Ask an Adopted Person

Alli is a 26-year-old woman who lives in New York. When she was 11 days old, she was adopted through a closed process, and she grew up in the suburbs of Chicago.

Do you remember finding out that you were adopted?

I don’t, really! I feel like it’s always been part of my consciousness. When do you start being conscious of things — maybe age 3, age 5? They must have told me when I was really young. My mom bought me these books for children about what it means to be adopted. She’d tell me I didn’t grow in her womb, I grew in her heart.

What is your family like?

Well, I’ve got an adopted brother from different biological parents who’s four years younger than me, and my parents were married almost 33 years when they got divorced a few years ago.

Do you all look alike?

Yeah, actually. We all have brown hair, pale skin, brown or hazel eyes. It looks like we’re a natural, biological family. People are always really surprised to find out that my brother and I are adopted.

Did you or your brother ever go through a phase of feeling upset that you were adopted?

Not really. I remember a time in fifth grade when a kid in my class said it to me in an insulting way — like, “Your first parents didn’t love you enough” — and I got angry because I knew it wasn’t true. I came to my parents in a nightgown that my mother had bought me (which I used for baby dolls later) and I also came with a letter. She’d written it on a typewriter. It essentially said, we couldn’t provide you with as good of a home as we wanted, we decided it would be best for you if you were able to have the things we couldn’t give you.

I knew my biological parents gave me up with good intentions. And I also feel like my adopted family is really my family. I never felt like my brother and I were any different from our cousins — our grandma loves us all the same.

When did you decide you wanted to track down your birth parents?

I always knew I wanted to look for them, or at least that I wanted to try. I knew there was a chance my biological parents wouldn’t want a relationship with me. My reasons have changed through the years, but even when I started fighting with my adopted mom a lot, around 12 or 13, I never thought of this search as a way of replacing my parents. It was just something I wanted to do. Like, just on a medical level, having to fill out all those forms about your family history and predispositions, and always having to say “I don’t know, I don’t know” — that gets frustrating.

Has your brother done the same thing with his biological parents?

He actually doesn’t care at all. I don’t know if there are deep reasons for that, some resentment we’ve never talked about, but he hasn’t let anything on. He’ll be 23 this summer and really has no desire to know.

So how did you go about this search process?

Well, you have to wait until you’re 18 or 21 in most states. I waited till I was almost 23, actually, because I wanted to be in a more stable place — not dealing with college or unsteady relationships — before I started the search. Illinois’ Department of Public Health has a service where you can submit a form looking for your health information, and if one of your parents has volunteered their medical information to be in the database, you’ll get “matched,” and you’ll get a letter.

I had looked on adoption forums online to sort of prepare for this process, and I was ready for things to take years if necessary, but it only took a week for me to get a letter back from the Department of Public Health saying that I’d be able to exchange information with my birth father.

What sort of information?

Well, I found out his identity, information, and medical history — and got my original birth certificate with the original name that my mother had given me. He must have gotten my information too, because a few weeks later I got a snail-mail letter from him.

Wait, you had another name! Can I ask you what it is?

Sarah Elizabeth! It’s a little crazy, isn’t it? I feel like people tend to reflect their names, and I’ve always felt like I was an Alli. When I saw my birth certificate, I was just like, no, I am not a Sarah.

Have you wondered about how your biological mother named you? If she went through long lists of names she liked, thought about how they would fit you, knowing she would be giving you up?

Totally. It’s a weird comparison, but it’s like — if your dog has puppies, you shouldn’t name the puppies if you know you’re going to give them away. Kids that live on a farm with chickens don’t name their chickens. But Rosie named me Sarah, and for two decades she thought she had a daughter out there named Sarah. It must have been strange to talk to me and find out that I wasn’t Sarah anymore.

So, let’s rewind for a second. How did that initial process of “meeting” your biological father go?

It was a relief to find Jim, but frankly I thought he was kind of strange. Not the sort of person I would gravitate to if he was my coworker or if I met him at church. We got to know each other over snail mail and email very slowly, but mostly through small talk. Instead of getting down to the deep questions, we were asking, like, how was your day?

But we exchanged photos early on, and he’s got this other daughter who was around 5 at the time. He sent me a picture of her, and she looked so much like I did when I was that age. And he wrote me back about the pictures I sent him — he said, “You favor your mother. You look exactly like Rosie.” He helped me find Rosie, actually — she hadn’t submitted her information to the DOH database, she didn’t even know about it. But he remembered a few details and was able to get in touch with one of her brothers, who passed along Jim’s information to Rosie, and Rosie got in touch with me.

So you’ve seen pictures of your birth mother now. Do you agree with him?

It’s hard to say. I don’t know what she looked like in her twenties. I don’t see my face in hers when I look at her pictures now. But I think my eyes are hers, definitely.

How much do you know about the circumstances of your biological parents’ relationship?

I don’t know too much. They haven’t seen each other since a few months after I was born, I know that. Jim’s mother didn’t even know that Rosie was pregnant while she was pregnant — she didn’t know about me until they’d already given me away.

I know they were in a relationship, but I don’t think it was serious enough for marriage to be on the table. They were young. Rosie was 19. I know that after I was born, Jim was getting shipped out to Montana for Air Force training, and he said to Rosie, “Come with me, come live with me.” And she said yes, and then she didn’t actually come with him, and he never heard from her again until he called her with my information a couple years ago.

I want to know why Rosie didn’t go with him. But I haven’t had the guts to ask her about her decision-making process. I get that Rosie couldn’t raise a child by herself. But I don’t know when she decided to give me up — right when she found out, or later? I don’t think she’s too religious, and I don’t know how seriously she considered abortion. I want to know, but it’s about the most personal question you could ask someone — why did you not have an abortion, what made you decide to keep me and then give me up?

Do you want to have a close enough relationship with her to ask these things?

Definitely. We don’t have too much in common, and it’s a little strange to imagine forming this relationship at this point in both of our lives — she works in a processing plant close to where I grew up, with a husband and children — but we keep in touch. She texted me when Sandy hit, stuff like that. Hopefully we’ll meet up in person soon.

What about with your dad?

I feel more ambivalent about him. He’s so different from me, even just in terms of his philosophy on life — he doesn’t want to get married or create a stable family. He’s not with the mother of his other daughter anymore, either.

I guess I just care more about meeting my mother. I’d rather know the woman who carried me than the man who helped create me. And I just have this intangible sense that she and I are more similar.

Are you glad that you had a closed adoption or would you rather have had the option to know Jim and Rosie as you grew up?

I think it’s such a personal, circumstantial thing. I don’t know if I personally could have handled knowing my biological parents while I was growing up. And my adopted mom is very protective. It might have been hard on her, to have to share, or have to say, “This is MY daughter now, the one I’ve waited for for twenty years.”

Tell me about your parents’ decision to adopt.

My mom married my dad–her second marriage — when she was about to turn 29, and she wanted to have kids right away. They tried for five years and it didn’t happen, so they went to a specialist and found out that she had severe endometriosis. She went in for surgery, and it was basically so severe that they had to remove everything.

That’s devastating.

Yeah! She was definitely devastated. I’ve never asked her explicitly about what she thinks about adopted versus biological children — I know, of course, she’d have liked to have biological children, but I think they started the adoption application process right away. They wanted two kids, a boy and a girl, and they knew they wanted kids that looked like they were part of the family, i.e. white kids. It took another five years for them to get me.

Actually, this is funny — I was born on Mother’s Day. My mother was in church watching all the moms in the congregation stand up, feeling crushed that once again she wasn’t a mother — she was almost 39 at this point — and she didn’t know that her daughter was being born right at that moment.

Have you started to locate certain things about yourself in your biological parents and other traits in your adopted parents?

Well, I’m a product completely of my adopted parents. Our speech patterns are similar, our beliefs, our values. But my adopted mom struggles with depression, and we fought so much throughout my adolescence, and so it’s nice to know that I can’t inherit certain mental health things from her. I’m very lucky medically, as far as I know. Jim’s medical history is totally clear — not even allergies — and I plan on asking Rosie for hers whenever I can do it without feeling invasive. And I have found out a few things about Rosie — that twins run in her family, and that she and a few of her siblings have the same sort of mild stutter I do when I get overexcited.

Did you ever leverage your adopted-ness against your mom while you guys were fighting a lot?

Oh, I could have stabbed my mother and it would have been less hurtful than telling her, “You’re not really my mom.” That was never, ever on the table. We fought like we were biologically related.

Last question. Could you imagine either giving up a child for adoption, or adopting a child?

You know, I don’t know what I would do if I went through an unplanned pregnancy. I was raised very conservative and religious — Calvinist, basically — and I became a Catholic at 18, which I know is unusual. And I had a pregnancy scare when I was in college, although it was one of those “I’m not even really having sex yet, I’m just incredibly paranoid” scares, and I thought about my biological mother, pregnant with me at the same age, and I wondered — could I do this, stay with a pregnancy to completion, and then give it up?

It’s nothing you can ever decide before the fact. So I don’t know if I could give up a child for adoption, but I feel strongly that I couldn’t adopt. I have such an urge to raise my own children because I was adopted. Also, as I get older I realize more that adoption can plant a seed of resentment — it came out a little in the divorce that my dad might have resented my mom for not being able to have biological children. Basically, I think that if I’m supposed to have kids, I’ll have them biologically, and if I’m not meant to, then I won’t.

At the same time, I’m super proud that I’m adopted. There’s so little media coverage of adoption as an option for unplanned pregnancy. Of course it’s hard to spend 40 weeks pregnant and then give a child up, but it’s a legitimate option. Pregnancy doesn’t have to be presented as having only two outcomes, abortion or raising a child. And giving a child up for adoption doesn’t mean that the kid will be raised all crazy and resentful — I feel lucky, lucky to be adopted, lucky to have found my birth parents. I got lucky.

Previously: Interview With a Virgin: Eliot

Jia Tolentino is a writer in Michigan.