The Wheel

I joke that when I brought my adoptive father and two of my birth mother’s siblings together at my wedding last week, I was the evil mastermind bending them to my will. There is truth in this. But now, nearly one week on, I’m trying to understand how much, or little, I have achieved.

I invited my adoptive father, my birth mother, her brother, and two of her sisters to my wedding. Two of the siblings, including my birth mother, were unable to attend. I told the other two that they would likely be meeting my adoptive father. I dithered over telling—warning?—my father about the presence of my biological relatives. I waited until the day he flew into town. After dinner with my fiancée and our children, as I was driving him to his hotel, I said that he would be meeting many new people, including two of my biological relatives. He repeated the phrase quizzically. “Biological relatives?” It was as if he didn’t understand the words. I briefly recapitulated the story of my search and reunion, although I didn’t say that I “reunited with” my birth mother; I said I “met” her. My father is approaching eighty years. I am approaching fifty. Talking with him, I still shrink from suiting my words to my thoughts.

He took a beat, then said, “I’m glad they chose to stay in your life, son.”

All weekend, my father seemed to be powered by a beatific force: nothing but smiles and jokes, tenderness and occasional tears. He gushed over the grandchildren he had not seen in nine years. He lavished praise on my fiancée, and over and over he called her son “an ace,” because “that’s the best card in the deck.” I took him to a CVS to buy gift cards for all our children. Ten minutes later he had made moony faces at babies in strollers, to the baffled amusement of their caretakers, and he had pried part of the life story out of one of the store clerks, who had lived for six years in Birmingham, Alabama, the city of my birth and adoption. Laying the Southern Gentleman on with a trowel.

My father lost his wife, my stepmother, in late March. From a distance, I did what I could to help. I wrote an obituary, and I prepared a eulogy that was read aloud at her memorial service. Thus came a thaw in the Ice Age spanning nearly a decade, after he met my news about discovering and “meeting” my birth mother as if I had committed parricide, a defilement to the memory of my adoptive mother, who had died 22 years earlier.

Talking with my biological aunt while my biological uncle and his wife (seated) and my adoptive father (standing) look on

I invited him and my biological aunt and uncle to my wedding not to force a reckoning—neither to heal a wound nor to inflict one. I did it because they were among the people I wanted present. And I did it as a protest against the expectation that I would have to choose who my “real” family was. I was conscious that no one in the world was asking for this convergence of souls. There are no cultural expectations or rules governing it, no script to follow. If anything, the co-presence of my adoptive and biological families signaled a breach in the covenant that we assume closed adoption to represent: that the family of origin shall disappear from the life of the adoptee, who shall be “as if born” to the adopting family.

I was astonished at what happened at my wedding. Before the ceremony I saw my father, still powered by that seeming beatific force, chatting amiably with my biological relatives and their partners. Toward the end of the reception, as guests were filtering out, I saw him with his arm around my uncle’s shoulder.

On his last night in town, as I was driving him to his hotel, I told him that not only was I thankful for his kindness to my biological family, but it healed something in me to see him in a literal embrace. He replied with what I later learned he had also said to my aunt and uncle that day: that he was grateful to them for giving me to him. This remark, generously intended and deeply unsettling (I am no one’s gift; they had no role in it; my birth mother did not relinquish me for his sake), reminded me that my father will never grasp the nettle of adoption.

My Evil Mastermind plan had come to this: toss people together, make no apologies, and see what comes. My father upended my expectations and showed a kind of strength I’d doubted he could summon. And yet I do not call what happened a “success.” It was altogether too contingent. I can’t say whether my father would have acted in the same way if my stepmother were still alive. He so clearly yearned for reconciliation, for the comforting reassurance of my saying I’m still here for you, Dad, that the beatific force powering him all weekend might have been simple gratitude.

I have no reason to think that my father intends to build a relationship with my biological family, or even to ask about them during phone chats. He received them kindly and acknowledged their role in my life: a small but also titanic step. The legacy of the trauma and secrecy of adoption is that I remain isolated in my freedom. I elected to bring these people together, but we remain a wheel: I am the hub, they the spokes. A few days after my wedding I texted my biological father, with whom I’d had my first phone conversation just a month prior. He had sent me photos of my half-brother’s wedding; I reciprocated with photos of my own. I am careful not to say much about him to my birth mother. My adoptive father does not know we have communicated. Every move is risky.

My message to other adopted people is that there is no such thing as the successful resolution, or closure, of an adoption. What happened at my wedding was under my control only in the minimal sense that I asked people to gather, and they did. The rest was contingent on things I could not control, the meanings for each of us—for me, my father, my aunt and uncle—entirely personal. There is still much that I cannot say, hurts that I dare not inflame. There is still no inclusive we. There is only me, standing in particular relationships to the particular people I care about. It’s a kind of paradox: the further I go along the path of reunion, the more fully I perceive this atomism into which adoption fractures the idea of “family.”