Kinship after Severance

Our family forms outpace our language.—Judy Osborne, Wisdom for Separated Parents1

When I was preparing for a career teaching and studying philosophy, I was preoccupied with meaning. I wanted to understand how the meanings of words are related to their use. I was guided by the conviction that words do not contain instructions for their application in new circumstances. All sorts of factors mediate the connection between a word’s meaning and the ways we apply it: history, social expectations, our conversation partner’s background knowledge. And meanings are not neutral. When we are debating things that matter deeply to us, and we seem to disagree about what should be said, it isn’t always enough to point out that you and I are using a given word in different senses—even if we are. That meaning is both unstable and contested is familiar to any adoptee who has been told who counts as “real family.”

Adoptees hear that their “real” family consists of the people who chose them, who love them, who raised them. The first time I spoke with my adoptive father about my reunion with my birth mother—years before he met anyone in her family—I casually referred to her as “my mom,” which evoked a shocked reply: “I never thought I’d hear you use that word for anyone but [adoptive mother].” If it were simply a matter of disambiguation, I might have assured him that I was only using “mom” in the sense of “birth mom.” But this would not have helped. Kin words like “mother” and “father” carry emotionally freighted associations that outstrip their meaning in a more narrowly referential sense—even if those words have multiple distinct referential senses, as “mom” clearly does. When the context calls for it, I disambiguate with the phrases “adoptive mom” and “birth mom.” But with adoptive parents like mine, the word “mom” functions as a trophy, or at least an honorific. My adoptive father saw it as a word my adoptive mother was entitled to. Maybe it was by divine dispensation, maybe by dint of her having spent so many years raising me. Probably both.

When family therapist Judy Osborne wrote that “our family forms outpace our language,” she was referring to the kinship networks that shift and reconstitute themselves after parents divorce. We lack simple terms to refer to the matrix of relations between such parents, their children, their new partners, and the in-law relationships sundered legally, and in other ways, by divorce and separation. This complexity confounds not only our language, but our sense of what these relations imply outside a “traditional” family context. My current (and second) spouse and I continually negotiate the scope and limits of our parental authority over each other’s children. What do stepparent-stepchild relations, and stepsibling relations, entail? What becomes of kinship ties with in-laws after a divorce?

I have a niece and nephew by my first marriage. A few years ago, after I had separated from my first spouse, but before our divorce was final, that nephew invited me to his wedding. I attended, despite my estranged wife’s effort to dissuade me from it. I discovered I had been placed at a table among complete strangers, far from the table for my in-laws, my wife, her new partner, and our children, who had made the trip with her. I carried my chair to their table. I recall the puzzled looks on many of their faces. Reflecting on it now, I use a word that had not before occurred to me: humiliation. It was humiliating to be shown I had been cast out of a family to which I had felt so closely bonded for over 25 years.

I have tried to remain in my nephew’s and niece’s lives. She lives on the West Coast, and whenever I travel there with my wife, I invite her to meet us for lunch or dinner. A few weeks ago my wife, my stepson, and I was in the city where my nephew lives. He and his wife have a toddler. We met her before my ex-spouse and my children did, her “true” relatives. Visits like these carry a distinctive sense of the illicit. It is as though I am violating traditional expectations by attempting to preserve a relationship with them. I cannot help suspecting that their mother, my ex-wife’s sister, disapproves. Even if not, I know that she does not value preserving a relationship with me, and maybe, in fact, feels it is impossible. It feels much like the “secondary rejection” that some adoptees fear from pursuing reunion with their original families.

These experiences strikingly converge. My niece and nephew, originally connected to me through law, and now only by shared history, seem to me like biological relatives. We maintain a relationship in some degree in defiance of family disapproval. To some degree in defiance of social disapproval. We have no shared language to describe the forms kinship takes after severance. We have no shared model for kinship after severance.

I often speak of the adoptee’s predicament as existential. Adoptees are free, but also burdened, to decide who counts as family. But I also speak of the facts of parentage, ancestry, origins. Moreover, I speak of the fantasy of adoption: imagining that a legal arrangement—terminating and reassigning parental rights, amending birth records— can create a parent/offspring relationship by nonbiological means. In understanding kinship after severance, what is real and what is make-believe? What is fixed and what is chosen and constituted?

I believe fantasy and wishful thinking enter where we take one set of kinship relationships to annul or supersede another. Here I do not mean legal relationships, which are whatever they are decreed to be by law. I mean the moral relations of belonging, connection, and responsibility that fall under the idea of kinship. My adoptive father’s surprise at my invoking a kinship relation to my birth mother showed his assumption that adoptive motherhood annulled that kinship relation. My birth mother’s sister revealed this attitude in another way, when I announced that I would seek contact with my biological father, and she angrily accused me of intruding on matters that are private to my birth mother alone. In her view, I had no right to this part of my history—or at least no right to speak of it openly.

Facts of history are what they are, however anyone wishes they were otherwise. One’s birth is an event in time, a part of history. Amending a birth certificate to name people who had no historical connection to one’s birth is a betrayal of that history, however momentous for establishing kinship. The adoptee’s predicament lies in having to choose what to make of their history. “Kinship” is the word that Judy Osborne proposes we use for these moral relationships—partly chosen, rooted in history—that connect us in familial networks. It is the broad word for the moral links between me and my birth mother, my adoptive parents, my children, my niece and nephew. It is the word for the familial links that can survive the radical transformations of legal severance, alongside the new links that those forms of severance make possible. Kinship is broad and inclusive: potentially broader and more inclusive than some people want. Broader than many adoptive parents, and ex-in-laws, want.

If we understand kinship in this way, then in a sense it does rest on a degree of make-believe. “You can’t choose your family” is a cliché that points to the substratum of fact and history that places people in familial connection. “Kin” then means something built upon but not reducible to these historical facts. Something not as fully voluntary as friendship. Friendships come and go, but surely not kinships. And yet kinship, like friendship, requires belief and commitment to sustain it, because the relationship is not purely historical but also moral. Paradoxically, we choose to be bound by facts larger than our own choices.

We can then look compassionately on the adoptive parent’s wish to circumscribe the realm of family. For they too have desires for kinship. But like the ex-in-law who prefers to excise you from the family picture altogether, the jealous or possessive adoptive parent steps too far in assuming that their kinship wishes can annul yours. Better to heed another cliché, beloved of my ex-mother-in-law, fittingly enough: “Love multiplies; it does not divide.”