Birth Certificate

This entry is about my on-going project (be)longing which looks at themes of race, heritage, transracial adoption and estrangement. Click here to read all of the posts on this topic.

There is this constant and pressing reminder that I don’t have a family archive. I’m aware of it as people make comments about all the things that their families have held on to for generations, the photo albums that their parents force them to look through, or the fear of how much they’ll inherit.

These are not my reality. Hearing this is like peering into another world for me. The archive that I am grappling with is one that hardly exists. I have my own archive of my photographs made over the last 30 years, yes, but beyond that it’s incredibly sparse. I literally have a few belongings of my mother’s and hardly any photographs of my immediate family, let alone those going back generations. It isn’t just the objects that are missing, it’s the stories too. In some ways I miss those more - longing for something to hold in my heart more than what I can hold in my hand. The archive I hold is an archive of absence over presence. The void of where an archive could have been.

I remember when Mama died and we needed a death certificate in order to make some practical decisions. Sitting in the registry office and being asked, “how many copies do you need?” as if it was such a normal question to consider. I had never even seen a death certificate before, and now I’m being asked to consider how many copies I need to prove that my mother is no longer alive, unaware of how important that document would become.

Recently I started rummaging around for a copy of my birth certificate. There are only 4 key documents that I have that have followed me from place to place: my birth certificate, passport, provisional driver’s license and our marriage certificate. The birth certificate tethers me to the past, the others to the present. I try not to think about when those around me will need my own death certificate.

Perhaps two decades or so ago I remember sitting on Mama’s kitchen counter looking through a bulging and torn giant envelope stuffed with documents. I think that she had wanted me to look through them to figure out what I should take back to my own home. I recall reading over hospital letters from my teens and early 20s about my reduced kidney function. Even recalling it now makes me shiver in fear, the shared worry that I would end up with the same kidney disease as her. “Take your birth certificate,” she said. “You’ll need that at some point.”

I always distinctly remembered the document because all of the boxes are in red, my favourite colour. Recently when I found the document stuffed in my wardrobe amongst other papers, I unfolded the crumpled paper and simply said to myself, “huh.”

What I did not and still do not recall is seeing that my father is absent from my birth certificate. Where it says FATHER each section has a line crossed through it. His name and surname, place of birth and occupation are replaced with a simple and repeated ———, the horizontal stroke of a black pen.

I paused and just stared at the document. In my mind I was jumping between the facts of the horizontal lines and willing myself to remember why he was not named name on my birth certificate. Where was he when I was born? Why did my mother not add him to the document? Did she do this intentionally? Did he not want to be on my birth certificate? I immediately thought back to his words to me, I never wanted you anyway, and resisted connecting the two.

The fact that the document does not provide any more information about the circumstances feels very apt given my current situation of repeatedly not being able to access information about the past - both mine and others’. The document does not explain why his information is absent, it just is. There is no recourse to discover further information. The lines are final.

In many ways so many of the absences I’m discovering are final. In this case my mother is no longer alive for me to query about why my father is absent from the very first document that legalises my existence, and my family estrangement makes this information unavailable to me through others. In some ways the birth certificate in itself is a paradoxical foreboding in my journey to unpicking what it means to belong and to whom. The birth certificate is a reminder that even in birth, I never belonged to him.