Adoption and Guilt

I’ve been thinking about guilt because it’s this month’s topic in the Zoom class Joyce Maguire Pavao and I are leading for a group of adopted people.

Today is the last Sunday of the month, so after this we are “done” with guilt. 

 Wouldn’t that be amazing? To be done with guilt?

But maybe, since guilt is something we create inside of ourselves with our own brains, it is possible to find a way to let go of guilt associated with being an adoptee, being adopted, having the feelings we do because of this situation. 

Stories are often the best way to new understanding, so here’s a story. Last night I was at my brother’s house, and my sister-in-law introduced me to one of their friends. My sister-in-law said something along the lines of, “Anne has strong feelings about adoption. She wrote a book about called Who the Fuck Are You? or something like that. She sees adoption as a problem instead of seeing it as a kindness and as an opportunity for a better life.”

My sister-in-law is an extraordinarily good, generous, loving person. Those people can be the worst when it comes to their opinions of how adopted people should feel about their adoptions.  

I’m going to tell you another story: when I located my brother’s biological aunt and uncle, they told me they tried to get my brother (their nephew) back when they found out his mother had given him to an agency when he was two. The agency conveniently lost their letters and gave (sold) my brother to my white parents. My brother’s aunt and uncle were Black, and they were still stunned, over forty years later that a family member had been lost to them, to a white family who not only took him, but changed his first and last name. 

When my sister-in-law introduced me to her friend, I bristled and said a writer I knew had just done a podcast episode on Adoptees On where they called into question the difference between white people adopting Black children today and while slaveholders purchasing Black children over history. My sister-in-law and her friend laughed, like, “Oh my god,” and I felt both twelve feet tall and two inches high. I wanted to strike out and I wanted to run. I didn’t tell them the title was You Don’t Look Adopted because, well, why would I?

I felt both right and wrong. They got to be people having a nice time at a party and I was an outsider whose thoughts made her different. 

This kind of moral confusion can lead to both guilt and shame. Once again, I was both wrong and doing wrong. I was wrong because I was a body that was not wanted by her mother and did not fit in to the society in which I lived, and I was doing wrong because I was still going on and on about something that didn’t seem all that problematic since I’d ended up in a “nice” family. 

I have been working on a book about writing your story when you are adopted, and last night I sent it to HBL, the man who had helped me get You Don’t Look Adopted written in a way that felt right and true to me. The draft I sent him felt like a terrible mess, and I was ashamed of it because I felt I should be able to do better at this point, but I also know that when I feel ashamed of something I wrote, it may be because I said something that felt true, and so I was curious to see if he’d say I needed to check myself into a wellness spa or if I was onto something. 

He liked it and did not suggest medical care. He did his HBL magic and found the (or a) problem. “One thought that occurred to me was your use of ‘once upon a time’,” he wrote. “It made me feel like writing one’s story could just become a fictional fairy tale, and not the gritty truth. Be aware of that. I think it could derail your message.”

He was so right. I was trying to do two things in this book: I was trying to say that an adopted person writing their story can feel like walking right up to the mouth of death, and I was also trying to do the light and rainbows and unicorn thing: everything will be all right.  

Bullshit. 

I wrote my story and everything was still not all right, and I feel guilt over this, and shame. I am not okay; what I did was not okay. I told my story and still I am furious and heartbroken and confused. I am still a troublemaker in a world that wants me just to bow down and say thank you.  I feel guilt because I “had my say” and I still have more to say. Isn’t one book about adoption enough? When am I going to be done? When am I going to get over all of this and just be normal?

What if part of being an adopted person who is aware of the trauma they carry in their brain and body is to understand, accept, and embrace the fury and heartbreak and confusion and to actually find joy in the expression of these things? The joy will come, does come, I have found, in my giving myself the freedom to be what I am. The guilt and shame is this weirdly obligatory hangover I carry with me because how can I feel fine when I am drawing attention to myself and saying things are not all okay even though I have been given so much? 

My energy is precious, and I don’t want to blow it at a gathering of people by arguing that adoption is not all good, just as I don’t want to wreck my look by spitting into the wind. I can be more clever than that. I can save my arguing energy for platforms that have a greater reach and a greater positive return. When I sat down to write this piece, I got calm and focused. I didn’t have to deal with crazy talk outside of my body because I was so focused on my own talk. I have to get my own beliefs and thoughts razor sharp and accurate before I go out into the world and talk story my way home.