Today, eight years and five months after I met my birth mother and her siblings in person, I am filling out a registration form with the International Soundex Reunion Registry, or ISRR. It is an almost purely symbolic performance. I am formally announcing my desire, which I may or may not already have consummated, to find and be found.
My adoptive mother died in February of 1995, two months before my twenty-first birthday. She missed my wedding a year and three months later, but she met the woman I married. She also missed my acceptance to graduate school, and my move to New England three months after my wedding. She missed my move to New York City, and my cancer diagnosis, and the birth of my first child, and my return to New England, and the birth of my second child, and my divorce, and my meeting my new partner, whom I will marry two months from now. When she died I was a college junior, immersed in scholarship, learning about the philosophy of language and Plato and modal logic and epistemology, formally enrolling in graduate seminars and studying Latin and Attic Greek. One month after she died I traveled to Boston and I presented a paper at the New England Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at Tufts University. At the age of twenty and ten months I was cocksure, almost wholly neglectful of my friendships, and rightly convinced I was bound for a Ph.D. at a prestigious school, and equally but wrongly convinced I was bound thereafter for a career as a professor.
My adoptive mother died eighteen years and eleven months before I saw my birth mother in person for the first time since I was a days-old infant. When I began to think, for the second time, about searching for my biological parents, I was no longer cocksure. My last adjunct academic appointment, at Boston University, had ended two years earlier. Friends in academia put in a good word for me when I applied for a miscellany of jobs in department administration and academic advising. None went anywhere. I spent most of my days looking after my children, preparing meals, brewing beer, and wondering how I seemed to have so fully squandered my talents and my opportunities and allowed my youthful friendships to wither. I was no longer cocksure. Self-pity was my new enemy.
Three years into the ten I took to complete my Ph.D., four and a half years after my adoptive mother died, I began to wonder, for the first time, if I could find my biological parents. Resources on the Web in 1999 were scant. I learned then about the ISRR. It is “a mutual consent reunion registry for persons desiring a reunion with next-of-kin,” serving people separated from their families in whatever way, including through adoption, divorce, foster care, and abandonment. I registered, offering what I knew, which consisted in the date and city of my birth, my birth mother’s approximate age (somewhere between 18 and 22, since I had been told she was a college student: she was in fact 21), her religion (Catholic: correct), and a guess at her ethnic background (possibly German or Polish: in fact a mixture, including Czech and German-speaking Austrian). I printed the registration form and mailed it. To receive a confirmation of receipt, I would have needed to enclose either a donation or a self-addressed stamped envelope. I did neither. I never received a response.
I learned that my birth mother, with the help of her sister—the same one who had helped arrange a place for her to carry her pregnancy to term in Alabama, far from home—had also attempted searching for me. I don’t know if she registered with the ISRR. For some reason, I haven’t asked her. I’m trying again, this time with far more information.
I have a copy of my original birth certificate, with no redactions. So I can include the names of the hospital and the attending physician, the birth certificate number, and my birth weight, which was eight pounds, nine ounces. I can include her full name and the name of my biological father—not because of the birth certificate, which lacks his name, but because she told me in her first email, before we had even spoken on the phone. Subsequently I found his Facebook page and that of my two half-brothers. Five months ago I submitted a saliva sample to Ancestry DNA and confirmed his paternity—not by matching with him, since he had not submitted his DNA, but with various of his first cousins. To each I sent messages, casual but energetic in tone: “Hello! We matched, and I am interested in tracing out my family tree and connecting with others. I would enjoy talking with you.” I have heard no responses.
By re-registering with ISRR, I think I am trying to amend and overcome not only my original poverty of knowledge, but my reticence and shame. The ISRR accepts my biological ancestry as valid and authoritative. It qualifies me for recognition. It sees all of my kinship connections. Neither the federal government of the United States, nor any state government, does this. I am a legal stranger to my biological families, and the intention of sealing my birth records in a closed proceedings, secret even from myself, was to render me as if born to my adoptive parents.
My adoptive mother died eighteen years and eleven months before I beheld the embodied solution to the mystery of my birth. I can only guess at her inmost feelings about our constructed kinship. She loved me with a clinging desperation others easily perceived. I never needed to be taught not to pry into the mystery, which was a secret, constructed by legal fiat at the behest of people necessarily not me. A gift horse doesn’t examine his own mouth. This love entailed possession. And anyway, everyone had joined in the pact. If a woman willingly gives her infant away under an eternal veil of secrecy, who would dare to undo the secret? I was a philosopher, accustoming myself to thinking all sorts of difficult and puzzling thoughts, but one thought I couldn’t think was I deserve to know who my mother is. I couldn’t even think of her as my mother, despite her giving birth to a child whose life’s course she shaped through the awesomely powerful act of relinquishment to hidden strangers.
This is what adoption does. It creates, magically, seemingly ex nihilo, forcefields and barriers that separate parents and offspring, who are otherwise joined in bonds unbreakable by any earthly act. Through failures of will, of courage, of imagination, I delayed solving the mystery of my birth for eighteen years and seven months after my adoptive mother’s death. It was that sense of the unbreakable bond with my own children, and a concomitant sense of obligation for their health, that led me to search the Web a second time for clues to the mystery. I was shocked to discover that a mere year after my first search, the state of my birth had repealed its law sealing adoptees’ original birth certificates. I got my documents. The forcefield held fast, until I switched it off.
But there are other forcefields. I switched from willing non-knowing to openness, and that openness joined my birth mother’s openness, and we were drawn back together. But though I know who and where and even to an extent how my biological father is, I haven’t found the strength to call out and await his response. Conceived by mistake, I was launched a thousand miles away. He had no part in that. Like me, he was given a forcefield, and like mine, its power partly consists in having an off-switch he is free to use but dare not. Adoption is full of “nothings you can do” that are in fact things you can do.
But I don’t know if he chooses openness or its opposite. I can overread the silences from his cousins on Ancestry. Full of fear, I inscribe fear and shame in those silences. I tell myself I am powerful, but by not feeling powerful, I lack power. It could be that, not knowing whether the other has switched off his forcefield, each of us will let them hold fast until death.
I hope to be surprised. Sending in a richly detailed registration to ISRR, I hope to discover that he had registered too. I’m enclosing a donation to ensure I get word of my registration’s receipt. It’s a dodge. Setting my epistemological strictness aside, I say I know I won’t get a match. I could mail a letter, send a Facebook DM. I tell myself I have nothing to prove, and that anyone would be happy to acknowledge me as their son. But it’s likely that he cannot do that, because I was conceived in original sin, and closed adoption stamps that sin upon you.
This is what adoption does: It renders some thoughts unthinkable, but it also renders some thoughts only thinkable, and unsayable. To my adoptive mother, I think: Despite what I have done, I love you as my own. To my biological father, I think: Despite what happened, I want us to know each other. The forcefields hold.