Larissa MacFarquhar has a long article about adoption in the April 10 New Yorker. It isn't bad. And I don't want to dismiss adoption as a problem; adoptees have more mental health problems and certain other isues than people raised by their birth parents. (The exact number is hard discover, for reasons I'll get to in a minute.) But in this article we meet multiple people who think they suffer all the problems of being human because they were adopted, and that nobody else suffers as they have. Like this:
Deanna is adopted, and she has spent much of her life grappling with the emotional consequences of that. She believes that a child who starts life in a box will never know who they are, unless they manage to track down their anonymous parents.
And this, about the founder of one adoptee organization:
Fisher had been in a car crash, and her last thought before impact was I’m going to die and I don’t know who I am.
First, as all my readers know, I hate, and I mean really hate, the idea that your genetic parents determine "who you are." You are you. All of us, adopted or not, grapple with what that means. If you think that meeting your birth parents will tell you something profound about that identity, eh. There are plenty of people who searched for their birth parents for years and then, when they found them, discovered that it made no difference to them at all. I don't know of anyone who was transformed by the experience. I realize that as an adoptive parent I have a certain angle on this. My wife and I agreed long ago that if our adoptive daughter decided to seek her birth parents, we would support her, and we have shared with her all we have learned about her early life in China. But at least so far she has shown no interest in delving deeper and prefers to get on with her life here, which seems to be working out very well for her.
Plus, as I'm sure you all know, adoptees have a bad habit of imaginging that the families they should have been raised in are perfect. Here is a good story about a woman who eventually tracked down her birth mother and discovered she had full siblings:
Angela had imagined her siblings growing up with Deborah, knowing deeply who they were.
Which is the kind of thing that makes me crazy. How can you think that everyone who grew up with birth parents "knows deeply who they are?" This is that complete failure of empathy that bothers me, the belief that other people don't suffer. Plenty of people get nothing from their birth familes but genes and problems. Many are, to one degree or another, abused, mistreated, or ignored.
As Angela discovered:
But when she spoke with Nay-nay it turned out that they had not been fully raised by Deborah, either. The boys had lived mostly with their grandmother; Nay-Nay had lived with her grandmother until she was nine, then she had lived sometimes with Deborah and sometimes at a friend's place.
And this is why you can't just compare adopted children to the general population and learn how much of their mental illness etc. was caused by being adopted. People from economically and emotionally stable families rarely get put up for adoption; also, many of the mothers are very young. So to understand the impact of adoption you have to somehow compare adoptees to people who grew up in families like those who give up children, and that is a very hard thing to do.
One interesting detail I learned from MacFarquar's article is that while adoptees have formed big networks on Facebook and so on where they share about being adopted and talk about finding or not finding their birth families, a majority of adoptees don't join these networks and so far as anyone can tell don't much care about it.
Which would be the approach I would endorse, if can you get there. Most of the time, the key to handling life's problems is not solving them but learning to live with them. I understand that adoptees often wonder about who their parents were; seems perfectly natural. But if you obsess over answering this one question about yourself, you will miss out on so much of what life has to offer. Better to live in the present and think of the future than to spend all your time staring into the blank places of your past.
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