Adoption is the ultimate mindfuck
I spend a lot of time sitting in our backyard, which is really just controlled chaos. There’s always something leaning against something else. A project that never got finished. A pile that’s supposed to get cleaned up next weekend.
My boyfriend works nonstop, his ninety-year-old mother has dementia, his daughter is in and out of the house from college, and life just sort of spills out into the yard. And I’m just sort of here as a newish girlfriend, a homeless person living in somebody else’s world. Perhaps adopted once again.
Next door is the complete opposite. The lawn looks like a golf course. The bushes are perfectly trimmed. Every few days somebody is spraying weeds or fussing over another corner of the yard. They even built a fence between our properties. Honestly, I don’t blame them. If I had a yard that looked like that, I’d probably want to block out ours too.
They have this little dog that barks constantly. The wife dotes on the dog the way my adoptive mother doted on every dog she ever had. I couldn’t even tell you all of our dogs names because I’ve never really been a dog person. But hearing her fuss over it instantly takes me back to my own childhood.
Sometimes I’ll look over and see the husband standing there with a distant look on his face while his wife is talking about running to the store or whatever project is next. Their adopted Korean daughter, who is an adult now, comes and goes, and I’ll hear things like, “Honey, can you bring me the pool cleaner “ or, “Sweetie, let’s go get Starbucks.”
They’re probably just having an ordinary family conversation, and I have no idea what their life is actually like. I’ve never even spoken to their daughter. Maybe they’re genuinely happy. Maybe they’ve made it work because there were never biological children mixed into their family. I honestly don’t know.
What I do know is that watching them in what I perceive as “performing family”opens a wound in me that never really healed. And maybe that’s not fair, maybe they’re just BEING family. But like their way, which is different than our way of being family, the one I’ve created with my boyfriend and his mother. ButI’m so fucked up in the head at this point I have no idea what’s real and what’s not.
I grew up in a very Christian adoptive home. We were expected to say I love you all the time and hug each other and it always felt weird to me. One of the words we learned was “agape, or “unconditional love, and I was taught that our little perfect family in the country in middle of nowhere in a place called Graceland Farms was blessed by the Lord Jesus himself. We were this special family brought together by God. I believed it.
Then my adoptive dad died when I was in my 40s and I had spent most of my adult life low contact with them but trying to still maintain appearances and having these surface level conversations and still performing for them because that’s what they liked. I had just moved back home after being out of state for many years.
Not long after, my adoptive mom invited me, her biological daughter, and her two grandchildren on a vacation together. The whole trip felt wrong. My sister and I had never gotten along, and I spent most of that vacation feeling like I was waiting for the other shoe to drop. There was a fight between me and my sister, she threw a full container of bug spray at my head, the kids started crying and I was blamed for everything.
When we got home, I thought I was going to move back in with my adoptive mom while I got back on my feet, which had been the plan before vacation. My life had completely unraveled. I had bounced between jobs, moved all over the country, and I honestly believed that if there was ever a time your family would catch you, this was it.
Instead, because of the fight over vacation and probably because pent up resentment over the years from my covert narcissist adopted mother, who is a serial dogooder volunteer with every organization known to man, I was told I wasn’t welcome anymore because she needed space.
Not long after that, her biological daughter and the kids moved into the house.
That was the end of us.
I hate them all.
I didn’t reach out after that, and I’m sure they tell themselves a story that I just didn’t love them. Maybe that’s true in a way. I honestly don’t know how you’re supposed to manufacture the same kind of love for strangers that people seem to have naturally for their own families. That’s the part nobody wants to talk about.
I’ve wondered if my sister wanted a real sister and resented me from the beginning. I know I never found it in my heart to love her the way people say sisters are supposed to love each other. We were just two completely different people forced into the same story.
When I look back, I realize I never really felt at home with any of them. We were on completely different wavelengths. They seemed interested in gossip, home and nesting, appearances, and what everybody else was doing. I wanted to travel, make films, ask bigger questions, and create a life that felt extraordinary. It always felt like we were speaking different languages. Looking back, I don’t think any of us really understood each other.
People love to tell adoptees that love makes a family. Yeah sure if you are delusional and distorted by religion, which my family was.
I think adoption is the ultimate mindfuck because you’re expected to build your entire identity on a foundation that disappeared before you were old enough to understand it. I lost my first family, my grandparents, my cousins, my medical history, my ancestry, my last name, and every story that came before me. Everyone else seems to grow up inside a family narrative that stretches back generations.
Mine started with paperwork.
I met my biological mother once. It didn’t magically answer anything. It didn’t erase the loss. It just reminded me that I feel disconnected from both worlds.
Now I live with my boyfriend and his mother. Even with dementia, she tells him she loves him. She encourages him. She still sees him as her son in the deepest sense of the word.
Watching that is beautiful.
It’s also heartbreaking to me because I honestly don’t know what unconditional love feels like. Agape my ass, it was all an illusion, a delusion brought on by adopted mother fantasy and religion.
As strange as it sounds, I feel more at home in this imperfect, messy house than I ever did in the picture-perfect family I grew up in. The chaos here feels real. Nobody is pretending everything is fine. Nobody is performing the role of the perfect family. There’s something honest about that, and after a lifetime of feeling like I was acting in someone else’s story, honesty has become more comforting than perfection.
That’s the sadness I carry around every day. It isn’t loud. It’s just always there. It’s the sadness of realizing that if my entire life fell apart tomorrow, I don’t have a family home to go back to. I don’t have parents to call. I don’t have grandparents, cousins, aunts, or uncles whose history is also my history. I don’t even know who those people are.
People tell adoptees to be grateful. I wish more people understood that gratitude and grief can exist at the same time. I wish more people understood that losing your history before you’re old enough to remember it doesn’t simply disappear because someone tells you that love is enough.
I’m forty-seven years old, and sometimes all it takes is hearing a neighbor call someone “Honey” across the yard, hearing a little dog bark, or watching someone fuss over a perfectly trimmed lawn to remind me that I’ve spent my entire life performing family — even deeply believing it- agape! for people that weren’t even there for me when I really, really needed them.
The love wasn’t real.
That’s why adoption is the ultimate mindfuck.