Growing up, I had not thought much about my birth parents. There was not much information available. At that time, closed adoptions were the standard. My original birth certificate was literally locked in a drawer, and replaced with one that names my adoptive parents. My mother told me that my birth mother was in college, that she had not told her parents she was pregnant, and had not named any father on the birth certificate. (All true, as it turns out.) My mother extrapolated from this that my birth mother was an unfeeling, dishonest and secretive person, and that my birth was the result of a very casual relationship. (Not true, as it turns out.)
My adoptive mother was a very dramatic person, which she confused with being a person who felt things deeply. As a child, I didn't really know any differently, so I took it at face value for a long time that, being reserved and introverted was the same as being rather uncaring and emotionless. Well, I knew I wasn't emotionless, but the sense remained that there was something wrong with me. And, I was secretive. It is a very common and in many ways healthy response to an over-controlling parent. But for a long time I still sort of thought there was something wrong there too.
I have always believed that being adopted was not the big problem in my childhood -- bad parents are bad parents, regardless of genetics. However, I have learned over the years that some of the dynamics of my childhood are common in families of adoption. One would think that, having adopted a child, you would be expecting the child to have personality traits, aptitudes and interests different from your own, and you would be prepared to accept and develop those differences. But at that time, it was much more widely believed that children were "blank slates" and that their personalities were much less influenced by genetics than they really are. This must have only added to my mother's sense of frustration and failure, that she could not somehow "fix" me in this way. No wonder she needed to deflect this failure somehow -- and blaming it on my awful heritage of being calm and deliberate (of course that's not how she saw it) was an easy out.
There was another way in which she feared that my birth mother, and my sister's, would have a bad influence on us. This had to do with the whole complicated, frightening area of sexuality. Although my adopted sister and I had different birth mothers, and their circumstances were quite different, we both of course were born to women who were not married, and who were not in a position, for whatever reason, to persuade their lovers to marry them. It is hard for someone born even 20 years later than I was, I think, to fully appreciate the attitude of respectable people toward such women back at that time. They were not just girls who had made a mistake. They were immoral people, and powerless, weak people at that. And as much as adoptive parents wanted to believe that a good upbringing would overcome this bad heritage, there was always the haunting thought that their daughters would turn out to be similarly wayward.
For my own mother, this must have been compounded by her feelings of failure at having been able to bear children herself. She had submitted to regular intimacy for years, a process she seems to have found distasteful and humiliating, without ever getting the one benefit she expected from the ordeal -- a baby. Added to this was her general need to control us and ensure that we were perfect -- whatever she thought that meant.
This was all harder on my sister, perhaps, than on me. While I had to bear the burden of being the cold and secretive one, I was also tall and bookish and flat-chested. As Aunt Margaret used to say about her own youth -- to a man, the boys in my school found me resistable. My sister had a more appealing personality, which suddenly seemed to have a downside -- there was the imminent possibility that boys would also be drawn to her easy laugh (she never got jokes so she laughed at everything) and her obvious desire to be liked. And, she developed a very pleasing, rounded figure which my mother dealt with by talking as if having D cup breasts was somehow inherently vulgar, and the only thing to be done was to smush them into a more civilized B cup bra.
Of course, fears about a daughter's budding sexuality are common and to some degree, understandable. They are exaggerated, in many cases, by the adoption factor. There is element of parenting that is also like this, and that is the expectation of gratitude.
Parenting is hard work, and we all hope that our children will appreciate this effort. (Eventually. To expect any visible signs of gratitude before a child is 25 or so is not, in my experience, realistic.) But it is one thing to have raised a child -- it is quite another, in some people's minds, to have rescued one from shame and squalor to live in more respectable, if not privileged, circumstances. My mother used to put this in the endearing terms that, if it was not for her, we would have grown up in a "tenement with rats running around and children peeing on the walls." Now, my birth mother was a college graduate, with parents and many other relatives firmly planted in the middle class, so I think this would not have been likely. Even if it was -- even for those people today who are adopting children from truly dire circumstances in other countries -- this attitude is not effective in provoking good behavior from children of any age. It is also not effective in promoting the bonds of love and loyalty that are supposed to hold a family together.
Do I think adoption was the problem with my childhood? Not really. Do I think adoption in general, or closed adoptions in particular, are wrong? No. I think adoption has a place, and confidentiality may have a place in some cases, especially when children are young. My mother would probably not have done a much better job with children she had given birth to herself.
Adoption is not, in itself, a problem. But it has its pitfalls, and in a family that is not strong, it can widen the fissures that are already there.
