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 Bianca ButlerAs a young child, I didn’t know that my mother and her twin sister (now deceased) had been adopted in 1960. I found out in 2000, when, after nearly 40 years of silence, their biological mother wrote to the twins asking to reunite.

That year, when I was 12, we all met my biological grandmother for the first time at dinner in Old Town Sacramento—me, my mother, my aunt, my younger sister, and my adoptive grandmother. By meeting her biological mother, my mother learned her biological father’s identity and that she and her twin are of mixed-race ancestry: African American and white. Their biological mother had been a young African American college student at the University of California, Berkeley when she relinquished her twin daughters for adoption. They were born in a time in the United States when interracial unions were not only taboo but also illegal (Loving V Virginia) and when young unwed women were shamed and stigmatized—a time known as the Baby Scoop Era, from 1945 to 1973, before Roe V Wade in 1973.

My biological grandmother is a trailblazer. She was a college student and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority member at UC Berkeley from 1958 to 1962. She was the daughter of an educated Army chaplain, and her family deeply valued education. When she arrived at UC Berkeley in 1958 from Riverside, California, she was one of roughly 100 African American students on the campus. Berkeley, which she describes as having been bohemian at that time, was a different world to her than Riverside. There, she enjoyed ethnic foods along Telegraph Avenue and the poetry of the Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

On campus in her freshman year, my grandmother met an artist from the Midwest who found her attractive and wanted her to sit for a painting. (She still has this painting today). They had a casual friendship, a brief affair, and an unplanned pregnancy. A few months after giving birth, she decided it would be best to relinquish her newborn girls for adoption due to social pressures and lack of support. She went on to graduate from Berkeley in 1962, earning a bachelor of arts in political science. The twins were adopted together in a closed adoption by a loving and devoted African American family in the Bay Area.

In my late teens and college years, I became deeply curious about the origin story of my mother’s biological parents. Getting to know my grandmother, I was proud to discover we are at least three generations of college graduates. She, my mother, my younger sister, and I all have college degrees. My grandmother and my younger sister even have their master’s degrees. I’m extremely proud of that legacy. It’s one I want to pass on to the next generation.

Although I first learned about the identity of my mom’s biological father in 2000, I didn’t become interested in learning about him until I was in college and exploring my family history. To my surprise, I discovered that he’s an internationally known artist who lives near Central Park in Manhattan. He has a resume full of accolades and accomplishments in the art world spanning several decades.

I first tried to contact him in 2007, when I was in college. I wrote to him at the Manhattan studio address on his website, and when I received no response, I moved on. In 2018, I noticed he used an Instagram account to promote discounted custom portrait paintings of people and pets. I wanted him to do a painting of my mom, and I thought this would be a clever way to reach him. I sent a message on Instagram saying I was interested in a custom painting and asked how I could send him a photo. I was surprised that he responded quickly, and, as he instructed, I sent him two photos by email. But when it came time to make the $500.00 payment to him, I was hesitant to move forward, and he was upset because he’d already started the two portraits.

I finally gave in and sent him a sincere and heartfelt message revealing my identity as his biological granddaughter and the truth of why I had contacted him, and I included my phone number.  Within a couple hours, he called me back. He immediately said he’d received my first communication—the letter I sent him in 2007, when I was in college. The crazy thing is, he told me, he received an email message a week earlier from my mom with her photo and a short letter saying she wanted to meet him. I had no idea my mom had been trying to contact him too.

In our phone conversation, he said he remembered very clearly having had an affair with my grandmother during the Berkeley years but denied that he was the father of the twins. We spoke for about 30 minutes and later communicated briefly through email, during which I asked jokingly if he grew up eating lefse (a popular Norwegian flatbread) and if he liked the music of ABBA. He said lefse was a special holiday treat in his family, and he never heard of ABBA. Even though the contact was brief, it felt good to finally hear his voice and to be acknowledged. The contact ended and he sent me a letter for my mother, his artist biography, one of his essays, a photo from his 20s, and the two portraits he painted of my mom—free of charge. I decided it was finally time to do an Ancestry DNA test to help me get more facts about my racial identity and heritage. The Ancestry DNA test confirmed that I’m 31% Norwegian and, through the DNA matches, that I’m related to his cousins. I sent him the DNA results, but he’s still in denial and, sadly, not open to a relationship.

Finding biological family and taking a DNA test can bring great joy and excitement, but it can also bring rejection and disappointment. With millions of people taking DNA tests such as those offered by 23andMe and Ancestry to reveal their heritage and find long lost relatives, it can be important for people testing to consider having a support system or a therapist to help cope with the possible emotional fallout. It can be very emotional opening up old generational wounds that still haven’t been healed. It’s important to prioritize your mental health and self-care in this process. I found talking with a therapist and supportive friends as well as writing to be helpful. Also, some people don’t want to be found, especially when race and adoption are factors, and I’ve had to accept that reality. I would love to have a relationship with my grandfather and learn about his life and his lifelong passion for art. I’d love to visit art galleries and travel to NYC, but that may never happen. It may be wishful thinking.

On a positive note, through Ancestry DNA I was amazed to connect with a cousin on my mom’s paternal side who is close to my age and open to connecting. She moved to Sacramento from Minnesota last year for graduate school, and we plan to meet. From her own ancestry research, she was able to give me more information about our shared heritage and ancestral homeland in Fresvik, Norway, which, in addition to Oslo, I hope to visit.

Even though my mom doesn’t talk about her childhood or her feelings about being adopted, I know it must have affected her. It’s been a long journey, but it’s given me deeper understanding, pride, and appreciation of who I am and my unique family history. I don’t know what the future holds or whether I will ever meet my biological grandfather, but I appreciate the contact I did have with him and his custom paintings of my mom, and I remain optimistic.Bianca Butler is a SF Bay Area native raised in the suburbs of Sacramento, California. She’s a graduate of Mills College, an alumna of VONA, and a family historian. She enjoys non-fiction writing, digital storytelling, and public speaking. She plans to continue writing family stories about the legacy and lifelong impact of adoption. Butler dreams of doing ancestral homeland trips to West Africa and Norway and documenting the experience through writing and film. She lives in Sacramento, CA. Contact her at biancasoleil7@gmail.com.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, @iambiancasoleil

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. 

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.