Make People Understand that Many Adoptees have no Interest at all in Finding Their "Real" Parents

The weather forecast has been for snow and ice, so we had our birthday celebration a few days early. She hadn’t had much appetite lately, so I took her to one of my favorite restaurants.

I ended up with a delicious meal – Thai Red Curry Duck – but her appetite went no further than a bowl of soup. She worries about me all the time, but I’m fine. It’s hard to mother her -

My mother and I will be going out for a birthday celebration dinner on Sunday, and I am just so glad to still have her. This is my Mom, and I can’t imagine loving anyone as much, or being loved so well. She’s 85, very sound mentally, and just a physical wreck. Lately she talks a good deal about my father, who died in 1995 – It seems she misses him more than ever. It’s going to be awfully hard when I lose her.

My father died 12 years ago tomorrow (September 25), and the date is always a difficult one for which to gauge the correct response with my mother. Most years she doesn’t want to go out to lunch or dinner to commemorate the date, but it is important to her that the date be remembered. We’ll see how it goes this year.

(This photo of him is probably from his college days. Although there may seem to be some superficial resemblance between us, that’s not particularly true.)

It enrages me when people who are not themselves adoptees, whether they have no connection to the issue or they have themselves given up their children for adoption, insist that it is healthy and necessary for adoptees to seek out their “real” or birth parents in order to have some kind of closure. This is presumptuous and arrogant. Certainly, any adult adoptee who feels such a need should feel free to make this attempt, and I wish them luck should their birth parents be willing to have contact. Of course, questions of genetically related illness should be answered immediately. What I am talking about is the assumption that a person is incomplete and doomed to unhappiness unless he forms this link. A physician who is the sister of a friend of my sister (not an extremely close connection to me, I hope we can agree!) buttonholed me at a party several years ago, informing me that “as my doctor” she insisted that I had to seek out my “real” mother. I’m sorry to say that I didn’t inform her that she was not “my doctor” but only “a doctor I happened to know.” I was a bit shyer and more polite in those days, and the party we were attending was at her parents’ home, so it would have been disruptive.

In short, I am enraged when people assume they have better judgment about an essential part of my life than I do.