These propositions are grounded in reflection on my experience as someone who was relinquished in a closed, same-race, same-religion domestic adoption in the United States. These propositions suggest, support, and clarify each other. I note many such connections in parentheses. I offer the propositions as empowerment to adoptees, and as advice, corrections, and warnings to kept people.
1. Adoptive parents raise other people’s children.
To be an adoptive parent is to raise, and to have the legal rights of parenthood over, someone else’s child. It might seem odd, or even counterintuitive, to put the point so starkly, but it is a simple statement of fact. The key to understanding it is to remember that an adoptee has a pre-adoption history: a life, however brief, before someone other than the adoptee’s biological parents acquired legal parental rights over them.
Many kept people are accustomed to hearing their birth stories: narratives detailing such incidents as what was happening when their mother went into labor and the adventures or misadventures leading up to their birth, and reminiscences of what impression, as infants, they made upon their parents. Adoptees have birth stories as well, albeit often secret ones. My mother lived in a farmhouse when she was pregnant with me. When I was born, one of her sisters was present, and she was the first person in her family to hold me in her arms. This is the birth story I learned at age 39, shortly after I had identified my birth mother and made contact with her siblings.
