Jody Keisner

Surprise! You’re Adopted

After David Shields, “42 Tattoos”

When a woman caresses her belly during the final months of pregnancy, her fetus reaches for the uterine wall, as if it’s a window between two lovers, and does so more often and for longer than when the father, other relatives, or overly friendly co-workers and strangers touch her mother’s body.

After I was born, my birth mother was not allowed to hold me.

I was adopted when I was one month old, in a closed adoption in 1974 through Catholic Charities in Omaha, Nebraska. For the drive home, the adoption agency gave my new parents a makeshift bassinet fashioned from a cardboard box.

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“Negative attitudes and misgivings towards adoption are so ingrained in pop culture that they’re almost invisible,” writes E. Young in 2018 for the magazine Global Comment.

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My younger sister, my mother’s “miracle baby!” as our family called her, was born thirteen months after I was adopted.

In 1997, the year after I graduate from high school, American Greetings makes a card with a cartoon cat on the front, who says, “Sis, even if you were adopted, I’d still love you . . .”

On the inside, the cat continues: “. . . not that you are, of course. At least I don’t think so. But, come to think of it, you don’t really look like Mom or Dad. Gee, maybe you should get a DNA test or something. Oh well, don’t worry about it. We all love you, even if your real parents don’t. Happy Valentine’s Day!”

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The period between post World War II and 1975, when three to four million infants were adopted domestically, is known as the Baby Scoop Era. Unwed girls and women were counseled by their families and church communities to “give up” their babies for adoption. It was the Pre-Roe Era and birth control was virtually impossible to get. Before the pregnancy showed, the mothers were sent away to maternity homes or a distant relative’s house. The women signed paperwork that they didn’t always understand, legalizing the closed adoptions that prevented them from knowing the identities of the families who would raise their children. Many mothers were not allowed to hold their babies. Some never even saw them. Lest they bring the shame of their sin upon themselves and their families, birth mothers, like mine, were told to never speak of their birth children again. Adoption records were sealed. Agencies believed neither the records nor the birth mother were important to a child’s health and development: they were recreating the ideal American family.

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Some adoptive parents choose not to tell their children the truth, and adoptees grow up unaware they have different biological roots, unaware of who they really are.

In the tenth season of Friends (2003), Monica and Chandler visit another couple’s home to learn about adoption. While Monica chats with the couple in another room, Chandler talks to their young son, Owen, and says, “…I’ve gotta get back to talking to your parents. They’re telling us all about how they adopted you.”

Owen, dressed for full innocence and wholesomeness in a Boy Scout uniform, exclaims, “What?”

Chandler, realizing his mistake and pausing for comedic effect, finally says, “What?”

“I’m adopted?” Owen asks, breathing harder.

“I got nothing!” Chandler says, throwing his hands up.

“I’m adopted?” Owen repeats.

“No,” Chandler says. “I didn’t say that. I said, ‘You’re a doctor. A doctor.’”

Laughter from a laugh track or a live studio audience punctuates the scene.

I don’t remember when my parents first told me I was born to another woman. I have always known, as if the feeling of the separation has stayed with me, fractured from memory, but still there, floating in my subconscious as if an umbilical cord in a womb.

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I gave birth to my oldest daughter Lily in the winter when I was thirty-six. Another woman gave birth to my youngest daughter Amelia in the spring six years later. Together with my husband Jon, we are an adoptive family of four.

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Dialogue from the Avengers, released the year Amelia is born:

Thor [defending his brother Loki]: He is of Asgard and he is my brother!

Black Widow: He killed 80 people in 2 days.

Thor [deadpan]: He’s adopted.

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Once, a teacher awkwardly commented on how much my younger sister looked like my mother but said no such thing about me, even though I sat right next to her at a school event. “At least I’m adopted and not a bastard,” I whispered to my mother. She raised her eyebrows at me, and the true meaning of the word dawned. Illegitimate child. Not unkindly, my mother laughed at my bewilderment.

A somewhat radical group of mostly adult adoptees formed in 1996 to confront harmful media portrayals of adoption and advocate for opening sealed and confidential adoption records. They call themselves Bastard Nation. On The Adoption History Project website, it reads: “Members deliberately use the term ‘bastard’ in order to ridicule adoption stigma and contend that stigma will diminish only with more frank, angry, and humorous sharing of experiences among adult adoptees.”

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Some adoptees have renamed National Adoption Awareness Month as National Adoptee Awareness Month, reclaiming their places at the forefront of the adoption narrative. But which adoption narrative? Are some adoption stories more “right” than others?

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My mother told me she and my father had chosen me, as if they’d stepped into a room with babies displayed like blooming flowers in a floral shop or puppies in a pet store. This was the sort of narrative adoption agencies encouraged, one that positioned the adoptee as “special” and “chosen.” Growing up I imagined her scanning the room full of small faces until she saw mine, pointing, and saying: “I want that one.”

Later, when I was a preteen, I learned more of my story: I had been the only option the agency offered—the only option my mother felt she had after suffering from three miscarriages. When she first saw me, my eyelids were stuck together from an undiagnosed infection. My eyes wept.

I like the fairytale version better.

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Google Search Bar Results for “Adopt a Baby,” A Partial List

How much does it cost, newborn baby adoption photolisting, how to find babies for adoption, black babies for adoption, babies for adoption Canada, adopt baby from China, adopt a newborn baby for free, how to adopt a newborn baby quickly.

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My pregnant friend and I are walking on a trail bordered by nature on one side and by the backside of blue-collar businesses on the other. We have been talking about her plans for birthing her fifth child with a midwife. She says, “I was so happy for you when you were able to have a child of your own. I wanted you to experience it.” Lily skips ahead of us. Amelia is strapped to my chest in a baby carrier. She faces out, so she can see the old maple and oak trees, the geese, and the muddy Little Papio Creek. While we walk, I tickle her feet. I think about what my friend has said. A child of your own.

Amelia’s first word is baby, as if she’s saying, “Here I am world!” Baby, baby, baby, she repeats. I am here. I am real.

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Adoptees have no “ism” to reflect what they experience. We don’t have an equivalent of words like sexism, ableism, heterosexism, racism, or classism. There is no word that reflects society’s privileging of biological family relations and the social stigma that clings to adoptees, as if a warty second skin.

We should invent one.

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Amelia’s daycare teacher is pregnant. At home, Amelia asks me in her warbly toddler voice, “Baby in your tummy?”

I laugh. “No baby,” I say.

“’Melia in your tummy?” she asks.

I remind her no, she was in her birth mother’s tummy. I set a baby doll on her bed next to a Barbie dressed in a swimsuit. This is you and this is your birth mother, I say. You were in her tummy. After she gave birth to you, she placed you with us for adoption because she didn’t think she could be a good enough mother and give you everything you deserve. I set a stuffed rabbit on her bed. This is me, your heart mommy. I heard the phrase, heart mommy, somewhere, as well as forever mom. I don’t know which one is better or if either will help her heal. I don’t say her birth mother “gave her up,” for adoption, either. I say, “She placed you,” which reflects more benevolently on the birth mother. I don’t know if anything I’ve said about her birth mother is true or if this is reckless invention on my part.

Amelia takes the baby doll, Barbie, and rabbit from her bed and moves them to the floor. She covers them with a blanket, and they disappear.

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In her 2014 memoir Not That Kind of Girl, Lena Dunham numerates her top ten health concerns, including among other things, her fear of developing cancer and her irritation with excessive lamp dust. Number 10 on Dunham’s list is infertility: “And so I will adopt, but I won’t have the sort of beautiful, genetics-defying love story that People magazine chronicles. The kid will have undiagnosed fetal alcohol syndrome. He will hate me, and he will nail our dog to a board.”

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Who gets to tell the adoption story? Who controls the narrative?

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When I’m a preteen, my mother hands me a thin manila envelope marked in her cursive handwriting in pencil: Adoption papers. (The pencil makes me anxious; so easy to erase!) Two of the documents inside are printed on thin yellowing onion skin paper: my health statistics at the time of birth (satisfactory), a couple of lines about the medical conditions of my extended birth family, and four short nonidentifying sentences each about my birth parents, communicated in the stiff manner of a driver’s license (age, eye color, hair color, height, and weight). I learn my birth parents were college students, not teenagers as I had thought, when I was born. Already the story I thought I knew of myself is changing. I tuck the documents in the bottom of my underwear drawer, where no one will find them, and stare at my face in the mirror.

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Myths About Birth Mothers, A Partial List

The birth mother is a teenager. She is uneducated. A slut. A drunk. A druggie. Poor. She is immoral. She abandoned her own baby. The birth mother brought this on herself. She is that kind of girl. The kind of girl who drank and smoked even after she knew. She will hide in a bush outside of the adoptive family’s home, waiting to kidnap the baby. She will meet the adoptive parents, and then seduce the adoptive father. The birth mother doesn’t love her baby. After the adoption, she will forget any of it ever happened. She will go on with her life. She is no longer a mother.

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The line “It must be difficult to love an adopted child as much as your own” was changed to “I don’t think Mommy likes me very much” in the trailer for the 2009 horror movie The Orphan. The new line is spoken by Esther, the nine-year-old adoptee, who is revealed to be a sociopathic killer.

In an article for Screen Rant and in reference to the adoption community’s criticism of The Orphan, Jessica Beebe writes, “Ultimately, horror movies often draw from elements of real life from overt adaptations of true crimes to adding a sinister edge to the more mundane, like adoption; movie watchers might need to learn to not take horror flicks so literally.”

The original line about adoption remains in the movie.

Warner Bros. added a pro-adoption PSA on the DVD, encouraging viewers to consider adoption.

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E. Young also writes in 2018 for Global Comment that adoptees “deserve to be able to control their own stories and reclaim them from a pop cultural void that has decided adopted children are strange and perpetually maladjusted.”

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In the 2004 movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, Vince Vaughn’s character Peter says to the opposing team of Girl Scouts: “You’re adopted! Your parents don’t even love you!”

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Adoption is the story of family written by someone else.

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I imagine Amelia’s birth parents arriving at the hospital in labor, anxious and frightened because they have kept the pregnancy hidden from their families and friends. Maybe they quietly tell a nurse, We can’t keep the baby. Maybe they say “give up” or “surrender” or “relinquish.” A caseworker is called—our caseworker. She brings a folder of adoption profile letters for them to look at, ours among them.

At work, my office phone rings, and I answer. As soon as the caseworker says “a baby,” I rise from my chair. I listen as she tells me on this day—the third day after their baby is born—a couple has chosen us for a closed adoption. I rush home to meet Jon. We both exclaim some version of, “I can’t believe this is happening!”

At the adoption agency, Amelia hears my voice for the first time when I take her into my arms and feed her a bottle. Trembling, I say, “I don’t remember how to burp a baby.” At home, we don’t have diapers, bedding, formula, or clothes. I don’t have time to think about the implications of Amelia’s closed adoption, either.

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Myths About Adoptive Families, A Partial List

Genetic kinship is necessary for love. Couples who cannot have biological children are failures—infertile and inferior. An adoptee will never truly belong in their adoptive family. Adoption is an afront to the traditional family structure. Adoptive parents are not “real” parents. Adoptive parents couldn’t possibly love their adopted children as much as their biological ones. A family made through adoption is second rate. Blood is the most important part of family.

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Is it wrong that I wanted Amelia so badly? To get her into my arms, she had to be taken from another’s. How do I reconcile the trauma of adoption—the dismantling of one family in favor of another—beginning anew in my home?

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As adoptions of migrant children detained at the border have already occurred without the consent of birth parents, adoption reform advocates fear this era may later be known as The Border Baby Scoop Era.

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A pregnant woman sits on a couch with her young daughter, who looks upset, in a meme created during the 2020 pandemic. The meme shows up in my social media feeds, shared by a couple of old college friends who are mothers now, too. At the top of the meme are the words: When parents start to crack during lockdown. In a cartoon talk bubble, the daughter asks, “Mum, am I adopted?” The mom says, “Not yet no, I only put the Ad out yesterday.”

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Adoptee Tropes in Popular Culture, A Partial List

Adoptee as Horror. Adoptee as Character Development. Adoptee as Plot Device. Adoptee as Personal Growth. Adoptee as Other. Adoptee as Wish Fulfillment. Adoptee as Greeting Card. Adoptee as Midlife Crisis. Adoptee as Fairytale. Adoptee as Identity Crisis. Adoptee as Second Choice. Adoptee as Shame. Adoptee as Punchline.

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Who gets to define the future of adoption?

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I write letters to Amelia’s birth parents, which our caseworker keeps in a file in her office, should they change their minds and want to read them. I tell them all about her firsts: first bath, first smile, first laugh, first word, first step.

Amelia’s original birth certificate is sealed inside of an ornate building in downtown Omaha and where we finalized her adoption in a courtroom when she was six months old. Even as an adult, she will not be able to view her original birth certificate without her birth parents’ permission.

Amelia is four now. When she asks about her birth parents while we play, I say, “Someday, I will help you look for them.” Though in a sense, they are already in our home, as if spirits, invisible but sensed, here in her bedroom.

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Psychologists theorize adoptees will struggle with lifelong fears of abandonment, loss, and rejection. I fear a reverse abandonment: I don’t fear my adoptive parents leaving me. I fear my children will, either through an accident or carelessness on my part. I fear losing the family I have created myself.

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“I don’t care how close you are to your adopted son or beloved stepdaughter, the love you have for your non-biological child isn’t the same as the love you have for your own flesh and blood,” writes Rebecca Walker in Baby Love (2007).

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Adoptees want to tell their own stories, in their own way.

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Amelia has never touched my uterine wall. Her heartbeat has never synched with mine. She has never turned her head at the sound of my underwater voice in utero, singing “Grow baby grow” after the Noisettes’ song lyrics “Go baby go” as I did for Lily. Somedays, awash in loss, I grieve for what Amelia has lost and for what I have lost, too.

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The language of adoption, the mysterious pull and sway of genes, the pain of parsing nature versus nurture, is written on our tongues.

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At bedtime, I sing a silly song Amelia asks for every night: “Big brown eyes now, little Amelia. Apple of my eye now, little Amelia. Go to sleep now, little Amelia.” In Amelia’s twin bed, our foreheads touching, I curl my body around hers like I did when Lily was small, like my adoptive mother did with me, like her mother did with her. Like centuries of mothers have done before us, and centuries of mothers will do after us, in untold moments of simple, extraordinary, powerful, unconditional, and imperfect love.

Jody Keisner is the author of Under My Bed and Other Essays. Her work has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, Electric Literature, Brevity, The Normal School, and many other places. Her essay “Runaway Mother” was a notable Best American Essay 2022. Read more of her work at http://www.jodykeisner.com.