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Adoptees
- Brandeis University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
I am a forty-three-year-old adoptee who just two and a half years ago found my birth mother after a search that went on and off for twenty-two years. I always wanted to know where I came from, what my heritage was, who I was. Yes, I love my adoptive parents and we have a good relationship . They even helped me in my search. But I wanted to know what everybody else knows . . . the basic facts of my identity. When my son was born three years ago, he was the first person I ever laid eyes on who I was biologically related to. It was overwhelming to me . . . but it was strange. Why? I have dark brown hair and brown eyes. My husband has light brown hair and green eyes. My son has blue eyes! Where did that come from? When I took him for his first doctor’s visit, I had to leave much of his medical history blank. I always hated that for me . . . but for him I hated it even more and I started searching again. My husband does genealogy research. He knows his ancestors for generations . I know nothing. I asked him why he cares about his ancestors from three hundred years ago. He said it was interesting for many reasons , including knowing where he fits in history. I don’t have that and I want it. This posting to an adoption Internet Website speaks to the core issues of identity. Adoptees wrestle with the same demons as people who suddenly discovered Jewish ancestors. The basic questions of “Who am I?” and “Where did I come from?” and “Where do I fit in?” plague both. Before one person can relate to another, intimately or even superficially, he must know himself. He must have an internal touchstone , a base line by which to gauge the outside world. The debate continues over whether we are biologically driven or environmentally molded. Are our tastes and inclinations genetically Adoptees encoded? Of course, we are influenced by events, but how much of our basic makeup is charted by heredity? If nature supersedes nurture, then adoptees stand to gain a tremendous amount of self-knowledge by finding out about their birth parents. The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart begun in 1979 made a fascinating, though hardly conclusive, case for the effect of heredity on personality.1 In that study, Thomas Bouchard and his co-authors found that separated twins exhibited the same taste in music, art, food, friends, careers, humor, athletics, hobbies, and so on. His findings were consistent even in cases where the twins were raised from birth in vastly different adoptive households. The study, though, has been criticized in some quarters for its narrow scope. People who find out that they are of Jewish descent receive an information packet of tremendous import. They then have the task of assimilating that new information into their years-old image of self. Even to reject the information takes sizable psychic energy. To be deprived of a personal history creates a mountainous challenge . It can leave an individual with a gnawing feeling of incompleteness . This disquiet is often inchoate. Many individuals told me that until they discovered their Jewish background, they felt a gap, an emptiness . They said they could not define it, but they knew something was missing. “I always felt incomplete. Nothing compares to knowing there’s a piece out there not yet finalized.” Shelley was one of several adoptees in her family, but she was the only one who looked different. She had many unresolved emotional issues to work out, and as a result she became angry, unhappy, and disruptive . For one thing, she was raised in a religious household, but it was not a religion in which she found a spiritual home. As long as I can remember, I knew I was adopted. I was raised in a very strong Latter Day Saints family. My adoptive grandmother is descended from Joseph Smith himself. I was the black sheep. Growing up, I experimented with drugs, sex, alcohol—which was all the more far out considering the family I was in. I was always looking for some explanation of why I didn’t fit in. I was so different: loud and with a wild streak a mile wide. I even look different. I have olive skin, dark hair, and dark eyes. Most of the neighborhood 99 Adoptees [54.234.233.157] Project MUSE (2024-03...