Catana Tully

Lately, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with several adult adoptees, all White Americans, aged between 30 and 70 years old, who were adopted in the States as babies or very young children. They contacted me after reading Split at the Root. Because of the immediacy of the emotional content in the book, they felt they knew me well enough to open up about their stories. While we hurt differently because our experiences are different, our understanding of each other’s ordeal is the same: our mother left us to grow up with another family; a family that in their own way loved us, but for a variety of reasons, we, at some level or another, could not bond with entirely.

Black, brown or Asian adoptees understand that their mother belonged to a socially and economically inferior class than the White family in which they are growing up. They also understand, very early on in their life, that the dark mother’s social status allowed her to be silenced. Distance or death also plays pivotal roles in international adoptions. These issues are a fraction of the exotic adoptee’s burden. But this is not about exotic adoptees.

In matriarchal societies children belong to the woman; the father is incidental. Women take care of all children in the community; men are the communal father. There is no such term as “illegitimacy” and there is no stigma attached to the birth of a child. Sophisticated Sweden has a different approach: there the state becomes the “father” of an unwed mother’s child insuring that the child receives a solid education and has all the provisions it needs to avoid marginalization. Such an approach does not allow for judgmental stigmatization and, as I see it, is a totally civilized approach to procreation and communal unity.

The burden of White adoptees lies in the fact that their mother usually belonged to the middle class, the same class as its adoptive parents. Usually, too, they were a “love child” (a rather odd term for a child that would be given away) of a young, unwed woman, whose family forced her to separate from her child to avoid the shame of “illegitimacy.”

Thus, social channels were created to disassociate the mother and her family from the child, hurting both mother and child. Those are the closed adoptions that forbid all contact between child and the family of its origin. Even if the young mother had wanted, she would have no way to keep in touch with her child. And the child would of course never be allowed to find her.

But things began to change toward the end of the twentieth century. Perhaps the women’s rights movement of the 60s and 70s allowing women to pursue careers of choice played a role. Female adoptees pursued law degrees and began to challenge the elaborate, yet morally porous, legal construct.

The laws of secrecy have been repealed in many states, these days allowing children and birth mothers to open the sealed documents and reunite. Not all reunions are joyous, of course, but all highlight the depth of a child’s connection to its birth parents.

Many a reunion brought answers to questions like: Why did you give me away? Why did you not try to keep me? Did you spend time thinking of me? Did you think about me on my birthday, on Christmas? I have always wondered if you missed me and prayed that you did, and prayed you would look for me and find me.