Social and biological kinship; How do we know which is which or even which is more important? Is it possible conventional families are more about social kinship than biological kinship? Many of us make the assumption that the bonds and common behavioral patterns in good biological families are genetic. We do not consider the possibility that some of those similarities that we think due to our genes could well be the result of many years of shared experience, especially shared emotional experience. In my book Children of the Manse, I use the ties of marriage and the example of the Marines to make the point that non-biological relationships (the married are not normally biologically related to each other!) and the legendary brother bonds among Marines can be stronger than those between blood relations.
Those of us who have lived with and remember our biological families, and are then adopted as older children into non-biological families, are able to compare the two. I was eight years old when adopted with three younger siblings and had many memories of my biological relatives, most of them unhappy. Once I felt safe and secure in my new family, I would not have welcomed the resumption of ties with biological relatives. That was especially true after my adoptive mother loved me into opening my heart to a willingness to trust adults again. In time she became my true and forever mother. I had no interest in returning to a family that had wounded the four of us when we were very young.
But two of my younger siblings, Janey and Michael, did not have memories of our biological family. As adults they were influenced by the media’s presentation of reunions with biological mothers as wonderful, fulfilling events. Michael’s therapist also favored such a meeting, perhaps influenced by one widely read writer on adoption issues who promoted the notion that adoptees could not possibly be whole human beings until they were united with their biological relatives and clan.
I advised against such a reunion, when Janey told me what she and Michael planned to do. I said, without thinking,
“Don’t open doors you can’t close.”
I was also concerned that such a reunion would hurt the feelings of the Luchs, who had given us so much. But I was overseas at the time (I am a retired diplomat) and my counsel was ignored.
Rather than making Janey and Michael whole, the reunion turned out to be painful. It isn’t pleasant to hear your biological mother spend most of the time during your first reunion blaming only your biological father. Or hear her talk only about her second family and show no interest in learning about you and your children. Or that she had never told the children of her second marriage that you exist. That information was inadvertently disclosed many years later by an uncle.
“It was all Me, Me, Me,” my sister later told me. “She psychologically drove us out of the room.” Michael left the luncheon table abruptly. Janey followed Michael outside.
“I had to get out of that room!” he explained. “I’m so depressed.”
“So am I,” Janey said.
Later Michael told me, “I wanted this woman to be interesting and there was no way I could make her interesting.”
I am sure there are some happy reunions among those surrendered as infants who have lived for years with no knowledge of their biological relatives. But, despite the way the media likes to present reunions with biological mothers, anecdotal evidence tells me most such events are disappointing. And some are painful.
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