The Question I Keep Getting Asked

"Do you know who your real parents are?" People mean well with this question. I believe that. But after thirty-six years as an adoptee, I've heard it enough to know that it contains an assumption I've never fully agreed with. The people who raised me are real. The people I was born to are also real. "Real" is doing too much work in that sentence to be the right word for any of it. The question I'm actually still learning how to answer is different: who am I in relation to all of this? That one doesn't have a clean version.

What Adoptee Identity Actually Involves

Identity formation is complicated for everyone. For adoptees, there are specific complications that come from incomplete or inaccessible origin information, from whatever narrative — accurate or constructed — was offered about why you were adopted, from physical features that don't match anyone you grew up with, and from the cultural and psychological work of integrating multiple histories that may or may not feel connected to each other. This is not inherently traumatic. It can be. It can also be handled well by families and result in adoptees who have a stable and integrated sense of self. But the integration requires doing actual work with the complexity rather than pretending the complexity isn't there. Researchers at the University of Minnesota's Center for Adoption Studies followed adoptees across several decades and found that adoptee wellbeing was most strongly predicted not by whether the adoption was domestic or international, open or closed, or how much biological information was available — but by the quality of the adoptive family's approach to discussing adoption openly and honestly over time. Families that treated the origin story as something to be managed or minimized produced worse outcomes than families that held the complexity without resolving it prematurely.

The Search Question

I searched for my biological family when I was twenty-eight. I found them. The experience was nothing like I imagined, which I should have expected because I'd imagined several different versions and they couldn't all have been right. What I found was people who were strangers who shared some of my features and some of my history. The emotional charge I'd attached to the search — the hope that something would slot into place — mostly didn't materialize. There was instead something quieter and stranger: the experience of looking at a person and recognizing something in their face that I'd only ever seen in mirrors. I don't want to overstate what that meant. But I don't want to understate it either.

What the Research on Reunion Shows

The clinical literature on adoptee reunion is more nuanced than the popular narrative about it. Researchers at the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute found that most adoptees who searched and found biological family described the experience as meaningful and are glad they did it — but that positive reunion outcomes depended heavily on managed expectations and the adoptee's own level of psychological preparation, not on the biological family's response. Reunions where the biological family was enthusiastic and the adoptee wasn't prepared for emotional complexity went as poorly as reunions where the family was resistant. The fantasy of reunion — which centers the biological family's response as the variable — turns out to be less predictive than the adoptee's own capacity to hold ambiguity.

A Tangent About the Language

"Birthmother" versus "biological mother" versus "first mother" versus just "mother" — adoptees use different language and feel differently about what each word implies. I've cycled through most of them. The terminology is doing real psychological work in each case: what relationship am I naming, and what weight am I giving it, and what does that imply about the other relationships in the set? I've landed on "biological mother" and "my mother" as a way of marking the distinction without elevating either relationship over the other. Other adoptees would describe this as minimizing. I'd describe it as accurate to my experience. Both of us are right about our own situations.

The Question I'm Still Learning to Answer

Who am I in relation to two origin stories that are both mine but don't fully connect to each other? I was raised in one culture, born from another, and the synthesis is something I'm the only author of. There's no template. What I've arrived at, slowly, is that identity for adoptees doesn't have to be an integration problem with a solution. It can be a description of a specific and unusual life. I am the person who was born here and raised there and searched and found and kept going. That's not an incomplete answer. It's just the actual one.