Family Is Fluid: An Adoption Story

I’m adopted.  I’m getting that out first because that’s how my family has always dealt with this issue – openly and without hesitation.  This concept is such a part of me that it’s second nature to mention it when I meet new people.  Other people are less comfortable with it than I am, however, and often double take when I say it.  Almost as if they think it should be a secret or sensitive issue I wouldn’t consider normal enough to discuss in casual conversation – as if I should somehow be ashamed of it.  And if that reaction wasn’t enough, they almost always ask the same follow-up question – my least favourite question to be asked, and probably the one I’m asked most often – “Don’t you want to know who your real parents are?”
 
If you have ever wondered that question regarding adopted kids, I’m afraid I have bad news for you – you’re ignorant.  Not necessarily out of malice, but certainly in such a way that reveals that you don’t understand the fluidity of the concept of family.  It’s probably not your fault, though.  American culture doesn’t educate about adoption particularly well, unless of course your last name is Jolie, in which case people know you as “that foreign kid someone famous decided to take in.”  Which isn’t really education but rather a reduction of the complexity of your humanity into the overly simple label “adopted kid,” one who exists solely in someone else’s hero narrative.  No disrespect or anything to adoptive parents, who generally are heroic, but more a comment on the systemic manner in which the public reduces this complex issue into an unsatisfying appellation.  But enough about that for now.
 
The point is, you probably don’t know much about adoption unless you are personally involved with adoption in some manner.  Adoption is one of those issues still stuck in the 1950s – we’re not supposed to talk about it because it makes people uncomfortable and/or it isn’t considered important enough in the face of other issues to mention.  Which is why I’ve decided to write this post about my own adoption, so that you and others can understand the adopted worldview, which is, undoubtedly, one of unique perspectives and challenges.
 
First, though, I must fully admit that I’ve enjoyed a privileged existence in comparison to many adopted (and non-adopted!) kids.  I’m a white male who was adopted into a white middle class North American family, after all, so I can’t claim to have experienced the adversity faced by those in the margins of society - especially international adoptions, which have their own sensitive cultural issues.  In fact, I wouldn’t be in a position to write this piece if not for my privilege, so I want to make it clear that when I discuss the challenges stemming from my adoption, they need to be put in the proper perspective.  Nevertheless, I can assert that being an adopted child, regardless of privilege, involves emotional, psychological, and spiritual obstacles unknown to non-adopted people.  Not necessarily greater or more difficult obstacles, just ones that are unique to the adoption experience.

The babyface of privilege

​Which brings me to my next point: there is no singular ‘adoption narrative’.  Every adopted child experiences the challenges of adoption in ways dependent on their specific social position, history, etc.  Even my own sister, who was adopted from a separate birth family than my own, reacted to her adoption in a dramatically different fashion than I did.  So this post isn’t representative of “How Adoption Affects Kids,” which is a summary that cannot be written, but rather an exploration of how adoption affected one individual.  My hope is that this story will come across as less self-serving than it may sound and instead illuminate some of the more common issues that adopted people face.  I’m certain that non-adopted children will recognize many of the discussed emotional struggles of adolescence, while also learning new things about the unique challenges of adoption.
 
Let’s start with some terminology so that you’ll be able to follow along.  Many adoptive families use their own terms for specific ideas, but there are some common phrases that people generally recognize.  The most important of these is the distinction between “family” and “birth/biological family.”  The term “family,” or any generic marker of kinship that would be used in a typical situation, such as “mother,” “father,” “sister,” etc., are used to describe the adoptive family.  In other words, the woman I refer to as “mother” never gave birth to me.  The woman who did endure that labour for my existence is referred to as my “birth mother” because she is my mother only in terms of the act of giving birth.  In my case, my birth mother never raised me for even a moment and my relationship with her lasted only long enough to cut the umbilical cord.  For that reason, she gets the qualifying terminology.  Other families with different situations might play with these terms a bit differently, but the general idea is fairly common amongst adoptive families.
 
So now we can answer that question from earlier: do I want to know who my real parents are?  Well, I already do know them.  My mother and father – again, who did not conceive or birth me – are my real parents.  They raised me since the moment I was born, fed me, clothed me, taught me everything I know – therefore, despite not sharing my physical blood, they’ve certainly earned the right to the title through years of putting up with me.

Depicted: a real family...
...also a mustache about which we shall never speak again...

​Many people get flustered when I explain this answer and say that my birth mother will always have a special connection to me because she endured nine months of pregnancy and then several hours of painful labour.  For many people, this act automatically gives her the right to be my real mother – perhaps because many of those people consider their own labour an unbreakable bond to their children, which is certainly a worthy and respectable idea.  But in my case, 9 months and a few hours of physical discomfort pale in comparison to the 30 years of physical, emotional, financial, and spiritual labour that my adopted parents spent in raising me.  My parents – again, the non-birth ones – dealt with the poopy diapers and temper tantrums, the puberty-stricken adolescent, the rebellious teenager, the love-struck then heartbroken young adult, and the anxiety-riddled graduate student that formed my personality. 
 
Let me put it another way.  When my mother tells other mothers about my adoption, they often blurt out the exclamation, “Well, I could never raise a child that isn’t mine!”  You’d think people would realize how insulting that sounds, but sadly I’ve heard this phrase said to my mother with some frequency.  She has the best response, though.  She laughs and then asks what they have that she doesn’t.  She got to raise a child from birth to adulthood, experience all of my failures and triumphs, and we have a wonderful relationship now just like many mothers and sons.  The only difference is that while other mothers spent 9 months enduring morning sickness and back pains, my mother went to the beach.  Okay, so maybe that’s a bit of a glib summary that adds a little flavour of how I would shape a response to the aging Southern Belles my mother befriends rather than what she actually says, but the idea is the same – birthing a child is a wonderful thing that should be respected, but it’s not the requirement for motherhood. 
 
If you use birth to justify the connection with your child, that’s wonderful, congratulations.  But don’t assume that the relationships between adopted children and their mothers are fragile because we don’t share your same standards of motherhood.  In fact, we’d quite proudly declare that our relationships might be even stronger than many natural born children specifically because we’ve had to craft a relationship from other means.
 
Maybe a demonstration would be best, so let’s take a look at my personal case.  To do this most effectively, we need to return to terminology for a moment.  In North America, there are two dominant forms of adoption – the “open” adoption and the “closed” adoption.  There are other forms, but these two are the most common.  In an “open” adoption, both sets of parents generally meet and are known to one another.  When the child grows up, they can know the names of their birth parents and may have a personal relationship with them in some form.  Most files are open to them to read and explore at their leisure.  My sister’s adoption was open, for example, and she met and became friends with her birth sister when she was about 19.  She even knows what her original birth name would have been, although she’d never use it because she thinks it’s super 90s and “gross” (oh, youth!). 
 
My adoption, on the other hand, was “closed.”  “Closed” means that my parents and my birth parents never met nor learned each other’s names.  They were paired together through an agency, approved each other’s case files anonymously, and a third party orchestrated my transfer to my new family.  My closed adoption also means that the information provided to me about my birth parents consists of about 8 pages of sparsely-filled medical forms, with their names redacted with white-out.  It looks like this:

​​The only change I made from the original form is to hide my birth mother’s birthdate for her own protection.  Otherwise, what you see here is all the identifying information I’ve known about my birth mother for the entire 30 years of my life.  That’s it.  That blank white space is all I know of my birth mother’s name.  A grand total of 8 pages just like this one contain all the information I have about her and her entire family as well as my birth father and his entire family, with all names redacted.  There are also a few short descriptive paragraphs that I’ll discuss momentarily, but I hope you appreciate how frustrating it can be to have to stare at a blank white space every time you want to ask a question about your family history.  It’s maddening to not even know the name (especially since it could have been my name).
 
There is one exception worth mentioning, however.  On the pages describing my birth father, whoever was responsible for redacting the documents missed one sentence:

This error is the only hint I have that my birth father’s name was probably Brian.  I still tend to refer to him only as my birth father, both because a name amongst so much anonymity feels awkward and because his name humanizes him in a way that I cannot replicate with my mother, which doesn’t seem fair to me.  Most of the time, I wish his name wasn’t there – it’s an eternal tease for more information that I cannot know.  This single bureaucratic error drove me crazy as a child.
 
Both the open and closed adoption styles have advantages and disadvantages.  In the open adoption, you can easily find your birth family and vice versa, but there’s no consideration of whether you want to know them.  The closed adoption has the advantage of anonymity, which can certainly be frustrating but is also beneficial for some children in terms of accepting a new family history.  However, the closed adoption also blocks a great deal of personal history, including some medical information (which can sometimes be accessed through a headache inducing application process), and tempts the abandonment narrative that all adopted kids face.  After all, it’s hard not to feel like your birth parents didn’t want you when you can’t actually hear them say they loved you.  Open adoptions provide more closure in that sense, but at the risk of losing agency.  What works best is a matter of context, as each adoption case has unique considerations that might be more appropriate one way or the other.
 
A sense of timing also complicates matters.  Some children are adopted before they can form permanent memories, whereas older children will remember their previous lives in some format, creating new challenges.  I can’t speak to the latter experience, as my adoption was completed before I was born.  Some people find that fact surprising and assume that adoptions are usually post-birth – I’ve never really known why people are shocked by this information, it just seems obvious to me.  In the case of my birth, my birth mother was not in a situation to support a child and decided to put me up for adoption fairly early in her pregnancy (yes, the common phrase is “put up for” not “given away” or anything like that).  As a result, I was taken from the delivery room and never saw my birth mother again – by her choice, mind you.  My parents – the real ones, not the birth ones – were able to visit me in the hospital until they took me home on the 6th day of my life.  

My dad giving me my first bottle on the very first day I came into my new home.
​October 16th, 1986. 

As I mentioned before, my parents never hid my adoption from me.  They even purposefully used the word “adoption” as much as possible around me while I was still in the crib so that I would never fear the word or find it unexpected.  Whereas other kids had Dr. Seuss and Goodnight Moon as their bedtime stories, Carole Livingston’s Why Was I Adopted? was read to me so much that we had to tape the binding.  Yes, they have children’s books specifically to teach adopted kids that they aren’t freaks.  My favourite page of the book was one where they taught that kids can't be bought in stores, with an illustration of adopted kids in a store window as a woman walks out with a child who has a price tag on him.  As horrifying as that sounds, it was actually a bit comforting because the underlying message was always that I wasn’t a mistake or brought home on a whim – I was specifically desired to belong to this family.  That sense of belonging is crucial to the psyche of adopted children.

​The old custom, again derived from that 1950s sense of shame, is to never publicly acknowledge an adoption.  If there’s one thing I truly believe to be universal about adoption, it’s that adopted parents should never, ever hide the reality of adoption from their children.  I’ve known several kids who didn’t know they were adopted until they were older and it never turns out well.  Think about it: if you know about your adoption from the beginning, you have time to grow emotionally as part of your new family and overcome the self-doubt that inevitably arises from adoption.  Whereas being informed later in life rips the rug of security you’ve always assumed you’ve had from beneath you and leaves you with no experience to battle all the questions and complicated feelings that most adopted kids have already dealt with.  In the case of one person I know, the (white) parents just assumed their (black) child would figure it out because of the obvious physical differences between them, and when they casually mentioned his adoption in his teens because they assumed he already knew, he panicked and refused to believe them.  Never assume when it comes to personal identity.
 
The counter argument that many parents make is that acknowledging adoption undermines their role as parents or distances the child from them.  This idea is foolish because it assumes, again, that adoption is somehow a negative thing.  If you enter into an adoptive relationship with that assumption, you’re doing a serious amount of harm to everyone involved.  Fear of acknowledging adoption implies that adoption is somehow an inferior state from ‘normal’ relationships, and all you’ll do is make more problems for everyone later.  If you don’t have the strength to acknowledge adoption from the beginning and battle through those identity struggles together, you probably should pause and truly think about why you want to adopt in the first place.  Is it for you or is it for your child?  There’s only one right answer, although if chosen correctly it’ll satisfy both sides.
 
This same argument applies to parents who think that adopted children who want to find out about or meet their birth parents are somehow insulting them and/or being disruptive of the family.  I’ve met far too many mothers who cry and scream and accuse their children of abandoning them when they ask about their birth parents.  This reaction is entirely selfish and demonstrates that these parents have not yet resolved their own insecurities regarding their choice to adopt.  Adopted children most often want to find out about their birth parents to strengthen their relationship with their adoptive families, not to abandon them.  Remember that an adopted child will constantly question who they are and where they come from, with varying degrees of intensity, for their entire lives.  As an adoptive parent, you do not have the right to emotionally blackmail your child into not seeking answers to that insecurity.  If anything, assisting them in their quest can be a highly rewarding and cathartic experience for both the child and the parent.
 
My parents always taught me to not fear my adoption, but being adopted inevitably plays an extra role in the insecurities that children like me face growing up.  Most kids start learning to resist their parents as they grow older and pass through the rebellious stages of life.  Adopted kids have an extra painful arrow in their quiver, however.  At some point in his or her early life, when they are fighting with their parents and are exploring what insults do the most damage, the adopted child will discover the phrase that cuts deepest: “Well, you’re not even my real mom/dad!”  My advice to prospective adoptive parents is to be prepared for this accusation because there’s nothing you can do to stop it.  Trust me, it’s just a matter of time until they use it.  However, do know that adopted kids hurl this insult right around the time they begin to question whether or not they truly are part of this new family or not.  It reflects their insecurities, not their hatred, and responding with love instead of resentment will go a long way in building their confidence in their self-identity.
 
I was fortunate that my parents reacted with support and understanding, encouraging me to explore my heritage so that I could realize just how vital I was to the stability of my family.  Nevertheless, I still doubted my place in the family for many years.  I asked the typical questions adopted kids ask: was I a mistake?  Did my birth parents just not want me?  Am I just pretending to be this person with a new name? 
 
The anxieties of youth added to the problem.  My family moved from my home country of Canada to the United States five days after my ninth birthday, an act that was devastating to me.  In my case, I’ve always fought against my insecurities by passionately embracing my adopted identity like a suit of armour.  Being Canadian is a large part of that identity, so when we moved I felt even more destabilized.  If both my birth family and most members of my adoptive family were in Canada, was I moving even further away from who I really was? 
 
Of course, childish cruelty didn’t help.  South Carolina isn’t exactly a shining example of multicultural acceptance and my new classmates were brutal when it came to my being a foreigner.  I was constantly harassed and teased for everything from my accent to my not wearing a heavy winter coat when everyone else was freezing with the approach of what passes for winter in the South (it was only 60, folks, c’mon!). 
 
As children do, any sign of difference becomes fodder for all-out attack.  Already an outsider, the revelation of my adoption just made me even more an oddity to be ridiculed.  I will always remember the day when, having just learned a robust vocabulary of swear words and their meanings, one of my classmates called me a bastard, paused, and with realization sweeping across his face, proclaimed, “Hey, you don’t know who your parents are, do you?  You really are a bastard!”  Kids really can be awful sometimes.
 
I rarely mentioned this bullying at home, preferring instead to internalize it and build my rage from within.  Obviously, this choice was not exactly healthy.  I reacted to bullying by deciding that other people weren’t worth my time and lashing out at them with everything I had.  I became a loner and, given my lack of athletic prowess, threw myself into academics specifically to embarrass other students through academic means.  Although time and experience have matured me some, I still exhibit many of these qualities that make it difficult for people to enjoy my company (a fact I am aware of and try to work on at all times).  And I wouldn’t doubt that my decision to pursue a Ph.D. is somewhat related to these feelings as well.  The point is that the regular insecurities of childhood mixed with the unique insecurities of adoption have long lasting effects on personality, and are still present in my daily life even as I approach 30.
 
I also struggled with my place within my own family, as most adopted children do.  Like many Canadians, my family spans a wide range of cultures, histories, and languages (with both French and English spoken at family gatherings with some frequency).  My cousins, of whom I have many, were all considerably older than me, and after our move we lived hundreds of miles from the rest of my aunts and uncles.  I even forgot the entire French language due to lack of usage in English-speaking America, a discovery that prevented me from communicating with many members of my family.  As a result, I struggled to position myself within a family that seemed distant in terms of both physical space and age.  Being so young, looking physically different, and not being near them to share their culture made me feel like an outsider.
 
My family is also one of those strongly Irish families that cling to the Old Country for identity.  My grandfather was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but left for Canada as a teen, making my father and his brother the first generation of Canadians in the family.  Most of my cousins remember Grandpa Trew for his thick Irish brogue and his love of sneaking alcohol around his strict Pentecostal wife.  He died just four months after I came home from the hospital, with only two or three photos of him holding me to remember him.  All of his Irish-isms for which others so fondly remember him passed me by.

One of the only photos of me with my Grandpa Trew.  He died a few short months later.  The artwork behind us is of an old fisherman and a little girl in a rowboat.  It still hangs in our home, and it always makes me think of this picture.

​Like many families around the globe, heritage is crucial to how individuals in my family construct their identities.  In our case, as with many Irish families, we come from a clan system where social bonds are based on shared traditions.  The Trew family name is of Anglo-Saxon origin and can be traced back to Rannulfus Truue of Warwickshire, England, in 1160 AD, although most of the family history revolves around Ireland.  This clan mentality is represented by the Trew Family Coat of Arms, which depicts two greyhounds representing honour and loyalty running across a banner, which is a common symbol in our households.  Many of my relatives have tattooed this image on their bodies, and I admit a strong pressure and temptation to follow suit myself.  But I’ve always wondered if I have the right to it.  As someone technically born to another clan, do I have the right to the symbolism of this group?  Am I even eligible to declare loyalty to a clan not of my birth, or would I always be suspect as an outsider?  After all, I don’t look the same and, after lots of time in the US, I don’t speak or act the same either.  Not being able to fully commit to my Irish identity in a manner consistent with others in my family has always made me feel uneasy about my role in the Trew clan.

​My mother watched my insecurities grow for several years, trying to be encouraging and supportive.  Eventually, when I was 14 and right in that period of life where everything is extra dramatic, my mother decided it was time to take me aside and have a serious talk about my adoption.  In her wise opinion, the manner in which I was lashing out at the world was caused not just by the stresses of my age, but also by anxieties over my adoption.  She astutely saw that, like most teenagers, I was desperately trying to control my world and make it what I wanted it to be instead of following the flow of life.  She knew that I could never control the situation of my adoption, however, and my desperation would only increase until I accepted my lack of control.
 
One day, she took me for a drive in her car and parked at a beach access lot down the street from our home.  She then did something quite unexpected - she said almost nothing.  Instead of lecturing me or trying to give me advice that my teenage self probably would have rejected anyway, she simply handed me a manila folder.  Inside was my adoption record – the 8 pages of information that contained everything I could possibly know about where I came from.  In her opinion, the file rightly belonged to me and I was now mature enough and in need enough to read it without hindrance.
 
My reaction to the file was not one of joy.  In fact, my anger flared for the following months and my mother thought for a while that she had made everything worse.  In reality, that car drive was an intervention of sorts that forced me to hit rock bottom in terms of anger regarding my adoption.  The reason is simple: I couldn’t hide from the truth anymore - it was all written on those 8 pages. 
 
The file revealed that both of my birth parents were 16 at the time of my conception.  In other words, yes, I was a mistake made by two immature and irresponsible children – nothing more than an accident made on some wild date, or so I thought at the time.  My mother, being religious, always told me I wasn’t a mistake but was planned to belong to her by a higher authority.  I tried to throw myself into religion – Protestant Christianity – to feel as she felt, but unfortunately this attempt backfired.  My competitive side took over and I began to study the Bible intensely, specifically for the purpose of using it as a weapon against those who treated me differently – in some cases quite literally, as I discovered mini-Bibles make decent projectiles.  Ask anyone I went to high school with about my religiosity at the time and you’ll probably hear some horrific things.
 
In reality, my religious fanaticism was more a method for self-abuse than anything else.  The more I adhered to strict (and inaccurate) interpretations of the Bible, the more I felt the need to atone for what I perceived to be the sins of my birth parents.  This paragraph didn’t help:

​My teenage self did not interpret this information lightly.  Not only was I a bastard made by two irresponsible teenagers, but they didn’t even have the courage to face this problem together.  Consider also that when read conservatively, the Bible doesn’t have many nice things to say about unwed mothers, unless of course you happen to birth the son of God.  While I have a fairly large ego, I wouldn’t go quite that far in describing myself.
 
The consequences of this rigid religiosity were twofold.  In one respect, I saw myself as the living proof of sin – a stain on the world that I could never erase, as my very existence was proof of my birth parents’ failures.  I justified my religiosity as a form of training – if I was produced from evil, then I needed to become stronger than others to prevent my inner evil from escaping.  Whereas others could be weak and fall to the temptations of life, such as my parents did, I must become unbreakable. 
 
Obviously, I failed.  Since I was a teenager with a healthy interest in sex and other such things, I was constantly riddled with self-doubt.  Every time I found someone attractive, I told myself that I was becoming distracted from my life’s mission – to be the strongest warrior I could be.  I purposefully wouldn’t allow myself to ask anyone out, even if I had strong feelings – a decision I still regret when it comes to some of them.
 
The secondary fallout of this period of my life is something with which I still constantly battle: distrust in women.  I find this admission the most difficult to make, probably because I’m in graduate school in one of the most liberal cities in the United States.  With such heavily feminist surroundings, I’m occasionally criticized for being a bit brusque with women and am judged accordingly.  The truth is, I consider myself a feminist and absolutely believe in equal rights for women, and also that the strongest and bravest people I’ve ever met are mostly women.  The problem isn’t in the belief, it’s in the expression of belief.  No matter how hard I try – and I do wake up daily trying to improve my behaviour – I still sometimes have a gut instinct to distrust women.  There’s no justification for it, but I do think if you understand what adoption is like, you can at least appreciate how I learned this distrust. 
 
Adopted children often have periods of their lives where they view their birth mothers, especially in a closed adoption like mine where she remains anonymous, as someone who abandoned them to an unknown fate.  The temptation to feel unwanted is high, and the blame is usually placed on the woman.  Only time, experience, and a strong relationship with my adoptive mother helped me learn otherwise, but it’s still a battle that I, and I suspect many other adopted children, fight every day.  Just believe me when I tell you that when I do behave poorly in this regard, no shaming is necessary – I feel it deep down far more than you can know.
 
My birth mother isn’t the only one I blamed, however.  My birth father received a special brand of hatred from me.  While I would categorize my teenage feelings for my birth mother as uncertain, I do think “hatred” is the correct word regarding my birth father.  Whereas my birth mother tried to fill in each paragraph of my adoption file with as much detail as space would allow, my birth father barely wrote more than a sentence or two to answer each question.  His pages are mostly white space as a result.  But what really hurt was a blurry line at the bottom of the last page, marked off with an asterisk.

​Not only was he no longer there to support my birth mother, which may have prompted my adoption in the first place, and not only did he expend what seemed like little effort or interest in filling in details so that I might know him better, but he hadn’t even told his family I existed.  In my teenage years, this thought filled me with rage.  How many people with whom I shared blood cells didn’t even know I was alive?  Was he such a coward that he refused to acknowledge my existence so as to preserve his own backside?  Did he ever fess up, or am I a source of endless shame to him?  I’ve tried to see alternate perspectives on this issue, to attempt to see things from what may have been his point of view, but I admit that I still struggle to understand this decision as anything but cowardice.
 
The turning point for my feelings came right around my 17th birthday.  Although, as I mentioned earlier, I wasn’t the most active person when it came to the dating scene, the fear of repeating my birth parents’ mistakes was always lurking in the back of my mind.  I remember waking up on my 17th birthday, looking up at the sky as if my birth parents were somehow peering down on me, and saying out loud, with a certain degree of spite, “I did what you couldn’t.”  Teenage pregnancies are often cyclical and self-repeating, especially in adopted families, and I was always afraid I’d condemn another child to the uncertainties that I had faced.  Since my birth parents were 16 when I was born, turning 17 somehow felt like a victory and in many ways was the first step to my making peace with them.
 
I also went to college at 17, which was the true turning point of my life.  Like so many others, my collegiate experience helped me find out who I really wanted to be.  I was fortunate enough to attend the Honors College at the University of South Carolina, which is still the best and most supportive academic community I have ever known.  No one judged me there but instead encouraged me to use my talents to improve the lives of others.  When I returned home for Christmas that first year, a friend told me I was dramatically more “mellow” and had dropped the intense religious fanaticism that I displayed only a few months earlier.  When he asked me why I was so different, I reflected on my experiences – freedom to explore my identity independently, new friends who encouraged my increasing participation in extracurricular activities, and, crucially, the experience of overcoming my self-guilt and finally asking out a beautiful woman who became my partner for much of my collegiate experience.
 
Also important for my newfound peace was the encouragement to channel my intellectual abilities into endeavours that resulted in emotions other than rage.  Applying my academic interests towards avenues of learning instead of judging was transformative.  I must credit my mentors, Hal W. French and Karl G. Heider, for encouraging me in this regard.  Hal was a religious scholar who directed my religious interests in a way that reflected the historicity of the Bible and its original language, greatly softening my interpretation of the text.  He even took me abroad to experience the religions of the world – Christianity and Buddhism in particular – up close, leading to my current pluralist views.  Karl, on the other hand, is a brilliant anthropologist who saw my adoption as a means to encourage me to explore human relationships.  Using adoption to lead me into the study of basic kinship, where all anthropologists start their studies, he eventually encouraged me to pursue my love of anthropology in other areas, and I am still working in it today.
 
Hal and Karl also inspired me to explore my heritage in a more direct way.  In 2008, with funding they helped me acquire, I travelled to Northern Ireland to meet my distant relatives, becoming the first New World Trew to return to the Old Country.  Despite my aforementioned hesitations, my acceptance as Irish was instantaneous.  Although I do not share the blood of the clan, my place in the family was made clear by a great uncle, Noel, who knew my grandfather John as a boy.  As he put it in his delightful brogue, “If Johnny Boy loved and accepted you, then you’re as Irish as any of us.”  Yes, he really does talk like that.  I haven’t gotten the family tattoo yet, but I suspect the next time I’m in Canada I may have it done, as it is both my right and my honour as a Trew to display it.
 
In the end, my collegiate experience taught me to reread my adoption file with different eyes. - to not be so fixated on the little slights that my imagination could turn into personal insults.  Instead, my experiences taught me to see the common humanity I share with my birth parents.  From little things, like my birth mother’s favourite movie also being one of mine, despite our other hobbies not quite synching up.

​To a paragraph towards which I had never paid much mind before, in which my birth mother tells me how much she loves me in the few words she had to say it.

​Since then, I’ve learned a great deal more about life and its uncertainties.  I’ve made peace with my adoption, and am now quite proud of it.  Most importantly, my relationship with my mother is better than it’s ever been because I’ve come to understand that when she adopted me, she didn’t just shoulder the responsibility of raising a child.  She also bore the burden of knowing that she owed my birth mother for her child and had pledged to raise me as healthily and happily as she could.  
 
My mother once told me that even though she never met her, my birth mother was always present in my mother’s mind during all the stages of my life.  If my mother could respect my birth mother and feel that she was somehow accountable to her in spirit, how could I selfishly continue to hold a grudge against my birth mother’s many unknowns?  To refuse to change would be to shame my mother’s efforts, something that I could not abide.
 
People often ask me if I want to find my birth parents, particularly my birth mother.  Non-adopted people always say, “Oh, if it were me, I’d want to know.”  When I was a teenager, I felt the same way.  I was determined to meet them to ask them a hundred questions that all began with “Why?”  As I’ve grown older, I’ve come to wonder what good it would do.  I’m happy with who I am, a member of a wonderful family with whom I share much more important things than blood.  My original name, my birth family history, none of that information can offer anything that I don’t already have in a much more satisfying manner.  Some people think I should explore my birth heritage for the future knowledge of my children, but that heritage won’t be any more theirs than it was mine.  Their heritage lies within my current family, Irish tattoos and all.
 
The only temptation I still have for meeting my birth mother is to tell her that I came out just fine, and that my mother heroically fulfilled her pledge.  I wish I could tell my birth mother that she did the right thing and that I will always be grateful for the opportunities that she gave me.  I only want to meet her to try to give her the peace of mind that I attained years ago. But therein lives a problem: did she also reach inner peace on her own?  If so, would my presence disrupt her life by bringing up old wounds?  She probably has a new family, new children, and a new life – who am I to interrupt that?  But then again, what if she hasn't and is waiting for me to reach out to her?  This uncertainty eats at the heart of my current considerations, which typically lean towards leaving sleeping dogs lie but are never fully placated.
 
Every adopted kid handles this situation differently, of course.  Some people want to know their birth families, some don’t.  Desires often change with age, with no right answer.  Finding out and not finding out both come with risk, and there’s no guarantee of satisfaction either way.  In many ways, it’s this uncertainty that plagues most adopted children throughout their lives.  The gamble is equally high either way, and no matter how strong our acceptance of our current lives, there’s always the fear of rupturing the foundations upon which our newfound identities are built.  Even those with strong wills and confidence who go into meeting their birth parents completely certain of their identities still cannot predict how these relationships will affect them or their psychology.  All I can say is that none of us take this decision lightly, and it’s a form of anxiety that most people cannot appreciate without direct experience.
 
For adopted children struggling with these types of identity issues, I offer some solace from my chosen profession.  In my field of anthropology, we often teach our college freshmen about two major types of kin: consanguines and affines.  Consanguine literally means “with blood” and refers to kin whom we relate to through descent, with blood as the generally accepted connecting factor, such as a mother and a son.  An affine, on the other hand, is someone to whom we relate through marriage, such as a mother-in-law.  The problem with teaching these terms is that they are false, particularly in the case of adoption.  An adopted child is someone who should, by literal definition, be closer to an affine, but is instead treated like a consanguine, thus redefining these concepts.

My two non-Irish grandparents redefining consanguine

Which is to say that families are fluid.  There’s no set standard for what a family should look like, just as there’s no set standard for parenthood.  In Cambodia where I work, everyone your age is referred to as either your older sibling or younger sibling.  The whole process of adoption is simply a matter of taking a new child in and raising them as yours (a practice that developed partially as a result of the genocidal events that took place in the country in the 1970s).  The local term for an adopted child is particularly elegant, as it can be translated as something like “a child for whom we care.”  Families flow like water here to accommodate everyone as best as possible. 
 
So remember, even if you come from a rigid cultural system where you feel like you don’t fit neatly into your family, you’re actively redefining what it means to be family every day of your life.  If your society is less open-minded, try to keep in mind that there is no set shape for what a family is supposed to be, and there are people all over the world who accept you as a member of your family, even if you’ve never met them. 
 
These examples help me make my peace with my adoption, although there are some lingering issues I should mention.  I still feel like an outsider when I meet my family because of how different we are, and I still wonder whether or not I should attempt to meet my birth mother.  Forgiving my birth father remains a challenging task, and not blaming women for my identity crisis is a daily struggle.  And heaven knows I still prefer to be anti-social around most people because of my childhood experiences. 
 
The biggest lingering issue is one of trust.  When you grow up wondering if your birth parents abandoned you, especially when your birth father wouldn’t acknowledge your existence, it can be hard to trust anyone.  After all, your parents are supposed to be the most trustworthy people you ever meet and, while my real parents far exceed that standard, my birth parents are a constant mystery.  Some days I am at peace with them, some days the old uncertainties rear their ugly head once again.  That’s how life is with adopted children – we can become more and more secure, but we can never turn off the temptation to wonder.  Despite the challenges, I still think my adoption has made me a much stronger person than I would have been otherwise. 
 
Adoption meant, in my case, that I had to struggle for my family.  I had to fight for my family at a time when most teens only want to rebel against them.  I’ve come to admire my mother and father for their sacrifices, and I’ve learned to appreciate just how desperately they longed for me – and specifically me – to be a part of their family.  Most importantly, I’ve learned to empathize and understand someone I’ve never met – to know that my birth mother almost certainly went through years of her own emotional struggles after giving me up, all as a sacrifice so that I could have a life she could not provide.  That’s a pretty special thing, now isn’t it?
 
I can’t possibly describe the full complexity of adoption, the emotional and spiritual struggle of it all, in one post, even one as overly long as this.  There’s just too much to say.  But I do think this little snippet serves as a decent teaser for what adopted life is like.  I’m sure some of these experiences will be instantly familiar to many other adopted children, whereas other children may not find common ground here at all.  That’s just how it goes with adoption – there are many branches on an endlessly growing tree. 
 
If you’ve made it this far, I thank you for your patience.  My hope is that there was some small inspiration for you here, as there was for me.  In closing, I wish to share some words far greater than my own, those of the great poet Max Erhmann in his classic piece “Desiderata,” as words of encouragement to any child who is questioning their identity.

“You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”