Unattached

An uncompromising statement: I am opposed to adoption because adoption is opposed to the truth.

I need to qualify this. I am opposed to the dominant idea of adoption in our society, and in other Western societies, which is that adoption is a nonbiological means of building families with children who have been severed from their parentage. It is the idea I oppose. I do not oppose all adoptions, or even all adoptions carried out under this dominant idea. I do not oppose my own adoption—which is to say that I believe neither that I should not have been born, nor that my mother should not have relinquished me, nor that the people who subsequently called themselves, with legal sanction, “my parents,” should not have been able to do so. Opposition to the dominant idea of adoption is consistent with all of this. Different adopted people who, like me, oppose the dominant idea of adoption hold different views about their own adoptions. Some believe they should have not been born, i.e., that their parents should have had the option to terminate their pregnancies or, if they had the option, should have taken it. Others believe that their parents should not have relinquished them—either that they should have had the support necessary to keep their child, or that (assuming they actually did have the necessary support) they should have used it. Still others believe that the people who ultimately, by legal sanction, started calling themselves their parents should never have done so. These are all reasonable views to take, and every adopted person’s life is different. I oppose the dominant idea of adoption without opposing my own adoption.

But I do regret and criticize the way my adoptive parents—which is to say, the way they and the panoply¹ of social workers, physicians, legislators, lawyers, priests, and admiring civilian onlookers—understood what happened when the decree of adoption lowered the veil of mutual secrecy between my birth mother and my adoptive parents—and between her and me. Despite my Catholic upbringing, I do not believe in miracles of transubstantiation. No intoning of words or signing of papers or, indeed, a lifetime of attentive and loving care, has the power to make or unmake kinship relations.

Still, I do call my adoptive relatives by the familiar kinship terms. The woman I call my mother (one of them, anyway), died twenty-eight years ago. The man I call my father just celebrated his eightieth birthday. I disambiguate when I need to clarify who I am speaking of. I also disambiguate (or not) as it suits my feelings at any given moment. (For example, sometimes it feels right to think of my birth mother simply as my mother.) I affirm every adopted person’s right to use these kinship terms however they choose, beholden to no outside obligation, to no one else’s demand. This is a reasonable response to the absurd reality that is adoption, under the dominant idea that I oppose.

I oppose adoption under the dominant idea not because it is absurd. As the philosophers Cora Diamond and Jonathan Lear, who make use of the concept, emphasize, reality endlessly produces absurdities.² War, catastrophe, tragic and cruel death—All of these defeat our efforts to make sense of them. “Good” things can be absurd. I have a good job in my chosen career field. I know many others in my field who have toiled for years, even decades, to catch a break like mine, and it hasn’t come. I cannot make sense of my good fortune against such a backdrop. Taking a baby from its parent and legally decreeing that strangers will now be known as “mother” and “father” does not rate any special mention among all the ways reality is constantly going topsy-turvy.

It is adoption’s opposition to the truth that I oppose. The key to my making peace with my adoption is that I finally possess the truth that it was designed, very deliberately, to withhold from me for life. And the way I have made peace with it is through realizing that I am unattached. Adopted people who lack the truth about their origins can make this realization as well; but as long as they lack the truth, I am unsure it can bring them peace.

I came to this way of putting it by reading a book my therapist mentioned. She advocates mindfulness practice (including, but not limited to, meditation) as a way to learn to reorient myself towards the parts of my experience that bring me anxiety. Imagining my own death (or perhaps better, the unimaginability of my own death) brings me anxiety. She mentioned Living in the Light of Death by Larry Rosenberg, a meditation teacher who founded a meditation center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I live. Part of his teaching in this book is that we can face the prospect of death by “dying to” the things to which we are attached. And not only to our material possessions, but to our ideas about ourselves, and even to our loved ones:

… many people can go along with this idea [dying to the things we fear to lose] when it has to do with concepts or personal possessions. But they balk when it comes to people. It seems to them natural, for instance, to be attached to their children. It is just a matter of loving them very much. But love is not the same thing as attachment. Love does not imply the creation of a self and the possessiveness that frequently accompanies it. As a matter of fact, we can really love only when we drop the self. Attachment implies a holding on, wanting things to be a certain way, setting conditions. But real love is unconditional. It is unattached to any outcome.

When you give up attachments, you are not rejecting the people who are closest to you. You are just relating to them in a radically new way. (p.132)

Although this teaching is not meant to apply specifically to adoptive kinship relations, I find it especially helpful in that context, because adoption is nothing if not a demonstration of the sheer contingency of life. By legal fiat, adoption creates an illusion of permanence in what began as a random matching of persons. And this illusion gives rise to the anxieties about status that we so often see expressed by adoptive parents when confronted with criticisms of adoption in cultural discourse, or with formal challenges to existing adoption law and practice.

I am attracted to the thought that real love not only does not require attachment, but is in tension with attachment, because attachment sets conditions, while love is unconditional. This speaks to my recurring feeling, when I hear adoptive parents express anxiety over who the true family is, that such talk doesn’t originate from love. “I love you, but we do not possess each other.” Nothing—not a legal decree, not affection and nurturance, not even a lifetime of toil—grounds a form of attachment that discriminates in favor of adoptive family over biological family. This is not to say that I should see myself as “belonging” to my biological family equally. It is to say that the notion of “belonging” does not help me.

The idea of unattachment also helps me make better sense of my biological family’s attitudes toward me. From the first contact, I have been struck by how easy it has felt to establish a relationship with them. There has been warmth and joy, but little anguish—little sense of tragedy over the passage of years. Reunion—if we want to call it that (and my reflection on unattachment has caused me to reconsider the word)—has felt less like a homecoming, and more like a collaborative project to make something new. Something new that is rooted, of course, in historical ground.

“I love you, but we do not possess each other.” The dominant idea of adoption, the basis of severance and secrecy, rests on the absurdity of the idea that genealogy is both firm and unalterable and rewritable by legal fiat and wishful thinking. But as adopted people, we belong to no one. The more I see the people in my life taking this truth to heart, the more my love grows.

1. The word “panoply” is martial in its etymology, meaning something like “a full complement of arms and armor.” That suits my purposes. Adoption, on the dominant idea, has something in common with missionary work, itself a kind of combat (often, of course, literally so).

2. See this post:

Absurd Reality, part 1