I Told Mom I Wanted to Find My Birth Mother. It Blind-Sided Her

As an adoptee, I watched with interest former NFL player Michael Oher’s legal battle unfold and considered how his story was misrepresented on film in The Blind Side.

I couldn’t help but wonder if the people he believed to be his adoptive parents were blind-sided, like mine were, when I began to look at the nuances of my adoption in new ways and question things I’d blindly gone along with before.

The blind-siding started when I told my mom I wanted to search for another mother—my birth mom.

We were sitting in a circular booth at P.F. Chang’s with my sister. The boisterous people at nearby tables and our conscientious server offered welcome interruptions for the second-most uncomfortable conversation of my life.

My mom started to sob: “I don’t understand. You’ve always said you weren’t interested in finding her.”

I shrugged, unfamiliar with the rocky terrain of speaking openly about this taboo topic where self-censoring ruled.

My mom’s upset quickly turned to anger, then accusation. She glared at me: “So you were lying?”

Lying? That was one way to look at it—the way a parent would who was never given full information about the long and arduous arc of an adoptee’s life experiences and evolutional understanding of adoption.

In the medical world, the ethical practice of informed consent ensures patients sufficiently understand information that would help them make sound decisions about their medical care, for the short and long term.

Of course, patients can choose informed refusal, intentionally proceeding into danger or refusing information that may be too daunting to know—at which point pens fly from pockets and it’s time to sign on the dotted line, because nobody wants to be legally responsible for a patient’s pending peril.

In adoption, the information we give to birth and adoptive parents is far from reaching the standards of informed consent we expect in medical care.

To make sound decisions about placement, and the care and raising of children, all parties involved in adoption decisions need to sufficiently understand the ways adoptees will experience it for the rest of their lives—and, of course, be willing to take off their blinders and let the information truly sink in.

For instance, informed consent would have flagged for everyone in my family that adoption is much more complex for an adoptee than can be conveyed in a simple rivalry between Lying versus Truth-Telling or a victory by either Nature or Nurture.

Informed consent would have alerted my mom that our shiny and tidy beliefs about adoption could only serve us for a time—in our case, several decades, which offered each of us a false sense of relaxing into constancy.

Had there been informed consent, when, just before turning 40, I told my mom that I wanted to find my birth mother, the news wouldn’t have landed like an abrupt U-turn, careening us off our safe suburban thoroughfare toward a precarious psychological cliff.

Her greatest insecurity, unspoken and not often conscious—that she wasn’t my real mother—led my mom in that moment to believe she would lose her daughter forever.

From my seat, in the restaurant booth and the metaphorical car, my mom’s cold reaction reinforced the belief I’d carried all along: She would leave me if she ever found out the depths of my other-mother-longing heart.

Before that day, I’d spent 39 years of my life parroting my parents’ adoption stories or quietly nodding along when my mom publicly shared her version of my story.

“I was chosen,” I’d insist.

“Being adopted is no different than being biologically born to one’s parents.”

“I came to my family for a reason.”

In high school I wrote a passionate opinion paper, trying on my mom’s beliefs that adoption was the only answer to unplanned pregnancy.

When friends faced fertility struggles, I inadvertently became adoption’s ambassador. I didn’t appear to be one of those “other,” broken adoptees culture has placed into our collective psyche—Loki or Cruella de Vil—even though inside I believed myself to be deeply flawed.

Why else was I given away? And why did I feel crazy?

But if asked, I’d offer assurances—”adoption didn’t affect me, I’m fine”—as they opined over whether an open or closed adoption would be better.

I’d pledge my allegiance, “I don’t wonder about another family. I have a perfectly good one,” never admitting to fantasizing about my birth mother constantly and clinging to a desperate hope that she was somewhere nearby, making note of my accomplishments and celebrating me on birthdays that I hoped she remembered.

My friends didn’t pick up on my robotic tone. They didn’t notice my rapid blinking to contain leakage of tears or emotions. They saw and heard the confirmation bias they sought, and thus embarked on their own adoption journeys.

In fairness to them, by this time I’d had so much practice acting unaffected by adoption that only the very astute could pick up on any discomfort. On the few times adoption came up in conversation with my parents, I feigned disinterest.

Even a string of therapists missed that adoption was the underlying issue in the mental health struggles, including suicidal ideation, I’d been grappling with since adolescence.

None of this was malicious. I didn’t have a personality disorder and I was not a compulsive liar. This was about survival. Attachment is our preeminent need, after all, above even food, as child psychologist and best-selling author Dr. Gordon Neufeld says.

To survive, I did my best to stuff any sadness and tried to believe the things I said and wrote. I worked to keep loved ones close by saying what I thought they wanted to hear. My first mother, whose voice, heartbeat, and nourishment I knew for nine months in utero, had gone missing upon my arrival. I couldn’t let anyone else leave me again.

With my brain operating so protectively, I lived emotionally flatlined when it came to my experiences of relinquishment and adoption.

And I’m not alone, as I’ve learned through the thousands of adoptee stories I’ve heard through the Adoptee Voices writing groups I lead and nearly two dozen adoptee interviews I conducted for my recently released book, Adoption Unfiltered.

To not be invited into our first parents’ presence—no matter how well-intentioned or necessary adoption may have been—is among the most significant life losses a human can endure.

Adoption often comes at a preverbal point in time when we don’t have words like “loneliness,” “abandonment,” or “hopelessness” to help us understand our experiences and emotions. No matter the facts or whether it’s an open or closed adoption, one of our core beliefs becomes that we’re unwanted and there’s something deeply wrong with us.

To actually feel the unavoidable ache that comes through adoption separation, which continues to manifest in different ways throughout our lives, is a daunting emotional task.

We fear it could be never-ending or perhaps too much to bear. Our brains step in to protect us—through working like I did to keep loved ones close, through numbing, through addictions, and sadly, often, through self-attack.

According to one study published in Pediatrics, “adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than nonadoptees.”

But it turns out that feeling the sadness of the separation inherent in adoption and grieving our losses is the first major step toward healing.

This is true for all in the adoption constellation, as I’ve learned from my co-authors of Adoption Unfiltered: Birth parent Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard and adoptive parent Lori Holden.

But when adoption is glamorized in our culture and in our churches, none of us receive informed consent about the necessity of grieving adoption’s losses and hardships, which abound.

It took me almost 40 years to make the move toward healing. As I poured my heart onto the pages of my deeply personal memoir, I expressed and mourned my life’s losses. Through feeling the lows, for the first time I could also feel and find rest in the joys, which flatlining had previously stolen from me.

I also learned that I could survive grief—I was more resilient than I’d believed myself to be and all along I’d been living my own hero’s journey.

Prior to publishing the book, I also survived the excruciating, primal fear that I might lose my adoptive and birth families once they read my story, which included my foremost uncomfortable conversation: Making the first phone call to my birth mother.

Today I openly write, grieve, and speak about adoption to support other adoptees and their families. I’m passionate in stressing the importance of listening to adoptee voices and helping other adoptees write and publish their stories.

My hope is that through our collective adoptee truth-telling we are offering the informed consent we wish our families—and friends to whom we’ve been Adoption Ambassadors—received sooner.

Through our sharing, we can ensure other families aren’t blind-sided decades into their kids’ journeys by the lifelong emotional effects of adoption.

Sara Easterly is an adoptee and author of books that include Adoption Unfiltered: Revelations from Adoptees, Birth Parents, Adoptive Parents, and Allies, co-authored with birth parent Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard and adoptive parent Lori Holden, as well as her award-winning memoir, Searching for Mom. She is founder of Adoptee Voices and a trained course facilitator with the Neufeld Institute.

All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.

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