Who's Your Daddy?

[joreth]

I'm reading a book right now and there's a recurring theme that's pissing me off. The reason it's pissing me off is because I see this same theme in society around me, and it happens to be an extremely personal issue. The issue is adoption.

We have an incredibly fucked up idea of family and parentage in our society. People are really, strongly, obsessively invested in who has whose genes. And I don't mean the biological drive to procreate. I get that we have this drive to make sure we have progeny to ensure the continuation of our genes. But we have lots of ways of making sure that we continue on, and our genes do just fine on their own without our interference. For instance, it turns out that homosexuality actually *helps* procreation. Let's say that Sam and Suzy have 2 children, Bobby and Betty. Bobby is gay and Betty is straight. Betty gets married and Bobby doesn't, because he's gay. That leaves Bobby available to assist Betty and her husband Johnny raise their little tykes, with babysitting duties, gifts, maybe even more substantial contributions to the household. Bobby is Sam and Suzy's insurance policy to make sure that Betty's kids (Sam and Suzy's grandkids) have an edge and therefore out-compete the kids growing up next door, who don't have the benefit of an extra uncle to dote on them.

That's an oversimplification of course, the point is that we have a variety of ways to ensure the propagation of genes, and some of those ways might not seem, on the surface, to be beneficial, but they are.

So, what does that have to do with adoption? Well, my position is that this obsession with whose kids are whose goes far beyond what can be explained with genes. It has to do with memes. Social memes. Those nasty little mind-worms that infect societies and dig in deeper than some biological viruses. Somewhere along the line, we collectively decided it was appropriate, desired, and necessary for men to guard the vaginas to make sure that nothing went in and nothing came out that didn't "belong" to the men guarding them. This idea gained traction quickly and took root deeply to the point where we are now looking for biological justifications to excuse the brutality of men against women and against other men (but mostly against women).

And this meme works going the other direction too - children who are socialized with this kind of bullshit are terrified at the thought that mommy or daddy might not be their "real" mommy or daddy. Even adult children are terrified about this. The worst insult a man can be given is that he doesn't know who supplied half of his genes (bastard). Even as adults, the mere thought that one's parents might not be one's "real" parents is enough to make grown adults resort to violence.

I am adopted. I have always known that I was adopted. Although I did not meet my biological mother until I was 30, and I have never met my biological father, I grew up knowing the story of my birth and my biological lineage. I knew that my bio-parents were teenagers when I was born, and that was the reason I was given up for adoption. I knew that I had European ancestry on my mother's side and Latin American ancestry on my father's side. I knew that my birth-mother was given a choice as to who my adopted parents would be and she chose the couple who raised me, although they never met. I knew all of this from the moment I was able to understand it. And I was always OK with it.

My adopted mom (whom I always call "mom") has always made it very clear to me that I may not have come from her stomach, but I did come from her heart. My adopted parents raised me from the time I was 15 days old. They stayed up with me at night when I was sick, they helped me with my homework, they dried my tears when I was so panicked at the thought of spending another day with the school bullies that I made myself sick. My adopted parents have always been parents in every sense that matters.

My birth mother (whom I usually refer to as "mother") was also held in high esteem. Something else that my adopted parents made sure to instill in me was a deep and profound respect for the woman who made the ultimate sacrifice in my adoption. I can't imagine how difficult it must have been to have carried a baby to term, given birth, and then given that infant to someone else, knowing that she would never see her baby again. She never did see me. She asked not to, afraid she would change her mind if she did. This woman, this girl, didn't abandon me. She made the best decision possible - to allow someone else to raise her child so that her child had the best possible chance for survival, because she was not the best possible choice.

In the book that I'm reading, the main character was raised by his father in a small village. His mother died before he had any real memory of her. The main character doesn't look anything like his father, and in fact, doesn't look anything like anyone in the village. He stands out like a Norseman raised in the south of Spain. But as he travels through the story, he learns hints that he may not be genetically related to his father. He learns that his father left the village for a couple of years and returned home with a baby. His father told him that he had been born in that village, so he vehemently denies this rumor. Every time it is suggested that he may have been a foundling, he shouts his name and that he is the son of his father.

And every time he does that I want to reach through the pages of the book, grab him by the throat, and throttle some sense into him. Of COURSE that's his name; having different genetic donors doesn't change that! Your name is what people call you, and having some other ancestry doesn't change what people call you, or what they have always called you in the past. Of COURSE that's his father; having some stranger impregnate some other stranger doesn't erase the last 20 years of the man he thinks of as his father, as he taught him to read, taught him to farm, taught him to fire a bow and arrow. That his genes come from people he's never met DOES NOT CHANGE WHO HE IS OR WHO HIS FATHER IS. It *might* explain some things about himself that don't make sense without that information, such as his coloring. But it does not change history and it does not erase those relationships with people he currently has.

And this book keeps pissing me off because I see people going through this same situation all the time. I see people panic at the thought that the people they love, who raised them, might have a genetic code that is 3% different from theirs, instead of 2.9% different. And the reason why that reaction pisses me off is because it is a direct accusation to people like me, people who were raised by someone other than their genetic donors. Every time I say I don't want children, and people ask what happens if I change my mind, and I say that I'll adopt, every time they say "but what if you want children of your own someday?" Fuck you. Any child I adopt WOULD be my own goddamn child. I think it's frighteningly telling that these people actually believe that someone could possibly deliberately raise a child and not love it as one's "own".

It's so terrible, so awful, this idea that we might not be blood-related to our parents. Someone who really thinks that is so busy freaking out over that thought, that he doesn't usually stop to consider that, if it's so awful that he is not related to his parents, then it must be just as awful for me to not be related to my parents. And I am deeply resentful of the idea that my parents are not my "real" parents.

My parents are every bit my "real" parents. Not giving birth to me did not make their sacrifices for me any less, or diminish their love even a single iota. There was never even a single moment of "she's not my REAL daughter, so I only love her a little bit". I, and my adopted sister, were the children my parents always wanted. We gave them every bit as much love, and as much grief, as any "natural" child ever gave her parents.

This idea of "natural" offspring is, I think, one of the most harmful, destructive memes we have the misfortune of propagating. It causes men to turn violent, to destroy women's bodies, to kill. It causes women to doubt their very humanity when they can't have children "of their own". It causes relationships to be destroyed at even the suspicion of other genetic material in the vicinity. It causes children to doubt their very identities because we do not encourage people to develop identities on their own merits and personalities, but on their relationships to other people. Who is this strange child if it's not "mine"? Who am I if I'm not related to my parents?

That child is the same child he has always been, and I am always me, no matter who my parents are. Regardless of where my DNA came from, my parents raised me and shaped the person I am now. I am the culmination of biological matter, values instilled by the people who raised me, exposure to ideas from society around me, and my own accomplishments. I am Joreth. Adult human individual and daughter of my parents. All four of them.

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Ever since childhood I found society's views on adoption odd, because when I learned of it, my initial reaction was that it must be great to be an adopted child, because then you would know for certain that your parents wanted you.

I was not adopted. My parents do love me and have cared for me, and I have no doubts about it. But I also know, as I have known for a long time, that I was an accidental pregnancy. A fifth child a bit later and after my parents would have been content to not have more children. They still chose to have me, keep me, and raise me. And they didn't treat me any worse than my siblings. They definitely loved me. But I'm not sure I was quite something either of my parents wanted at the time. I think that's okay because they still committed to my care, loved me, and raised me. You don't have to be planned for. But I think it is likely nice to know that your parents went out of their way to acquire you, because they really wanted to have and raise you.

[joreth]

:-) That was actually my stock response for when I got teased for being adopted as a child - that at least my parents actually wanted me and that I wasn't an accident. I don't think that elementary school children really knew how to react to that defense!

[the-failed-poet.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I also am planning to not have children and if I ever want to actually have a child I'm going to adopt. And I get the exact same response that you do when I mention these plans. "But what if you want children of your own body?" I'm not sure what's so special about my body versus someone else's that children that come from it will be Extra Special compared to whatever child I adopt.

It's a horrible meme that suggests that children from someone else's body are somehow less loved than children of one's own body. Bleeech.

[joreth]

It really angers me. I just watched a Bollywood film (I'm watching all the films from which my dance routines come) where a grandmother was outright hostile towards her grandchild because the grandchild was adopted. Her son was married, had a daughter and a son, and then they adopted another daughter. The son committed suicide and the daughter-in-law was left to raise 3 kids on her own. The grandmother blamed the wife for the husband's death and, to her face, would say the child was a burden and unwanted.

The grandmother finally wised up only after she was told that the grandchild WAS her natural grandchild. The husband had an affair, knocked some woman up, the woman died, and the husband took in the baby. The wife, the one who was cheated on, embraced the child, loved her, raised her as her own because 1) she was an innocent child and 2) she was part of her husband, whom she had now lost.

I get the message they were trying to send - that the old woman was a bitch and children shouldn't be treated like that. But the old woman never actually learned her lesson, because she only accepted the child as "hers" when she learned they shared genetic material. She never came around to believing that the grandchild was worthy of love just for being a child.

I have to say, though, that the wife came out of the whole mess looking like a damn fine admirable woman, and the film gave her all the credit for being an admirable woman.

[leora.livejournal.com]

That is horrible. I try not to make distinctions or play favorites between my nieces and nephews. Some of them are related genetically and some aren't, but they are all my nieces and nephews (except my great-niece and great-nephew who are a great-niece and a great-nephew). I mean, I kinda sorta do have preferences sometimes, but it's more about which ones I have more in common with or am currently getting along with better, because they are different people. And I try not to make that too obvious, but it is a different matter anyhow. And I'm not actually sure I have much in the way of preferences currently. It helps now that they've gotten older. I used to have preferences for the older ones, just because they were more developed.

The children raised by my siblings are part of my extended family. The details of how those families formed isn't as significant as that those families formed.

I think this meme is weakening a little though. The frequency of step-families without portraying any step-family members as evil helps. My nieces and nephew not through blood are through marriage. I think that's pretty common. As more people get the experience of non-blood relatives somewhere in their family, whether through marriage or adoption, it helps them realize that that is just as meaningful.

[james-the-evil1.livejournal.com]

This isn't a topic I know a ton about, so I'm curious about your take on something. In your case you were raised knowing the "truth" so to speak of your origins. I understand the pressure of societal memes, but what about the stories, both anecdotal & case researched, going back generations, of adopted kids in situations where the adoptions were fully closed and no hint was given to them that they were adopted (which was the norm for quite some time) yet those people grew up always not only with a strong feeling they were adopted (far stronger than the "this can't be my family" feeling that's not uncommon for teens) but once they get to be adults & are able to find out the truth an all out DETERMINATION to find their birth mom, a drive so strong they spend all kinds of crazy money & such, and where some have committed suicide if they can't find the truth?

In many of the cases I've read about, there's been little or no interest or care in the birth father and often it's not so much that they want to know their mom as it is a case of "I NEED to know why I was given up." Some meet the women, ask that question, and then want no more contact.

Sort of a flip side to this would be the case of the guy who ran the fertility clinic who was secretly using his own sperm, creating (that we know of so far) 60+ offspring. Most of these kids were NEVER told their moms used donated sperm but again they felt something was "wrong" or missing & they went looking, using the internet & such, and a couple of dozen of them found each other online. They had good families AND were with their biological moms, and in some cases half-siblings, yet they felt something was amiss & felt "immediate kinship" with their sperm-siblings, often more strongly than with their "real" families.

So I'd like to know, since you have perspective I never will, how you feel these situations fit in to the ideas you're presenting here. :-)

[joreth]

Technically, my adoption was fully closed too. My parents just chose to tell me those scant details they had anyway (when choosing kids to adopt, the potential parents get to know things like ethnicity and age of parent, because apparently that's important when choosing kids). If they hadn't, it would have been a considerable effort to explain how I got my sister without my mom being pregnant, but that isn't the reason why they told me - they just felt it was the right thing to do.

It's a complex issue, not the least of which because we can't really tease out "nature" from "nurture". How many cases do we hear about where someone was absolutely certain that something was "wrong" or missing, who went looking, and found out that no, they are actually genetically related to their parents? We really only hear about those cases when it turns out to be true, because it's such a fantastic tale. Even the "research" on the subject does not properly account for this sort of thing and much of the research has been discounted (it's been years since my evo-psych classes in school, so forgive me if I'm fuzzy on details and sources).

A good part of this drive to find our "real parents" stems from, I believe, the social pressure to know our "real" parents. If we don't look like our parents, if we act different, if we like different foods, it immediately brings up suspicions. The idea I'm presenting here is an entire culture-wide paradigm shift where *it doesn't matter*. If the entire culture was infused with the idea that it doesn't matter who contributed the genetic material and that the definition of "parent" is "person who raised you", not "person who contributed DNA", I suspect we would have far fewer of these searches. Take, for instance, the black woman with a black husband who had twins, one of which was a white baby. Not albino, but caucasian. It happens, and the DNA shows that both "parents" are really the genetic contributors. But stories like this make the news because everyone wants to know who the "real" father was, and it's just incredible that a baby can come out being related to someone and yet being so different.

I'm not saying that there isn't any genetic link at all - I always felt like an outsider in my own family because I was very different in personality, and I learned that I have much more in common with my bio-family than with my adopted family in spite of having no contact with them. But my nephew, who is genetically linked to his mother, my sister, is *also* very different, an outsider (and a lot like me), whereas my sister (who is adopted) is *exactly* like my parents in so many ways that it's scary, and is nothing like her bio-mom.

The examples you gave of "need to know why I was given up" are part of the social meme that I'm talking about. I'm sure there is some inherent drive to know who we're related to, but I think the strength of that drive is encouraged by a society that places more importance on that bio-link than is necessary.

[james-the-evil1.livejournal.com]

That would make sense, tho some of the twin studies of seen argue for, in at least some cases, a stronger biological link. I don't think that debate will ever exactly be settled.

I'd LOVE to hear some feedback on this from non-US folks, especially from cultures where the idea of "family" is far more extended than the nuclear or super close knit US model, like in parts of Europe where close friends are more likely to be considered "family" and introed to kids as "aunts and uncles," for instance, or tribal cultures where people are raised in groups.

One strong argument for your point about it being a cultural issue in the US would probably be the reaction to Hillary Clinton's "it takes a village" ideas when Bill was the president, and how people came after her as "attacking" or "trying to destroy the family," and certainly the fundamentalist religious types promoting the idea that children (not to mention wives) are largely just the "subjects" or "property" of the parents. Certainly the strained importance they give to a NARROW concept of "immediate biological family" vs "chosen or extended family" fits your hypothesis, as well as a large degree of the short sighted and selfish decision making we see here vs other places.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I think part of that stems from them never talking about the cases of people raised by their biological parents who feel like they don't fit in, want to find their real parents, but there is nothing to search for. My eldest sister's favorite book as a young child was the story of a young girl raised as a witch, but she was really a fairy, and she eventually gets to end up with her real family. It was very fitting. Not all kids feel like they fit in with their family, and I think many kids who feel like they don't will wonder if perhaps it's that their parents aren't actually their parents. If it turns out that is really the case, then they will assume that was the cause of the issue, but it might not be.

I certainly had feelings and thoughts about that as a child, but I was definitely the child of my parents. I was a fifth child, born at home with no chance to be switched at the hospital. My older siblings will vouch for my mother's pregnancy. And I'm really pretty certain that my father is my father, both because I don't think my mother would cheat, and because I have several genetic traits that I seem to have acquired from my father's side.

But I didn't fit into my family. If you use Myers-Briggs terminology (which is a decent enough way to explain one way I didn't fit) I was the only F in an entire family of Ts (6 other people all Ts). I had problems throughout my early childhood, because I seem to have a different learning style than my siblings or my father, so whenever they tried to teach me things it backfired and made me miserable. They also didn't know enough about education to understand the problem, so they tended to blame me, because the same methods had worked with everyone else, so I seemed to be the problem. So, I didn't fit, but I was genetically a part of my family.

If I'd been adopted, I might have felt a desire to seek out my birth family to see if I fit in better with them, but I couldn't do that, because I was with my birth family. And I'm not talking about when I was a teen, for both me and my sister our issues tended to be more around young Elementary School age. I think it just didn't develop to be stronger because of the overwhelming evidence that we weren't adopted.

[james-the-evil1.livejournal.com]

Leora, Ray Bradbury did a wonderful flip on this idea with his stories of The Elliots, a family of vampires, psychics, werewolves, and monsters, much like the Addams family, and the "normal" boy who was left on their doorstep as an infant that they adopted to raise as their own. He grows up being TRULY "other" yet they always manage to show him he really is one of them because they love him. Good stuff.
I'd like to know the name of the book you're talking about.

[leora.livejournal.com]

It's been years, and it was my sister who was really into it, but I think it was this book http://www.amazon.com/Little-Witch-Harper-Trophy-Books/dp/0064401197

That looks right from what I can see of the descriptions. I've now spoilered it, because if I recall correctly, it turns out that she isn't really the daughter of her witch mother, but is a cursed fairy. Which is good, because she hates living with her mother and doesn't want to be a witch.

[james-the-evil1.livejournal.com]

Bradbury's "Elliot Family" stories sound MUCH nicer LOL.
Better lessons about love & acceptance & the real meaning of family IMO.

I'll check that out tho.

[leora.livejournal.com]

It probably is. I think this story is a better fit for giving kids in abusive families hope for the future. But it was a book we had in my house. And it is a cute story that is done nicely.

Personally, I do remember liking it, but I don't recall it vividly. It's been decades since I read it. I also went through a witch phase, where I liked lots of stories with witches. Although I was mainly into books by Ruth Chew, which tended to be cute, fun stories that involved witches. I only remember them vaguely, but I recall one about a couple of kids who found a witch and want to keep her (kind of like the found a pet model of things) and end up having her hanging upside down in their closet or some such. I think there was another with magic artifacts, including seven-league boots. Things like that, which were just lots of fun. Especially since when I was reading these stories most of the ideas were new to me. While the basic story lines or concepts in them may be well used in many stories, everyone needs to encounter them somewhere first, and that story tends to get a boost in how good it seems because the idea is new to you. I was totally amazed with the first book that presented the idea of parallel universes to me, but it did not invent that idea.