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 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…

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• Tell us your stories. See guidelines. 
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At Thanksgiving 2018, my cousin suggested we get our DNA tested so she could track our grandfather’s lineage. I hesitated. I was 51 and had never had a desire to do DNA testing. Because my parents, both deceased, had known their heritage, I already knew mine. After some pressure, I agreed to take the test. We ordered our kits and I didn’t pay attention to mine when it arrived. After about a month, I found it while cleaning. I spit into the tube and didn’t give it a second thought.

In February 2019, my test kit came back with a complete mixture of ethnicities. I was confused and assumed there’d been some sort of mix-up. My mother had been 100% Irish and my father 100% Italian. I grew up Italian—like Sunday-dinner-at-2-at-my-grandparents-that-lasted-until-6-with-20-relatives kind of Italian. I’m an incredible Italian cook and I use many of my grandparents’ recipes. But my DNA test showed I’m only 2% Italian. The rest is German, French, English, French Canadian. You name it, I’ve got it—a far cry from the 50-50 I thought I was all my life.

I reached out to a DNA cousin on my match list who was an amateur genealogist and who realized that our match meant that one of her two uncles had to be my biological father. That’s how I learned I’d been adopted. One uncle was a playboy and one dated the same woman from the time she was 14 years old, so my father had to be the playboy. I discovered later that had I tested at 23andMe instead of or in addition to Ancestry.com, I would have matched with my father and one of my biological brothers, who’d been given kits as Christmas presents by my biological mother.

I learned that my biological parents were 15 and 17 when they had me. Strangely enough, my mother and her mother were pregnant at the same time, but no one knew my mother was pregnant. Her mother delivered a baby first and was with her husband and the new baby at the doctor’s office when my mother went into labor at home alone. She went into the bathroom, locked the door and delivered me. When her parents came home, they knocked down the bathroom door and there I was.

Finding out at 51 that I’d been adopted was confusing and an enormous blow to my identity. I’d been very close to my parents and took care of them both in my home for years before they died. I felt I’d lost my identity and my family in one fell swoop. Not only wasn’t I Italian, but I wasn’t my parents’ biological child. In a small town like the one I grew up in, your identity is entirely linked to your parents until you’re past 40. My father was very well known in our community, and I’d always been known chiefly as his daughter. I felt lost and confused.

I needed as much information as quickly as possible to make sense of this. I tried calling adoption agencies, but wasn’t able to learn anything. I finally managed to get a file of non-identifying information that filled in some blanks. It turns out I didn’t come to live with my adoptive parents until after I was a year old. It appears I was in foster care during that time because I’d been born at home without prenatal care. I talked to my parents’ neighbors and they filled in some blanks. Over time I realized that many people I grew up with knew I’d been adopted but no one had told me. A cousin finally told me that my parents couldn’t have children after my brother was born, so they adopted me.

I connected with my biological family and learned that they’d continued their relationship, have been married for 48 years, and have 3 other children. It was almost too much to take. I was overwhelmed. They’d wondered about me all their lives, and once we were in touch, wanted to pick up where they “left off.” But I was suffering trauma. I had to go to a counselor to help me work through the emotions. The cousin who talked me into doing a DNA test went into therapy as well, feeling that she’d somehow ruined my life by encouraging me to take the test.

It’s been more than a year and I’ve gotten to know my biological family. I’ve discovered that this experience has been a blessing in an odd way. Few people, after their parents have passed way, have another opportunity to develop such a familial relationship. Few can go from an ending to a beginning.

Sometimes I’m alone, driving in my car, and I’m struck by a mixture of grief and astonishment. It’s taking a long time to process the grief, but each day gets a little better. My husband and adult children have been incredibly supportive and have accepted my biological family members into their lives.

I look for opportunities to be grateful. I was raised by wonderful parents who loved and supported me my entire life. Now I have an opportunity to get to know my biological parents who also love me. Life is a journey, and sometimes the journey is truly an unknown adventure.—Anonymous