IMAGINE HUMAN LIFE as a gigantic tapestry. We weave our own lives into that fabric—our ideas, feelings, and plans, slipping them around and through the plans and ideas of others and into our family patterns that expand and become more complex as we add and blend in threads from other sources.
This book was written for adopted teenagers who, like all teenagers, are entwined in their family patterns and in the larger fabric of the social world. It is written as well for the parents, teachers, counsellors, social workers, nurses, doctors, and friends who surround them. Adopted teens have something different from their friends in other family circles—a loose thread that may need attention before they feel complete. Some tape this loose connection to themselves and try to ignore it. Others trace it back to its origin and leave it there. Still others carry a long disconnected burden that entangles all the relationships of their lives.
The patterns are often not simple ones. It was this emerging view of the complexity of being adopted that set me on the path of research and discovery with teens.
I read books to my children about adoption, but by the time they reached twelve, I couldn't find any in my city library or book store that spoke to teenagers. My sons, both adopted as infants, never asked me about their backgrounds, and I wondered what they were thinking. They answered my questions about adoption with a brief “yes” or “no,” and a kind of bland indifference. Didn't they care? Did any teenager care? Did anyone know what teenagers thought about adoption? My curiosity grew, as did my concern that I might need to know more, that a lack of books and information might be hiding something important. I decided to find other adopted teenagers and ask them: “What do you think about being adopted? What do you know? How do you feel?”
I borrowed every book on the subject in my local library. Using a friend's computer, I did a search on all books in print on teenagers and adoption, and using another friend's university card I raided the college library. I read every book I could get my hands on that had anything to do with the subject.
In the summer of 1985 I packed my Dodge van, bribed my twelve-year-old son David to come with me, and headed south from Williams Lake. My friend Nancy, who was seven months pregnant, her eighteen-month-old son Max, and Felicity, the twelve-year-old daughter of a Winnipeg friend joined us in Vancouver. From there the caravan went east, gypsy-like, along the Trans-Canada Highway with Max's play-pen strapped to the roof-rack. We stayed with friends and relatives along the way. I interviewed adopted teenagers who were daughters, cousins, or friends of my friends. In this casual and random fashion we wandered over the prairies and arrived in Winnipeg where Delores, a busy mother of five with no time to look for adopted teenagers to interview, had put an ad in two city newspapers asking interested teens to call her number. And call they did. Her phone rang for days. I crouched in the pantry, the only quiet room, writing down teens' names, ages, addresses, and detailed directions to their houses. For four days I drove around the city listening, taping, asking them questions.
In the fall I stayed in Vancouver, put an ad in the city paper, and collected names and addresses that kept me interviewing for six weeks. I also did some interviews with friends' children, and friends of friends' children in my then home-town of Williams Lake, B.C.
This sample of teens was random. I couldn't control how many were eighteen, or how many were girls and how many boys (22 girls and 18 boys), so I can't say that the results of my interviews are an accurate and typical reflection of the whole population of teenagers. I tried to get as varied a response as possible, but I certainly wasn't rigid about it. With one exception, all the teens I interviewed had been placed for adoption as infants, so I did not report on the difference between those who were adopted as infants and those who were adopted as toddlers or older children. Some researchers, such as Victor Groza and Karen F. Rosenberg (1996), do show distinctions based on placement age, but I did not interview enough teens adopted at an older age to do so. I didn't do any interviews with teens who were not adopted, so I relied on the research and writings of others to note differences between the adopted teens I interviewed and those who were not adopted. With these few restrictions, I listened to, recorded, and transcribed the fascinating stories of the teens.
When I started the interviews I was afraid that I wouldn't find out anything at all, that no one was at all concerned about being adopted. My own two boys had lulled me into thinking that the circumstances of their birth were of academic interest only. In fact my oldest son, eighteen at the time, said, “What are you doing a book on adoption for? No one's going to buy it. Nobody cares.” He was wrong. The teens surprised him and they surprised me. I had suspected that there was some dissatisfaction, but I truly wasn't prepared to have teens so passionate about the whole concept of adoption. I asked them to teach me about what it's like to be adopted, and they certainly did.
I resolutely ignored my own experience with adoption and my sons' indifference, and imagined any number of questions teens might want answered. What did they see as their needs: to know about birth parents? To know about their medical history? To know what kind of a family their birth mother came from and what kind of work she did or does? Whether their father was a lawyer? A logger? A drunk? Did they have trouble with the idea of adoption only if they didn't get along with their adoptive parents, or did they have trouble with the idea even when the relationship was good? What did they want to know about themselves? I asked these questions and the teens told me much more than I could have imagined. The names have been changed and some-times descriptions are altered a little to protect their privacy, but the quotes are accurate.
I published the findings of this research and then found that with new laws, new attitudes, and a faster exchange of information, the world of adoption began to change very quickly. As my children grew, as I read more and listened to more stories of others, I learned how notions of adoption were changing in our society and in the lives of teens.
In the fall of 1997 I attended a conference on aboriginal adoption and realized from the material available that no one had investigated and written about how the teens of today were reacting to the new world of adoption. One of the organizers at the conference asked me when I was going to do more studies; there were new questions to investigate. Why wasn't I looking at these questions, he wanted to know. What was it like to have two sets of parents? Did the adopted teens feel more secure or more threatened? What about those alarming statistics that claimed that a significant number of jail inmates were adopted, that a significant number of disruptive children in school were adopted?
My own adopted boys were now adults, the oldest a husband and father of two boys and not at all interested in finding his birth family—so he said. My youngest son had connected to his birth mother and aboriginal family, heritage, and community. Change was happening in society, and in my own life.
In an interview for a sports story, I suddenly stopped my questions, looked at the man I was interviewing and said, “I think you're my oldest son's uncle.” We discussed my son's birth and found that this man might be the brother of my oldest son's biological father. (After checking, we found that he wasn't, but he knew my son's paternal birth family.) It seemed eerie that, in a city of two million, I should interview someone who knew my son's birth father.
The tapestry of life weaves around us sometimes without a great deal of planning on our part. With this serendipitous meeting, I felt as if I had been entwined into someone else's story and given new threads to follow. My children now have new connections, threads which may weave around and into their tapetries. Slowly my children may begin to look at themselves as part of a bigger world and become involved in a more complicated set of relationships.
What is that widening family circle like for teens? Do they find this relationship web comfortable? Suffocating? Threatening? Reassuring? What do they think would be best for them?
By this time I had two computers, my own Internet link, and five library cards. I had written fifteen books since I first wrote about adoption and had more contacts and research skills, but the expert source of knowledge on adoption was still the teens, so I needed to talk to them. I asked the Chris Spencer Foundation for help. They were enthusiastically supportive and voted to finance more research. The Adoptive Parents Association of B.C. were also encouraging, and offered to manage the funds and give me referrals to teens. This happened so quickly that it felt as if I were suddenly carried along by a project that had an energy and life of its own.
I found teens who had been adopted at birth and were now dealing with adoption, and others with an obvious racial difference between themselves and their adoptive parents. I talked to ten, four boys and six girls, in this phase of the research. I also talked to four birth mothers who had given up a child years before, a birth father who had suddenly found a teenaged son whom he had not known about, a father who was searching for his child, a single woman who had looked for and adopted a child racially different from herself, and four adults who had been interviewed for the original book when they were teens. The world of adoption—being adopted, adopting children, giving up a child—is a dynamic and changing one full of diverse personalities and people with strong opinions.
The teens I interviewed in this phase of the research talked to me about culture, prejudice, belonging, and grounding in ways that would have seemed very sophisticated years ago. The teens were knowledgeable and often thoughtful. The differences between the teens today and those of the first phase of the research are not differences in the way they feel about adoption so much as in the number of relatives and relationships they must deal with in their families. As well, teens today are more used to doing research—a skill that's now taught in schools. There are many search sites on the Internet which don't require any registration or fees so teens can easily access them. Has increased information about birth parents led to a more secure feeling in teens? Does increased knowledge bring with it different problems and different fears? Is there counselling available on the subject of adoption? Do we have a sense of the usual process of development for adopted children, or do we still believe that adopted children do not have particular development issues? My interviews with the teens showed that they had many of the same feelings and ideas that teens had in the past: feelings of loss, a need for knowledge of the past, fears of rejection, and concerns about hurting adoptive parents.
The questionnaire used in the interviews was designed to explore the teens' views of many aspects of adoption. I wanted to have some way of comparing their answers and making sure that I covered all the important subjects. One of my temptations when interviewing is to become so interested in what is being said that I get off the subject completely. The questionnaire was a way to make sure that I talked about adoption and not the mileage on my car or the latest movie. As well, I met the teens in private so that they could expand on the questions and say as much as they liked. A spirit of inquiry was established so that they clearly understood that what they told me might become part of a book that would be useful to others. They were also assured that their identities would be disguised.
I taped their stories and listened to them over and over. Having written eight novels I didn't anticipate any problems writing. What I hadn't realized was that fifty personalities were clamouring to be heard and expecting me to make their opinions clear to others. It took a lot of sorting, searching through tapes, thinking, and re-checking what the teens had said before I could start. My responsibility was to tell others exactly how those teens felt, what they had said, what they had meant. I looked for common themes and also any exceptions as well as using, in many cases, one teen's words to tell a common story.
The teens I interviewed came from Canadian cities—Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg—and from towns and rural areas as remote as northern British Columbia. They lived in many family constellations—one brother, two sisters, no siblings, four brothers—had loving families and abusive families, wealthy families and middle-income families. Some of them had left home and were supporting themselves; others still lived at home. They were white, black, and aboriginal, with degrees and variations of colour. They ranged in age from thirteen to twenty-two and all were adopted. Their personalities were as different as their complexions. Some were curious and helpful. Others were passionately anxious to tell others what they had gone through and how they saw the problems of their age. I interviewed them in beautiful homes where Inuit carvings sat under exquisite paintings, and in dark apartments where roommates and boyfriends hung over the backs of the chairs listening and adding comments. I inter-viewed them in my car, in restaurants, in shopping malls, and in many homes.
I expected to find the teens polite and a little distant, since I was, after all, somebody's mother, so I was pleased and grateful that they were so frank and willing to talk. I was continually surprised at how much adoption mattered to them. Their feelings couldn't be contained in short answers to a few questions. My own prejudices and ideas were swept away in their explanations, conversations, and the talking, talking, talking they did about adoption. The research became a long conversation with fifty teens about their feelings and ideas. Sometimes they told me quietly, sometimes emphatically; but they wanted to tell me and, through me, the rest of the world what it was like to be adopted. I became a vehicle for their expression and this book became theirs.
The ongoing story of adoption continues to grow, including more and more affected people. Grandparents, aunts, and cousins have relationships which, in the past, have been ignored. Tribal affiliations, ethnic heritage, family medical histories, and genetic information have come to be increasingly important as we as a society learn more about ourselves. An adopted child comes with connections, and it is those connections that he or she is looking for.
“Mom,” my son said on the phone after the first week of his move to his aboriginal territory and his birth family, “everyone is a cousin!” It may be that the discovery of “all our relations” where “relations” includes our ancestors is much more complicated, rich, and important than we had previously believed.