essay

Once upon a time a little girl was born in a charity hospital in Hell’s Kitchen to an unwed mother. Her name was Gabriella Herman and she was adopted about six months later. Her name was changed and her identity was erased. Her birth certificate was dated two years after she was born. By the time she was six months old she’d had three mothers: a birth mother, a foster mother, and an adoptive mother. _____ My reunification with my birth mother began via a letter from Catholic Charities followed by another by Air Mail from my birth mother. To me it felt like a new beginning. Perhaps then it is fitting that our relationship would end with a letter. This time it was sent 25 years later and by certified mail. _____ The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child’s Memory Book is my attempt at unwinding the story of my birth and identity through the lens of stories told to me by my birth mother. The book was accepted for publication on Mother’s Day 2020. The synchronicity was not lost on me. My debut! My first-born! My book baby! My mother––dead for decades––wasn’t here to celebrate my happy news, so I called my birth mother to tell her my book was about to be born. She was excited for me on the phone. She mailed me a congratulatory card. Inside she wrote; “You did it! Congratulations on getting your book in print in 2021. How wonderful! XOX.” She was fond of using the USPS and had a habit of sending me envelopes stuffed with news clippings, Harper’s articles she’d torn out of the magazine, and typed letters that contained sternly worded directives even though I hadn’t asked for her advice. I called these her “lectures.” I shrugged them off in the interest of maintaining a relationship with her. After all, she was the only mother I had left. _____ I use dolls as a window into my story by recreating photos from my baby book in my dollhouse. Doing this allowed me some distance from my fears. By playing with dolls I could examine those fears through a different lens. Dolls are used to understand trauma in myriad ways––“show me where he touched you,” or “point to where it hurts” or “can you show me where she hit you?” Memory born from trauma is full of dead ends. Shame is spring-loaded. My birth mother’s stories circled back on themselves: they were versions of a truth. When I brought up the shame and the trauma I felt as an adoptee, she said they were useless emotions.

Two 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.

A common mistake adoptive parents make when hearing adult adoptees speak about adoption trauma is discounting their experiences because “times have changed” or their adoptee hasn’t voiced similar feelings. Some parents will straight-up ask their adopted children if they feel the same way and then rest easy when their children deny having similar feelings. Differing details of adoption stories can be used as evidence of irrelevance. Adoptee voices that land as “angry” are often quickly written off as “examples of a bad adoption.” “Not my adoptee,” is a knee-jerk, defensive response that blinds parents to adoption-related dynamics that may be uncomfortable or painful to consider—especially when everything seems to be going swimmingly in early childhood. This posture, though, discounts the real and proven trauma inherent in adoption, missing an opportunity to fully support adopted children and ultimately benefit from closer, more authentic relationships. That trauma looks good on you. One reason it’s so easy to miss signs of adoption trauma is because it can present so well. Adoptees are unintentionally groomed to be people-pleasers. Once we’ve lost our first mothers to adoption, we can work incredibly hard to win the love of our next mothers. We strive to measure up—doing and saying whatever is needed to keep our adoptive mothers close. This is all unconscious and certainly not meant to be fraudulent. To our brains, running the show, it’s simply a matter of survival. Children need parents, after all, and attachment is our greatest human need, taking priority even over such basics as shelter and food, as explained by child developmental psychologist Dr. Gordon Neufeld.

That evening Ma ate clumsily from a bag of cheese curls and the orange dust caked on her fingers; crumbs hung from stray hairs on her chin.  Her left eyebrow tensed with each dramatic revelation the show brought. The episode was about the reunification of a mother and son after decades apart. They fell into each other’s arms and I became as tense as a pole. My heart sped up and a hard lump formed in my throat. I remembered the box in the upstairs closet labeled, The clothes Lisa came in, as though I purchased at a store with nothing before. A clean slate. “I never stopped thinking about you,” said the mother on tv. Tears escaped from my eyes. I wondered aloud over the years but had never asked the actual question. “So Ma, what do you actually, really,  know about my birth mother? She looked at me, one hazel eye lifted slightly. She breathed in carefully, turned to me, and switched off the tv. “Well, her name was Margaret. Your name before we got you was Libby. But we thought you were more of a Lisa.” My cheeks flushed. “Libby? Like short for something, like Elizabeth? Lisa’s better anyway.” “Nope, just Libby. Margaret was mentally ill; we know she lived for a while in the State Hospital. Also, we know that she may have been raped – or something.” Raped- or something? A tremble tightened in the pit of my stomach. “By who? Who raped her?” “It may have been another patient. They didn’t tell us much.” She sounded a bit too removed. “Seriously? Really? That’s really nuts huh?”

My dad, is my dad. I said what I said. You can’t change my mind. My therapist has tried to—or at least to change the words I use to describe my father. Over my lifetime, I’ve called my father daddy. I’ve referred to him as my father or Steve. But he was my dad. My dad was an NPE. He grew up with a drunk mother and without ever knowing his own biological father. He bore his stepfather’s surname and wasn’t welcome at the stepfather’s family homestead over the holidays, unlike his two half brothers—his stepfather’s sons. I find it interesting that my dad referred to his own missing biological parent as his “sire.” He seemed to be a stickler for labels and calling things by their proper names, although I suspect, in his case, his choice of label was heavily peppered with anger and resentment. He never knew his father. Or why he left. Or why none of his father’s family sought him out. But my dad—he was my dad until I was almost four years old. But then he abandoned me. My therapist thinks that because he left me, and because he never resurfaced, his title should be nothing more than sperm donor. She thinks by calling him dad I give him too much power and influence over me. There is language in NPE, adoption, and donor conceived circles to describe family members and relationship roles, but it’s complicated. Words and roles—like dad, father, donor—just aren’t simply defined anymore, and I’ve had trouble unpacking the roles and titles in my life.

Light, water, love. What a plant needs to thrive, to grow. Common needs for humans. But what if you didn’t get what you needed to grow? Would you somehow persevere? I didn’t have what I needed to grow. I had the basics: food, shelter, clothing. They were fragile, not always in quantities that lead to secure knowledge of comfort. Clothing was mostly from garage sales or purchased with credit cards that would later have to be cut up. Shelter was a house that was mortgaged several times over to pay for a gambling addiction. Food was portioned, and bellies were filled with bread and butter to supplement basic nutrients. Love was hard earned. It was conditional to behavior. Feelings of animosity and jealousy led to separation, physically and emotionally. My adult self recognizes the disfunction, the probable mental illness, the absurdity of the accusations. I did not feel loved. I moved out three weeks after high school graduation, and I was given a tree a short time after that. A houseplant ficus tree. I cared for that tree. I gave it light, water, love. I made sure it had a sunny window in every rented apartment and basement space. As it grew, so did I. Finally, living in a house to call home after I married, the tree thrived, and so did I. It grew so big and tall that it had to be replanted, cut back, split, and repotted many times over 30-plus years. It became a member of the family, fondly known as “the tree.” It stood in as a Christmas tree more than once. The tree lived at a trusted friend’s house when it got too tall.

Until recently, most people likely haven’t encountered someone who’s been knocked off balance by a DNA test result, so it’s understandable they might not appreciate the magnitude of the impact. But it’s just a matter of time. Mind-blowing DNA revelations are becoming so common that some DNA testing companies have trained their customer service staff representatives to respond empathetically. While those employees may know the right thing to say, here, in the real world, the people around us often haven’t got a clue how it feels — like a punch to the gut. If you’ve become untethered from your genetic family, you might get a second surprise: some of your friends and loved ones may be remarkably unsympathetic, often infuriatingly judgmental, and sometimes even hostile. It’s clear that although DNA surprises have become ubiquitous, social attitudes haven’t kept pace, and a stigma remains.

my body remembers the shiver of separation the moment of release from anything and everything I ever knew my body remembers the renunciation the retraction the ricochet of loss pain becomes an echo of that loss that thunders through my skull screaming forcing me to remember what my body refuses to forget