On adoption

A family... and not one drop of shared DNA.

As I was growing up in El Salvador the concept of “adoption” wasn’t something I’d encountered. You’d hear of certain families taking in children with no parents or parents who were not able to care for them. Occasionally you’d hear of women “selling” their children into the care of other families because they couldn’t afford to raise them or they needed the money for their own survival. And of course there was always the boogieman everyone “knew” about but no one had ever personally witnessed: the children who were snatched away to be sold to families the USA either because they were infertile couples or because their own biological children needed organ transplantations. They were the stories I grew up hearing in that third world country. My own personal experience was nothing I could call adoption, but it was what I saw.

There was a young girl in the town I grew up with that was thought of something like homeless or a ‘street kid’. Later I was told she did actually have a mother but for whatever reason, this girl was essentially fending for herself when I first came to know of her.  I was lucky enough to live with my mum and her partner, my four siblings, and at times also my grandmother, two uncles, two aunts, and a cousin. I had a family. I had a house to live in, food, and the essential things we needed to study. This girl, the ‘street kid’, had very little of what I had. At one point in my childhood I remember my mum took this poor soul into our house. I remember the first day she came my mum washed her hair to get all the head lice out because she didn’t want me and my siblings catching them. She took some cooking oil and put it through her hair and then combed it with a fine-tooth comb. The most bugs I have ever seen in my life came out of her hair, there were clumps of them with each stroke. It seems another world to think back to it now, but I guess it was a different world to the comfy life I live now. When the cleaning up was done, this girl became one of us, one of the family. She ate at our house, mum enrolled her in school and got her a uniform, she had books to read and learn. My siblings and I were old enough to know she was not one of “us” but to anyone else, it may have seemed my mum really had six children and not just five. That is the memory I have always had of what is now commonly called “adoption”, and for that reason I admired mum even further (though she would never had personally dared to call it anything akin to adoption).

Since about the age of 12 or so, I thought it’d be great to have children. It seems strange to say it because I would have been a child myself at the time. My family thought it was funny too and they’d ask me how many children I wanted to have. I’d always say 3 or 5 or 8 or 10. Yes, I thought I wanted to have ten of them and I’d buy a minibus to carry them all around in – and I’d have them all by the time I was thirty. I couldn’t wait to be eighteen, but not for the reason most adolescents do, but rather because I thought at eighteen you can marry and then start to have children. I had a maximum of 12 years in which to gather as many kids as I could, I thought. And I knew, or decided, by the time I was very young that at least some if not all my children would be adopted. I guess two things played into this: the fact it never crossed my mind to want or expect to have a husband or male partner, and the fact I admired so much the people who don’t get caught up in “genetics” and ownership and recognize that the ability to raise a child is a gift in itself – to a child and to a parent.

As I got older and older, I started to tell people (my mum and friends) that I wanted to adopt a child (or children). Ironically, my mum was not very supportive of the idea. I understand now that her reluctance is based on her not even realising the example she set for me when I was a kid in El Salvador, and the fact she thinks having a child, especially an adopted one, will interfere with what she thinks I should have: a husband and children “of our own”. I grew up without a father, I never expected to have one around for my children either. It’s not that I did or didn’t want one, I just never expected I’d have one – and this does not bother me, really! I had a family without having a male father figure, surely I can build one of my own similarly and I would never think of it as second-best, as less-than-ideal. Never.

The other (often uninvited) group of people that tried to discourage me from my idea to adopt a child were friends of my mother, an older generation of perhaps misinformed individuals.  Why is adoption bad (according to these people)? I can summarize their basic arguments as 1) ownership, and 2) tradition. Traditionally a family consists of a mother, a father, and their biological children. By extension, the tradition is that the parents remain married for life, that there is no infidelity within that married life, that the two parents are of different sexes to each other, that the children will be healthy and fully able-bodied, that the father will be in full-time employment while the mother tends to the household and the child-rearing, etc. etc. That is not the world we live in today, everything that was once tradition has changed, some things you could say changed for better and some for worse, but nevertheless human beings have proven a million times over that we are a very adaptable species.

And now about ownership. Think of yourself and ask ‘who owns you’? Most of us will probably have thought that no one owns us, or we own ourselves. Maybe if you’re an adolescent or a child, you may have said your parents own you. But who as an adult says they are owned by their parents? You have the same parents from when you were a child into adulthood, so why should ownership change? Because it actually doesn’t. The truth is any thinking parent will acknowledge that their children are not their property, you don’t own one as you own a shirt or a shoe. Parenthood is a task, a role, a responsibility; it’s not a similar thing to land- or property-ownership. You don’t ever own another human being. You can influence, shape, teach, or affect them, but you won’t forever own anyone. When children are babies until adulthood, parents are charged with the task to protect and provide for a child. As a parent of a young child that is your job, your expectation, but you couldn’t similarly say that a security guard in a jewellery store owns the expensive jewels he looks after just because it is his job to safeguard them. Do you have more right to ownership of a person because you share biological matter with them? Is it a prerequisite for something or someone to share DNA with you for you to see merit in them? Should we marry only our brothers and sisters because strangers are otherwise less-than? A person who is loving, who is a true parent, need not share anything other than love, experience, and sustenance with a child to call themselves a parent.

Throughout my life as I shared my aspirations to one day be a parent, and my dream to adopt children, I received further “advice” as to why I shouldn’t. You’d think I was proposing to become a suicide bomber or a career criminal to be so strongly opposed. People would tell me that adopted children are bad because the majority come from drug-addicted, mentally unwell, criminally insane parents with all sorts of genetic and congenitally infectious diseases. Adopted children are defective, and not only that, but they also grow up to be bad, mad, or sad people. They become drug addicts, criminals, mentally ill, and/or perpetually resentful of being adopted children. Unfortunately the one example often quoted to me as proof was an acquaintance that did not disclose to their child he was adopted until he was well into his mid-twenties. Of course he was resentful but of the deceit and non-disclosure, not of the love and opportunities he was given in his adoptive family! There was some selective filtering of the content of this adoptee’s complaint. Nevertheless, this person was someone I knew and so the example is blown up in its probability value. Maybe he was one of a minority, maybe he is quite typical, but knowing no other adopted people, he was painted as more than representative of the sampled population, but as the 100% of the population.

And then one day I met a woman who told me she was adopted. I have never once heard her refer to her parents as “adopted parents” as opposed to “REAL” parents. It was strange to hear what I suspected all this time: that not all adopted children are resentful, defective, or feel eternally unloved. It blew my mind to hear her say once that she wasn’t born to her parents, but that she was born for them. She couldn’t imagine a different life, she didn’t need to, she had a loving and supportive family as it is.

And there it is, there’s what I heard and what I think and what I’ve seen about adoption – and you know what? I am occasionally reminded by people that I have three half-brothers and a half-sister, but you know what? I only know I have three brothers and a sister, the people I grew up with, the people I share more than “half” my DNA with, the people who share in the full extent of my life. And sharing life, being a family, is more than about ownership and about biological material. Personally, after having heard it all, all the evils of non-traditional families, I’d still love the opportunity to build a family around a child that needs only my love and caring and not just my DNA to survive.