Un/Masking Truth: Adoption and Finding the Heart to Live Better

In Melbourne where I live, masks have been a pervasive part of life for the past two years. On a recent overseas flight, during which I was required to wear my mask for nearly 24 hours that mask became more than protection. It became a comfort. It made a surprisingly cocoon-like experience when combined with an eye mask, hoodie, and headphones. I slept better on that flight than I usually do.

And I don’t want to give up my mask in my daily life, either. In Australia, we’ve gone from 263 days of lockdown—two hundred and sixty-three days of stay-at-home orders, no visiting friends, no traveling further than 5 Ks from home in the pursuit of COVID ZERO—to, now, ‘let COVID rip.’

In face of that ripping, it seems no one has the heart to think about COVID anymore, and so we have the second highest rate of daily COVID infections in the world and a somehow tolerable 9000 deaths (Australian Department of Health and Aged Care, 2022) ¹ when just one death was unacceptable in 2020 and 2021. This is ‘living with COVID.’

And though I—we—are ‘out’ of lockdown, I can hardly bear to write these words. I’m still trying to shake off the effects of that very long imposed isolation.

And then there’s the earthquake of the daily news. The war—and war crimes and unacceptable death toll in the Ukraine (Habershon, et al., 2022; Human Rights Watch, 2022). The vicious attacks on trans people and the roll back of rights in the US and Australia (Bailey, 2022; Karp, 2022). The continued savaging of the 1619 project, critical race theory and people of color in the US and around the world (Granderson, 2021; Bohanon, 2021). The list is long, and it goes on and on.

And then, this week, the leaked supreme court majority opinion authored by conservative justice Samuel Alito striking down Roe and Casey. Alito argues that abortion is not a right guaranteed by the constitution. He writes that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start” (Politico, 2022, p. 6). “The decision has had damaging consequences” (p. 6). In other words, abortion is not a right, but a wrong. And while this decision will be celebrated by the so-called truth movement, it will have damaging, unconscionable consequences for all of us.

Amanda Gorman put it so powerfully in 2019:

this right here isn’t only about women and girls. This fight is about fundamental civil rights. Women are big part of it / but at the heart of it, are freedom about how fast our families grow. It goes farther and larger than any one of us. It’s about every single one of us. Gorman, 2019.

And for every single one of us, this roll back on the freedom to decide to have a child will mean more, not less, unwanted and unplanned children.

However, it will not mean that they are placed

or lovingly planned for

or delivered into the welcoming arms of would-be parents—

that’s pretty language for an unnecessary trauma visited on birth mothers and babies.

No, these unwanted and unplanned children will be

put up,

given up, surrendered for adoption.

They will be abandoned and conscripted into the intergenerational trauma that is the adoption system in the US and everywhere else in the world.

My daughter is one of those adopted children. My partner is one of those adopted children. I am one of those adoptive mothers.

I love my daughter and my partner beyond measure, and I am grateful to be an important person in their lives.

This decision masquerading as a question of what is or isn’t protected by the constitution, what is or isn’t a right “deeply rooted in [the] nation’s history and tradition” (p. 5), what is or isn’t an “important question to be resolved by. . . citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting” (p. 6), This decision masks the truth that what happens to a woman’s body is not hers to decide.

It masks the truth of what happens to the children abandoned to adoption.

And in the name of unmasking, here’s some of what happens. Adoptees spend:

a lifetime grappling with loss and keen feelings of rejection

have tremendous guilt and shame, as if they deserved that rejection, that loss

endure an endless cycle of ongoing grief

experience an unstable sense of self and difficulty creating deep and long-lasting relationships

feel anger at the loss of control over the decisions that led to their adoption—to their loss and grief, guilt and shame—that sometimes results in an inability to self-regulate or assume control of their own lives (Kaplan & Silverstein, 1988).

The list is long, and it goes on and on.

The truth is adoption is not about reproductive rights or raising children. And without those rights, all you have is wrongs.

Some time ago, I wrote about the wrongs of adoption, not to make it right, but to unmask the truth of the tidy story of self-less and nurturing adoptive mothers, desperate and unequipped birth mothers, and needy and grateful adoptees.

I wrote about what I—what adoptive mothers—might feel or think or do in the light of that knowledge. I wrote:

so that someday [s]he might read your words and understand what? That you didn’t know? That you thought that love might make loss bearable? That you love [her] not because you couldn’t have children of your own, but because [s]he is not yours, because children are never someone’s to own?. . .That had you understood all of these things--the pain, the injustice, the suffering, the grief of. . . adoption--you would’ve reconsidered that privileged, violent choice. (Holman Jones, 2011, p. 325-236)

I stand by the questions that stand against the masquerade of adoption. And I stand by the second person voice, aligned with the ways “you” suggests that these are questions that everyone single one of us must ask about the children who bear the violence of laws, and customs and mandates that left their mothers with no choice.

What I no longer stand by are the words that form an apologia for me, my motherhood, and the unearned privilege of parenting my daughter:

even though you believe one person’s unwillingness to contribute to an unjust system makes a difference, you wonder how your refusal might change her life. Will she be relinquished? Adopted? If you weren’t [her] mother, who would be? If you aren’t her mother, who or what will occupy the cavern filled by your love? (Holman Jones, 2011, p. 326)

The “you” here puts distance between me and the exception I wanted to make—continue to make, every single day—in order to be her mother. Does that choice that make a wrong into a right? Does asking such a question unmask a personal truth in order to “better inform transformative visions and utopias of hope both through and beyond the mask?” (Alexander, 2022, p. X). I don’t know. I want to believe that it does, though I don’t know if I have the heart.

**

Last week I also read Anne Lamott’s annual Mother’s Day post, which earns her hate mail every single year and which she continues to post, refusing to participate in the masquerade of the mother as more fulfilled and superior to all of the women who are non-mothers, who lost children, or who lost their own mothers. She writes:

Every woman’s path is difficult, and many mothers were as equipped to raise children as wire monkey mothers. I say that without judgment: It is true. An unhealthy mother’s love is withering. (Lamott, 2010).

To this I’d add losing a mother’s love to systemic racism and the poverty that comes with it.

I’d add losing that love to become the human currency that pays the wages of compulsory heterosexuality and parenthood. These things too are unhealthy. Withering.

It’s true. I see it in my daughter’s free-floating anxiety. I feel it in her inability to be alone. I hear it when she says, over and over, that she doesn’t know who she is. I see and feel and hear it too in my partner’s heartrending writing about her own experience as an adoptee.

One thing the last two years have taught me is that though a mask might be a cocoon protecting us from the outside world—protecting us from each other—

I know in my heart—and my head—that “living with” this truth is no longer acceptable.

I know that I—that we—must find the heart to think and to say and to do something in the face of this devastating decision.

We’ve got to unmask adoption as life-shattering (rather than life affirming) option before that decision creates a new generation of burdened and blamed birth mothers, complicit and greedy adoptive mothers, and abandoned and lonely children.

Instead of letting it rip and living with it, we—all of us—have got to find a way to live better now.