Dear Daniel,
None of this biological nonsense matters. My family is your family.
This is what you said when I found my birth mother at thirty-one. Once I had her name, you became a sulking child. You scoffed at the pains I endured to locate her—sluggish nine-to-five bureaucrats demanded notarized documents for crucial medical records; an awe-provoking conversation with a maternal relative who claimed I died as an infant and who was suspicious of my motives—to garner insight into my life preceding the world I had been adopted into and was expected to be grateful for. You always said you’d help me find her when I was ready. When the time came, you became the second parent to abandon me. Your reticence was no surprise. Years of thinly veiled insecurities you held about the life you provided gave way to outrage, proving my search had been a personal betrayal against you.
My entire life people have asked, “What are you?” As a kid, I found admitting I was adopted to be awkward, even though it was obvious to most. Where your frame was stout and athletic, my body was lanky and angular, with arms too long and thighs thick with disproportion. As your face was soft and photogenic, my profile culminated into a downturned mouth resting on a witch’s chin. Your dark skin glowed with sun-kissed health. My complexion was translucent and pocked, blue veins sprawling just under the surface. I wonder if the adoption agency thought they were clever, or if they thought both adoptive parents and adoptee having brown hair was enough to signal we belonged to each other.
Lack of an ethnic qualifier forced me to form my identity by defining myself through the eyes of others. As strangers and I guessed at my ethnicity, I became hollow. The shame evolved into the scrutiny of my physical features against yours, none of which led to a qualifier, a connection, a link.
Meeting my biological mother didn’t provide any clarity. I found her to be a sad liar who begged to hold me like an infant on her lap, insisting it would salve the wound of our original separation. She said we were of Comanche ancestry. After the pills and drink ran through her system, she admitted the truth and blamed me for the scorn and abuse her mother waged on her as a result of my existence. All that, and I looked nothing like her.
I felt compelled and within my right to reject her just as swiftly as I had been relinquished thirty-one years prior. You could not have been more pleased. You rushed to me, giddy with calculated consolations and faux concern. You relished my disappointment as it confirmed what you’d always suspected: my biological family was faulty, and only you could give me the love and family worth having.
At times in my life, I held your family stories of survival and pain and love and wrapped myself in them as though they were my birthright. But how could I say I, too, was a descendant of Polish Holocaust refugees? Did you think adopting me meant I also adopted your specific history? Your home is not ground zero of my existence. You signed some paperwork, you put a roof over my head and called me your daughter . . . but I am not of you.
Telling me my biological family didn’t matter while, in the same breath affording yours so much relevance, reinforced my lifelong fear that I—and my history—am unworthy of inclusion and consideration. I realize now that your understanding isn’t possible, nor would it make peace of my struggle living between two worlds, neither of which I call my own. When you abandoned me, you abandoned your fatherhood. Adoption brought us together, and it will always keep us apart.
***
Rumpus original art by Ian MacAllen
