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Genealogy Revised in Secrets and Lies Paris De Soto For years, I imagined that my birth mother was either a fabulously wealthy and famous actress or a brilliant, eccentric archaeologist. I would look for her anytime I visited crowded, urban areas, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. In dreams, we all have access to "a lost otherworld I A world we lose merely by waking up;'I and my "lost otherworld" would inevitably include my lost, repressed-or rather, suppressed-maternal origin. I remember a portion of a recurring dream I had when I was about eight: Kate Jackson (of the television show Charlie's Angels) was my "real" mom, who would drop by my adoptive parents' house unannounced and take me to the roller-skating rink she owned. There we would hang out with her best friends Cher and Farrah Fawcett, and she would allow me to eat unlimited quantities of chocolate ice cream. Sixteen years later, this little fantasy and the whole of my family romance would be undermined by one Pauline Elmensdorp,2 a secretary working in the basement of a suburban hospital outside ofChicago, born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa. As disappointing as it has been for me to replace fantasy with very quotidian reality, surely the reality check that Pauline Elmensdorp represents in my psychic life is preferable to relying on myths and flights of fancy for the answer to the question "Where did I come from?" Yet the rights of an adoptee to seek out and find her birth parents is at the center of one of the most heated debates in adoption policy, the sealed-records debate. In the United States, adoptees do not have that right unconditionally. Depending on the state, an adoptee may have very limited legal avenues by which to pursue her birth parents, and these limits have angered adoptees who want to search and birth parents who want to be found. Protests against the sealed-records policy take place with increasing frequency on a variety of levels, from national radio and television programs to local adoption-related events. I encountered the latter last year: when I saw Mike Leigh's film Secrets alld Lies at the State Theater in New Brunswick, I was accosted on myway out by adoptees' rights activists. Theywere distributing copies of a local newspaper editorial debating the pros and cons of"breaking the seal;' that is, the seal to an adoptee's records. These activists insist that an adult adopted as a minor should have the right to access her original birth certificate and medical records, sealed at the time of her adoption. Many of them claim 193 194 Imagining Adoption that an adoptee's knowledge of her biological and historical origins is "an integral part of [her1identity formation"3 and that a lack of such knowledge results in "genealogical bewilderment."4 Their opponents, however, argue that adoption records should remain sealed to protect the confidentiality of the birth parents and to prevent any disturbance to the adoptive parents once the adoption has been decreed. Given my own experience as an adoptee who found her birth mother four years ago, it makes sense to assume that Iwould side with the activists. Ofcourse, I support an adoptee's right to her own records, and I agree that knowledge of her origins may recover an integral part of her identity. From my perspective, I can tell you that an adoptee who finds her birth parents will be able to undo the notion that she is a"fake child," a "synthetic product" who simply"appeared one fine day without having been carried in any known womb."s Yet knowing her origins can provide the adoptee with neither a whole identity nor genealogical continuity. Although an adoptee's search for origins may start out as a search for identity, it becomes ultimately a search for narrative: an adoptee's discovery of her origins will enable her to account for certain key facts and events in her life of which she has been ignorant. Knowledge of her birth parents may fill a gap in an adoptee's biography, but it cannot fill a gap in her being. Most adoptees' rights activists claim that an adoptee's access to her records will reveal not only the "truth" ofher origins but also the "truth" ofher identity; yet with these truth claims, they resort to fiction themselves. Although I do not agree with the essentialist rhetoric used by most adoptees...

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