"Adoption: Uncharted Waters", A Review

Adoption: Uncharted Waters
David Kirschner, Ph.D
Juneau Press


“Adoption: Uncharted Waters,” by David Kirschner, is a brisk read, especially if you’re a fan of the true crime genre (who doesn’t like to read case studies of serial killers and parricides?). However, there is a more serious intent behind “Adoption: Uncharted Waters” than titillating the bored and morbidly curious, and that is to assert Kirschner’s claims for the diagnosis and proposed treatment of the Adopted Child Syndrome, or ACS. Kirschner pioneered the theory of ACS as a definable syndrome through over forty years of clinical practice with adopted children and adolescents. In 1986, struck by the parallels between the autobiographical narratives of David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam” killer, and those of some of his patients, Dr. K. became focused on adoptee killers as extreme exemplars of ACS. Kirschner has been able to interview several high-profile adoptee killers, including Joel Rifkin and Jeremy Strohmeyer, as well as assisting in their legal defense. His success at convincing the justice system of the validity of ACS as a mitigating condition in the acts of these killers has been spotty, and has attracted as much negative attention to ACS as positive.

Thus, in addition to the case studies and theoretical explication, “Adoption: Uncharted Waters” contains a great deal of Kirschner defending this theory against his critics. These critics are a varied crew, representing the juridical (Allen Dershowitz), the academy (sociologist Katarina Wegar), and the political. Kirschner complains that he catches it from both the political right and left. Welcome to Adoption World, Dr. K! But more on this in a bit.

What is missing in “Adoption: Uncharted Waters” are analyses and critiques of the theory of the Adopted Child Syndrome from the quarter most capable of providing it - a review of his peers. I’m neither a clinical nor a research psychologist, and whatever carps I have with ACS are, for the most part, political and cultural critiques that have no bearing on the validity of Kirschner’s research or conclusions. So I’m not going to analyze ACS underlying psychological theories, diagnoses, or Kirschner’s proposed treatment. What I will note is that ACS provides a compelling and coherent narrative of the development an adoptive Self, albeit a narrative of pathology, and this where Kirschner and ACS get into the most trouble.

Kirschner goes to great lengths to explain how ACS occurs in an extremely small number of adoptees that experience varying combinations of genetic predispositions and traumas in development, including the Primal Wound described by Nancy Verrier. Others are less circumspect about how adoptees develop ACS and how many adoptess have ACS. Even B.J. Lifton, who Kirschner cites in his book as a friend and colleague, and who worked on her own theories of ACS (concurrently, at the least, with Kirschner, if not before), has on occasion opined that all adoptees, potentially, have ACS. AMFOR, Lori Corangelo’s anti-adoption organization, takes Kirschner to task on its website for what it considers waffling on this point. The AMFOR web article attempts to raise the suspicion that Kirschner may have yielded to pressure from some mysterious pro-adoption force in modulating his previous opinion. And this is from people who ostensibly support the notion of ACS.

As much as Kirschner would like to “contain” ACS within the limits prescribed by his research, it has grown legs of its own and ambled into the larger laboratory of adoption discourse. It is here that ACS became “ACS” (the narrative as opposed to the psychological theory), a creation myth of adopted identity. Much the same thing happened with the Primal Wound theory, which through its entry into adoption discourse became transformed from psychological observation/opinion into “the Primal Wound”, a universalizing narrative of adoptee angst, confusion and existential unease. And it is as the mythic narrative that “ACS” was analyzed and critiqued by Bastard Nation, among others.

I recall that when I was invited to join Bastard Nation’s Executive Committee back in 1997, Shea Grimm asked me if I “believed in the Primal Wound.” I could tell by the context of the question that this could have been a determining factor in whether I would be accepted or not as a BN leader. My answer must have been satisfactory, since I went on to serve on the ExecCom, but I think the frame of the question is more telling. In the discourse of adoption, “the Primal Wound” and “ACS” are articles of faith, not theories. One either believes in their narrative arcs or one does not. Adoptees can choose to “adopt” them as narrative overlays that may contextualize remembered (and unremembered) events and the emotional responses to those events. Adoptees can self-diagnose with “ACS”, “the Primal Wound” or both, and project sets of meaning on their behaviors and responses. One can diagnose other adoptees with “ACS” or “the Primal Wound” and thereby deploy sets of meaning onto (or against) them. Kirschner complains that BN and others have distorted and misrepresented ACS in their critiques, but the misrepresentation was created when ACS becomes “ACS”. (Of course this transformation of theory into narrative isn’t exclusive to adoption, imagine how Freud must have felt when his theories morphed into cultural artifacts.)

While “ACS”, the narrative, has garnered acceptance from some due to its ease of use (all you have to do is believe in the narrative to make it so), it’s also accumulated a wide array of critics. Kirschner gives the impression that he’s surrounded by these critics and uses the language of conventional political positioning to describe them; Bastard Nation on the Left, the National Council for Adoption on the Right. This is problematical on many levels. Adoption politics are not divisible by conventional frames of Left and Right. Adoption as an American institution (meaning traditional, sealed records adoption) has been embraced by both parties, and, at times, by all wings of both parties. Resistance and reaction to reforming adoption practices has been bipartisan. One of the most resistant groups opposing opening adoption records to adult adoptees has been state groups of the ACLU, which can hardly be described as right-wing. In California, I worked with a moderate Republican on an open records bill and found our major opposition was a conservative Republican and a group of extremely liberal Los Angeles Democrats. They managed to put aside their quotidian differences over abortion, gay rights, the role of big and small government and every other issue in order to beat up on adoptees.

So, while “Adoption: Uncharted Waters” is a good place to start if you’re interested in adoptee pathologies, it leaves much of the story untold. David Kirschner is probably not the best person to follow the transformation of his theory into a free-floating narrative in the discourse of adoption, he’s too close and too invested in the theory of the Adopted Child Syndrome to be able to analyze the “Adopted Child Syndrome”, the narrative. Which is too bad. One of the strongest impressions I got from the book is how compassionate and caring Kirschner is towards adoptees. If he lived closer to me, I might be tempted to use him as my therapist. But not because I’m a true believer.

A Piece of Paper as the Regulation of Desire

A piece of paper can no more bring peace of mind than being able to choose which bus seat one sits in can solve the intractability of racism. But it's amazing how many molecules are agitated when attention is brought to bear on these relatively inconsequential matters - demanding a document in a file, taking the "wrong" seat on a city bus.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, that is to say over ten years ago, some adoptees began to communicate with each other on the internet. They found that the internet provided an unmediated space in which to create discourse, and this communication became a "site" (not a website), a location in which they could articulate notions of adoptee identity outside the restrictive framework imposed by their socio-culture (and that framework included the main streams of adoption culture at that point).

These adoptees, freed (at least temporarily, at least in this corner of cyberspace) from the restrictions of positioning in triads, dyads and such, began to articulate a nascent sense of adopted/bastard identity that was autonomous and integrated. I don't mean to imply that these adoptee/bastards were "whole" uncomplicated people, freed from conflicted family dramas and attendant quotidian neuroses, no, they were, as a group, crazy as hell. But they were onto something; the possibility of an adopted identity, differentiated from non-adopted identity.

One signal quality of this newly considered bastard identity was what was articulated as the "need to know". My readings of late lead me to believe that this was a misstatement, what was being formed was a notion of a "desire to know". Why "desire" and not "need"? Because "need" is quantifiable, "needs" can be "met" (or "unmet"). You "need" to breath, you inhale, for the moment your need to breath is fulfilled. You "need" food, you eat, you are satiated. "Desire", however, is open-ended, insatiable (this is not to say that "desire" is immutable. "Desire" or "desires" can be transient and evolving, or disappear altogether). What these Ur-Bastards were doing, in embracing historical models of bastards as renegades, fabulous creatures, "children of nature", Clark Kent/Superman, Moses, etc., was building a model of adopted identity that wasn't predicated on deficiency, but on desire.

Out of this fertile swamp of emails and posts to alt.adoption evolved Bastard Nation, which was designed as a political organ. As an actor in the arena of politics, Bastard Nation articulated the "desire to know" as a "right to know". BN didn't differentiate between an adoptee who was desperately searching, one who never felt the urge to search, or one who had already found their first families. BN didn't care if adoptees wanted to use their copies of their OBCs to find their mothers or as wallpaper in their downstairs bathrooms. They were all presumed to possess a "right to (the desire) to know." The "desire" was unarticulated, but it informs the bastard discourse throughout. It was not, ever, a needs-based assertion.

BN focused on access to OBCs because the restriction of access is a primary means by which the state regulates bastard desire, and through which it denies the possibility of an "adopted identity." We are allotted one "family" to identify with, it wouldn't do to have two (or more!). The act of demanding this small piece of paper, of asserting a right to the desire to know, is like inserting a laser-beam thin wedge into the edifice of the power that regulates non-adopted and adopted identities alike. As I said, it agitates the molecules. It exposes the dreads, fears, hatreds and paranoia that those in power hold about bastard/adopted identities.

So, that's why those little pieces of paper are important. Not because they promise to fulfill a need, but because in the act of acquiring them we illuminate our desire to know.

[This piece has been gestating for a while, and owes much to the essay "The Immaculate Deception: Adoption in Albee's Plays," by Garry Leonard, and his theory of "adopteestentialism." What really pushed me over the edge, though, was Kimberly Leighton's essay "Being Adopted and Being a Philosopher," a gem of discipline and brilliance.
It is also a Happy 10th Birthday card to Bastard Nation. And as such, I must acknowledge Marley Greiner, Shea Grimm, Damsel Plum, Debra Schwartz, Denise Castellucci and many others who were there at the Birth of a Bastard Nation. And of course, the incomparable B. J., without whose Moments no one could have conceived Bastardy in the first place.]

The Triad is a Five-legged Stool...

I bought the party line that adoption consists of the Triad because it's repeated so often and so reverentially that it takes on the quality of a sacred litany... however you want to call it out: adoptee/adoptive parent/birthmother, adoptee/adopter/natural mother, etc etc ad infinitum world without end. But then it dawned on me... probably after attending another moribund conference dedicated to truth in adoption (where 99% of the presenters and 60% of the attendees were therapists and social workers)... the Triad is a shell-game.

Adoption actually consists of five legs, the adoptee, the adopters, the first parents, the full gamut of adoption professionals, and the state. Adoption professionals, a category in which can be lumped social workers, facilitators, attorneys and therapists, may disagree within their class on what adoption is, but are adament in invoking their privilege to define what adoption is to those in the first three categories (those to whom adoption is an existential reality). The state ultimately holds the power; the state created adoption out of whole cloth, and reserves the ultimate right to decide not only what adoption is and will be, but also the right to enforce its will on all the other four legs, through statute and regulation.

The beauty of the Triad, at least to the fourth and fifth leg, is that it renders their agency invisible. The state and its quasi-agents, the professional adoption class, can float divinely over the pell mell and gore, offering definitive commentary and altering the rules of the game. It's a tidy racket.
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Late Discovery Website Launched!

Ok, this is self-serving, but important. I've launched a new website at http://www.latediscovery.org

It's a site for and about Late Discovery Adoptees. It has articles, stories and a survey for and about LDA's. Check it out!

LDA's in the News

There were two Late Discovery Adoptee stories in the news last week, first in the Philadelphia Enquirer, then in the Boston Globe. I was interviewed and cited in the Philadelphia article. Must be something in the zeitgeist… I’ve also been contacted by a reporter from ABC news about participating in a possible segment. We’ll see…

LDA narratives are compelling, after all anyone could potentially wake up to find out that everything they thought they knew about their origins is wrong. But in sheer numbers I think that the upcoming wave of donor-conceived individuals who discover their histories will inundate society.

My LDA pages, with information about Late Discovery and instructions on how to join the Late Discovery List on Yahoogroups, can be found at by clicking here

Identity Theft and Recovery: Late Discovery Adoptees

(This originally appeared in the Winter 2000 newletter pubished by the Post Adoption Center for Education and Research)

“Our law emphasizes the right of the child. It demands that children be told the truth, that they are adopted. Sometimes we think it cruel to tell a person the truth (first as a child, later as an adult). But that view reflects a colonialist attitude. Only the colonizer refuses to respect the identity of the colonized." (Graciela Fernandez Meijide, member of the Argentine Congress, on the 1997 law making it mandatory that adopted children be told they are adopted. From “Searching for Life: The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo and the Disappeared Children of Argentina”, Rita Arditti, University of California Press, 1999.)

The email message I received tonight was not unusual. In the months since I started the Late Discovery Adoptee List on the Internet, I get at least one such post a week. The man who wrote me had just discovered that he was adopted and was grateful to communicate with someone like himself. Like many Late Discovery Adoptees, his story was very similar to mine. I remember when I first found out I was adopted, I felt like I was the only fool on earth who hadn’t known, and possibly the only person to find out they were adopted when they were grown.


I discovered I was adopted when I was 36, shortly after the death of my mother. My father had passed away a few months before, and as their only child it was up to me to make her funeral arrangements and clean out her home. While sorting through family photographs, letters, and official papers, I found the documents that first informed me of my adoption.


I felt as if the ground opened up beneath my feet and I was falling into an abyss. This free-fall lasted for two- and-a-half years. Who was I? Why had the people who were supposed to love me and protect me lied to me my entire life? I had to meet many other adoptees, adoptive parents, and birth parents before I could begin to answer these questions.


There are many books available on adopting, on adoption, on being adopted. There is plenty of advice to prospective adoptive parents about when to tell their children they were adopted. Although there is a great deal of discussion about when to tell your children they are adopted, very few touch on why you should tell them in the first place. It is assumed to be a given. It is as if the choice not to tell is so wrong it is taboo to even speak about it. I’ve learned that the things that cannot be said become very powerful.


When I finally reached out to other adoptees through a local support group, I found we had much in common such as the longing for grounding in our identity and the questioning of our “official” stories. I found the emphasis on search in this group, and others I contacted at that time, confusing and frightening. I wasn’t ready to search. As a friend remarked to me when I told him I wasn’t even considering locating my birth family at that time, “Who needs more people to resent?”


Isolated, I simmered in my anger and resentment. I finally met another like me, online, and we shared war stories through email. Slowly, through posting my story on the Internet use-net group, alt.adoption, I found six or seven more. Shea Grimm of Bastard Nation asked me if I would like to make a presentation about the experiences of adoptees like me at the First Annual BN Conference. I accepted reluctantly because I had no credentials relevant to the subject other than my own life story. I sent out a questionnaire to the adoptees with whom I had corresponded, and from the dozen responses I forged some general observations about us.


I found that writing the presentation, “Late Discovery Adoptees: Are You Adopted? Are You Sure?” was a crucial turning point for me. For one thing, it exhausted the rage I had held for years against my parents. Not only was I able to place myself in an understandable context, but my adoptive parents as well. I went back to the place I had left them when I read the first adoption document with my name on it, and I returned to mourning them.


Over the last eight years I’ve been in contact with hundreds of people like me — people who found out their true history as adults. If I’ve met so many, how many more are out there? How many more have yet to discover? When I was adopted back in the ’50s, adoption was still deeply wrapped in shame. Shame of illegitimacy, shame of infertility. My parents’ decision not to tell me has a certain dysfunctional logic. Many of the stigmas that stained past attitudes about adoption have been lifted, but members of the triad still face many conflicting attitudes and social prejudices. Adoption as a means of forming a family still suffers by being “different.” The temptation to sidestep the pressures of “difference” by denying the reality of a child’s adoption is still compelling.


I enjoy speaking with groups of prospective adoptive parents. I usually meet them in pre-adoptive classes, where I give them the benefit of my own experience. However, the adoptive families who listen attentively in parenting classes, meet in support groups, or keep abreast of adoption issues in newsletters are the ones who need to hear my message the least. The parents who manage to rearrange their entire lives around the fiction their children are not adopted stay far away from such counsel. They are instead out there pretending to be “normal.”


The quote at the beginning of this article intrigues me. It rings true to me, yet is dissonant with the memories of my parents’ love for me. Can we be colonized by those entrusted to love and care for us without condition? Of course we can, and the lie that creates Late Discovery Adoptees is only one remarkable motif in a discordant symphony of family dysfunction. I feel the only resolution to this contradiction is to bear witness, and encourage all the others who have had their truth stolen from them to come out of the shadows.

News and Views: Brit Annoyed Wanking into Cup No Longer Confers Anonymity

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1746867,00.html

In the April 5th Guardian Unlimited (UK), columnist Marcel Berlins complains that the new law conferring the right to identity to Britain’s donor-conceived by outlawing anonymous sperm donations has already dealt a death-blow to the sperm donor biz. He offers no data to back up his gloomy analysis, other than the personal observation that the specter of one of his progeny appearing later would have put him off when, back in the day he used to jack off in a sperm bank cup in order to afford the odd pint and shepherd’s pie. Berlins has no desire to face the product of his commercial exploits. To him it was a wank, pure and simple. There is a difference, though, between young Marcel polishing his bishop in a clinic WC and young Marcel sitting at home in the lavvie polishing the self-same bishop; for one, no one gave him cab fare for popping off at home… For another, it is highly improbable (if not, to give the Devil his due, statistically impossible) for anyone to have gotten pregnant as a result of Marcel’s private furies, while the whole point of his actions at the clinic were to get somebody great with child. Intention is karma, said the Buddha.

What’s overlooked in both Berlins’ column and the comments from readers is the dissonance between the marketing claims that clinics make to prospective parents on the high caliber of their donors and the portrait of the average donor Berlins paints. Clinics promise material to prospective parents from donors who embody the highest physical, moral and social qualities. Berlins suggests that instead donors are wankers for pay who don’t want to deal with the mess afterwards. It makes one wonder whether these qualities and attitudes are inheritable….

LATE DISCOVERY ADOPTEES:

Are You Adopted?
Are You Sure?

INTRODUCTION

I'd like to note, right from the start, that I am not an adoption professional nor do I hold any credentials as a psychologist or academic researcher. I am, by profession, a building contractor, so this is a new experience for me. The observations I am putting forth are done so with humility, and with the realization that my methodologies may be suspect. Please bear with me, and temper your review of my materials and criticisms of my analysis accordingly. I would not have attempted to undertake the study of LDA's if there were existing research available to me, so this is an attempt to fill a void concerning a phenomenon that is, by its nature, obscure and marginalized.
Six and a half years ago, the last place I would have imagined myself being would have been a conference of adoption activists. I was in my mid thirties, happily married, awaiting the birth of my third child. I was grieving the death of my father the previous fall, and monitoring the deteriorating health of my mother, who had been hospitalized and treated for cancer two years before, and who, after numerous therapies, had been diagnosed with a relapse.
It was a trying time. I was torn between the needs of my mother, who lived in a different part of the state and my extremely pregnant wife.
My mother passed away on January 21, 1991. I had made arrangements to fly down before her death, and kept my reservations so I could take care of her funeral and empty the house that she and my father had rented.
I had an emotion filled week. My mother was a packrat, and kept everything; out of date telephone directories and shoe boxes with old shoes she had worn out filled her house to the gunnels. I rented a giant dumpster for most of the stuff, sold some of the furnishings, and packed a couple of suitcases with family photos and letters. I flew back to the Bay Area knowing that my wife had entered labor that morning, drove straight to the hospital, took off my jacket, knelt down beside my wife's bed, and witnessed the birth of my daughter Phoebe.
About a week passed. Loren lay in bed nursing Phoebe, and I sat at my desk sifting through the suitcase. I came across a small flat box, which I noted contained copies of my mother and father's birth certificates. In this box, enclosed in their original envelopes, was the history of my adoption, starting with a letter from a friend to my mother, a letter of sympathy over a miscarriage. It was dated the year before my birth. Then a small envelope, a certificate from the County of Los Angeles granting my parents the license to run a foster home, for an infant named Baby Boy Church. Then a document allowing my parents to provide medical care for the same infant, signed by Jean Marion Church, then signed again by Jean Marion Brewster, both signatures in the same hand writing. From the date of birth shown, I was Baby Boy Church.
I ran in and showed Loren. I remember feeling incredibly exhilarated. I called my Aunt Dorothy, who had been married to my father's brother Eulis, and who had been around back in '54, and told her what I had found. She said, "You mean you didn't know?" I called Porter, my mother's oldest friend, with whom I had been in contact throughout my mother's illness, and he said, "You mean you didn't know?", in the same tone of incredulity as my aunt. I could empathize, I felt incredulous as well.

"You mean you didn't know?"

No, I didn't know.
Our culture views the phenomenon of Late Discovery with an almost primal dread. The emblematic LDA is Oedipus, who could not, as an otherwise honorable man, have committed the twin taboos of parricide and maternal incest had he not been ignorant of his true birth status. His tragedy hinges on the fact that he did not know. His ignorance, by the way, acquitted him neither from human nor divine punishment.
In the collections of archetypes we know as the Tarot, LDA's before their discovery may be best represented by the Fool, the card which number is 0, with the figure of the Fool blithely traipsing a mountain trail, with one foot lifted over the empty space as he apparently prepares to walk off a cliff.
Everything I knew was wrong; my name, my ethnicity, the entire tapestry of my family dynamic unraveled at my feet. I became the Fool, just after the moment captured by the Tarot. I was in free fall.
All of us, in this most individualistic of societies, no matter how high or low our class status, no matter how exhalted or mean our positioning in terms of money, education, gender, race, adoption, or any other marker of group differentiation, own one thing. Our narrative. Our story. The presumption is that we start at birth and march in a straight line through youth, adulthood, and then old age, with our traumas and joys providing wrinkles, switchbacks, and all the other individualistic imprinting providing the plots of our narratives.
This was the string that was cut for me.
I not only lost particular assumptions, such as my assumption of ethnicity, but also my basic assumptions concerning ethnicity; not just the particulars of family history, but my assumptions about family. Most of all I was forced to examine, in detail, every assumption I had about identity.

Identity as a Site of Contention

What changed, really?
I was still obviously a white male. I was still a husband and father. I had not lost my experiences, I had lived my life and my discovery changed none of my life's salient benchmarks or subtle gradations. What my discovery did was to change their flavor, or texture.
I remember feeling free, as if a load had been lifted from my shoulders. Many questions that had plagued me for years about my family were suddenly contextualized by my discovery. I had carried the feeling that I was "self-created" for a number of years, and my discovery validated that intuition, along with many others less clear or articulate. I had gone through a three year course of therapy beginning when I was thirty. At some point near the end of our relationship, my therapist told me that it appeared to him that something, some sort of traumatic event, had occurred early in my life, perhaps at a pre- verbal stage. In a sense he was right, but I feel the trauma was not a singular event, but was the Lie, which stretched in a continuum from my birth until my discovery. The Lie was the faulty foundation on which rested my family's dynamic structure. It should be noted that the Lie was not isolated, but was one of many lies intertwined between my mother, father and me.
After this period of elation, depression set in. The second year after my discovery I felt hopeless, groundless, and rootless. My self-created self felt stunted and withered. I felt I was dropping down an abyss. I was fortunate that I live in a community with lots of resources, I was able to find an adoptee support group fairly easily. I went to a meeting of an adoptee support group, and was able to connect many of my feelings with those described by my fellow adoptees. I learned the language of adoption. Issues. Abandonment. Wound. Some of this was helpful, some was less so, but I was at the beginning of a learning curve and didn't feel I could be overly analytical. I was adopting the notion of being adopted.
I started a very half hearted search, because I thought that was what I should do, as an adoptee. I went about it all wrong, and when the search fizzled, I was glad. I went back to introspection and incubation. Gradually, my depression lifted.


LDA's
After a few years of solitary introspection, I decided to reach out to others about my experience. I wrote some articles, and posted to the adoption Usenet groups and joined an Internet mailing list or two. I read the writings and posts of others who shared my experiences. I found Bastard Nation, on Reg Day last year, and immediately joined. I decided, upon Shea Grimm's suggestion, to lead this workshop, and at that point drew up a questionnaire for these adoptees to fill out.
At this point I used the term LDA to describe us.
In reading the answers to my questionnaire, sent to me by about a dozen adoptees, several points stand out.
The lie which creates LDA's hold entire families, parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, hostage. Decisions to associate with certain family members are made predicated on their willingness to collude in the lie. Some families use geographic isolation to distance themselves from extended family members who may not be trusted to conceal the LDA's circumstances. Some LDA's are raised around extended families sworn to secrecy, where subtle, and sometimes less than subtle, manifestations of prejudice based on blood-ties are acted out beyond the capabilities of the LDA to fully fathom or analyze. In my own family my grandmothers were consistently cooler and more distant to me than to their grandchildren by blood relationship.
One LDA described the web of emotional blackmail that held her family. Family members, who knew of her adoption, told her after her discovery, "I told her she should have told you", evidently not realizing the gravity of their own complicity.
In the structure of the LDA's family, the lie serves to protect and cover the perceived shameful "abnormality" of adoption. LDA families appear "normal", and the entire family, the LDA included, is presumed to benefit from this normality, in comparison with other adoptive families. Some family members reap more of this alleged benefit than others, however.
The LDA's lie almost always originates from the adopting mother, and acts as a cover for her shame. Shame of infertility is the constant theme, most often the mother's, but not always so. One LDA's father was rendered sterile through a wartime bout with venereal disease, and the mother used the LDA lie not only to cover the adoption, but to cover the shameful circumstances leading to the infertility leading to the adoption. The mother who originates the LDA lie wields significant control, through control of family "secrets" and through the notion that the lie somehow protects her, which shifts the function of the family from the healthy process of protecting and rearing the adoptee child to protecting and maintaining the mother's secret.
Sometimes the mother's role as secret power broker is transferable to siblings, spouses of the LDA, or other family members. The mother will tell a sibling the secret, with the understanding that the sibling will not divulge it to the LDA. One LDA discovered at the age of sixty-four while examining family records. When he told his wife, she replied that she had known since the beginning of their marriage, and that she had not told him because she shared the LDA's mother's view that his birth status was "none of his business." Another LDA found out after her discovery that her mother had divulged the secret to her older sister when the sister was twelve. The sister carried the secret fearfully and with deeply confused loyalties, unable to reconcile the desire to please her mother and the profound sense of betrayal the lie created toward her sister.

The Social Construction of Concealment

The LDA's lie did not occur in the vacuum of atomized individual families without context or social reference. Although the LDA was unaware of their status as parts of the adoption triad, the parents were at least nominally aware of the popular social perceptions of adoption, as well as the legal specifics of their individual adopting, and their decision to manufacture the lie took place within the this social matrix.
"One assumption of modern adoption practice is that adoption is a "rebirth". This fiction assumes that the adopted child never had a birth family; adopted children leave behind all traces of their past and are fully "reborn" into a new family." (1)
The adopted parents of LDA's take this assumption to its logical extreme; if an adopted child is "reborn" completely into its new family, then the why acknowledge family of birth or the subsequent adoption at all.
"Once the adoption takes place, and is recognized legally..., the adopted person is a member of the adoptive family, with all the rights and obligations of any other young person in that family. She or he takes not only the family name, but also the family's very identity-- so that when someone talk about going to visit "the Williamses" or "the Garcias," they mean all the Williamses and Garcias, not just those who were born directly into that family." (2)
All the current popular literature I have read, whether it was intended for adopting families or adoptees describe the adoption process in these basic terms.
But, they also recommend informing adoptees of their birth status early and honestly.
"The child may or may not then ask which way he came into the family. Whether he does or not, he should be told that he is adopted ... Most of the "horror" stories one hears about adoption stem from the fact the child was not told at an early age by his parents of his adoption." (3)
The need for openness was not always so clear-cut, however. In 1960, Dr. Marshall D. Shechter, a Beverly Hills psychiatrist, advised that adoptees not be informed of their adoption until they had passed through the "age of Oedipal conflicts... between the ages of three and six..." (4)
He explains that the "fears and fantasies of the adopted child are sometimes aggravated by the well-intentioned ways in which the adoptive parents try to soften the news that the child is adopted." Anxiously noting the high proportion of adoptees who seek psychiatric help, he recommends a "thorough investigation of the child and his environment..." before breaking the news.
I have yet to find any documents advocating completely and irrevocably burying the truth of an adoptee's birth status, but there are many that allude to or recommend bending the truth. In the article, "My Mother Was a Stranger" (5), Mrs. Sally Phillips is contacted by her birth-mother. "Sally had always assumed her real parents were dead." A rather extreme assumption on the face of it, one that begs the question, who told her they were dead, or at the very least allowed her to believe so? In another article, "The Truth Hurt Our Adopted Daughter" (6), a mother agonizes while her adopted daughter enters a downward spiral of bad grades, acting out, and intermittent depressions, all explained as stemming from the daughter desire to know what happened to her birth parents, and by extension, the story of her relinquishment. Daughter sees her adoptive parents fawning over other folks babies, and wonders how her birthparents could have "abandoned her". So, Mom takes daughter to a psychiatrist, who afterwards tells Mom to lie to daughter, at least until daughter "is old enough" to comprehend that her birth-parents were unmarried adulterers, whenever that will be.
So, one night while watching Highway Patrol, dad blurts out that daughter's parents were killed in an automobile accident. "The parents you were born from, died," just like on the TV show.
Her mother rationalizes, "Soon Amy will be a young woman. She will have the feelings to help her understand the things which can happen to lead to a baby's being placed for adoption. When she has achieved this understanding, when she no longer needs the concept of death to explain her adoption, we feel sure Amy will forgive our lie."
She then adds, "This is the story of our personal experience. Perhaps it will be of some help to other adoptive parents whose children may need the special kind of reassurance that Amy did. I know there are many respected adoption agencies who maintain that it is always best for a child to be told the truth. From our own experience, however, we have learned that children often draw mistaken conclusions about truths which they are too young to understand. We have talked to many other adoptive parents and have heard similar stories."
So we see that although lip service is paid to honesty, deception is not only embraced as a welcome alternative by some families, but is in this instance suggested by a mental health professional. And promulgated by the popular press. This is the cultural milieu in which most of the Late Discovery Adoptees with whom I have contact were raised, a confused and conflict ridden site of secrets and lies posing as beneficial family dynamics and therapeutic nostrums.

LDA's and Activism: Now that we know who we are, what are we going to do about it?

We are the poster children of the Closed Records system.
Out of the contradictory and convoluted sets of values presented to them, our families chose deception as a method of constructing their adoptive families because it offered the illusion of resolution. There was no need for us to worry about our adoption "issues", whether or not we would yearn to search for our birth parents, or any other typical adoptive parent abandonment issues, for the simple reason we did not know we were adopted.
Unlike other adoptees, we did not share a life-long sense of difference, or if we did we did not attribute this difference to our birth status or imagine that the state played a role in our alienation. We grew up into adults assuming we shared the same rights as other adult citizen, unaware of the state's collusion in our lie.
These misapprehensions disappear when the LDA discovers. After an intensely personal adjustment, the LDA may reach out to other adoptees on the Internet, in local support groups, or in therapy of one sort or another. Early on the LDA encounters the questions of search and reunion. This leads inevitably to the LDA's discovery of the Closed Records system. The LDA's I have communicated with, regardless of their present involvement in adoption reform are, not surprisingly, unanimously against Closed Records. I have yet to find an LDA that was pleased to have been lied to, and this anger can be, and often is, energized against the state and the adoption system as it exists.
Conversely, we are unassailable as critics of the system as it exists. Our lives are testimony to the pernicious cloud of secrecy obscuring adoption. I would posit that the first step in an LDA's commitment to activism against Closed Records would be to make public our private secret. We must follow the now familiar route authoring letters, articles, giving interviews, appearing on Oprah, Leeza, all the daytime weepers and confessionals; telling our stories, and shaming the system that shames us. Unlike Closed records manques, like Carol Sandusky, we have nothing to lose from the truth.
LDA's have a deep reservoir of outrage; regardless of what private acceptance we may have reached regarding our individual families, we detest being lied to elsewhere, or being told that it's for our own good, or the good of others at our expense. We have developed very good boundaries, we've had to. We need to press outwards with our newfound boundaries and get the government out of the realm of our identities, and back to the job of presumably accurate record keeping and paper pushing.
As an Open Records activist, I have found being an LDA very helpful in outreach to non- triadians. After all, I used to be a non-triadian myself, and, conversely, the possibility that the non-triadians may be LDA's hangs expectantly in the air between us. LDA's pluck a resonant chord in "civilians", a chord of ambiguity and anxiety about what society deems normative in families in general, and specific ambiguities and anxieties that they may feel about their own families' secrets. LDA's stand and deliver a message that says, "Yes, everything you know may be wrong." To possess this potent ability to upset and question is somewhat frightening, and a little of it goes a long way in personal relationships, but it is a good communications tool for an activist.
Lastly, and most importantly, we must insure that this ceases to happen to other adoptees. Perhaps a law similar to the Argentine law requiring parents to inform their children of their adopted status is needed, if somewhat clumsy to enforce. Ultimately, the best weapon is the truth, our truth. If we give witness to the gross injustice of concealing a person's birth status in as many public forums as possible, perhaps we will dissuade families from considering this option, or, in families that have concealed, we may persuade family members to come out and admit the secret. Concealment of birth status can only exist as long as family members collude, whether they are siblings, parents, members of the extended family, or family friends.

FOOTNOTES
1. "When Love is Not Enough", Harvard Law Review, vol. 015, no. 7 (May 1992)
2. "So You Were Adopted", Fred Powledge, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1982
3. "Let's Talk About Adoption", Susan and Elton Klibanoff, Little, Brown and Company, 1973
4. "Keep Adoption a Secret", Science News Letter, July 23, 1960 (reprinted from the Archives of General Psychiatry, 3:21, 1960)
5. Redbook, 116:48. March 1961
6. Parents Magazine, 38:44, January 1963

BB Church's Funhouse

Hi all,

This is the blog of BB Church, so named Baby Boy Church at birth. The first two names are accurate and descriptive, I was a baby and I was a boy. I was not a church nor a Church; that name was given by my mother to the hospital as a dodge. No matter, four days later I became someone else, through the act of adoption, and my original name was lost to me for 36 years...

Until I found it, on a piece of paper. I have reclaimed my original name as part of a discourse of inquiry into the institution of adoption in the United States. This blog will become one facet of that discourse. Enjoy!

BB Church