When I retired and
left a life spent mostly abroad as an American diplomat, I had the time to
research my early history as a child abandoned to a county orphanage. I set out to obtain my official social
workers case file which I hoped would confirm and enrich the memories I had of
that period in my life. At the same time
my younger sister was beginning to open up contacts with our biological family,
in which I had less interest. But she
persuaded me to go with her to meet an uncle and aunt, an older brother and
younger sister of our biological mother.
I agreed, mostly because I was grateful to Mary, the aunt, because
she had helped me to begin to read at age four, a gift I have appreciated all
my life.
Published personal
accounts of adoption seemed to me to be mostly about the unhappily adopted who
had only been able to find a sense of belonging through reunions with their
biological relatives. That did not seem
to fit my case at all. But how could I
be sure? Perhaps I would also experience
a dramatic and fulfilling sense of belonging through a reunion with Nate and
Mary. And if that happened, would the
identity I had in part accepted and in part forged over the years of living as
a Luchs crumble before the flesh and blood reality of a family whose genes I
shared? Who would I be then?
So I was anxious
about meeting these biological relatives.
If I belonged to these people biologically, did I have to think of
myself as one of them after half a century living in a different family and
culture? I was almost sixty years
old. My sense of identity, which is
linked to my sense of security, was hard won, primarily during my adolescent
years. I had absorbed the culture of my
adoptive parents and had come to believe that our identities and fates need not
be determined by our biological families.
My biological father
spent most of his youth in prison and at one time, he, a brother and sister
were all locked up by the state of Ohio.
Did that mean I or my brothers and sister had to repeat that sad history? If so
many of our personal characteristics are determined by our genes, why didn’t we
have criminal records? Why had none of
us ever been arrested?
We are freer than we
often think. Sure, the borders are set
by biology. We probably can't much change
our IQs. We are born with musical talent
or we are not. But I believe from my
experience as an older adopted child that within those given limits, there exists
a great zone of freedom and our identities and what we make of our lives is in
considerable degree up to us.
I had come to see the hard way how biological families can
hurt us and keep us from developing our full potential. I had to be freed from them to undo the
damage they had done. When biological families abuse us instead of nurture us,
when they seriously neglect our health and education and well being, we must be
freed from them to make a new beginning.
Truly, I had to be separated from my biological families to become
me.
Well, you may be asking.
How did the breakfast meeting with your biological uncle go? It was friendly and pleasant. But as I said to my sister afterwards, I did
not see…..a single similarity, odd as that may sound, nothing that resembled
me. He and I looked so unlike each other
that I thought; if someone had randomly selected an older man off the streets
and set him down to breakfast with me, the odds are he would look as much like
me as this biological uncle. It turned
out that I and my siblings physically bore more resemblance to our biological
father’s family.
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