Coming Into Consciousness
What It Means to Know Yourself as Adopted
Learning about one’s adoption is... strange. For me, it came with a glowing narrative: I was chosen! Chosen by God! That one idea shaped how I saw adoption and myself - as something special, something good. It taught me early on that to question anything about my adoption was to be ungrateful and unfeeling for my parents. Most adopted people just know this intuitively. Gratitude is the default setting.
So, while my four-year-old brain had questions, it also knew better than to ask.
Where did my first parents go?
Are they alive?
Would they come back?
Do I want them to come back?
Do I have siblings?
Like many children adopted before the 2000s, mine was a closed adoption. There was no contact, no information, no original birth certificate, only a revised one, erasing the first part of the story. My first family didn’t just disappear; they were made to vanish.
We’ve long been told that closed adoptions were created to protect the privacy of first parents and to guard against potential disruptions. But what we now understand is that this system functioned primarily to protect secrecy, at times to the point of deception. Many adopted people today are beginning to recognize what has long been hidden: that some adoptions, particularly during the Baby Scoop Era, were coercive, and in some cases, tantamount to legalized human trafficking.
The cost? Generations of adopted people stripped of their history, forced to navigate identity formation, attachment, and emotional development with critical pieces missing. The ripple effects on self-worth, relationships, and mental health are undeniable.
Back in the 1960s, researcher David Kirk introduced the concept of open versus closed communication in adoptive families. Closed communication ignores or minimizes the differences between adoptive and biological families. Open communication, on the other hand, acknowledges them, allowing space for questions and conversation. Research shows that adoptees raised in families with open communication tend to have a stronger sense of identity and higher self-esteem.
Still, even in homes where questions could be asked, answers weren’t always available. And research suggests most adopted people, regardless of whether they pursue reunion or not, have a deep desire for information about their genetic background, medical history, and personal origins. Ideally, agencies and adoption workers could serve as intermediaries, helping adoptees find pieces of themselves without compromising the privacy of first parents who wish to remain anonymous. This is one simple step that could be implemented now to improve the lives of adopted people and their families.
I was a curious kid. Around third grade, I began asking questions. My mom and her friend had opened a gourmet food store, The Natural Gourmet, and I spent some afternoons perched on a prep table, covered in pop-beads and bracelets, helping with gift baskets, and talking her ear off. One day, I told her with total conviction that I knew who my birth mother was.
I’ll never forget the look on her face: sheer panic. She rushed over and asked in a hushed voice if someone had approached me, if someone had said they were my birth mom. At the time I couldn’t understand her fears, but time has revealed her insecurities around having adopted children, how she was shamed by some in our family for being unable to produce “natural” children. Knowing these things hurts my heart for her and angers me because I know she wasn’t alone in those feelings. In the end, my revelation was nothing more than fantasy, as I simply stated that my birth mother was Madonna.
“Like a Virgin” was on heavy rotation, and I was convinced my singing voice and sense of style were inherited directly from the Material Girl. After taking a pause, mom had me do the math. If I was nine and Madonna was twenty-six… Too young to be my mother. The truth? My first mom turned 17 just eleven days before I was born. She was born the same year as Madonna. But as a child, the idea that someone so young could be a mother? That never occurred to me. Pausing, I considered my options, and then declared, “Okay. Then it must be Cher!”
One of my earliest, most vivid memories is of my mom humming to me, rocking me to sleep with the steady beep of my IV in the background. I must have been no more than 3, in the hospital after having vomited out the lining of my stomach. Again. Her eyes were closed, probably exhausted with worry and being up for days on end. I was wiggly, feeling better I suspect, and didn’t want to rock or snuggle. She opened her eyes and looked down at me, saying through gritted teeth, eyes narrowed, “what is wrong with you?”
I can smell that room: the permeation of alcohol in the air, that classic hospital smell, and my mother - her breath, the powder she used, her perfume. I loved my mom but I struggled with my connection to her. At times we were so in sync, so close. Other times, I felt like a deer caught in the headlights. Frozen. Afraid to make the wrong move.
Like many adopted kids, I couldn’t tolerate the not knowing, so the blanks were filled with fantasy, pop stars, and daydreams. The space left by my missing mother and the impact that has on a person’s identity, it was all too big, it had to be filled by someone, a person I could see, imagine, emulate. Something tangible.
It’s funny in retrospect. But the deeper truth is that children always try to make sense of what’s missing, especially when what’s missing is part of themselves. And when adults can't (or won’t) offer honest answers, kids find their own. That’s the legacy of closed adoption: not just the absence of information, but the quiet ache that follows—an ache to belong somewhere, to someone, to know the story that came before your own.
Excerpt from: Down the Rabbit Hole: The Mental Health Implications of Adoption Trauma on People Adopted at Birth.
Poignant, brave and beautiful, your essay further enhanced my understanding of my son's situation with his adoptive parents. Thank you.
How can you cry when you didn’t know her?
One of the most difficult outcomes of searching for our bonded first mother is the discovery of a grave at the end of the search. Guided by the desire to bring our memories into balance, resolve the past, and end the pain, our emotions intensify as the search moves forward. Anticipating closure, and a chance to escape from our past, we find, instead, the silence and isolation of her death. The adoptee may feel that providence has cheated us once again, as fate moves beyond our control. We have completed the journey, overcome the impossible, and embraced our inner pain expecting relief. What we discover is more of what we have been seeking to escape from, more grief, unanswered questions and the feeling that fate has abandoned us once again. It is a second death for us, with the first being the implicit memory of her loss. Now confronted with death at the end of our search, both losses combine and the grief can be unimaginably difficult to bear. How can this be? Unresolved, disenfranchised, grief does not weaken as the years pass by. Time has no meaning for powerful emotions and the loss we experienced as infants thrives decades later as if it has just happened in the present. The bond that joins a mother and her child extends through the decades, across any distance, and endures even beyond death. So then, how can we cry when we didn’t know her? The truth is that we did know her, and we remember her loss as if it had just happened.
Infant memory
“While it’s true that infants are pre-cognitive, it is not true that they are unaware. Infants do not think but they do experience and process emotions. Consequently, infant memories are stored not as words, but may be encoded in the mind as affective scheemas
(Gaensbauer,T. 2002). Even today the common belief in society is that infants can’t experience loss, or create memories. Infants do not think but they do relate to and process emotions. As a result, infant memories are stored not as words or pictures, but embedded in the mind as feelings. Let us consider that emotion can be a virtual language, with affects like joy, fear, and grief, as words and the first mother’s familiar touch, expressed by intimate contact is the only voice the infant comprehends. The process of this interaction is facial expression, posture, tone of voice, and physiological movements (Bowlby, J. 1969). Through this language of emotion, mother and infant create a unique, dialogue through which complex concepts are exchanged.
Affecting this language of emotion, the infant learns the nature of their world. Hope, trust, love, and security are experienced by the infant’s emotional interaction with the bonded first mother. The infant recognizes its mothers scent, heartbeat, and touch. When the infant needs to eat, is frightened, needs to feel secure, or is in distress of any kind, the familiar mother embraces the infant and is recognized. The infant learns to anticipate and expect that the same mother will always be there. Our brains hardwire those expectations, emotions, and experiences into memories and beliefs that will become the foundation of our ability to trust and love as adults. Then suddenly, the mother is gone never to return causing the infant to react with shock, anger and repression. A primal memory will be created. A memory that later in life will not be recognized but only experienced as an emotion, not remembered and never forgotten.
The Great Disconnect
As adopted adults these memories can haunt us emerging when we least expect them with a power that can threaten to overwhelm us. It is just our infant mind trying to make itself known to our adult mind, which doesn’t easily understand the origin of these powerful feelings. As infants grow and develop into childhood their memory systems mature and record events explicitly, as words and images. Research involving infant memory indicates that events occurring early in life are stored and recalled in the same way as the infant grows into adulthood. “When a child experiences early, preverbal trauma the child is deprived of the ability to use language to organize the experience at a conscious level or integrate necessary neural structures”(Seigal, 1999). Simply put, as adopted adults we carry with us the same experience of anger, and grief that we experienced as an infant when we originally lost our bonded first mother, but as we mature, we don’t translate those feelings into conscious thoughts and words. We feel without the words to express those feelings or the understanding of where they come from. This separation of what we think and what we feel as adoptees is the great disconnect of the adopted. It prevents us from finding the right words with which to explain what we feel. It inhibits our ability to comprehend what happened to us making it difficult to resolve our thoughts and feelings. Some adoptees, will throughout their lives try and build a bridge of understanding joining thoughts and memories while others will keep them hidden. All during our lives, whether we consciously realize it or not, we are reaching out to you, our mothers of origin, for the balance, security, and feelings of hope you first gave to us. Be secure in your thoughts that we have never forgotten you, we just don’t know how to say it. At the same time we are reaching out to our adoptive mothers but we don’t have the words to ask for help.
The Search as a path to understanding
When we embark on the search we must keep in mind that the journey is as important as the destination. Each has its pitfalls and rewards. The search itself is our attempt to build a bridge connecting what we know with memories we can only feel. As we search those emotions intensify and come to the forefront of our minds. As I stated previously, the words to describe them don’t come easily. We say things like; I feel lost, I don’t belong, I feel isolated, and alone. We are seen as none of these when viewed from the perspective of friends and family members. We feel disconnected, even in the presence of our adopted families who do feel connected to us. They can’t understand that we may be experiencing deep, everlasting emotions and memories from a time before we could think. A time when all have forgotten we were alive as if before the adoption we didn’t exist. For many of us we feel as if we were never born. Reassurances spoken to us, fail to reach the part of our mind that feels. We know what we know, but we still feel what we feel. We feel lost because we need to be found, isolated because we have been separated from our maternal other self, disconnected because no one believes us and society doesn’t understand. We feel grief because we have never completed the process to resolve our grief. It makes matters worse when the government seals our records treating us like perpetual children with no right to know our own natural families. The search is one way, to bring thoughts and feelings into a state of accord. It is as if, we the adopted, walk two paths all of our lives and at the end of the search they merge into one.
Death is not the conclusion
When we encounter death at the end of our journey we feel like we are left empty handed. I was aware that I could find death waiting for me and I prepared myself for that possibility. I suspected it even before I was sure when I learned that my mother didn’t attend the funeral of her father. In the face of this I held a glimmer of hope that she was alive. When I found a cousin and made the call to her asking if she knew where to find my mother she told me that she died many years ago. Nothing in my life prepared me for the shock of that moment. I felt cold, and more alone than ever. For the first time in my life I felt hopelessness. It was the end of my search but not the conclusion of my journey. There was one more task to accomplish, one more place to go. I had to stand by her grave.
“It was my desire to find my mother alive that drove me never to surrender to hopelessness. However, as fate would have it, this was a destiny not meant for me. My search began nine months before and ended beside a grave in Bellaire, Texas. “There were no headstones in this place. It appeared as a gentle meadow, not a place of the departed. There were trees with red blossoms casting shadows on the grass as if watching lovingly over the souls with whom they shared their world. The graves were all marked by small plaques lying on the grass. As I knelt beside hers, the words Arlene Hope Glasser gazed up at me. I remember thinking Hope, her name is Hope. We are together again, the circle is closed.” (Hafetz, R. 2005).
Making sense of it all
So then, after all the obstacles have been overcome and we stand at the end of the search confronted by death what have we accomplished? Ask yourself who you were before and who you are now. The search alone transforms us. Can you feel completeness and a sense of authenticity? Yes we still feel grief, but isn’t it passing through the stages of resolution now? You know your name at birth, your family history, and the reasons you were separated. Can you not say that while you still feel pain you can now own that pain, and it no longer owns you? You are no longer lost you are found. You feel alone but now you know you never were alone. You have built the bridge connecting thoughts and emotions, and your two paths have become one path. The search for our first mothers is also a search for our true self. The journey always ends where it begins, within us.
Robert Allan HafetzMS/MFT
Roberthafetz@verizon.net
Author of Not Remembered Never Forgotten