I have wondered about the procedures surrounding adoptions
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.
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I have
wondered about the procedures
surrounding adoptions.
Unmarried mothers
giving their babies away,
made by their parents.
babies in children’s homes
given an adoption certificate
with no reference
to the birth parents identity.
I am the son of a Black man adopted by white people. The circumstances of my father’s adoption is still somewhat of a mystery to me, simply because no one will tell me the truth. Or they have told me different versions of the truth. 3 months before my mother died I asked her a question about my heritage and she slipped up. Driving in the car, I saw her panic at her own indiscretion, and demanded that she tell me what she knew. She told me a story I had never heard before. It seemed bonkers but entirely plausible for the 1950s. When she suddenly died a few months later I had so many questions and no one to ask.
It is a version of a story I have not been able to corroborate.
I am estranged from my father and all of my family.
I always thought of my father’s adoption as not my story but solely his. But of course it is mine too. Those that came before me, biologically or adoptive, are a part of my story because they are a part of his story, and he is a part of my story, albeit begrudgingly.
In 2020 I wrote to my (white) adoptive aunt to see if she would talk to me about the facts of my father’s adoption, because I wanted clarity on the story that my mother told me. She wrote back that she could only do that with my father’s permission and some facts about adoption in the 1960s (from which the above blackout poem is made).
It is such a strange place to be situated in - where the truth of who you are and those that came before you - is held silently by the generation that came before you.