Who Is That?

Hello Blogville friends! Welcome back, it is so nice to see you. This morning I am drinking a hibiscus white tea as I write this blog. As an adopted person I blog because I feel it is important to open up a dialogue about adoption topics (and sometimes other topics too) that impact on so many of us. 

I mean, this is not the first time I wonder if any of you will relate to the blog’s content, but as you know by now, I simply share my thoughts and feelings anyway. Maybe someone out there will say, “Hey! Me too!” and will no longer feel alone. 


As an adopted person I was never able to look at the people around me and relate to them based on physical features. I simply grew up learning not to bother to making physical comparisons. Most of my friends seemed to look like, or share distinctive features (good or bad) with one parent or the other, or with their siblings, and sometimes even with their extended family members. Not me though, so at some point I simply gave up looking. Well, at least looking within my family and extended family.


I cannot truly express how it felt the one or two times I did look at someone outside of my family and see a tiny resemblance, or when others saw and pointed out a resemblance between me and another person. So many of my friends wanted to help solve the ‘mystery’ of my birth ‘roots’. There was once a same-aged girl in high school that everyone thought could be my sister, or at the very least, a cousin. What does one do with that? Go up to her and say, ‘Hey, did anyone in your family give up a baby for adoption around the year you were born?’ Then, while considering approaching this girl, the overwhelming feeling won out as I considered, ‘Even if it’s true, what right do I have to intrude?’ Let me tell you, it’s hard being some family’s secret. In hindsight, it turns out the girl from high school and I are not actually related so, “phew”.


With the best of intentions, many  folks would make comparative comments about me looking like my parents or even my maternal grandmother in an attempt to make me feel accepted, or feel like a “good match” with my family. There are no clear words to express how not sharing DNA related features feels inside. I do know that for me, even at a very young age, I simply stopped looking for similarities that I might have with someone in my family. I feel this made me a little oblivious to people’s looks and to comparative self-awareness. I had no bar as to compare how I should look while I aged.


Of note, I often imagine how challenging this must be for inter-racially adopted people. Do you think those same well intentioned type of folks try to justify their “match” with their family? Somehow I don’t think so. Though I will add that I often felt that inter-racially adopted people were lucky because everyone simply knew and accepted that they were likely adopted, while society still tried to offer me a charade of ambiguity about how I became my parents’ daughter. I still cannot fully understand why a child’s joining a family through adoption, or even kinship, needs any more explanation than that. 


When my husband and I had our birth children the ‘well meaning’ comparisons started all over again. Remember, by now I had given up on searching for physical likenesses between me and others I met. I was confused by people asking who the baby I had given birth to looked like. I mean I understood in some way how, when I was young, people felt they should make me feel that I had been a good ‘match’ with my parents but I then began to wonder whether or not my children looked like me made them any less mine. In fact, sensing my confusion (frustration?) I remember my husband telling people, in a simple and matter of fact way, that our children looked like themselves. Usually that ended the questions. 


Fast forward many years. People remark that my little granddaughter looks like me, especially my daughter’s mother-in-law; who has always insisted on it. I do not know if I was surprised that a grandchild might look like me but I do know I had stopped looking for resemblances between me and my children and even my grandchildren when I finally considered it a moot point. Whether or not I looked like my parents did not make me any less their daughter, nor do their looks or resemblance to me make my children and grandchildren any less mine.


In fact, just the other day I showed my granddaughter a picture of my birth mother and asked her who was in the picture? She looked at me strangely and said, “That’s you!” like I was playing a joke on her. She is correct, I do look very much like my birth mother did. I look very much like my birth mother and it appears that I get my height from my birth father. Yet, it was decided they would not be my “parents” so I learned that looking like your birth parents is not a factor in whether or not they choose to keep and raise you. After all, when my birth mother made her relinquishment decision I was just a tiny baby that probably looked like all the other tiny babies. It took me years to come to terms with the fact that how I looked (or behaved) as a newborn did not have anything to do with her not keeping and raising me. Other life circumstances were responsible.


As I have discussed in other blogs, when I met the daughters that my birth mother kept and raised together with her husband, they were literally overwhelmed with the resemblance between their mother and me. In that moment, for my birth half-sisters, there was no doubt that I too had been born to their mother.


All that to say I do not identify as a birth child with familial features. Therefore I do not automatically relate to others, specifically based on physical features, in my everyday life. I also do not relate to how I look to others either as it turns out. I saw a picture of an older woman the other day and noted her wrinkled face simultaneously as I thought that she was dressed very nice for an old lady. Then, literally moments later, I walked past a mirror and realized that ‘old lady’ and I are probably the same age. It was at that time that I realized, “I don’t identify with wrinkles.” 


Thank you so much for visiting with me today. I so enjoy your company and I hope you enjoy my stories. As always, feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail at [email protected]. Or you can follow me on Goodreads and be the first to get new blog post notifications. 'See' you next time.