It took a long time for me to admit that being adopted had caused me to lose something. It took me years- and even to this day, 10 years into reunion, its something that people just don’t want to hear about.
“But you have a family who loves you now,” they tell me. And that’s true.
“But you are better of with the family who adopted you” people say. And there is definitely some validity to that statement.
But in general, I am able to brush off these comments. What could people who aren’t in my situation possibly understand about how it has affected me? But recently, a conversation with my birth sister, Pippi, struck me. She too was placed for adoption, a few years before I was. We share a birthmother but not a birthfather. She is very strongly against adoptee rights, claiming that birthparents should be entitled to absolute privacy, should they choose to request it. If the birthparents don’t want to be found, she says, then adoptees should have no right to seek them out. We often debate this, as my own viewpoints are radically different. But in these conversations, it always comes down to one crucial concept: Loss.
Pippi simply does not believe she has lost anything by being placed for adoption, and thus has no invested interest in knowing our birthparents. After all, she explains, she has parents. She does not feel that her birthparents have anything to offer. She’s happy to be alive, grateful that our birthmother made the courageous choice to have us, and also happy that she made the right choice by placing us for adoption.
I find a lot of aspects of her point of view hard to swallow. Grateful? Courageous choice? She sees our birthmother, for all intensive purposes, as a vessel- the courageous but ill prepared woman who brought her into this world so she could be raised by her *real* parents.
I love Pippi, and though I do not agree, I respectfully agree to disagree. But her words really have me thinking- how can this loss that I feel so deeply completely not affect her? She sees meeting our birthparents as something to do out of mere curiosity, something that can be done without emotional consequence. Whereas I have devoted years of my life trying to fit my birthparents into my world, trying to heal what has been broken. Its not that Pippi likes her adoptive parents and I do not. We both have close, fulfilling families. It’s not that Pippi fits in better with her family than I do with mine. In fact, its probably the opposite! So what is it. What makes this loss so real to me and so foreign to her?
Adoption has given me many great things. But in order to have a family who wanted and could provide for me, I had to lose a great deal. I feel it in BOTH of my families. When my nephews were born and my whole family marveled about who they look like, and I was absent from the conversation. When my family talks about ancestral heritage, of coming from Sicily and Ireland to Brooklyn- and I realize that one some level I am not a part of that history. I feel it when I speak to my birth family, when they talk about times past- dinners tables that I didn’t sit at, love and a sense of belonging that I wasn’t around to experience. I feel the loss when my birthfather recounts the story of my birth, when I read the letters my birthmother wrote to me when I was a baby but never sent, when I see photos of them holding my baby sister- born only a few years after I- loved, cherished, kept. I feel this loss. I feel it everyday. I even feel it when I am with Pippi, and we laugh about some shared joke, or marvel over some shared feature, and I think:
“We could have lived our lives together as sisters. What has happened to our family that we grew up 1,000 miles apart?”
I don’t wish that I hadn’t been adopted. It would be simpler if I could say that I do, but it just isn’t so. And that’s what makes this loss so strange, so difficult to articulate. Because it’s not one that I would change, or do-over. And maybe that’s what Pippi doesn’t feel, maybe that’s what she can’t see. Maybe she doesn't understand that we can love each other, that we can feel sadness without taking away from our joy and our love of our adoptive families.
Maybe I’m just fanciful, or overly sensitive. Maybe I should be a little more like Pippi- able to overlook the bad and focus on the good. But when I am with her, and I look into her face- I see a reflection of myself. I feel happy that we have found each other, overjoyed that we have lived good lives, that we are happy, that we are loved. But I also feel a twinge of sadness- because I spent the first 20 years of my life without her -this spunky, sassy, strong woman who is my sister- and a part of me feels that we should have known each other all along. I look into her eyes, and I feel the loss of “what could have been”, and it makes me a little sad to know that she does not feel the same thing when she gazes into mine.
