MOST TEENS I INTERVIEWED saw adoption as a good way to give homes to children who needed them. It was too bad that they had had to leave their birth parents, but they were glad they had ended up in their adoptive home. It seemed a right and reasonable process, but they knew that not everyone felt this way.
During the junior-high years many were teased—“Your mother didn't love you,” and “You're weird”—because they were adopted. While this teasing hurt at the time, it wasn't widespread and stopped as they and their friends grew older. No one reported problems over adoption with friends or neighbours at the time of the interview. They told me that adoption made no difference to their chances in life or to the way they were treated outside of their homes.
The teens seemed indifferent to questions about social prejudice and, since I had assumed they met quite a lot of prejudice, it took repeated answers of, “No one treats me any different because I'm adopted,” and “It doesn't make any difference,” before I believed them. In the great democratic surge of the teen years where trying to fit in is so important, they would rather ignore differences than talk about them. Perhaps prejudice is something that becomes more obvious and yet more subtle as we get older. As well, prejudice against adoption is not socially correct. While theoretically adoption is a socially-approved cultural process, there seems to exist a strong bias toward “natural families,” “blood ties,” and “ancestral memories.” Our acceptance of an adopted person's need to find his or her biological family is based on the assumption that biological families belong together.
This bias toward biological families operates in direct contradiction to our apparent acceptance of adoption. No wonder teens don't want to talk about it. The contradiction is confusing and unsettling. In order to feel secure, teens must rely on society's acceptance of adoption as a normal cultural practice, while at the same time knowing that bio-logical families are preferred.
The teens I interviewed had very few problems with brothers and sisters about their adoption, but two told me that they had a grandmother who couldn't accept them as part of the family. In both cases, their parents explained that the grandmother was old and wrong. “Grandma's a little crazy; you're all right.” As in many cases where rejection is part of life, it was easier to deal with it when acceptance and support came from those closest to them.
The teens had friends, cousins, and neighbours who were adopted. There are more children adopted today than thirty years ago. None of my sixty-five first cousins were adopted. My children have fourteen cousins, five of whom were adopted. I took an invisible flight down the street where I lived at the time and did a census. Two of my children were adopted; my first neighbour had three children she bore herself; the next neighbour had one biological child and one adopted child; the next had one adopted child, then a biological one; the woman at the corner had two biological children who were stepchildren to her husband. Families today tend to be combinations of biological, adopted, step- and foster-children more often than they were even ten years ago. When teens are younger, as Kerri said, they sometimes feel as if they are the only adopted child in the world, but by the time they are fifteen or sixteen they know others.
The teens saw adoption as a positive process—every one of them told me that they would adopt children themselves. Some didn't see themselves in a position to do so for many years; some said they wanted to have biological children first—but all said they would adopt. Many felt that they would be better parents to an adopted child than their own had been.
“I would understand,” Rhea said emphatically. “I'm going to adopt. And I'm going to foster children, too. Because there are just too many children in this world who don't have a decent home or some place to say, ‘This is where I can come and touch down when things get too rough.' Anyway, I figure I know how to do it. Oh, yes. You bet! I'll adopt.” This enthusiasm for being an adoptive parent stems from their own experiences, and indicates that these teens think adoption is a socially acceptable and responsible option for families.
While her ideas were similar to Rhea's, nineteen-year-old Sarah came to her conclusions through a good home and loving attention from her adoptive parents. “My parents did a good job [on me], so I can too. For sure I'm going to adopt.”
Sarah arranged to see me at her parents' apartment in a busy section of Vancouver close to downtown. She was blonde, fair-skinned, and the only child of loving parents. Married recently, she now lived with her husband three hundred miles north and was visiting her parents for a short holiday in the city.
Sarah knew quite a lot about her birth parents. Her adoptive parents had read the social worker's history and remembered much of what they had read. When Sarah was fourteen, her adoptive mother told her everything she knew. Sarah knew what kind of a person her birth mother was, where she worked, that she had a sixteen-year-old daughter, what her father was like, and what work he did—though not his name. She knew that her sixteen-year-old sister had offered to quit school and look after her, that her mother just couldn't support two children, that she had no one to help her.
Sarah's adoptive mother did what many fail to do. She progressed from the “chosen child” story of the younger years—the simple explanation given to inquiring four- to six-year-olds—and developed the explanation of Sarah's adoption into the more complex and detailed history that teens' need.
Although she knew her birth mother's name, address, and telephone number, Sarah didn't plan to contact her. And while she was happy with her start in life and knew her adoptive parents loved her, she realized that all adoptees didn't feel the same. She felt every one had a right to know who he or she was and to be comfortable with that knowledge. Her own comfort level may have been a combination of an easy-going temperament and her parents' attention to the importance of adoption and adoption information in Sarah's life. She wanted to meet her birth mother if that was agreeable to her, but she would not barge into her life without some indication of welcome.
Sarah could have called on one of several adoption services in her area. But such services for adoptees are not a routine part of life that are available with the aura of entitlement that comes with eye examinations or routine dental check-ups. No one arranges every year or two for the adoptee to have the opportunity to talk about issues of their development. If they did, all members of the adoption triangle—children, adoptive parents, and birth parents—would probably have much greater understanding of the effects of adoption.
Sarah has strong feelings for her adoptive parents, believing that the parent-child relationship is an emotional one that develops, rather than a biological one that just exists. She had resolved many of the questions about adoption in a timely way as she grew through her teen years and was comfortable, as many teens are, with her adoptive status. Her parents had given her a good childhood and she looked for-ward to the future.
It is easy to understand that emotions may be hidden, but physical appearance would, one would think, be obvious. Not so. Adopted children often do not notice that they look different from their adoptive family until approaching the teen years. Differences in physical appearance are accepted by younger children easily; it is adults and teens who apply character traits to physical appearance. Information about birth families gives adopted children a sense of physical connection to others who look similar. Those teens who had information about their biological parents said such things as, “My mother was tall and had hair like mine,” with a kind of pride. They also gave their ethnic origin, “I'm Russian, actually,” as if it was a label that established their identity. We all spend at least some time as a teenager trying to figure out who we are, how we feel about life, what values and actions are right for us. A sense of belonging in this family, in this school, in this community, and even to this human race is established (or not) more during the teen years than at any other developmental stage. It's normal to want to know how you fit into life.
Those teens who are obviously a different race from their parents or from their brothers and sisters find that this need for an identity gains significance as they grow older. They may be in their late teens before they realize there is a difference, or they may have noticed it at a very early age. There isn't a magic age at which they suddenly notice that their skin is brown and their adoptive mother is white. Some children always know, but it isn't significant to them until they gain awareness of the role of race in society and come up against society's prejudice. If their family believes that they are wonderful as they are, they will have less problem with prejudice than if their family believes that they are somehow inferior because of their race.
Many families today try to give their children some knowledge and understanding of their ethnicity, race, and birth culture. While it isn't realistic or even possible for them to offer the same environment and cultural richness of the birth family, adoptive parents can provide enough information so that children will feel comfortable with people of their own race as they grow up and leave home.
In North America and Europe, adopted teens are most often non-white—Black or Native American or Korean—in a family that is white. Once, I met an aboriginal woman who had a white daughter; I was a white woman with an aboriginal son. We laughed about our family portraits—negatives or positives of each other. But most often, if the teen's race differs from her adoptive parents, she is usually a minority race. In some areas of the country, this is easily accepted; in other areas such a teen will meet prejudice and racial discrimination. It helps to remember, as one teen said to me, that “prejudice is the other person's problem,” although prejudice can become a very difficult problem for teens.
There are organizations that promote cultural and racial identity. Teens who are of a different ethnicity or race from their adoptive parents may want to join one so that they can meet people who look like themselves, and can learn from them.
How much background information should an adopted child receive? Some argue that adopted children should not know their beginnings because some stories may be unhappy. The teens I inter-viewed did not agree. If they didn't know their information, they could easily imagine it as very bad. Most adopted teens have friends who are in difficult circumstances: living with a divorced mother because their father is an alcoholic or moved in with another woman; or living with a father because their mother has left the family. Dealing with trouble, learning to live in a loving relationship even when rejected by one parent, and learning to like yourself, are part of teen life. Teens told me that they could handle their slice of life as well as anyone else.
As Leslie said, “Everyone else has that kind of information. Why can't I have it? What is it, some kind of big secret? Or is it so bad that someone, somewhere is keeping it from me?”
Most teens I interviewed were not concerned that they had very little information on their medical backgrounds. All had been told that their parents were in good health. It seems unlikely that all the parents of so many adopted teens were without any medical problems and more likely that the reporting of the medical history wasn't accurate. One was born premature, one had had pneumonia, but the rest seemed to have had a disease-free background . . . with one exception. One teenager knew that a grandparent had died of cancer. That meant 199 grandparents were disease-free.
At the time they were born, most of their birth parents were under twenty-five. Many of their parents were under fifty and no medical history was obtained further than that generation. Heart disease, cancer, adult diabetes, cataracts, and various other hereditary ailments most often develop after fifty years of age. The teens generally accepted their disease-free history. Only Leslie and Nicole wondered if their history had been accurate. One young woman who had been trying to have a child wanted to know her birth mother's child-bearing history because her doctor kept asking for information she didn't have.
Some teens worried that they might inherit mental illness. While some mental diseases such as a tendency to schizophrenia and depression may be inherited, and since adopted children often don't know their medical history, they worry that this is part of their back-ground. There are studies that show a higher incidence of psychopathology in adoptive parents than parents who have not adopted (Holden, 1991). The researcher voiced surprise that adoptive parents who had been assessed for their suitability as parents, demonstrated psychopathology. So it may not be heredity that predisposes adopted children to mental illness, but the environment they live in—their adoptive families.
Suicide rates are higher in adolescent adoptees than nonadoptees (Boult, 1988; Robinson 1991), but studies indicate that while the tendency to impulsive behaviour may be inherited, the actual suicide is a choice that is linked to social and environmental factors, and may be more because of social attitudes to adoption than to heredity. Again, this phenomenon may be linked to the relations between the child and his or her adoptive parents.
Eating disorders are more prevalent in adopted children than non-adopted. This may reflect the lack of belief in their identity and low self-esteem rather than an inherited predisposition.
While teens need information about their birth families so that they can establish their identity, they also need it to better understand their own capabilities and limitations. If a teen's biological family has many members who are alcoholics, the teen will be better able to deal with an addictive body that cannot tolerate the kind of “weekend drinking” that many of their friends can. Information about tendencies and predispositions in their biological families could help teens make better-informed choices.
B.E. Boult (1988) describes some of the fears in adopted adolescents, which include those about the moral character of their birth mother and her rejection of them, that their adopted status might be temporary if their adoptive parent decided to give them away, and feeling alienated but unable to talk to parents about it. Their fears are all ones that adoptive parents can address, so they are not inevitable, not genetically programmed into the child. These problems have been caused by a society obsessed with secrecy and taboos in the adoption process, particularly the lack of open discussion about adoption. In my work with suicidal teens, I found that fulfilling the need to belong in their family and the ability to talk to someone, preferrably their parents, was strongly preventative of suicide. Adoptive parents who are more likely to be psychically pathological, a society that causes confusion by withholding information about where the adopted child belongs, along with the underlying problem of not being able to talk to parents, combine to result in a greater incidence of suicide. If parents understand the real need of teens to talk and the way in which that talking and parents' listening can help prevent suicide, the higher rate of suicide among adopted teens may decrease.
Were teen boys any different from teen girls in how they felt about being adopted? Boys who had been adopted seemed to have the same rate of criminal behaviour as the general population, but higher than the population of adoptive parents (Howe, 1998). Girls seemed to have rates more nearly co-related to their adoptive parents. Generally, boys have more learning problems than girls. Studies show that adopted children achieve as well and even better than non-adopted children (Maughan & Pickles, 1990), yet we are still concerned about the likelihood of learning disabilities, anxiety, and hostile behaviour patterns (Howe, 1998) in adopted boys. Studies show that adoptees are as successful when they are adults as non-adoptees, but the teen years are often more difficult.
How teenaged boys felt was about being adopted was important to me. Were there differences between boys and girls other than those the researchers pointed out? I had the impression, so far, that boys just didn't concern themselves with adoption very much. Was this because my sons refused to discuss it, or because boys are generally taught by our society not to discuss emotions? Was it true that boys really didn't care as much?
Fifteen-year-old John lived at home with his adoptive parents, two sisters, and one brother. No one else in the family was adopted. He was tall, lanky, quiet, a good student in high school, and planned to get a law degree. While interested in adoption—he answered my ad in the paper—he didn't seem worried about it. The information he had on his background told him that during the first fourteen months of his life, he had been placed in several different foster homes. Neither he nor his (adoptive) mother knew why. The curiosity most often felt about birth parents was shared by John. He wanted to meet them, see what kind of people they were, and find out if he had any brothers and sisters.
John said he would eventually marry and have children. He would adopt children, he told me; he could tell his son what it was like. “I could tell him I went through the same things”—the wondering, the talks with his parents. He'd understand his own son's need to do all that. John appeared calm and level-headed and while he had had concerns in the past and talked them out with his parents, he didn't tell me what those concerns were. Perhaps John's greatest stability comes from the his ability to talk easily with his parents.
Mike had been worried that he hadn't been wanted in the first place. Alex had worried that there might be hereditary mental illness in his biological family. The twins told me there was no problem with adoption. Bill desperately wanted to find some biological family connections after being rejected by his adopted parents. The young men I interviewed had many different concerns. I couldn't assume my sons' reluctance to talk about adoption was in any way typical. In fact, I couldn't assume from the teens I interviewed that the boys were any different from the girls in their attitudes and concerns.
Maryann, sixteen, worked split-shift at a fast food restaurant and had three free hours before going back to her job. She threw a jacket over her uniform and climbed into my van in the parking lot where we sat out of the rain. She was slight, short, and spoke in teen dialect, the jerky shorthand that made her story seem all the more spontaneous. Slow to start, once she began telling me how she felt, she talked for a long time without urging. She had lived through difficult years between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, leaving home several times, feeling desperate, overdosing on drugs, and generally trying many ways of getting away from her family. She felt anchorless, drifting without direction, floundering around Children's Aid, social workers, and her parents. At this time, she was trying to get Children's Aid to support her in an independent apartment. Maryann wanted to be in charge of her life; she thought she did better when she was living away from authority.
When she is eighteen, Maryann wants to find her birth mother, but not her birth father. Her adoptive parents were willing to help, although her father was worried that rejection by her birth mother would hurt Maryann. Her adoptive mother didn't think that would happen, but rather that, since her birth mother kept Maryann for six months before placing her for adoption, she cared and would probably be willing to talk to her.
Knowing her birth family was very important to Maryann. She thought her aimlessness had something to do with the fact that she didn't really feel entitled to her place in society.
Although Maryann still wants to know her birth mother and her name, she thought of her adoptive parents as her parents, even though she didn't want to live with them. She said that if she could make it through high school and get into a university, she planned first to be a medical doctor, then a psychiatrist who works with delinquent kids. She understood what it felt like to be alienated. “A lot of kids feel that adopted kids are not really people; that's their attitude. They want to know how you deal with being given up. They're curious, I guess. My family treats me okay now. I get some negative feeling from my grandma because I'm adopted. When I was younger that hurt, but my mom put her down for it. One uncle and aunt are okay. My friends and neighbours don't care about adoption. They treat me okay. No problem there.” She was clear about who did and who did not accept her.
“When I was thirteen I tried to commit suicide. I took a bunch of pills. I really hated my [adoptive] mother to the point that I wanted to get out and get away. You know what I mean? I had a teacher who took me to the hospital. After that I had social workers and psychiatrists and I was knocked around from social worker to social worker and I was starting to hate them, you know what I mean?
“I've got one at Poplars now that I had from grade nine at St. John's. I mean we just don't get along at all. I sit down and it's the same questions she asks every week. I don't know. It's stupid, some-times. You see it was strange, because I didn't know I was overdosing. Like I was just blank. I was taking them {pills} all day; I took them in class. I mean I had them because I was up to ten or fifteen aspirins a day—every day. Plus stress pills. It was kind of like a high all day. It made me relax. Then, after a while, I was just taking them and taking them. I had a bottle on my desk and I took all the pills in the bottle.”
Maryann sat in silence for a moment and watched the summer rain stream down the windshield of my van. “The thing is, now I've got a problem. I'm living out of the house {at her sister's] and I've got to find another place to live. So now I have to go down to Children's Aid again and get mixed up with all their stupid social workers and every-thing. It's going to be a real pain. I mean, when I was younger I went to Children's Aid to get out of the house. And what they wanted to do was have a family get-together, you know? My dad and my sister were willing to go, but my mom wasn't. She said it was my problem, not hers. She didn't want nothing to do with it, eh? So I don't-know. It's a money problem now. I can't live off my dad. I don't know what's happening now.”
Maryann couldn't talk her problems out with her mother, possibly because she didn't know how, or because her mother wouldn't listen.
While many teens have difficult relationships during these years, adopted teens have the added problem of always being unsure of their status as a family member. This can result in the “striving for perfection” behaviour of some teens and the testing “will you love me if I'm bad” behaviour of others. Some adopted teens believe that they are “bad” and that as soon as their parents discover this, or as soon as they are bad enough, they will be rejected again. This feeling of alienation, of disentitlement within the family, causes emotional insecurity, anxiety, and a lack of trust in the parents' ability to support and sustain them. Some parents believe that their adopted children require constant reassurance that they are loved, and that, no matter what the parents do and say, it is never enough.
I'm not sure at what point my oldest son began to believe in my support and love, but I remember after a particularly difficult time when he was eighteen, screaming at him, “Loving you is a life sentence!” In spite of my anger and frustration, I believe he realized that I was his mother forever, whether he was “good” or “bad.”
Maryann was still going through the difficult years. “When I go in there [to Children's Aid},” she said, “I don't know what they're going to say. ‘Cause if I go in there, they're not going to shove me in no home.” Maryann was adamant, “that's for sure. I mean if I go in there and they say, ‘Well, we'll stick you in this home,' I don't know, I'd rather live on the streets. It's not as if I'm up to anything most of the time, you know. I mean most of my life now is just working, going home [to her sister's place], sleeping, working, going home, sleeping. So I mean it's not as if I'm up to anything. I'm happier now. For some reason inside of me, I feel a lot better now I'm out of the house.”
We watched the rain, cocooned in my van, thinking about the problems of being sixteen and adopted. My son David poked his head out of the Dairy Queen. I waved. He ducked back inside.
“Sometimes being adopted doesn't affect my life at all and sometimes it does. You know, sometimes I think, ‘When I find her [birth mother], I'm really going to wring her neck. She ain't going to hear the end of me.‘” She smiled and shrugged. “Adoption isn't going to affect me. It won't bother me at all.”
While Maryann told me this I thought of her feelings of alienation, or not being real, of not belonging. At some point soon, I hoped, she would understand that her feelings may be related to her being adopted.
“My mom and dad treat me like they would if they'd had me. I mean, I can go back home. I mean, even though she kicked me out, now she doesn't mind if I go back home. But now that I know what it's like being out, I don't want to go back. I've been out of the house two months now—after the end of grade ten. I lived with a friend for two weeks and they were going to keep me, but me and my friend started not to get along, you know how that happens, so I moved in with my sister and now my sister and I aren't getting along. She keeps saying, ‘When are you going to move out? When are you going to move out?' I live with her and her boyfriend. My mom doesn't think I'm going to get anywhere. I'm a number one skipper-outer. I don't know. . . .”
It is hard for teens to have faith in themselves when their mother does not believe in them, or when they think she doesn't. As well, Maryann was dealing with the age-old problem of trying to define her-self as separate from her parents, as a person in her own right. This common teen task may be complicated by the perception of most adopted teens that she had never been allowed to be herself, to define herself truly, but had always had to assume a position as a child of the adoptive family. She may have been be able to accept that position intellectually, but emotionally she didn't feel authentic.
I asked Maryann if she would adopt children herself.” Yes, because I think I'd understand what an adopted child is going through at certain times and ages. Compared to what parents do that weren't adopted. Like my sister [a biological child] wants to adopt. But you know I just hope she'll understand.”
David was patiently waiting under the eaves of the Dairy Queen, hands in his pockets, hunched over as he tried to keep the rain away. Feeling guilty for being warm and dry, I opened the door, called, and he dashed through the rain to the van, nodded to Maryann as she left, and settled in for the drive. I forgot to turn the tape off and have a record of David criticizing my driving with the acumen and theoretical expertise of a twelve-year-old all the way back to my friend's house.
Suzanne, mentioned previously, at fourteen years had had great difficulty in believing that she belonged in her family. Her mother had told me that Suzanne was “difficult . . . a handful.” Slim, blonde, and beautiful, Suzanne was also intelligent and sad. She found it hard to talk to me, difficult to tell me what she was thinking. Speaking hesitantly, softly, she took time between sentences to decide whether to reveal anything to me at all. The youngest of three children, Suzanne was the only adopted child and the only girl. In spite of what ought to have been a privileged position, she felt as if she was treated as an outsider in her own family. She didn't get along with either her mother or her father and thought that she would never be good enough to fit in. In some ways she felt lucky to have a family that could give her food, clothing, and an education, but, in other ways, she felt the isolation wasn't worth it. At twelve, she had run away from and stayed away for a year. When she returned, nothing had changed. She still felt unwanted, unaccepted, not quite what the family had expected. What she didn't tell me at the time of the interview was that her adoptive father was sexually abusing her.
Suzanne often had a different opinion from the rest of the teenagers I interviewed. “Yes, I'd adopt. I'd treat my children as I wanted to be treated as a kid. I'd let them know everything about their parents.” And then, on second thought, said, “But then maybe I wouldn't adopt, because I don't want my children to carry the worry of wondering about their natural parents. I don't want that to be between us.”
Adoption seems to be a reasonable possibility to most teens. This doesn't mean that they aren't independent thinkers—they have come to their understanding of adoption by puzzling it out for them-selves. Adoption was not a subject that was often discussed in the class-room or the school yard except as a curiosity. This was one reason why so many were anxious to talk to me; they seldom had anyone else to talk to about it. Even when they felt secure in their social situation, and even though they felt adoption was a reasonable, realistic social process, they didn't talk about it. Some felt that talking about adoption was somehow “disloyal” or “hurtful” to their adoptive parents. I had thought that my sons didn't talk to me much about adoption because they didn't care about it. But the teens I interviewed made me realize that I couldn't presume that. They told me my sons probably wouldn't talk to me about it.
The teenage years are tough times with parents. Many told me that their parents were uninformed, too critical, too demanding. But when asked to rate their (adoptive) parents out of ten (ten being high and one, low), seventy-five percent rated their parents between eight and ten while twenty-five percent rated them six or less. Even those who had stormy years with parents, who had run away from home or had been unhappy, didn't always rate parents low. “They really tried,” one girl told me. “I was an awful kid. I'm really glad now that I came back and tried again because they really cared.”
Karen said of her family, “I get along great with them now. In the past year, now I do. Like, now I love them more than ever. When I was fifteen and up to now, I didn't care what they said about my life because they were wrong. Because as far as I was concerned they didn't know me. I felt a natural mother had a certain touch with her own child-like she kind of knew things about her own child.” She had absorbed the social bias that biological families are best, that adoptive families are a substitute.
“That's what I thought then,” Karen continued. “So I figured they [adoptive parents] didn't know anything about me and talking to them was a waste of time. And it was a waste of time to me. There's only two people—you and my sister—that I have actually wanted to talk to—wanted to tell these things about adoption.”
For some adopted children, the fear of abandonment is so strong that they push away those who are closest to them, often their adoptive mother. While this fear may not be conscious, it influences their lives and may motivate their behaviour. If they do something awful enough, their mother might reject them. They believe at some level that since they have been rejected before, their adoptive mother will reject them, too. Rather than waiting for that to happen, they try to provoke it.”
“Me and my parents,” Karen said, “we haven't sat down yet—to this day, actually—to see how I feel. It was such a huff when I wanted to find my real mother. No one had the . . . calmness to actually get into deep discussion with me. So like, my {adoptive] mother told me that because of the fact that I was the last child, and she'd been through so many things with the other four: sex, managing money, and things like that, just the ways of life period . . . she didn't talk about those things with me.
“I'm just starting to get myself on my feet. But still I'm not stable enough. I'm too emotional. Anything just hits me and I blow up like a fire hydrant.”
I gave her credit for at least being able to feel.
“I know how to feel, all right. I'm getting pretty sick of all this feeling. I'm having trouble accepting love, too. I know there's some-thing inside me I have to deal with. Because my own [birth] mother couldn't keep me, I thought she didn't love me. I still think she didn't love me. This is why, when somebody tells me they love me or some-body tries to show me they love me, I reject it.”
When the teens told me that they would have families of their own, would adopt children or have biological children, they usually left out this piece of emotional development that Karen was talking about—the idea that they could trust a loving relationship. The sense of trust develops in the first years of life. If the adopted child had bonds of love that were broken or disrupted in those years, he or she may need to work hard at dealing with this before creating a new family of their own.
Karen's boyfriend who had been listening to records in the living room was an immediate problem. She wasn't just projecting that she'd have problems with trust in the future—her boyfriend was here, and her problem was now. “You know, I need so much proof—unreasonable proof—because of the fact. . . . It all bears down to my mother. That is the problem.”
Many adoptees, most of whom are less articulate than Karen, have the same problem. Having once been abandoned, with the disruption of bonding that that entails, they fear being abandoned again. Like Karen, they know that loss is part of life, that people may love them and leave them, and that they are probably lovable. But they feel unlovable, that there is something inherently wrong with them that will cause abandonment in the future. Every relationship becomes tainted with this fear. Not all adoptees have this strong a fear, and some don't seem to have it at all. But some, like Karen, who is not pathological—sick or emotionally ill—have an early-set fear of being abandoned. This fear exists together with a relief at having been placed in their adoptive home. It is not a comfortable juxtaposition and one that adoptees must tease out, talk about, and attempt to resolve.
Karen was gaining awareness of herself. Adoptive parents, social workers, and society in general have not been very understanding about the grieving that adoptees need to do for their lost mothers, and the resolution they must have over their first separation. Most people believe that if the separation was at a young age, surely babies don't feel the loss. Apparently they do.
“I don't have a lot of self-confidence. I'm twenty and I don't even have my grade twelve. If you don't have grade twelve you don't have much self-confidence. I need a lot of people saying to me, ‘Oh, you look good.' I need to build my life so I have something to make me feel good. This is why I'm doing this {getting her grade twelve diploma}, so I have something to feel good about myself. Now I feel I do every-thing wrong.”
When I asked Karen if she felt she was part of her family or if anyone in her family treated her differently because she was adopted, she said, “I thought my relatives treated me differently, but you know it was probably just me. I mean I even do that to this day. I see things that aren't really happening. It's just my perspective. I always thought that the natural ones were getting treated the best and we were getting the worst of it all. My family is very strong, very career-oriented, all of them. They're all affectionate, all loving. My family is super. There's nothing wrong with them—now. When I was giving trouble against my mother, my family was giving it right back. And it wasn't good then. I was a rotten child. I was rotten. I pulled a knife on my brother, like for hitting my sister. Things like that.”
I had a sudden surge of sympathy for Karen's parents. I looked straight at her. Her eyes twinkled in understanding and she nodded. “I really was a rotten kid. When we were younger we were all so close in age, my mother said this is why we went through all this. The only way I figured I was ever going to get out of my situation was to scrap my way out of it.
“I always figured I was a rebel. I met a lot of people who scrapped with me and I wasn't going to be ‘Miss Sweetness' and sit back and smile. I was going to scrap right back.
“I think when I ran away from home [at fifteen] and hitchhiked across Canada, I learned a lot—some things good, some things not so good—but I was independent. At that time I was doing what I wanted to do and no one was going to tell me any different and no one was ever going to tell me I was wrong because I never gave anybody a chance. Even now, when someone tells me I'm doing something wrong, I rebel against it. I say, ‘Forget it. I can do what I want. I can say what I please.' My family knows that now. My mom knows that. She will not argue with me now.”
The trouble Karen and her family went through resulted in more secure emotional support for her. “I finally realized that they [her adoptive parents] brought me up. My family is super now. My sister talked to me; she said that she went through the same resentment. The feeling of being alone. I mean, like, ‘Who are you? Your own mother gave you up. What was the matter with you?' She told me that she put my mother and family through hell, too. She finally realized that they brought her up; they clothed her and fed her and comforted her. The alternative was foster care. At one time she wanted to find her parents, but she doesn't even want to meet her birth mother now. Mom is Mom, born through her or not, because that's who she was raised with. I couldn't understand that then. But I understand it now.”
Karen and her sister had come to an intellectual understanding of their entitlement to their positions in the family and, perhaps, an emotional acceptance as well. They were caught in the anger and resentment between their first separation and gratitude for their adoptive home. To be accepted by their adoptive family, they had to be relinquished by their birth mothers, which caused uncomfortable and contradictory feelings. If all the members of the adoption triangle—birth mother, adoptive parents, and adoptee—had understood the need for reassurance and the need to feel secure in the family, Karen may not have had such stormy teen years.
When I asked teens to evaluate their parents, they were realistic. If they rated their parents below five on the one-to-ten scale, it was usually for a serious reason such as abuse, or a cold attitude, or a lack of caring. No one who had only the usual problems of interfering mothers or demanding fathers rated parents below five, except Katy, who told me she was having a particularly rough time with her (adoptive) mother.
Everyone felt that their parents owed the same kind of responsibilities to their adopted children as to biological children. There should be no differences between them. Only Suzanne felt that there was a difference between herself and her brothers who were biological children. She thought there shouldn't be any difference, but that there was. No one else saw any differences and no one expected that there would be any differences. Some thought their parents should be more understanding and help them to find their beginnings, their birth parents, or information about their birth parents.
“If they accept me as their child, then they accept the fact that I am adopted and that I have a different history from them. If they accept me, they can't ignore the fact that I'm adopted.” Rhea was emphatic about that.
When I asked what teens thought the responsibilities of a child to his adoptive parents were, all of them told me that the child had the same responsibilities as a biological child: the child owes a duty to the parents; the parents owe a duty to the child.
What about the second set of parents in the adoption triangle? Teens started life with another set of parents. What are these parents' responsibilities to them?
“They should let me know who they are. Nothing more.” Dora said after pondering the question.
Rhea thought differently. “I think they owe me my background and the reason why they gave me up. At least that. But not their names, or where they live now.”
Lena believed that the responsibilities of her biological parents were over. “I'm here and that's pretty well all they needed to do for me, give me to a good home.”
Leslie said, “My mother owes me something. She should tell me who my father is. If she doesn't want to tell me, that's her prerogative. I'm not going to fight her for it. But she ought to tell me.” Leslie knew her birth mother's name, where she lived, and quite a lot about her.
Katy wanted to know why she was given up. She felt her birth parents owed her a reason. “Not an explanation exactly, or an excuse or anything really involved—just why. I also want to know if there are any loonies in the family.”
Most of the teens did not feel that their birth parents owed them anything at all. Nor did they feel they owed anything to their birth parents.
“No, definitely not. No. I don't owe them anything,” was the usual reply. Only fourteen-year-old Katy felt an obligation to her birth parents. “I owe it to them to grow up to be responsible; to lead my life right. Not to screw up. They put me up for adoption because they didn't think they could bring me up in an environment that would be positive. They put me in a good home and they probably want to see me grow up to be a responsible person.”
Rhea felt that she had a responsibility not to disrupt her birth mother's life. “I should give her a guarantee that I'm not going to cause problems or seek revenge for her giving me up.”
Dora said the same thing in a different way. “I feel an obligation to let them live their own lives.” No one else felt any obligation to their birth parents.
These opinions were offered before the teens had met or knew their birth parents except for Rhea, who had ongoing contact with her birth mother. There may be a time when as adults, the teens will have different perspectives about any obligation to birth parents.
In my youngest son's life, his birth mother gives him his place in the feast halls of his aboriginal community. His place depends on her. He is then part of a culture and tradition that has obligations and responsibilities which may involve him. Adoption is a common practice in his culture. Other adoptees may find themselves part of a large family, or the only child of a single parent, and responsibilities may become more real and more obvious. Because teens saw no obligation to birth parents at this time in their lives does not mean that they will never feel any obligation.
I asked teens what difference it would make to their lives if they knew their birth parents.
Katy said, “I want to know them. More than anything, I want to know who they were; what they were like—their lifestyle; if they are alive. That bothers me, seeing as you have to wait until you're nineteen to find them, that's a long time. It wouldn't make much difference, really, knowing about them. I wouldn't put my parents down—like I wouldn't forget about them and go and live with my natural parents. They [her adoptive parents] are the parents that brought me up and they're the ones I'd stay with,” Katy said, although at this time, she thought her adoptive mother was old-fashioned, too strict, and didn't understand her at all. “My natural parents didn't have to put up with me as a baby. They didn't have to bring me up. It's the truth.”
Paul didn't know if it would make much difference. “I'd like to watch them for a week—be invisible or something so I could see what their life is like without them seeing me. I wouldn't intrude unless . . . I don't think I would intrude. I'd like to know who they are and what they're doing.”
Nicole wanted to know “What they look like and that's it. I would be concerned about invading their privacy now. I don't think it's important [to meet them] because I know basically the reason I was put up for adoption and I'm quite willing to accept that. But I want to know what they look like, to see why I look the way I do, stuff like that. I was given a description of height, hair colour, eye colour on the forms, but I'd like to see for myself.”
Eighteen-year-old Sherry wanted to know about her birth mother. “I'd just like to meet her some day. I'd like to know what she looks like. She might not want to see me, but if I could just meet her and talk to her, I'd like that.”
John, fifteen, was systematic about his needs. “I'd like to meet them. See what kind of people they are. I'd like to know their occupations, where they live, and what they look like. I'd like to know if I have any biological brothers and sisters and other relatives. It would kill off a bit of curiosity I have about them.”
Helen thought that “It wouldn't make a lot of difference but it would satisfy my curiosity. If I never met them it wouldn't bother me a lot. It would bother me, say ten percent, but if I met them I wouldn't regret meeting them. It would satisfy me. A lot of it is curiosity: what they look like, who they are, who I look like, who I take after. I'd also like to know my grandparents. I've never really known my [adoptive] grandparents. They both live [in Europe}. I only met them twice. And I'd just like to know who my grandparents are. I'd like to know what they're like compared to my parents, compared to me.”
Suzanne joined the majority. “I'd be happier. I have all this curiosity built up about them.”
Lena repeated Suzanne's general ideas. “It would give me a history. Let me see where I came from. Satisfy a curiosity.”
Rhea had met her birth mother a year earlier, when she was seventeen. She told me about the impact it had made on her. “It was like this big, huge, ultimate question was answered. It was being able to look in the mirror and being able to identify with someone.”
In answering the question, “What would you do if your birth parents came knocking on your door?” Suzanne, the fourteen-year-old whose adoptive father had abused her, was the only one who was willing to consider a parenting relationship with her birth parents. No one else wanted to try to fit their birth parents into his or her life as some kind of parent-substitute. Many thought their birth parents might be friends, or friends of the family.
Cindy-Lou explained, “I wouldn't go away from my [adoptive] mother, but I'd try to be a friend to my birth mother. I guess I'd try.”
Lena said, “I think I'd like my birth mother as a friend. Someone who could be a buddy and come over for coffee.”
Nicole was more cautious. “If we got along I'd try to treat her as a friend of the family.”
Stevie was blunt. “How should I know? They might be idiots.”
Sherry said, “It would be hard to do that [fit birth parents into her life] because they'd be no different from any other friend. They were never there in the beginning. It would be really hard to fit them in.”
Sarah said, “I'd respect her as a friend, I think. But my real mom and dad are the ones I have. I think I'd like to see my birth mother now and then. But not yet.”
Rhea, who knew her birth mother, told me that she considered her birth mother “Fifty-fifty as a friend and as a kind of a mother. She can't really be my mom. She wasn't there to change my diapers. She wasn't there to make me feel better and wipe off the tears. But now she's there to talk to when I need someone to talk to and I can't do that with my adoptive mom because she is just such a judgemental person . . . . I tried to find my {birth} mom when I was fifteen and being bounced from foster home to foster home. Everyone kept saying, ‘You can't find her until you're eighteen' and I kept saying, ‘I don't need her when I'm eighteen, I need her now!' I found her when I was seventeen and I'm glad I did. But like I said, she wasn't there in the beginning for all those years and she didn't ‘mother' me. She's a friend, though.”
Mike had a little trouble telling me exactly how he felt. “Maybe I'd fit them into my life as friends. I sure wouldn't kick out my mom and dad, if my real mom showed up. They put me up for adoption, so . . . . This could all be different if I was adopted when I was older. I'd have different feelings about my [birth] parents then. I might have liked them. Or they might have abused me and then I wouldn't like them. I don't know them at all. I don't know if I would want to know them.”
Leslie said that she would talk to her birth parents. “I feel resentment toward my birth mother. Why couldn't she have kept me? But I've spent nineteen years without her and I've turned out pretty good.” Debbie thought it would be difficult to fit her birth parents into her life. “I don't think I'd want to. I mean, I have enough problems as it is. I think a lot of problems would arise from any relationship like that too. Sue {foster mother] has motherly feelings toward me. She's only seven years older than I am, but still, she has motherly feelings toward me. And my {adoptive] mother! She'd be really threatened by it. But Sue would understand. She knows I would never leave here to live with either of my parents. I've reassured her so many times. We've had a lot of discussions about that one.
“Those two {Debbie's foster parents] would do anything to make me happy. They'd bend over backwards for me, and they have. But I'd do the same for them. Other people would be affected if I started a relationship with my birth mother. It would even affect my relationship with my boyfriend. He thinks it's an excellent idea that I want to look for her, but then again he'd probably get upset if I had any more demands on my emotions.” Debbie had looked at how she was handling her life and decided that she could not, at this time, juggle any more relationships, including one with a birth mother.
Helen thought that her birth mother would “never be a parent, but it would be nice to have her as a friend. I was really upset when I was about thirteen. I wanted to meet my birth mother then. My [adoptive] mom talked to me. She did try [to find her birth mother}. That helped me the most. My {adoptive} mom cared enough to try and help me go through the pain that I was going through then. I used to see those television shows like ‘Little House on the Prairie' where they made adopted kids seem sad, pitiful. Like who was going to take care of them? That got to me. Probably I just wanted to be hugged by Mom, but I thought I really did want to know more about my birth mother.”
Some adopted teens feel threatened by a prospective meeting with their birth mother. Does meeting their birth mother mean their adoptive mother is less “mom”? If their adoptive mother helps them search, does this mean she wants to give them up? While they may intellectually understand that their adoptive mother is trying to do her best for them, they may not be emotionally ready to accept this. Everyone who loves and supports an adopted child needs to respect his feelings, including the adoptee himself.
I asked Helen if she thought it would have been good to meet her birth parents when she was going through such a bad time at thirteen.
“No. I would have thought of Mom as Mom and my natural mother as a friend, but I probably would have done a lot of things wrong. Now I'd be able to handle it, you know, and talk to her. When I was younger I would have wanted to go with her. And I'd have regretted it now.”
Judy, fourteen, who had told me at one point that knowing about her birth parents would be good because she might want to go and live with them, answered the question, “How would you fit your birth parents into your life?” with a defensive, “I'd meet them, but I want to live with my [adoptive} parents. I'd treat my birth parents as friends, but that's all.”
The question is perhaps too overwhelming to be answered easily. Birth mothers have been shrouded in secrecy in most adoptees' lives, and a reunion would need preparation, discussion, and an exploration of expectations and feelings. It would not be a casual, easily-accomplished meeting. Most teens are not prepared for it. They want to feel secure in their present families and not threatened by a new relationship.
Over time as I contemplated the teens' words, a surprising wave of positive emotion for adoptive parents washed over me. The teens' adopted families, good or bad, were their families. I realized that they saw their relationship with their adoptive parents as important. They talked about it, revelled in it, argued with it, fought it, and appreciated it. They felt surrounded by parental feeling, even saturated by it, but they still wanted to know where they came from, why they were given up, and who their first parents were. They knew where they were; they wanted to know where they had been.
How does being adopted affect teens relationships with society at large? As children, some teens had heard taunts from other six-or seven-year-olds that strongly impressed them. “You're adopted. You aren't real.” Small children, even when they have been told that they “were born in another lady's tummy,” are often shocked by the revelations of the playground. Their attitude toward adoption is often one of great curiosity coupled with peculiar interpretations of their own. Years ago, when my oldest son was tiny, I had a state visit from a six-year-old neighbour.
“Mrs. Crook,” she said, looking puzzled and avidly curious, “my mother says that your little boy is going to be a doctor. How can you know?”
I stirred that question around in my mind and finally said, “I think your mother said that my little boy is adopted.”
Her face cleared, “that's it!” Then, “What's adopted? Isn't that some kind of doctor?”
The worst comments about adoption have come from adoptive parents (in very few cases) and from junior high school friends and acquaintances who seem to use the knowledge as a mallet. Teens told me that no one else seemed to care. If they were treated as a child with special status at home because they were adopted, this could come as a rude shock.
Some teens weren't particularly sensitive to taunts about adoption and suffered very little from them. When I asked Barry how he reacted to teasing in junior high, he said he couldn't remember because he wasn't really interested in adoption at the time.
Other thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds are particularly sensitive. Debbie told me that her older brothers always teased her. “They used to bug me about it. ‘Oh, yeah. You were the ugliest one there. Our parents felt sorry for you so they adopted you.' I used to hear things like that all the time. I believed it. I trusted my brothers. They were some-times nice, and when they were, I just thought the world of them, at least until about last summer when I found out what kind of life they lead—drugs and alcohol. Really screwed up.”
Joanne was not harassed in her family, but she heard taunts from her “friends” in junior high school. “I'd hear, ‘You were given up. You were ugly. No one wanted you.‘” While Joanne understood that she was wanted in her family and that the teenagers were only looking for ways to be offensive, it still hurt.
Roberta, at nineteen, remembers how she suffered when she was fourteen. “I remember being called a bastard. I remember kids at school saying, ‘Those aren't your real mom and dad. that's not really your grandma and grandpa.' When they said that about my mom and dad I was almost afraid that they were right. But when they said that about my grandmother I knew they were wrong. My grandmother thought I was wonderful. And my grandmother was mine. I remember the kids saying things like, ‘Why would someone give their kid up for adoption?' ‘Oh well, adopted kids have learning problems. They don't have the same feelings as everyone else.' I started to wonder if I was normal! I couldn't talk to my mom and dad about it. I mean, you lie so much to your parents when you're younger. You can't tell them how you feel. They have these expectations of the perfect daughter and you don't want to let them see any different. I had to grow up and they had to grow up and accept me.”
Some adoptees feel that they must be the “perfect” child, that they must try very hard to fulfill their parents' and society's expectations. Such children may be the passive, compliant ones who act out only occasionally, but who bury their questions, anger, and insecurities deep in their emotional core, only to surface in later relationships. A quiet, compliant child needs as much information and discussion about adoption as the child who acts out.
Some parents tell their adopted children that they are “special” and “chosen.” These labels often mean that the child feels he or she has to be exceptional. Because being exceptional is difficult if not impossible, the adopted child feels inadequate, never quite good enough. Compounding this is the notion that if he wasn't good enough for his first mother, he can't be for the second one, either. It would help to talk about this pressure to be perfect, but often teens don't understand why they feel inadequate and think that there is something intrinsically wrong with them.
Maryann commented on the vulgar curiosity she saw in the world around her. “A lot of people feel you're not really a person, that's their attitude. They want to know how you deal with being given up.” She naturally resented being questioned like this.
I hadn't realized that there was even that much notice paid to the fact that teens were adopted. Many people have peculiar ideas about birth parents. There is still the expectation, as Rhea said, “That I'd find my natural mother in the gutter.” Many people—adoptive parents, social workers, adopted children, and uninvolved observers—still believe that a birth mother comes from an unloving, unfit family, and lives in poverty, and that birth fathers are uncaring. This attitude persists even in the people whose sister or aunt or neighbour placed a child for adoption.
John, in his prosaic and practical way, gave a more positive view. “Usually you're put up for adoption because your biological parents can't support you properly and they want something better for you. Your adoptive parents want you.”
Leslie was optimistic even though she was still arguing with her (adoptive) mother about her need to search. “I feel positive because I know a lot of kids who were adopted and didn't get along with their parents and couldn't handle the situation. They ended up going from foster home to foster home, or group home to group home, or group home to lock-up. They ended up getting pregnant at fifteen and giving up a kid for adoption, somehow getting back at the whole process. So I feel good that I had a good home; I was lucky.”
Helen had similar feelings about her family. “When you are adopted you can lead a normal life, a normal family life. Someone cared enough to put me out for adoption when they couldn't afford to keep me. They wanted me to have a good home. I've always seen adoption as a positive thing. I've never been mad at my birth parents. . . . I understand that a sixteen-year-old couldn't keep a baby—not really very well.”
If the reason for relinquishing a child to adoption is most often the lack of financial support, and if poverty engenders ill health and few choices, then it's reasonable to assume that children raised in poverty would have problems. They are not genetically programmed for trouble. Statistically, adopted children fare better in the areas of crime and mental health than the children of their biological families, so to some extent being adopted into a secure home protects them from problems.
Judy, fourteen, viewed the parenting situation as a giant lottery—getting a good set of parents was purely a matter of luck. “Some parents are mean. If you search and find your natural parents, you might not believe they really are yours and they might not live up to your ideas of them. The best thing about adoption and living with your adoptive parents is that you get a real family.”
I don't want to leave the impression that teens are constantly being questioned or put down by their peers. The incidents these teens described were isolated, but notable to them. Generally, teens didn't find many people who gave their adoptive status much thought. When I asked if they thought that being adopted affected their lives, they told me that it didn't really make much difference to them and that it definitely wouldn't make any difference in their future. Even when it obviously had influenced some during their junior high school years, they didn't expect it to affect them in their adult lives. And, even when the adoptees were a different race than their adoptive parents and/or brothers and sisters, teens still told me that adoption didn't make any difference in the way they fit into society.
Considering the number of adoptees who search for their birth parents and who feel that they cannot settle into their lives until they find their birth mothers, this view of the future may be unrealistic. Being adopted matters—they need to think about it, decide how they feel about it, and understand how society's attitudes affect their lives—past, present, and future.
What motivates people to bring a stranger's child into their home? Do they love all children, or anybody's child, or just this one? Are they concerned, loving people who want to give a child a home, or selfish self-serving people who want the appearance of the perfect family? Or are they complex combinations of all these needs and motives?
The need to adopt a child seemed simple and straight-forward. When I talked to social workers and parents, and when I examined my own situation, it was obviously more complex. Many times teens told me that their adoptive mother couldn't have children. “My mom has some kind of a problem and she couldn't have kids and they wanted kids, so they adopted.” Sometimes parents wanted to be sure of the gender. “My mom and dad wanted a boy,” or, “My mom and dad wanted a girl.”
A social worker once told me that parents should make sure that they aren't adopting a child to show their families, their neighbours, and society how kind and generous they are; that they aren't using the child to improve their own social status. At first, I thought his suggestion ridiculous, but the more I considered it, the more I realized some people might feel that adoption was expected of them. Some religious groups encourage their members to adopt children in order to bring them up in their faith and give social prestige to those who do so. But even in situations where the motive for adoption is not just a matter of giving and receiving love, the children are most often loved for themselves. Reassuring us, researchers tell us that in over eighty percent of adoptions, parents and child remain together. It is difficult for anyone not to love the child who becomes part of his or her life.
Many couples adopt a child after a frustrating effort to conceive, and so may approach the adoption process with unresolved feelings of loss. While childless couples-by-choice are more socially accepted today than in the 70s or ‘80s, married couples were expected to have children at the time when today's teens were babies. This social expectation added pressure to those who had to face the fact of infertility. When parents are diagnosed as infertile, they often feel loss and regret for the children that might have been. This sense of loss needs to be resolved before adoption so that the newly adopted child doesn't become the obvious proof of the parents' “failure” to have “one of their own.” The societal attitude that biological families are better than families that are blended with adopted children and stepchildren still exists. There is no reason behind this, other than the historical property rights argument, that is, the biological child as “rightful heir,” but this attitude still operates in our lives. It helps to know that it is only an opinion and not a truth.
As a guest lecturer at an adoptive parents meeting, I was asked, “What do you say when your daughter looks right at you and says, ‘You're not my real mom?” The question startled me.
Such a question didn't seem a big problem, so I answered, “When that happened to me, I said ‘Tough, kid. I'm the one you're stuck with.' The child is, in the time-honoured way of all children, only trying to upset you where she thinks you are vulnerable. You are, after all, not her real mother in that you are not her biological mother. You are her real mother in legal and emotional terms.”
There had been a lot of emotion behind that question, and I knew that I hadn't really satisfied the woman. Much later, I realized that I had been denying the difference between a biological family and an adoptive family and had been anxious to downplay the question. In conversation with the social worker after the meeting, I asked why he thought the woman had been so upset by her daughter's question.
“I think the mother may have unresolved infertility issues,” he said. “You have already had a biological child. ‘Real' has a different definition for you. You can compare your feelings for your adopted and biological children and know securely that you love both intensely and that they love you. She is afraid that she doesn't love enough or loves too much or in some way is not a good enough mother.”
We are all, at times, afraid we are not “good enough” parents. In fact we know we aren't good enough. It might have helped that woman to talk to other parents, to find that her feelings were common—as I realized when I was asked that same question again and again. On the other hand, although feelings of inadequacy are common, I don't want to minimize the power of the emotions around infertility.
Parents who feel threatened by this question may need to talk with a counsellor. Some researchers believe that infertility issues play out in the parents' attitudes toward the adopted child, and can be particularly deep and damaging in the father-child relationship. They believe that fathers with unresolved infertility issues are more critical of their adopted children and that they are more critical of their sons than their daughters. Parents might find it helpful to talk about this with someone who has experience with this problem. The reason a father is so critical of his son might have nothing to do with the son, and every-thing to do with infertility issues of the father.
Adoptive parents are often young—in their twenties or early thirties—when they adopt and often are not wise in their understanding of psychology. Growing up and understanding ourselves takes a lifetime. When we are young, new parents, we may not completely understand our motives.
With a stepdaughter and one biological daughter and unable to have more babies, I still wanted another. We felt our family was too small and we wanted boys. It seemed really quite simple at the time—it was about emotional needs, not reasons. I know that, until our last son was born, I felt our family wasn't complete. I don't think I looked any deeper than that. In both cases we waited nine months from the time we applied for our sons to the time they were born, so the whole process seemed quite normal. Other than a brief visit by a social worker, we weren't involved in a detailed home study, physical tests, or years of waiting. Although we attended a series of six pre-adoption classes, we didn't go through any serious introspection or examination of our motives for adopting. At the time, I believed that the pre-adoption classes were just another way for the social workers to evaluate our suit-ability as parents.
Many parents want a baby without examining their reasons. There may be many reasons and most parents probably have more than one. Some couples believe a baby will hold their marriage together or that it will make them feel more important, and more secure. Others believe a baby might make up for the faults of an older child, or that one with special problems will need them. Some may believe that adopting a baby will reverse their infertility and allow them to have a biological child. And some may not know why they want to adopt.
Kerri invited me into the house where she was babysitting. She was just nineteen and planned to go back and finish high school and then attend a child-care program at the community college as soon as she could. In the meantime, she supported herself with some help from her parents. Kerri was bright and pleasant, trying to find subjects she and I could talk about. She wanted to know and like me, and wanted me to understand her. She told me about her struggles to be independent at sixteen; how she wanted to live apart from her family, wanted to see them only occasionally, wanted to know her own mind, and trust herself. But these were struggles to become a separate person, something she had in common with other teenagers, not struggles against her adoption, or with the idea of being adopted. Now she lives easily and happily in her parents' home and feels like an adult who is accepted and loved.
Kerri told me of her understanding of why her parents adopted her. “Another lady was taking care of me and my mom went to see me and I was lying in this buggy. I was six months old when my mother found me. If she hadn't taken me I'd have died of pneumonia. I had pneumonia then. I lived in a buggy—that was my crib . . . playpen . . . bed . . . everything. I never had any exercise. Every time I cried, I guess the foster parents fed me. That's all they did. To shut me up they just fed me a bottle of milk or a cookie or something. So my mom saw me and she just said, ‘You poor little thing. You come to me.' Like, my mom had two boys and two more boys she'd adopted and she'd always wanted a little girl, so she got me. I guess she wanted the experience of having a daughter.”
As a young child, Kerri slept in a bedroom above the family living room. Her parents were unaware that she could hear, from her bed, every word they said below her. That was how she discovered that she and her brothers were adopted. It was exciting and special information that she immediately shared with her brothers. Their parents then talked about adoption with them and the subject has been easy to discuss since. Kerri doesn't feel any great need to find her birth parents. She's thought about searching and talked to her brothers about it, but she has decided not to look. She feels happy, secure, and loved by her family and boyfriend and doesn't see any need to disturb that.
Kerri spoke about her first conversation about adoption. “Mom and Dad sat us down all together and explained it to us. It felt odd at first. We all felt really strange and really different and we didn't know if we should tell our friends. We thought people are going to say, ‘Ha ha! You're so ugly your mother didn't like you!' But as we grew older and I told my friends about it, a lot of them said that they would like to be adopted because then they'd know that someone really wanted them. And that's how I feel, and that's how my brothers feel, too, that our parents really want us. Up to about grade five I thought my brothers and I were the only ones who were adopted and it felt really good when we realized that other kids were adopted, too. . . . You think you are the only one—but you're not.”
Kerri had the security of four older brothers, two of whom were also in the position of having been adopted into the family. She knew she wasn't the only one, or even one of the few who were adopted. An only child, or the only adopted one in the family, would find it more difficult to understand Kerri's perspective.
Some researchers think that adopted children who have non-adopted sisters or brothers have a more difficult time during adolescence. This may be worse if the parents had a biolgocial child after the adopted one. If parents had other adopted children—as in Kerri's family—the adopted child had an easier time during the teen years. The adopted child may feel reassured by another adopted child and threatened by a biological one.
Four teens I interviewed had sisters and brothers who were much older. Paul explained, “My parents already had raised my brother and sister and they thought they'd like to do it again, so they adopted my sister and me.” In one case the baby replaced another child. “My parents had a son who died. They heard I was available, so they picked me up.” Dan seemed to think that gave him a ready-made place in the family. Dan was also the youngest in his family. My own sons are the youngest as well.
There were also teenagers who couldn't remember why they were adopted. Fourteen-year-old Judy didn't think it was important to know why. “Mom told me, but I can't remember.”
Reasons for adoption can be complicated. Adoption is not a fairy tale. Parents who may not know their own motives for adopting may find that the adopted baby does not provide the “cure” for their problems, or does not meet their emotional needs.
In two cases social workers placed children with families who were not ready to love them. As in all professions, not every worker is excellent. Some make mistakes. Some are beginners or are overworked, and others don't have the education needed to make the appropriate decisions for their clients.
I drove an hour into the suburbs to talk to Dora. She was alone in her boarding house in a well-kept suburb of a small city. Dora was eighteen and living with support from the welfare department, her income supplemented by babysitting and occasional jobs. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and a low, melodious voice. She had a logical measured way of speaking, saying what she meant thoughtfully and carefully.
Dora knew her birth mother had been young and unable to care for her, but she did not know where she had lived before she was placed for adoption at six months. Her adoptive father was a professional man who was away much of the time and her adoptive mother, while home with her, was unable to love her. At twelve years of age, Dora faced her mother's indifference and had to learn, after years of painful and unsuccessful effort, that she couldn't change the situation, that she had not caused it, and that her mother's rejection was not Dora's fault, that's a tough emotional fact that some adults never face.
I had a lot of admiration for Dora. By the time she was fourteen, she knew she could never be loved at home. She was placed in a good foster home with a loving foster mother until she was seventeen. Psychiatric counselling helped her to accept the situation. Now a mature eighteen, she seemed calm and stable, and although she blamed her parents, she also felt sorry for them. Her adoption was an unlucky deal. She was dealt parents who couldn't love her—that's the way the cards fell, that's the hand she had to play in life.
At seventeen, when her foster mother was ill, a different social worker placed Dora back home. Not a good decision. There she endured physical and emotional abuse for eight months before she moved to a boarding home. Dora wanted to work in Early Childhood Education, planing to help children have a better childhood than she did. She was as a survivor who was not looking back for a reason to fail.
It had taken years for her to understand why her adoptive mother couldn't love her. She had thought it might all stem from why she was adopted in the first place. “My mom had five miscarriages. Then they adopted a girl who died of a heart condition, then they adopted my brother, then two girls. One died of a respiratory problem and the other had cerebral palsy and they put her in an institution. And then they adopted me.”
It was difficult to believe that one family could be subjected to such heartache. But it is possible that the other children were placed in temporary care as foster children. That might be why so many different placements were made.
“At that point, as far as I'm concerned, my mother's mental health must have been all downhill. The social worker couldn't see that. She never re-evaluated the home. She just went on her first assessment way back and never saw what it took from my parents to have all these children come in and out of their lives. By that time I think my mother was afraid to love any baby; she just froze. . . . my mom told me that the reason she never really got close was so that, if I left or something happened to me, it wouldn't hurt her.” It was the circumstances of her placement, her parents' reasons for adoption, that made the relation-ship so difficult.
I asked if she thought it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Yeah,” Dora responded. “Bonding never really started. My family really broke apart when I was twelve. I've been in and out of foster homes since I was fifteen.
“My mother told me that my birth mother was raped. She said I was a rapist's child and that was why I had no heart and no feelings. And I believed that. It wasn't until I got my non-identifying information that I found out that my birth parents had been going together for a year and a half.” Her voice hardened as she held back the pain. “Well, Mom, it was a really long rape; it was a year and a half.”
The hair rose on my arms and the muscles of my neck stiffened. I was suddenly furiously angry at her adoptive mother. As a public health nurse I had seen children subjected to cruelty, neglect, and even persecution, but I have never accepted it. It always makes me angry. I reminded myself that I was only supposed to record Dora's feelings, not my own. The silence lengthened.
Finally I said, “Well, you know . . . that's a cruel thing for a mother to say.”
Dora sighed. “I guess so. When I asked her why she had told me that I was a rapist's child, she said that my mother was fifteen and my father was eighteen, so it was statutory rape. Like legal rape. My mom knew they had been going together for a year and a half. She only told me that to hurt me.
“She upset me for a long time, though. I was trying to make some sense of life and going to school and all that, but I didn't think there were any feelings in me or for me at home. But I got help. My English teacher sent me to the doctor and he sent me to a counsellor. I went for three years because I was really disturbed. It really bothered me—that my mom didn't love me. After two years of counselling the psychiatrist tried to tell my mother what the problem was and she wouldn't listen. She walked out. I tried to get reunited for a year after that, but the psychiatrist said to give it up and try to shape my own life without them. The last time I saw them was two years ago. I was asked, more or less, not to contact them.”
I asked her if she knew why her parents had wanted children.
“It's the little dream they had—the mother and the father. So it was the dream of having a little boy and a little girl and dressing them up and having a family and making everything complete.”
Dora's story was difficult, but her moral courage was inspiring.
Sarah, nineteen and indulged by loving parents, had almost a fairy-tale experience. She told the story of her parents' expectations with pride. “My mom and dad couldn't have children and they wanted them really bad. They had a nursery set up for two years before they got me.” Sarah was happily married now and still fondly attached to her parents. So many teens had had difficult lives that I was relieved and pleased to talk to someone who had had a happy childhood.
Lena also had good feelings for her parents. She felt they had conducted a search for her. They had needs around race, and Lena satisfied them. “My parents wanted a baby that had one white parent and one black parent—like them. They waited for a woman to have this baby and the baby turned out to be blonde and blue-eyed. They said, ‘No way.' So they looked around until they found a baby that had black skin, and that was me.”
Lena felt that she had met her parents' requirements and so was entitled to her position as a daughter.
The reasons why parents adopt are varied, but the parents of the majority of teens I interviewed truly wanted a child at the time of adoption. Almost uniformly the parents were middle-to-high-income earners. None of the teens had been adopted into a poor family; none had ever worried about getting enough to eat. All of them, including those of mixed race and those who didn't know what race they were, felt that they belonged in the social group they lived in. When parents adopted a child, the child in turn adopted parents, the family, and the community in which they lived. All the teens I interviewed felt a strong sense of identity with their group, family, and community. “I wouldn't want to be anywhere else,” seventeen-year-old Nicole said. “I mean, I don't want different friends or a different school or a different family. Nothing else would be mine.” This feeling could be part of being a teenager and may change as they grow older. Race and biological heritage, as with non-adopted people, matters more when adopted children are in their twenties and thirties.
There were two exceptions to the teens' feeling of entitlement to their families and communities.
Suzanne, age fourteen, wanted another chance with another family. “I'm not loved here. Something else, some other home, might be better. I don't get along with my mother. My mother has unreasonable rules, not normal rules. I hardly get along with either of my parents. They sort of treat me like a stranger—like I'm not really theirs. They treat my brothers [biological children] like angels. Maybe my birth mother might want to see me.”
I interviewed Suzanne at the beginning of this project. She had an unhappy family situation and was especially sad since she could see no future there. I had talked to her mother first and had been told all that was wrong with Suzanne. The implication was that the mother had done her best with Suzanne and failed, so there was nothing more she could do. At fourteen? Just when a girl needs her mother? Suzanne's problems seemed deeper than the usual “Mom is so ignorant” attitude that is common to thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds. I felt a great sense of sorrow from Suzanne.
Several years later, Suzanne called to ask if I could give her a copy of our taped interview because her psychiatrist thought the inter-view might help her work on her past. She told me at this time that her adoptive father had been sexually abusing her. “I wanted to tell you when you interviewed me. I started to a couple of times,” she said, “but my mother was in the house and I was afraid she'd hear me.”
I had sensed her unhappiness, but had not known its cause.
Not everyone had a happy family life. An important question seems to be whether teens felt wanted now—whether they felt loved, respected, and valued now—not what their parents' reasons for adoption were in the past. Some had a clear understanding of why their parents had adopted them, for good reasons or bad; some had no idea. But, with the exception of Dora, who looked to the parents' reasons for adopting as the site of her problems, most showed little interest. More important was the way the parents treated them now.
In spite of the teens' insistence that their parents' reasons for adoption were not important—fourteen years can seem eons away for teens—those reasons still cause behaviours and reactions in the life of the family. Parents' lack of awareness of the reasons they had wanted to adopt may interfere with their relationship with their adopted child. They may find themselves in patterns of thought and behaviour which are detrimental to loving relationships.
There are many ways in which motives for and unspoken beliefs about adoption make the relationship between parents and children, particularly teens, difficult. Consulting a psychologist or counsellor could help both to understand what is involved in that relationship.
Adoptive parents often consider the effects of heredity on their child before they adopt, and periodically throughout the child's life, especially when the child is in trouble. In the peace and love years of the ‘60s and into the ‘70s, some parents believed that children only needed love to become “as if born to” the family. Today, we are more aware of the way in which heredity influences our children.
Heredity is the curly hair the birth mother gave the baby, the gender his father gave him, the allergies, blue eyes, long fingers. Heredity is black skin, slanted eyes, a small nose. What he is when he is newborn does make a difference. It matters that she was born a girl and programmed to become a tall woman with excellent health. Her life would be different if she had been programmed to become a short man who suffered from allergies. It might not be better or worse, but it would be different. It matters if a child is born a boy with brown skin into a society that still equates skin colour with character traits and political ideals. Heredity was not as important, the teens told me, as how they are treated, what their family is like, and where they live. But still, heredity is an important factor and parents very often consider it so. No one I interviewed had a parent who claimed that the positive characteristics of their child was a result of environment and the negatives a result of heredity, but it may be an unspoken belief of many.
Sometimes adoptive parents tell children about only the positive aspects of their heredity. Cindy-Lou was thirteen years old, a precise and organized thinker. I interviewed her in her suburban home; her mother welcomed me, then disappeared into the back of the house while Cindy-Lou and I talked.
Cindy-Lou knew quite a lot about her birth parents—what they looked like, ethnic background, talents—and she tried to incorporate what she knew about her past into her present life: “My mother liked to play the guitar and piano and sing. She's just like me.” Cindy-Lou believed that environment affected her life about sixty-five percent and heredity about thirty-five, but she still wanted to identify with her biological background. “When I'm eighteen I want to try and find them [birth parents] and just meet them and stuff. . . . See what they're like. I've always wanted to meet them. Do they have any other children now? It won't make any difference to my life, really. It'll just satisfy my curiosity. I don't know how to go about finding them, but I'd love to do it. I'll ask my {adoptive] mom to help.” Cindy-Lou saw her adoption into her particular home, school community, and neighbourhood, as a gift given to her by her birth mother. “I'm not any more special or any less special because I'm adopted. I'm just like other kids. Kids don't believe this Very special bit.' Maybe I'm a little bit spoiled. My friends say I'm a bit spoiled.” Cindy-Lou seemed to accept her heredity, but then she knew quite a bit about it.
The question of heredity is a fascinating one. A baby comes with genes that are programed for specific talents, body appearance, disease, perhaps even character traits. I've alway thought it the job of parents to encourage the good traits and discourage the bad. It didn't make much difference to me if the undeveloped combination that came in a baby was from my background or not. I have enough peculiar relatives in my history to keep me from being too sanctimonious. But I believed that it was part of my job as a mother to teach my children how to develop their talents. When my father-in-law told me that my three-year-old son kept time to the music because “Indians had a natural rhythm,” I almost hit him. I'd spent three years singing to the kid; he had his own record player and records; I held him up to the piano as soon as he could depress the keys. While I was willing to admit that he might have arrived with the germ of musical talent, I refuse to think that I wasn't part of its development.
I had expected some teens to ask about their ancestors several generations back, but none did. While they were avidly curious about their birth mother, they didn't care very much about searching further back into their pasts. They seemed anxious to establish themselves into a normal, biological, family one generation back. Not that they wanted to live with that family; they just wanted to know where they began. They wanted their original history to give them a sense of belonging to the human race; to feel that their thread of life connected with the fabric of everyone's life. Charlie was ironic. “I mean, I'd like to know for sure that I didn't come off a tree or something. Did I come into the world normally the way everyone else did?” Intellectually, he knows he did, but emotionally, he doesn't always believe it. Some adopted children feel it disloyal to their adoptive parents to inquire too closely into their biological family. Adoptive parents need to make such inquiries more possible and comfortable.
Paul was dark, energetic, friendly, and keenly interested in the whole concept of adoption. He took a lunch break from his work as a hairdresser and we did the interview in my parked van on the street. He was nineteen, the youngest of four children, and seemed secure in the love of his adoptive parents. His brother had offered him a good opportunity in his beauty salon, and Paul was enthusiastic about his future there. Paul's parents were a hard-working older couple—the father was of retirement age, the mother fourteen years younger. He felt a strong sense of belonging in his family, in his religious community (Baha'i), and in his town.
Paul knew that his birth mother had kept him with her for about nine months and then finally placed him for adoption. He'd been told that he was in and out of ten foster homes before his adoptive parents took him at age twenty-two months, but he had no idea why he'd been passed around so much as an infant. Living on his own now, he got along well with his family. He saw his childhood as average, stable, with petty little differences with his parents that didn't seem important now. His parents gave him advice and encouragement when he asked for it. Paul was financially independent, but the family definitely felt a moral responsibility toward him, and he to them. The family is of mixed race—Paul and one sister appear to be aboriginal; his older sister is white, her husband, black.
Although he was curious about his birth mother, Paul was not willing to risk his secure family ties just to satisfy his curiosity. His ambitions were not centred on his beginnings, but on his future. He planed to be a hair stylist—a good one—“world famous.”
Paul, like so many others, would like to know more about him-self. “I mean, a little ethnic history would be nice,” he said. “Am I Native Indian, Italian, or what? I don't have a clue. I should know that. My future children should know that. I look different from my brothers. A month ago I realized that I'm not like everyone else. That I'm not a white guy. At least, I don't think I'm a white guy. It was just so weird. The only way I see it as different is physically different. . . . I really noticed it this summer because after the first two weeks in the sun I'm black like a berry. So it's strange. But I don't consider myself mentally or culturally different. I've even pulled out my I.D. to prove I'm my brother's brother. But, as a matter of fact, I look like my two sisters [one is adopted, one is a biological child of his parents}. We all look alike. Really dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin. But my brother [a biological child] is the one that looks different.”
Others had similar problems concerning race. Bill told me, “I don't know if I'm sort of Chinese, or Indian, or what. No one knows. No one's telling me anyway. I'd like to know where I came from even if my parents were running drugs. It would be better than not knowing.”
Like many teens, Bill thought that if his parents had been “good people” he would have some information and that no information meant they were “bad.” This assumption is one of adoptive parents as well, but it is not true. Many adoption agencies just did not record accurate information.
Some parents believe that they cannot influence their child's development, that the child who was most often illegitimate was somehow the repository of all the genetic faults from both sides of the bio-logical family. In spite of the fact that a look backwards in time into their own histories will reveal both wonderful and pathetic characters, some adoptive parents believe that legitimacy protects biological children from inheriting the “bad” traits. They have concerns that mental illness and criminal behaviour is inherited, and more likely inherited from poor people, as birth parents are assumed to be. Parents may have read studies that discussed the emotional and physical problem of adopted children and attributed those difficulties to heredity.
Studies tend to ignore the many strengths of adopted teens. Teens often have a strong belief in their own resilience and faith in their own individual personality. Stevie was just such a person. We met in a shopping mall in a city—her choice. She had wanted to meet without her parents' knowledge—probably her usual mode of running her life. She was cool and blunt, did a few drugs (she said), found school too easy, and thought her parents played roles. I was impressed, and a little startled. Thin and dark, she spoke in short, clipped sentences with a habit of freezing suddenly when I was speaking, as if I had said something fascinating. Her eyes twinkled whenever she found my questions and her own answers entertaining. The joke wasn't shared between us, but she enjoyed herself. She was a deter-mined, and very intelligent, young woman.
The youngest of four adopted children in her family—two brothers and a sister came before her—she talked about adoption as an accident of birth and of little importance now. Adoption was “no big deal” to her. Stevie felt strongly that she had a right to her adoptive parents' attention and support, and that her position in the family was secure, although her parents could have done a better job of raising her. Her complaints were about methods of child-raising and not physical or emotional abuse. A drawback of her intelligence was her perception that she was more capable than most people and certainly more capable than her parents. Although she knew they would help her with her future, she was quite able to manage her own life. She made me nervous. I wasn't that confident at forty.
“As far as adoption goes, it's no big thing. Usually if I say I'm adopted, and if it is something big to the person I'm talking to, they don't believe me anyway. A bad thing is from all those crazy anti-abortionists that say if you don't want the kid, put it up for adoption. I think that's stupid. What's the point of going through a pregnancy and then giving it up? But then, if you're a parent and you want a kid, I guess adoption would be good for you. I mean if there wasn't adoption, you'd be stuck, wouldn't you?” Adoption to Stevie was a valid legal process and a person who was adopted had, like anyone else, a real place in the family. Any other attitude was melodramatic.
Stevie had definite ideas about heredity and environment. “Well, where you live is one hundred percent, that's the most important. How you look? I suppose some people like blondes, right? If you wanted to hire a blonde instead of brunette? Well, I guess it would matter some. If you're a woman instead of a man, I guess that affects you about fifty percent.”
With her quick wit and strong opinions about her place in the world, Stevie reminded me that while teens can share developmental tasks and difficulties, they are individuals who react in their own way to the challenges of their lives. It was inspiring to realize that while adopted children share common fears and patterns of behaviour, as do adoptive parents, everyone is capable of individual unique responses.
The teens I interviewed were, for the most part, not concerned with their parents' reasons for adopting. In spite of the fact that those reasons might still be an underlying and important factor in the family dynamics and relationships, the teens saw the reasons as ancient history and not part of their lives.
No matter how a child comes into the family—through adoption, as stepchildren in a marriage, or by birth—they cause a change in the family constellation. Imagine two planets moving in orbit, each spinning in its regular pattern of movement, passing and repassing each other. Add a third planet with its own pattern of movement, and then a fourth. The relationships of each to the other are compounded and the possibilities of collision increased. If the parents had no children before they adopted, the change seems almost overwhelming. If they had other children, they may not have prepared for the ways in which children and childhood needs not only interact in their lives but engulf them, occupying most of their time. This change is one that all families make and may not be much different for families of adopted children, although the reasons for creating this change in adoptive families might be different. Generally, adoptive parents plan for the child, and parents of biological children are sometimes surprised by a pregnancy. One man I talked to, a teacher, had experienced an unplanned adoption. He was approached by a former student who asked if he and his wife would adopt her baby. They had only a few weeks preparation time before the baby was with them. Most adoptive parents don't have babies suddenly dropped into their arms.
Once the baby is in the home, the changes that occur to the family seem to be similar—feeding schedules, colic, baby showers, immunizations, and the ongoing activities of childhood—whether the child is adopted or not. Parents want to be part of their children's lives and, since they are the caretakers of their child, they must be part of their lives.
Parents may have many fears about the process of adoption that they don't discuss, either because they don't recognize them, or because of feelings of loyalty toward their children. They may fear that heredity is stronger than environment and that their child's heredity is faulty. Parents of adopted children sometimes fear that the child will reject them because they are not “real.” This, as indicated earlier, could be a result of parents' concerns about infertility, or it could be a feeling of lack of entitlement—that they are not good enough, rich enough, mature enough, or capable enough. When parents have other biological children, they find it easier to believe that these feelings are common to all parents, and that parenting is a difficult and often humbling experience in which few feel capable or deserving.
Parents also, especially in the first few years, worry that the birth mother will take their child away, or that the courts will return the child to a member of his or her birth family. This happens rarely, but that is enough to make most parents fear it, if not actively or with daily apprehension, at least with an underlying niggling worry. Many adoptive parents have heard of the birth mother who, when the child is eight months or a year old, decides to sue for custody, and wins. Adoptive parents are less likely to remember when the birth mother or father sued for custody and lost. No wonder adoptive parents aren't sure of their entitlement, when the courts occasionally decide that they are somehow not entitled to their adopted child. When the child is a teen, this fear is less a threat.
All parents at times fear that they are not good enough parents. But adoptive parents are concerned that they are somehow missing that bond, that intuitive knowledge that they think biological parents have. As Karen said, “I felt a natural mother had a certain touch with her own child—like she kind of knew things about her own child.” Parents sometimes feel that their child's birth parents might have understood him or her better. It takes years for some adoptive parents to realize that their child isn't looking for the perfect parents and just wants a relationship with the nurturing ones he has.
Adoptive parents most often believe that they have more financial resources than the birth parents because, after all, lack of money is probably the most common reason for relinquishing a child. However, I once did a television show in Toronto with a birth mother, adoptee, and adoptive parent where the birth mother was much more educated and wealthier than the adoptive parents. Usually, adoptive parents do have more financial resources. In any case, adoptive parents generally do not feel they lack the ability to care for their child financially.
Parents often don't want their child to stand out as different from the rest of the family. Instead of seeing difference as something to celebrate, they may see it as threatening and refuse to talk about it or even acknowledge it. Should adoptive parents point out the differences between the child and others in the family and talk about them as a positive thing? Emphasis on difference can result in children feeling that they don't belong in the family. Should parents pretend that there are no differences? These are not easy questions. Obvious physical difference such as skin colour, or other physical differences such as a short boy in a family of giants, can lead to feelings of alienation. It seems reasonable to assume that parents who discuss these differences and listen to their child's views in a receptive, positive way, will help their child accept himself as a person who is entitled to his place in society with confidence.
Sometimes parents fear the surprise of a child's talents and career choices. Adoptive parents treat their children “as if born to,” and expect them to fit into the family's class and modes of behaviour and to have similar educational accomplishments. Thus they are dismayed when the children choose different paths. Studies have shown that adopted children generally achieve less education that their adoptive parents. We can speculate on why this is so, but it is probably not because they have less educational opportunity. If the children have low self-esteem and are preoccupied with thoughts of rejection and “not belonging” as they reach the teen years, they may not be emotionally ready to study and make the gains in education that their adoptive parents expect. As well, they may not feel entitled to a higher education, a better job, a “good life.” It is a parent's responsibility to set expectations for their child and to help that child to achieve the moral, educational, and social development that are necessary to lead a happy life. Sometimes the child's low self-esteem makes those expectation impossible; sometimes it is the expectations that are impossible.
When I speak of North American society, that vast land of millions of people, I realize that there are many different cultures. And within the many different cultures are different attitudes toward adoption. North American “culture,” the one in which most people live and understand their lives within the milieu of a modern, fast-moving world of television commercials, pop music, and changing fashions, contains mini-cultures—the small towns, isolated villages, French settlements, Mennonite towns, Mormon communities, street people, and the hundreds of other smaller cultures. “Society” and “culture” are vague terms and it is impossible to state definitively what any society or culture thinks or believes. Not only are their many societies, they are in constant motion, in a continual process of change. With these restrictions in mind, we can perhaps try to understand society as the imaginary larger force in our lives into which we fit into roles as mother, father, businessperson, teacher, doctor, mechanic, son, daughter, friend, and lover. It is this world in which we live that influences us and motivates us. Some people have a spiritual life that is also rich, interesting, and influential, but even that spiritual life exists within the society, and is even shaped by it. By “culture” and “society” I mean the everyday lives of most people, not the rich, famous, or literary. Given the limitations of the word “society,” I trust the reader to imagine a definition that makes sense and is useful.
How does the process of adoption work within our society? We have evolved from the era of secrecy of the 1940s to the 1960s, with its notion that the child was “as if born to” the family, to the general acceptance, at least among professional adoption placement agencies, that the child's biological history should be preserved. This represents a significant social shift from the attitude that denying there was any difference between a biological child and an adopted child meant parents were noble, to the other extreme where celebrating differences by bringing attention to adoption is socially responsible. Birth mothers who gave up their children and promised never to look for them were considered noble once; now they are thought to be irresponsible. The actions haven't changed; the attitudes have.
In this book I speak of adoption as the legal process of making a stranger's child part of a family. There are many adoptions where a stepparent adopts his spouse's child; aunts, uncles, and grandparents adopt their relatives. Those children adopted by relatives may know their family histories, although there can be secrecy and deception around those adoptions as well. All but two of the teens I interviewed had been adopted at birth, but there are many children adopted after infancy. Their memories and their concerns may be different from the teens interviewed here. The definitions of both open and closed adoptions differ according to the agencies, birth parents, and adoptive parents involved. Some adoptive parents are willing to exchange information with the birth mother at the time the child is born and send pictures for a few months, and then perhaps yearly. The birth mother is not the legal guardian, nor is she expected to nurture and sustain the child, but to maintain a distant interest or a “watching brief” so that she is continually reassured that the child is being well-cared for. The purpose of open adoption is not to allow the birth mother the chance to direct and influence the child's life, but to give her to feel enough at ease about the child's situation that she can get on with her own life. The difficulty for some adoptive parents is that when a birth mother remains in their child's life, however distant, they cannot pretend that he was born to them and are forced to acknowledge that the adoption process is different from the biological process. This reality is hard for some adoptive parents who have been socialized to believe the “as if born to” myth. An adoptive relationship is no less strong a relationship than a biological one, and perhaps that is what parents need to be reassured about. The first time someone criticizes your adopted child and you have an enraged she-bear reaction, you realize that the maternal or paternal bond is powerful.
Birth parents give up the right to their child and can't, on some future day, claim the child. At fifteen, Mike had not known this. “They gave me up. that's done. They don't have the right to take me back, do they?” he had asked. He was relieved when I assured him that they didn't. It is highly unlikely that a teen who has lived all his life with his adoptive family would be ordered back by the courts.
The Adoption Act in all provinces and states makes the adopted child the child of the adoptive parents for all purposes. This means that they are children of their adoptive parents under all laws, can expect the same rights and privileges as a biological child, and can inherit equally with biological children. The law removes any legal differences between biological children and adopted children, making them legally the same. The Adoption Act, a provincial act in Canada and a state act in the U.S., establishes that the adopted child is a legal child of the family, a status that is binding everywhere.
This doesn't mean that people don't argue in court and try to change the laws. Occasionally, people demand rights that the law doesn't presently grant them. Sometimes adopted kids are surrendered to the court as “incorrigible,” or unmanageable, in the same way that bio-logical children are sometimes handed over to social services when parents can't cope. But most often, adopted children stay with their adopted parents for their lifetime.
The adoption process, the way babies are placed for adoption, is not simple and straightforward in all parts of the continent. Each province or state has its own rules, policies, and practices. Some religious and political organizations have their own adoption agencies so that they can place the children of their members within their own group. Some agencies accept babies whose mothers belong to a certain religious denomination or racial group and place the babies within the same group. Other agencies accept the baby of any mother and place it into homes that are culturally and racially different.
In private adoptions, the child is usually in the home when the social worker's assessment visit is made. While the law requires the visit, the worker would need valid grounds for apprehension in order to remove the child. In spite of some bad publicity, private adoptions are not necessarily poor adoptions. Adoption, after all, began as a private initiative. Large private systems, such as Catholic Charities, have been placing children in homes for years. Children adopted by aunts and uncles, stepfathers and stepmothers, and by neighbours, are usually adopted privately. North American society is seeing more and more private adoptions as the waiting list for government adoption agency placements stretches in some cities from months into years. Parents are travelling to foreign lands to find babies, and the legal and ethical concerns around adoption are growing.
Even when a placement agency sends only Catholic babies to Catholic homes or aboriginal babies to aboriginal homes, the needs of the child are usually very important. Even if they restrict themselves to one group of babies, the motives of the adopting parents may be loving and accepting. As well, the parents who adopt from religious or private agencies don't necessarily reflect the ideals of the placement agency, although they may be chosen because the agency thinks they do. Sometimes parents agree to an organization's policies only to adopt a child. Once the child is legally part of their family, the parents may not follow the philosophy advocated by the adopting organization.
The intent of government agencies is first to serve the best interests of the child, then the birth mother, and finally, the interests of the adopting parents. While that is the philosophy, in practice some government workers can be incompetent and/or overwhelmed with work. If the best interests of the child are to be served, then the child would most often be placed in a family that already has children, has been proven stable, and has had years of practice raising children. Because it seems more equitable to adopting parents to place children in families with no children or only one child, and as such families are in a position to complain about the service they aren't getting from the agency, the first choice of most agencies is to place a child with childless couples, or those couples with only one child.
Social workers shuffle adoptive homes in what seems to be a capricious game of chance, juggling the needs of the child and the needs of adoptive parents with estimates of how long they think the marriage of the adoptive parents might last. The lucky winner gets a baby. In fact, there is a careful system in most agencies. Adopting parents are selected by the social worker and birth mother to match, as closely as possible, the religious, academic, and socio-cultural background of the birth mother. One knowledgeable and experienced social worker told me that the most successful matches occur when the birth mother thinks the description of the adopting parents sounds like a description of her family. But more and more families are accepting difference as a value they want in their family, and adopting across racial and cultural lines. Some birth mothers choose to have their child adopted by a different-race parent.
There are birth mothers who are pressured into relinquishing their child. Kendra, now twenty years old, gave a child up for adoption four years ago. “The social worker told me that if I wanted to keep my baby I'd have to do it on my own; the welfare wouldn't help me. She told me it was illegal for me to get welfare and to hurry up and decide.” In fact, the policy of the welfare department of her province was to sup-port the mother if she wanted to keep the child. Kendra had very bad luck in the assignment of her social worker.
“I couldn't make a quick decision. I wanted to look over the files of adopting homes really carefully, so I put my baby in foster care for two weeks while I read the files and tried to decide. The social worker told me to hurry, that they had a problem getting homes and that I had to pick one of the four she offered me. I insisted on seeing more files. The social worker told me that my baby was screaming all the time and I had to hurry to get her into a good home. I was totally honest with the social worker, and she lied to me. I have a real grudge against social workers now. I never saw that worker again after she placed my baby. I wanted to be left alone when I was pregnant and no one would leave me alone. And then after, when I needed someone, they all left me alone.
“I wanted to write a letter to the parents when my baby was six months old, but the social worker said they didn't want to hear from me, to ‘forget it.' She hung up the phone on me.
“The social worker would do things like keep me waiting in the office. I'd have a one p.m. appointment and she would be across the street eating lunch; I could see her and she'd keep me waiting until two. She treated me that way, maybe, to make me feel inadequate so I'd give up the baby easier. My social worker specialized in adoption.
“The father of the baby offered to help me. He offered me money and he offered to marry me. But a kid is no basis for marriage, so I didn't want that. And my mother was strange. She and my father were divorced and she had some funny ideas. I was afraid that she'd charge the father of my baby with rape because I was only sixteen, so I wouldn't tell anyone who he was.”
The strongest check on all social agencies on the placement of a baby comes from the birth mother. If she demands that a certain order of priority be followed in placing her child, the child is more likely to achieve a good home. But most birth mothers, like Kendra, are young and emotionally vulnerable right after their delivery. It's hard to be strong when you are physically tired from childbirth and emotionally distressed at parting with your child. Some birth mothers have parents who harass them. It's hard, immediately after childbirth, to make the right decision.
Occasionally, the birth mother has not signed a release and her child can't be placed for legal adoption. In these cases, a child may go to foster care and then occasionally be forgotten in the bureaucracy of the welfare office. Some agencies now have a system of tracking in place which should prevent children from disappearing between papers in the welfare office. There seems to be no system of legal checks and balances that forces social workers to do their best to find homes for children. Rather, it is a moral and professional obligation which is strongly felt by most social workers.
My family had wonderful social workers when we were looking for our sons. They were competent and caring, each with a sense of humour. I had worked with many social workers when I was a public health nurse and had met a few who were less than competent, but only one that was uncaring. The stories the teens told me about the pressures they received from social workers and the uncaring attitudes came as a shock.
Children in Canada who are given a status number as a First Nations person are in the position of having the federal Indian Act take precedence over the provincial Adoption Act. In the U.S., Native American children do not receive a status number, but they are enrolled in a tribe, either with land under a treaty, or without. In both countries, what they gain by being registered as an Indian under the Indian Act can't be taken away by the Adoption Act. So children who are members of a First Nations or Native American nation don't lose their identity when they are adopted. They are legally adopted, but still have status as a Native Indian. This means that they have not only the rights of a legal child within their family, but also the rights of a Native Indian in Canada or the U.S.
In Canada, children in this situation have the right to apply to the tribal band in which they were registered for funds for post-secondary education, medical care, and other services. They can also apply to live on reserve and ask the band for any reasonable help with their lives. At the age of twenty-one, they can choose to be a part of the band, or to accept a financial settlement. The band could vote to refuse such a settlement to a child, but it is unlikely. Rules and regulations can change, however, so this could be different in time.
Aboriginal adopted children who travel to their Reserve or Reservation may meet a warm, friendly group of relatives, as my son did, and find that they have a place in the clan system. On the other hand, the family may not be interested in them or may be suspicious of their motives for “returning,” and reject them. Aboriginal children will need the support of their adoptive family and a trusted counsellor in either case. Both acceptance or rejection can be very emotional.
Occasionally, a band may decide that a child born of a band member who is not registered as a status Indian may have the right to band funds. In the U.S., Native American children have the right to the benefits of treaty if they are enrolled with a tribe that has treaty benefits, as well as rights to health benefits, education, and welfare. If they are without a treaty, they have rights to health, education, and welfare only. What rights a biological family decides these children are entitled to is neither legislated nor predictable. Adopted aboriginal children may need to meet their biological family to find out if they will get support.
Many First Nations and Native American organizations have departments that help adoptees find their birth parents and may even help pay travel costs. If adoptive parents cannot accept the teen's need to connect with the biological family, this search could be very difficult. It will be much easier with their support.
Native American teens in white families may feel as though they don't belong in either culture. Often they are viewed as “Indian” even if they have never lived in that culture, so they will be treated as if they grew up in Native culture. They may discover that being part of that culture is a source of strength. It also may be confusing and disorienting, a cause for emotional turmoil. Their race is an aspect of their life that they must understand and accept.
Racial differences don't seem to mean much when adopted children are teenagers, although it may become important later in their lives. None of the teens I interviewed concerned themselves with racial, religious, or political motives around adoption. They didn't see them-selves as saviours of religion or race, and didn't see why they should involve themselves with anyone else's problems with adoption.
Andy and Allan, both fifteen and adopted from Korea at a young age, didn't think that cultural heritage was important. Their culture, they told me, was the teen culture they lived in now, not the culture they came from. They didn't see themselves as part of their Korean culture and didn't see why they should consider any other place in society, except within their family.
Karen said, “To an adopted child, adoption is personal. People who are not adopted . . . should not speak about it or judge it.” Those teens I interviewed who were a different race from their adoptive parents felt that race as well as adoption was a private affair. The Caucasian sister of a First Nations teenager told me about the racial differences between her and her brother. “It never occurred to me until one day I was introducing my brother to someone and I suddenly thought that they might think it odd that we had different-coloured skin. Until that time I'd never thought about it. He was just that colour. Like I had blue eyes and he had brown. I was eighteen, and, hey, I'm pretty smart, but it was only then that I noticed we were different.” While racial difference may affect adopted teens, they often do not believe it does.
Adoption often serves the best interests of the adoptive parents and the adopting agency. Over the years, many people have been concerned about the child's best interests, but concerned people make decisions with the knowledge they have at the time. Very often, the best interests of the child are not clear, or are mixed into the culture's notion that claiming a soul for a religion was in the child's best interest, or that sending a child so far away from his biological family that they could never connect was “safeguarding” the child. What one era views as beneficial, another era sees as cruel.
Amendments to the laws on adoption can be passed at any time. What seems to be written in stone one week can be changed the next. Lawmakers are responsive to lobbying by interested groups. Those who wish to change the adoption laws can write their member of the provincial legislature or state legislator about what they want done to make the laws better or more useful for them. Social workers must operate under the law—they can't give information if the law for-bids it. To change what social workers do, you have to change the law.
There are some incidences of babies placed for private adoption in a system that seems to be buying and selling. Some countries where children are bought and sold don't regulate lawyers carefully. International adoption agencies can give advice on this. And in some countries where lawyers are regulated, there are still many who try to buy and sell babies. In an attempt to control this, some provinces and states have introduced laws such as the one in British Columbia (1980) whereby the law “prohibit{s] the offering or accepting of a consideration of value in money or in kind for the purposes of inducing a person to make a child available.”
This law was tested in 1982 when a couple applied to the Supreme Court to allow them to pay the birth mother of their child some recompense for her expenses. The judge allowed the adopting parents to pay the travel, medical, and legal expenses of the mother. The courts didn't want to make recompense for medical and legal expenses unavailable to the birth mother; they only wanted to prevent the birth mother from benefiting from the transaction—to prevent the business of selling babies. Different states interpret similar laws differently. What may be a legally acceptable payment in one state may not be in another, but all U.S. states are making efforts to prevent trafficking in babies.
The Law Societies of most provinces and states frown on lawyers charging exorbitant fees for finding a baby for a client. The lawyer is supposed to arrange the legal adoption, not be a broker for the clients. Professional ethics should prevent baby brokering. Some lawyers who specialize in adoption help birth parents and adoptive parents come to agreements which may be perfectly legal and helpful, yet may come close to brokering. Any lawyer suspected of selling babies should be reported to the Law Society.
There are children who are brought from foreign countries for adoption in the United States and Canada. But all adoptions in the U.S. and Canada must come under the state and provincial laws, so if children were adopted in their country of origin, they will be re-adopted in their home state or province. If adopted internationally, children must have immigration status in the U.S. and Canada. An adopted child from a foreign country is not “automatically a U.S. citizen. Nor will the child automatically be admitted to the U.S. once adopted” (Bascombe, 1997). With many different levels of bureaucracy in the home country, foreign country, and in international laws, adoptive parents need the help and guidance of an adoption agency. Once children are legally adopted, after the order has been processed and passed, they have the same legal rights in their adoptive family. It makes no difference to the adoption order where they came from as long as the order is proclaimed in their new country. The adopted child becomes the child of the new family. An adoption order in one state or province is legal everywhere. While adopted teens feel the need to find connections to birth families, they also need to know that their connection to their adoptive family is strong, enduring, and legal.
The influences on teens around adoption are personal, familial, and societal. As teens grow, they move from the strengths of their adoptive family into society, and it is as they mature and take their place in that society that their attitudes to adoption, and the attitudes of those around them, make a difference in their lives.