I’ve been thinking about adoption, of late. Maybe because my social media feed is saturated with National Adoption Awareness Month posts… And maybe because, as an adoptee, I have a personal stake in the conversation.
Adoption touches some of the most intimate dimensions of human life: birth, separation, love, belonging, identity, and family. The stakes are hardly trivial, no matter what our relationship to adoption is… whether it’s foreign to us or intimate.
The topmost question on my heart when it comes to adoption is this:
What else might there be to see about it, beyond what we’ve already seen?
Because if we turn and look again, we might question whether we actually understand adoption. Do we grasp its significance, its deeper meaning, and its implications for people’s lives? Do we even try to truly understand it, or do we go with the pre-givens and scripts that have been handed to us about it?
I’ll wager that for an experience so thoroughly surrounded by explanations, adoption remains strangely under-examined. I’ll wager that the “answers” we’re going with when it comes to adoption are often premature, wobbly, and un-baked.
Add to that, we have become remarkably adept at discussing how adoption is a blessing and a gift. And now more and more people are starting to rightly complicate the conversation, to recognize that adoption is every bit as much a source of wounding, trauma, pain, and loss.
We are less adept, perhaps, at questioning the assumptions that make those our primary options… compelling us to stay somewhat stuck in the “is adoption good or bad” dichotomy. And even to decide “it’s both good and bad” doesn’t do justice to the layers and the intricacies of human relating and kinship that are involved.
And so, it may be the case that we could benefit from a little less certainty about what it all adds up to.
First of all, adoption is not one singular experience, generalizable or universalize-able. It is a case-by-case customer. Nor is it simply a collection of competing threads of experience, each requiring its own place at the table.
Adoption is also about more than forging relationships. For it’s—obviously—also a social institution. And a legal arrangement. And a reconfiguration of kinship. And a response to particular historical circumstances. And an encounter with some of the most fundamental questions of human existence. Questions like:
What makes a family?
What makes a person who they are?
What is the relationship between our origins and our identities?
And why are we so often compelled to make one truth disappear in order to accommodate another?
Perhaps one of the most interesting things about adoption is how readily it exposes the assumptions lying beneath what we otherwise regard as ordinary life.
We tend to imagine family as something relatively self-evident. We purport to know who our parents are. We purport to know where we came from. We ostensibly inherit a name, a history, a place among people who recognize us as their own.
Unless, of course, we don't.
Adoption can rearrange these seemingly straightforward realities in ways that reveal just how much of what we call family is biological, how much is social, how much is legal, and how much is something altogether more unidentifiable… or dare we say, mysterious.
And this is not merely a question that affects adopted people.
Throughout human life, the arrangements we take to be natural and permanent are continually being revised. Families form. Families dissolve. Families expand. And families reconfigure.
Relationships are being made and unmade all the time. Identities we once inhabited with certainty become unfamiliar and of the past. People discover that the stories they have been told about themselves are incomplete, sometimes profoundly so.
Adoption makes some of these discontinuities unusually visible, placing them at the fore. If only we will look… and see what there is to see.
Adoption is, in this sense, one of the tears in the fabric through which we may begin to see the pattern of the weave.
Adopted people may carry a particular fracture, but no one escapes their own version of a fracture. So adoptees are not unique in being fractured, but adoption does carry the capacity to expose the many other versions of fracture, contradiction, and creative possibility that are already woven into human existence.
And perhaps the most interesting thing about a tear in the fabric such as this is not simply that something has been broken. It is that something previously not apparent—namely the intricate pattern of the fabric’s weave—becomes apparent.
With this month of November having been officially devoted to “adoption awareness,” I wonder how much of it people will spend in effect becoming aware of little more than what they already believed about adoption in the first place.
Because the tropes are real. The familiar stories repeated. The dominant narrative readily available. There’s the rescued child. The relinquished child. The grateful adoptee. The wounded adoptee. The selfless mother. The loving family. The long-awaited reunion.
These stories contain genuine strands of truth. Yet they may also obscure truths that do not fit so comfortably within them. And sometimes the stories themselves become part of what we must eventually find our way through.
For the question is ultimately about more than whether a particular account of adoption is true or false. It is about what becomes difficult to see once we have decided, already and beforehand, what the experience means. For instance:
What happens when we mistake an explanation for an understanding?
What happens when we confuse a legal arrangement with the whole of a human relationship?
What happens when we imagine that the presence of love settles the question of loss… or that the presence of loss diminishes the reality of love?
And what else might become visible if we stopped asking adoption to resolve itself into a familiar, recognizable story?
Perhaps adoption is less an experience at the margins of human life, and more one that brings us unusually close to some of life’s central mysteries.
For one, the mystery of how we come to belong. For two, the mystery of what makes us who we are. For three, the mystery of how much of our lives is given, how much is made, and how much remains beyond our understanding.
There is still so much to discover about adoption itself. About its histories, its institutions, its consequences, its possibilities, and the astonishing variety of lives that unfold within and beyond it.
And perhaps there is something to discover about ourselves—individually and collectively—in the process. Not by deciding once and for all what adoption means… But by becoming curious about what we have not yet seen.
Asking ourselves gamely:
What am I not seeing?
Yes, it seems an excellent question to ask when it comes to adoption. And perhaps an even better question to ask of this world of ours, this world we have co-created together.
🗝️🌀
Love + Oneness,
Naomi
