Forever Running From Nothing

I know there are a lot of adoptees out there who don’t dwell on the fact that they’re adopted. Perhaps they sailed through their childhood with exceptional adoptive parents who did whatever they could to help them find out who they are; didn’t have the attitude that the adoptee was an accessory to their egos; had honest and intelligent conversations about adoption with the adoptee appropriate to her age level;  supported the adoptee’s need to deal with her rejection; didn’t have the attitude that the adoptee should be grateful for being adopted; didn’t say negative things about the adoptees first parents; didn’t use the fact that the adoptee was brought into the family from someone else’s as a means of punishment or threat, and so on. There are possibly thousands of positive adoption stories out there where the adoptee wound up loving and respecting her loving and respectful adoptive parents as her own real parents. One such story belongs to Jackie Kay, author of her newly released novel about adoption, Red Dust Road.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are the horror stories of endless abuse, the adoptive parents who hadn’t dealt with their own issues of infertility or possessiveness, or narcissistic depravity and used a child who wasn’t their own as their mop and punching bag. These adoptees might wonder if even decent foster homes would have been better than life chained to abusive people who should never have had children–either their own or anyone else’s–in the first place.

I have no proof, but judging from the blogs I read out there, I can’t help thinking that the majority of adoptees have stories to tell that fall somewhere between these two extremes.

There are so many movies, novels,  “self-improvement” books, and news stories and  that deal with the aspects of adoption and either purport to have authority or strive to entertain. Like everything else, some of these treatments are honest and some are dishonest, some have agendas and some seek truth. I think that as long as public perception of adoption continues to support the status quo, adoptees will continue to be invisible slaves* to the system. By status quo, I mean that adoptees (regardless of age) are expected to be grateful for being severed from their roots, and that adoptees have no right to find out who they are because that would prove them ungrateful and would stab a metaphorical knife into their adopters’ hearts. So the adoptees, fearing further rejection, go along with the lie or rebel completely: those adoptees who literally kill their adoptive parents.

Here’s more status quo for you: It’s interesting to me that the spell checker on this blog site doesn’t recognize the words “adoptee” or “adoptees” but does recognize “adopter” and “adopters.”

For years I’ve thought about adding my own truth to the body of knowledge through either a memoir or a novel, but either I was too afraid to speak my heart because my a-parents were alive or I lacked the self-confidence to do so. Now my a-parents are dead. There’s no one to feel a “knife.” But I still lack the self-confidence. You see, I was one of those compliant, acquiescent chameleons who wanted desperately to fit in, but where there should have been spine, a self stiff enough to stand up for my “self”  is…nothing.

As for me, I had a biological father who impregnated my biological mother.  The problem was, both of them were married to someone else. So when my mother and father divorced, my pregnant mother was left impoverished with a five-year old child. She had no support and when I was born, my a-mother (I still don’t know how she knew this) told me that my b-mother cried for weeks, months after she had to give me up. I guess I’ve always resented my a-parents with the child logic of, Instead of taking me to raise yourselves, why didn’t you really love me and help my first mother out financially so she could have kept me?

At any rate,  like the majority of adoptees,  as I grew up and didn’t know who I was, I remained a cripple inside, a freak that didn’t belong anywhere, a hothouse plant that was over-protected and and expected to think, do, and be normal.  So we adoptees become adaptees. Hyper-vigilant and over-anxious we conform, we comply or lose our humanity in varying degrees, sometimes completely and become monsters or kill ourselves because the loss of self is too unbearable. As I said, I was the compliant variety. I learned to fit in everywhere even though I belonged nowhere.

So far I’ve been a vagabond. I’ve had 53 different addresses in my life. I’ve spent my entire life running away from nothing, which is another word for my self because there’s no self there. Anxious doesn’t begin to describe my state of mind. Language is woefully deficient to describe an adoptee’s sense of loss and emptiness. I’m forever trying to catch up to a place I’ve never been. I’m forever apologizing for being my “self” because I don’t have a clue what it means to have a real identity. I took grief from bullies in grade school because I was different in an unspeakable way.

For those who are not adoptees and still think we adoptees should just get over it, stop dwelling on it, allow me to offer a metaphor. Being an adoptee is like starting out with a fresh hard drive loaded with a new operating system, ready to store information, but the hard drive is removed as well as the memory, so the BIOS (a computer’s “BIOgraphical” information) can’t be read and so the system motherboard is forever searching, searching, searching for memory and an operating system that don’t exist, and forever there is no system to boot.

This is the “nothing” I’m forever running from.

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*Slave: A person who is held in bondage to another; one who is wholly subject to the will of another; one who is held as a chattel; one who has no freedom of action, but whose person and services are wholly under the control of another.