Who is the ‘Ideal Adoptee?’

Adoptees, in terms of how we view our adoption, come in as many different flavors as are found in the mustard section of the grocery aisle. We run the spectrum from being content with our lives and complacent about searching for birth relatives, to depressed about the ‘primal wound’ of adoption, torn up with identity and belonging issues. And, how we think about our adoption can change over the course of our lives.

So, who then is the “ideal adoptee”? 

I first saw this term on one of the blogs I follow. Since our society is caught up with the concept of ideals – ideal climate, weight, job, family size, etc. – it’s no surprise that adoptees are placed on a spectrum, too. In thinking about the concept of an ideal adoptee, I looked at a definition of adoption:

Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting of another, usually a child, from that person’s biological or legal parent or parents. Legal adoptions permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities, along with filiation, from the biological parent or parents. 

In many jurisdictions the adopted person’s full original birth certificate is cancelled and replaced with a fabricated post-adoption birth certificate which states that the child was born to the adoptive parents. This deception, where carried out, may continue with the adopted person for life and can be the cause for many well documented traumas experienced by the adopted person, including loss of identity, family history, culture, biological family (including not only biological parents but also siblings and extended family), family medical history and records, and increased risk of suicide, homelessness, incarceration, PTSD, depression, and anxiety (source: Wikipedia).

If you erase an individual’s biological profile, and then legally prevent them from accessing it – something two-thirds of the states in our union still do – how does an adoptee evolve into a well-adjusted adult? Does this mean that an adopted person who doesn’t seem to be screwed up is the “ideal adoptee”?  Or is the adoptee someone seemingly content with the direction of their life and complacent about a search for personal information, the “ideal adoptee”?  

Many of the adoption related books, published articles, and blogs that I follow discuss the “well-adjusted adoptee.”  This is the person that seems satisfied with their role in their adoptive family, does not profess or manifest issues of rejection, loss, identity or belonging, and does not seem interested in searching out or reuniting with birth relatives. Literature suggests that the “well-adjusted adoptee” may have thoughts and emotions that are buried or suppressed. As the well-adjusted adoptee matures, some of them are triggered to question their adoption.  Often, those queries lead to search and reunion. Other well-adjusted adoptees do not challenge their adoption in any way. 

I’m a product of closed adoption, an era that is akin to the age of the dinosaurs.  Back in the 1950s, my adoptive parents were essentially told this:

If you love your adopted child – as much as if you’d conceived and carried them for nine months – then they will not question where they came from.  If you raise your adopted child in a heterosexual two-parent household with a strong foundation in religion, establish rules with appropriate rewards and punishment, you will have a well-mannered, well-adjusted child.  Provide your adopted child with adequate explanations in a kind manner and offer support should your child need it. If you do all this, then you will have an “ideal adoptee,” a child who will not question their adoption and who will not disrupt the family you’ve put together. 

If the “ideal adoptee” is the well-adjusted child who never questions their adoption, I have to wonder if that adoptee is cheating themselves of basic human knowledge, or if they are simply afraid.  Afraid of what their adoptive parents might say and do. Afraid of what they might find during search and reunion, or afraid of how they might be treated by found birth relatives. Perhaps, preserving self-dignity and self-concept, something every person strives to do through life, crafts the well-adjusted adoptee into the “ideal.”

I may have seemed to my adoptive parents that I was fine with my adoption, and mostly I was because I grew up with my twin sister, a factor that sets me apart from most adoptees.  When I asked my parents for my adoption paperwork, I was in my forties and experiencing health issues. The search for information did not sit well with my adoptive mother and her lack of support affected our relationship.  To her, I had been the well-adjusted adoptee, the ideal, and now I had broken ranks. My quest became more about disrupting the family she’d assembled and less about me and my needs. Her expectations, what she’d been led to believe by the social workers at the time of my adoption, were at odds with my expectations of her as a supportive maternal figure.  

Did asking questions about my adoption make me less of an ideal adoptee in her eyes? Probably.  From my perspective, questioning my adoption and my subsequent search and reunion with birth relatives made me into a well-adjusted person.  I acknowledge that this is not every adoptee’s path. I recognize that those that choose not to dig into their roots or search for birth relatives are not left of me on the scale of “ideal adoptee.”  Each of us chooses our own path to wholeness. We become our own ideal. Worrying about how we stack up against other adoptees, or measure up to other’s expectations is not healthy, which is why the notion of what is ideal stinks.  

What is ideal? To me, ideal is what is best for the individual and what forms that person into a well-adjusted member of society.

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