Transcriber: Susana González Reviewer: Keira White
In the mid 1970s, there was a really popular song called:
″Oh What a Night″.
″Late December, 1963…″
At about the same time,
I was in Mrs. Morris's science class learning about sex ed for the first time.
And while kids sometimes have a problem with sex ed, not me.
I had it all figured out. You see, I knew my parents would never do that.
(Laughter)
And… I had proof, I was adopted.
And I’d also figured out exactly how it had happened.
Late December 1963 was exactly nine months before late September 1964,
when I was born. ″What a lady, what a night.″
The song was about me and my conception.
Adoptees are kind of strange like that,
we are always juggling two or three different identities at the same time.
The first is usually who we think our adoptive families want us to be:
the good student, the good kid.
We work really hard to be that person
so that they do not give us back to another family.
We’re also our science, our biology, we’re our DNA profile.
But since we don't have a name or a face to put with that,
we create someone to help us make sense of our world.
Usually it's someone famous if you're a kid.
Anyway, it’s a little bit like being on a gerbil wheel of:
″Who am I?″ all the time.
Adoption is generally considered
a great way to create families and help children.
But it’s a lot more complicated than you might realize.
It's particularly complicated for adoptees who are trying to navigate
the inherent unknown and it can be very complex and have consequences.
Adoptees are four times as likely to attempt suicide as their peers.
Four times.
Addiction, depression, anxiety,
all run rampant in the adoptee community.
Adoptees are more likely to kill or be killed by their parents.
October 30th serves as Adoptee Remembrance Day,
and these days don't just spring up on their own.
Adoption is predicated on secrecy and anonymity.
But, you know, we don't live in that world anymore.
And the construct of adoption hasn’t really kept up with the science.
30 million people have taken a commercial DNA test.
That's not just good marketing.
MIT tells us that there are enough data points now to connect all of us.
Genetic secrecy is over.
And while this is revolutionary for adoptees,
it's not their whole story.
They’re missing some of the context
and the personal details they need to create a strong identity.
This is how it happened for me.
Do you remember how it felt when you learned there was no Santa?
You were disappointed, sad,
kind of worried about what was going to happen at Christmas now.
And you were a little angry at your parents for deceiving you.
That's what it's like for an adoptee as they navigate their world,
picking up little pieces here and there of their identity.
You see, we all learn that there’s no Santa.
But not all of us are adopted
and adoptees learn their truth in a relative vacuum,
and it’s difficult and no one really likes to talk about it.
It would be so helpful
if all of the information were right there, all our lives,
if all the facts were there and adoption was transparent.
I loved my parents and they loved me.
I have had a fantastic life.
That's not what this is about. I always knew I was adopted.
It wasn’t a secret, but it was a taboo topic in our household,
one that we just really weren't encouraged to talk about.
I’m not sure why, but I know my parents had fertility issues,
and fertility is another one of those shame-heavy,
cloudy topics that society doesn’t like to discuss.
I knew that while they were living,
this was not a topic I could pursue with them.
I went on to marry a physician who’s also a geneticist.
As I approached my 50th birthday,
he pretty much insisted that I get my medical history.
I was totally ambivalent.
I had just buried my parents.
I didn’t know if I wanted to find any more.
And getting adoption records can be… next to impossible.
There's legal firewalls everywhere.
You have to write letters, pay fees, petition the court.
When the court opens the records,
it then gets passed along to a social worker
who transcribes what’s in the file without using any names.
There can be a lot in that file or there can be very little.
It’s kind of a crap-shoot.
The laws are so strict that to this day
I am not legally allowed to see an original copy of my birth certificate.
I wrote the letters, I paid the fees, and I took a DNA test.
I’d like to tell you the ins and outs of how that all panned out,
but we don’t have time.
I will tell you, however, how I felt about this.
Remember I was ambivalent.
This was the most personally profound,
wonderful and difficult thing I’ve ever done.
It was personally profound because I finally made sense to myself.
Growing up, I didn’t look like anyone in my family,
and I wasn’t like them either.
I was this artsy, crafty tomboy.
I was sweaty, messy, super athletic and creative.
I rode my bike to the pool, to go to swim practice,
and then I came home and in the basement, made prom dresses.
My parents didn’t break a sweat.
My mom didn’t know how to plug in the machine.
We didn’t fit. We weren’t a match.
It was clear I was other in this family. I never saw myself.
When I got the biographical information back about my father’s side of the family,
all of the men in that side of the family were tremendous athletes,
some on a professional level.
My father’s lifelong nickname was Bullfrog because he liked to swim so much,
and the women on that side of the family? Seamstresses, for a living.
I was a crafty tomboy. I mean, that sounds silly,
but I finally got it, almost on a cellular level,
I understood a lot of the things I had been trying to reconcile my whole life.
What I was, was who I was.
I approached both sides of the family.
My father died in 1996,
but his extended family welcomed me with open arms.
And they told me that had they known about me,
they would have kept me with the family.
This was a feeling that was very overwhelming and unreal
because I don’t think I’d ever actually thought about what it would be like
to be wanted by my birth family.
It was a whole feeling,
it was sincere and it was comforting.
Of course, none of that could have happened because I was a secret.
They wanted to know about my mother,
and it had taken a little bit longer for me to find her.
And when we found her, she said she was glad to know that I was alive,
but she was not happy to know, at all, that I knew who she was.
My father hadn’t wanted to marry her.
I was a shame souvenir.
And she had done her best to forget and erase me.
She gave birth to me.
She never held me. She never named me.
She handed me to a room full of strangers, and she left.
I was a dirty little secret.
She didn’t want me then, and she doesn’t want me now.
That was devastating to realize, even as an adult.
I sort of fell into a hole I didn’t know was there.
I was that baby she never held.
I embodied our trauma.
It turns out you can’t unlive the trauma
of being separated from your birth mother at birth.
It just doesn’t happen.
I’m not alone.
For the last two years or so,
I’ve been meeting weekly with 25 or more adult adoptees.
And we tell our stories and we talk about our feelings
and we put words to things we didn’t know we had words for.
It's extremely validating.
And while not all of us had the same experience,
most of us felt exactly the same experience.
You see, adoptees were put into a ″yes, but″ world.
″Yes, but your parents loved you.″ ″Yes, but you should feel fortunate.″
″Yes, but you’re lucky.″
People need to realize that adoptees live in a ″yes, and″ world
where there’s two stories happening simultaneously.
Yes. I loved my parents. Yes. I’m grateful for the life I’ve had.
And I grieve because my birth family didn’t want me.
And I grew up not knowing. And not what I didn’t know did hurt me.
I can have all of these feelings at the same time.
And adoptees need you to let us have these feelings at the same time.
They are part of who we are, we are a sum of our parts.
To conceal one or part of that, it’s just not possible.
No one should conceal a part of them
just because society is uncomfortable with it.
So, what do we do?
We have to stop concealing what is.
If you were… but, first of all, thank you for listening to this,
because you’ve opened your minds to another narrative which exists,
needs to be heard and needs to be discussed.
If you're an adoptee, find other adoptees, find an adoption competent therapist.
It really matters.
If you’re a birth parent
or, excuse me, if you’re a parent that is an adoptive parent,
thinking of adopting a child and you want to keep it a secret,
ask yourself, “Why?”
Do your own emotional work first.
You’re adopting a child, not a solution.
And when you adopt a baby, you adopt the whole baby.
You adopt the trauma they’ve been through, and any traumas they will go through.
You adopt the DNA and you adopt the heritage
and the whole baby deserves the whole story.
If you’re thinking…
As a parent, this is your responsibility, to help them through this,
if they want to find out more information.
If you’re thinking about surrendering a baby for adoption,
realize that that child can and will find you.
And the best gift that you can give them is information and access.
If you’re thinking of donating sperm or an egg,
think about what’s going to happen in 17 years.
You’re not making money, you’re making a person,
and someone will knock on your door, and 50% of them will be 50% of you,
and they deserve to know the portion of you that’s them.
Adoption is becoming more open, and that's a good thing.
But we do face this whole new wave of donor-conceived individuals.
70% of them do not know about it until they’re 18.
That’s an awful lot of identity issues going on.
Adoption needs to be more open.
People ask me, “Are you glad you did all this?,
because you clearly found out a lot more about yourself
than you thought you would”.
And I say: ″Yes!″
I found out I wasn’t the child of a pop star.
But I was the child of a man named Bullfrog
who liked to swim just as much as I do.
And knowing all of that made a big difference.
Thanks for listening.
(Applause)