We drove away and Bonnie asked why I’d upset Daddy. ‘You shouldn’t say bad things to him,’ she said.
The question stunned me. How did she know that deep down I believed this was my fault, my character flaw, my genetic defect?
Adoption can do this to you. From the beginning you are ‘a’ child. But you are not ‘the’ child, the one they longed for and could not have. And despite everyone’s best efforts, you are never quite right, because in all kinds of love we look for a mirror, a reflection, a version of ourselves. The parent–child relationship is no different.
You start out as a warm weight to fill the empty arms. But as you grow with no resemblance to your new parents you become the other.
Of course, all children transform into other as they become themselves. As parents, we shepherd that transformation. But the mythology around adoption says that there is little difference between a natural child and an adopted one because you raise them up the same. So natural differentiation is hampered, even squashed, to keep the myth of sameness alive. As you slip between being the desired baby and being the stranger in their midst, your identity becomes a constant and often unconscious internal negotiation. Until you have children or meet family in reunion. It is often at this point that you realise you’ve been looking for someone you resemble your whole life and that you begin to understand genetic mirroring.
Biological families never get to question mirroring. It’s as natural as air. Parts of you are reflected in the people you see every day. It goes beyond physical resemblance.
In reunion with biological families, adopted people speak of the shock of the mirror. How strange it is to recognise an inflexion or the rise and fall of a laugh. A matching earlobe or a subtlety of language. In these moments we begin to comprehend what the adoption myth denies.
I’ve heard reunion described as shedding a skin. But what if I sloughed off my salamander skin, translucent as milk, to find there is nothing beneath? This fear of being without substance in form or function haunts me still.
But consider the newly minted adoptive mother. What does she see when she gazes into the eyes of the child most longed for? She will not find her reflection there, not even a scrap of similarity. The new baby is as much the other to her as she is to it. A part of her knows this is not her baby.
Historically, women who gain motherhood with someone else’s baby occupy an uncomfortable place in society. In folklore, elves or fair folk took the rightful child and replaced her with one of their own. The changeling child. In Rumpelstiltskin, a woman in fear of her life must promise away her firstborn to survive. An ugly troll takes her baby. In Rapunzel, a husband offers up their future child to save his wife. The one who returns to claim the eventual child is of course an evil witch. Even the Bible gets in on the act. Moses’ mother must choose between her son being killed or letting an Egyptian princess raise him. When two women claim a newborn as their own, King Solomon threatens to divide the baby in two. It is the real mother who is willing to give up her child to save it.
The message has always been that only dire circumstances will part a mother and her child. And those who take advantage of that situation are never real mothers.
But even now, all these decades later, I know Mavis’s heart’s desire was to be the mother and not just a mother. Despite her discomfort, she wanted to love the baby she ended up with. But she had to bond without the help of hormones. Without the oxytocin released in breastfeeding. Without nine months of the shared journey, or the element of the mystical that lingers over birth. An adopting mother must nurture without the welcome home from the travails of childbirth, without celebration or the sense of ancestors hovering nearby.
In the absence of those ancestors she must pour herself into that void. She must grow her love based on need alone — hers to be a mother and the child’s need for care. And she must believe, above all else, in the power of nurture over nature.
In a moment of weakness, Mavis once confessed that she felt everyone knew she was not a real mother. She feared the opinion of other women and the censure of her fecund sisters. She had to be above reproach in all the ways we judge mothers. She over-compensated, orchestrating every detail of our lives. From perfect homemade clothes to perfect hair and the expectation of exemplary behaviour. I was always under scrutiny. Any hint that nature might claim me back was crushed.
But then I became a teenager, a true changeling. There were cultural and emotional differences that nothing in my upbringing could explain. It was in that failure of nurture to create a likeness that our adoption myth began to unravel.
My wrongness was like a mine shaft that swallowed up all my self-esteem. And then there was my other wrong. The one that set me apart.
My spine first gave out at thirteen. For almost two years no one believed I was in pain. I finally collapsed that night in the bedroom, unable to move even a finger without unbearable spasms. A genetic defect, they said over and again until those words came to define me. The damage was such that surgery was urgent and expensive. There was a chance of permanent disability. I was in bed for months as Mavis cared for me as a good mother does.
But such was the power of those two words ‘genetic defect’ that no one thought to enquire further. Spondylolisthesis was, after all, an inherited lumbar weakness. The perfect explanation for all that was
