meet the adoptee friends who pivoted from operating an ice cream truck to ice cream to posting a popular podcast. Can you each summarize your adoption journeys? Sarah: My bio parents met in their first year of college but went their separate ways after the second semester ended; he went back to New Hampshire, and soon after, he was drafted in Vietnam. I’m not sure if he dropped out of college or what the circumstances were that he was drafted, but he never learned of the pregnancy. My bio mom kept it from her parents—weirdly, she was also adopted!—and on a plane from JFK (she was from Queens) to St. Louis where she was to go to nursing school, her water broke. There was no hiding that from her mother. She was not allowed to even hold me. I was immediately taken from her. I was placed with a foster mother for about six weeks and then adopted into my family. A few years later, they adopted a boy, and when he was five months old, they discovered they were pregnant with twins. They divorced when I was seven, and my brothers and I stayed with my dad (who remarried about five years later). My bio mom had four kids after me (and another she carried almost to term but lost after a terrible car accident)—all of whom were kept. My bio father, who died before I was able to meet him, had three kids, one from a second marriage. So I’m the oldest of seven biologically, and three from adoption. I also have three step-siblings. I met my bio mom and siblings in 1998 and stayed in touch with her until she died in 2009. I’m still in reunion with my sisters. Louise: My biological mom chose to put me up for adoption in September 1968 after leaving college when she became pregnant with me. She was 18 years old. She’d known my biological father in high school in Colorado, where they dated. From what I’ve gathered, they met up again during the holidays and I was the result of that encounter. My biological father was already engaged to his girlfriend at the time who was also pregnant previous to their encounter. My bio mom took on the journey of having me on her own. My bio dad did know about me and signed off on my adoption. I believe that the decision to relinquish me was made by my bio mother “in her right mind” because I have letters from her to family members who had asked her to consider letting them raise me. She was very insistent that I have a father figure who was strong because of her missing some of that in her childhood and she did not want to see me being raised and not be my mother. She had strong convictions on having me be with an intact family. I do think it critically changed her path. From what I know from relatives, and she may have regretted it later in life. She passed away at a young age in a drowning incident so I’ve never been able to ask her. I know who my bio dad is and who many of my family members are from knowing his name and having it confirmed on Ancestry. I have not had a reunion with them. I do stay in contact with my bio mom’s sister and cousins. My parents adopted me through an agency several days after I was born in Denver. They had one biological son and had lost a baby girl a few years prior to me in delivery. My mom could not have more children of her own. I then grew up in Littleton, Colorado

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.

Rebecca Carroll, author, cultural critical, and podcast host, was adopted at birth by a white couple and raised in a predominantly white community in rural New Hampshire, where, as the only black resident, she’d see no one who looked like her until she was six years old. Her father was a high-school art teacher and her biological mother, Tess, had been one of his students. When Tess became pregnant by her older boyfriend who lived in Boston, the teacher and his wife adopted her daughter. Growing up in this white family in this white community, she had no touchstone for what it meant to be black, no mirror of her own blackness to reflect and illuminate who she was. And worse, no one cared. Her only point of reference as a child was Easy Reader from The Electric Company, whom she fantasized was her father. When she first encountered a black person in real life—her ballet teacher—she wondered, “Did she know Easy Reader from The Electric Company? Did she go home at night to live inside the TV with him and the words and letters he carried around with him in the pockets of his jacket?” As she grew older, Carroll was aware of being seen by this teacher in a way her parents did not, yet she was also aware of the differences. “I felt small pangs of fragile awareness regarding who I might be, what my skin color might mean. There were days when I wanted to be, or believed I was, black just like Mrs. Rowland, but it also seemed as though I would have to give something up in order for that to remain true.” She was increasingly aware that unlike her teacher, she moved through the world with the “benefits afforded by white stewardship.” As a transracial adoptee, Carroll had to hurdle barrier after barrier merely to become authentically who she was always meant to be. And considering that the most formidable obstacle to her ability to truly recognize and finally claim her identity as a black woman was her family—both her adoptive parents and her white birthmother—it was an extraordinarily lonely struggle carried out by a force of one. How, isolated in an overwhelmingly white world, could she know what it meant to be black? While Carroll’s adoptive parents were largely oblivious to her need to understand, absorb, and assert her racial identity, her birthmother, Tess, aggressively denied her daughter’s racial and cultural heritage. When they began a relationship, 11-year-old Carroll was curious about and soon enamored of her mother, but learned there was a cost to the relationship. She carried that burden for a long time, making excuses and ignoring her intuition as her birthmother did everything possible to torpedo her growing attempt to construct an understanding of herself as a black woman—gaslighting her, subjecting her to blatantly racist comments, and effectively dispossessing her of the right to her own blackness. She straddled two worlds, ill-fitting in one and made to feel like an imposter in the other.

i. 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.

As 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.

I 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.

My 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 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.

I am the daughter of an adoptee. My mother, adopted from an orphanage when she was nine months old, was raised by parents who were loving, protective, and kind people. They raised my mother, a second adopted son, and their third and only biological child in a pastoral, rural setting where the kids rode horses to their one-room schoolhouse, kicked around in the surrounding woods and pasture, and lived a pretty idyllic existence. When my mother was 18 years old, she became pregnant with me. In a whirlwind of impulsive action, she married my birth certificate father, moved 2,000 miles away from home, and six months later gave birth to me. By the end of the year, she had packed me up, returned to her parents, and essentially disappeared the man I believed to be my father. Within the next twelve months, she remarried, gained two more young children, and, four years later, she and my stepfather had a daughter of their own. Amidst this chaos, I immediately began to identify myself as an outsider in the family: a sensitive and insecure child, an interloper among the three children of a man with whom I lived but hardly knew. In just a few years, I was both born of and made into a fatherless child. The psychological construct known as object relations theory has shown us the cruciality of early childhood relationships to identity formation; that is, the origins of the self emerge from exchanges between the infant and others. Originally theorized by Austrian psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, the essential idea is that the infant’s bond to the parents shapes future relationships. What this means is that the mother as a physical object is invested with emotional energy from the child and the psycho-emotional impression of the mother, the internal object, comes to represent what the infant holds in her absence. If the object formation is disrupted early in life—as, I would argue, it is with virtually all adoptees and MPE/ NPE*—the failure to form these early relationships leads to problems later in the child’s life. Object relations theory also points out that situations in adult life are shaped by and mirror familial experiences during infancy. My mother’s own adoption unquestionably caused for her a failure of identity formation leading to problems in late relationships. No doubt and with good reason, the sense of attachment and security that adoptees can, and likely do, feel carries over into adult relationships in all kinds of ways. The question is how this manifests itself. Adoption is not, by any means, the only way that this attachment disruption occurs. In fact, biological children may suffer the same disruption for a variety of reasons. The lack of attachment demonstrated by my mother in her adult relationships is not necessarily a reflection of her relationship with her adoptive parents, and not all adoptees develop in this same way. In our case, whatever the disruption my mother experienced as a child, whether the result of her late-infant adoption or some other barrier to her attachment, it severely affected her identity formation. This affected identity formation is where the intergenerational disruption of object formation can be seen most clearly.

My 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.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is not the first, and certainly won’t be the last, to pose abortion as a problem and adoption as its solution. The adoption argument has become a pillar of the anti-abortion movement’s platform. Each time the words abortion and adoption appear together in headlines, there’s a rapid and robust response from adoptees and others to counter the fallacious proposition. This time, however, Barrett’s comments have roused ire not only for their essential, objectionable content with respect to adoption, but also for the cavalier language she used to dismiss the impact giving birth has upon a woman’s health, her career, and her life. During the recent Supreme Court oral arguments concerning Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban, Barrett, an adoptive mother, not only posed adoption as a substitute for abortion, she further suggested that if the consequences and obligations of motherhood are deleterious to some women, they can simply sidestep the “problem” by taking advantage of safe-haven laws, as if dropping off a baby to a police or fire station has no repercussions to a mother or her baby. As if there were no career reverberations and no health risks. As if the wellbeing of the child were of no concern. As if it doesn’t matter that adoptees may be weary, enraged, or traumatized by having again and again to field a question that should never be posed: Would you rather have been aborted?

The return flight was most memorable. A six-month-old boy slept in my lap for 18 hours, never crying once. He was not my baby and legally no longer belonged to the woman who gave birth to him. On many papers signed by governments and agencies on opposite sides of the world, he belonged to a family in the United States. I was 19, and my thoughts and memories reeled back and forth through time. I reflected upon the experiences and challenges I had encountered as an Asian adoptee in America, and I wondered about the known and unknown possibilities his future would hold. As I thought about his journey to the other side of the world, I silently cried. Did anyone notice? No one said a word. My tears fell on and off through the course of the long night. We were flying together in limbo, he and I leaving one home on the way to another, though I felt neither place was truly ours to claim. Was this only my story? Would it be his too? In the summer of 1987, after I completed my first year of college, my adoptive parents generously sent me on the Holt Motherland tour. Holt international was an Evangelical Christian adoption agency founded by Harry Holt and his wife Bertha in 1953. Harry Holt is credited with creating the logistic and legal pathway for the intercountry adoption of Korean children to families in the United States. The Motherland tour was an effort by the Holt organization to create an opportunity for adult Korean adoptees to learn about their Korean heritage and visit their “homeland.” I did not ask to go on the tour, but when it was offered, I readily accepted. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I did not have much access to Korean culture. My parents were not the kind who celebrated or shared the beauty and culture of the country I and my two adopted siblings had come from. I recall meeting Bertha Holt on two occasions for large gatherings when I was very young. The evangelical church community my adoptive parents belonged to recruited new members throughout the Long Island, New York suburbs. Their church members adopted roughly 100 Korean children. I have a picture in my mind of us all posed in a hall with Bertha wearing a hanbok. Somewhere on Long Island, in a box of my now-deceased parents’ photos, it may be hidden. Unlike most Korean adoptees dispersed into the white American population, I was raised among many other Korean adoptees and their families. When my parents’ church devolved into a conservative, Sephardic, Kabbalistic, messianic cult, I was in first grade. I was told we do not pray to Jesus anymore. I and two of my brothers were put in its private religious school until sixth grade, where half of the children in my class were Korean adoptees. Yet we never talked about being adopted. My best friend was a Korean adoptee, as was her sister. I and my adopted siblings talked quietly, privately, about many things, but never about our lives before adoption or our families on the other side of the world. We, according to my adoptive mother, were God’s will in her life, her mission. Thus, I was named Amy Doreen—beloved gift of “God.” Amy is a common name among Korean adoptees. When I was a child, I imagined it made me special. As a teenager, I held on to the name of “love,” hoping if I embodied it, it would come to me. As I grew up, I came to find the name silly and ill-fitting. Amys were pretty, sweet, and bubbly, cherished—they were something that was not me. Inside, and occasionally outside, I was mean, cutting with words, hungry, lonely, awkward, uncomfortable in my skin, angry, and always afraid. I cursed myself, as I was cursed at, and felt cursed. Being “God’s gift” was always a chain.

When 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 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.