There was a time when good sex was pretty much reserved for married heterosexual men. Married women were supposed to be quietly pleased to satisfy their husband’s carnal desires in the marital bed.
Anyone who;
- chose not to marry
- couldn’t find a mate
- weren’t allowed to marry the object of their affection for one reason or t’other…
… was just supposed to do without sex. Period. That was the way things were Supposed To Be.
In reality, people have always been having sex with one another, regardless of those expectations. The resulting progeny were shoehorned into the prevailing Social Norms using all kinds of pretenses, bribery, polite fiction, and outright lies. Adoptions, formal and informal, flourished as a solution under these conditions.
The interesting thing about adoptions over the generations, is that adults giving up children for adoption, and the adults taking in that infant to raise, like to speak of adoptions as being for the good of the child.
Perhaps. Sometimes.
And suddenly… here we are; a society with access to relatively affordable genetic testing, instantaneous communication, and a sizeable percentage of the records of American social transactions. The long treasured ‘closed adoption’ is now more of a polite fiction than a reality. All those laws designed to shield families from inconvenient progeny engendered on the wrong side of the marriage certificate, are unenforceable.
In my proximate family we have three adoptees; myself, my wife, her brother. In every gathering of friends, we find a few more. This makes the conversation about adoptions, adoptive parents, birth mothers, sperm donors, etc… very very interesting.
The challenge for most adults in our shoes is that it’s impossible to know the motivations or circumstances that required the surrender or the adoption. This is true even if we have been told “what happened” … because at least half of that story is a lie. The biological mother didn’t voluntarily give up the child, or the pregnancy wasn’t accidental, or the father didn’t disappear. Or all of that was true, but what caused those things to happen are skeletons the older generation wants to keep in the closet. You know what I’m talking about. These family secrets have led more than one aspiring Genealogist to ask “Inconvenient Questions“, disrupting family dynamics and wreaking unpredictable mayhem on holiday planning and the front leaf of the family Bible.
In my case my birth mother chose to “keep” me. She also chose to tell me at age five that my father adopted me when they got married. When I was a teen she told me my biological father had died of a heart attack.
On one hand, my adoptive father was an amazing parent. I have no regrets on that front. He taught me responsibility, geometry, how to use power tools, and that it was okay to trust men. Losing him to a heart attack when I was nineteen was devastating.
On the other hand, most of the limited detail my mother gave me on my biological father, including that he died in his fifties, has now turned out to be lies.
Having spent forty minutes on a single telephone call with him when I was 61 and he was 85, I am beginning to understand her reasons. I mean, what asshole calls his long lost offspring (who he knows believes him to be dead) when he has no interest in remaining in contact? To set the record straight? “Yeah. I’m not dead. I did have zero interest in you or anything else that might tie me down. But your mom was banging in bed.” Seriously. You’re eighty-five dude. Grow the fuck up. The fact that 50% of my genes come from this guy is just annoying.
Thankfully most adoptees I’ve met have better outcomes to the whole ‘finding family’ saga. Regardless of the reasons for the loss of connection in these cases (US Military indifference, racism, religious dictates, infidelity, social disapproval, sibling rivalry, toxic families, etc…) discovering biological connections turns out to be a positive experience. Or at least one that opens doors and provides opportunities to learn about how the gene pool plays out across the generations.
I’m happy for them. Most of the time. But sometimes I wish I’d find someone with a story similar to mine. So we could commiserate over beers and feel less unique. There must be a Facebook group out there for us. I think I’ll look into it.
Lindley On the Road 