So, what is the opposite of ancestry? "Hey, I've never thought of it that way. How interesting," mutter a thousand genealogically obsessed people with family trees like bloody sequoias. In this age of DNA and Ancestry.com it is the most natural thing in the world to revel in the surfeit of information available. All you need is patience and wifi and you can find out anything your heart desires.
Well, that is not the case for all of us.
Sometimes it doesn't bother me. I had a very loving upbringing surrounded by five siblings. And I was the baby. (Oooh, the widdle baby!!) I mean, I was loved! But I'm grown now and am raising two beautiful boys of my own. And I totally love it when I see myself in them. The smallest thing that I can identify as originating from me fills me with insane joy. I have roots! But, no. I don't have roots. I have branches.
Being adopted means not having roots, not having ancestry. I was not begotten or begat. There was no Sarah who "knew" Judah kind of nonsense. I am the product of no one. And the longer I live the weirder that seems. And the angrier it makes me.
I am not legally allowed to know anything about my ancestors. That seems like a shitty deal to me.
For the longest time I told myself that I didn't want to meet my biological mother. (Why is it never the father? Do adopted boys daydream about not meeting their fathers?) I just wanted to know what she looked like. I still can't decide if that is the most horrible vanity or just a symptom of the aching need to be related to someone. I figure, I was an interloper the first time we met and I didn't want to rehash that relationship again so I would be happy just with a picture and some info.
About 20 years ago I did get some non-identifying information. I found out a few things: my ethnicity (which was a mind-blowing revelation) and the circumstances surrounding my adoption (which could have served to educate Alanis Morissette as to the actual meaning of irony). The funny thing about information is that you can never really have enough. I began to wonder whether my heart could handle meeting this woman who bore me. But it wasn't just my heart. How would I fit my head around her? I love my mother. (For future reference, when I say my mother/Mum/Momma, I will always mean my adoptive mother. She is the only mother I have ever known and she is the only person who can ever have that title. When I refer to the woman who gave me life, I will always refer to her as My Biological Mother. Clinical maybe, but we do what we have to). How could I have two mother figures? What if I fit into my biological mother's life better than my Mum's? What if I found out that she married my biological father and they went on to have five kids and they all lived happily ever after on the island paradise of St Lucia (where she really is from)! I mean, it's too exhausting to think of all the possible outcomes. So I'd let it go.
But I'm getting older. And now there is the real possibility that she may already be dead and I'll never know more than I know right now. And again, that seems shitty to me. Not when everyone else has the option of tracing their lineage back nine generations!
My Mum always encouraged me to look for her. Which is really incredibly understanding and loving, right? But a little part of me always thought, "Why do you want to push me away? Don't you know that I just want to be your daughter?" But of course she couldn't know that. She has biological relatives. She assumes (as I assume most people with biological relatives would assume) that I would want to find my "real family". Okay, so here's the thing. When you are adopted, your family is the people you grew up with. They are the ones you are close to and have shared your life with. That's what family is. That's all family can be to us. Encouraging me to look elsewhere for family always felt more like a slap in the face than a hand on the shoulder. Now, when my husband of 17 years encourages me to find my biological mother, it feels different. We have made people together. We have a vested interest in checking out what kind of material we're working with here. And he sees past my humour and stunning witticisms right to that hollow centre.
So perhaps it's time to search in ernest. I've been on the Adoption Disclosure Registry for 20 years. They finally opened the records in my neck of the woods in 2009. But seeing as they sealed them in 1927, that's 82 years of backlog to get through. The fabled matching up may take a while.
So, I propose to blog my way through this quest. I don't know how prolific I will be. It's tiring, soul-sucking work. Thus, there will be whining. But for all of you who are bored to death hearing the same family stories every Thanksgiving, come see how the other half lives.
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
