PART I

Heritage: adoptees covet it, are puzzled by it and even sometimes dismiss it. People who don’t lack a bloodline, who simply harbor it, like blue eyes or broad shoulders, might never consider heritage because it’s always been there. And they don’t always understand an adoptee’s quest to connect with their own. “What’s the big deal?” some ask, “It never mattered to me.”

I question that.

Perhaps heritage is something not missed until it’s lost; not coveted until it’s been taken away, isn’t even considered because it doesn’t have to be. It’s like breathing. One doesn’t think about taking a breath and then exert the effort to do so. It just happens, it just is – until it isn’t. And then, suddenly, it becomes the most important thing in the world.

Growing up adopted, claiming a heritage has never been a rote exercise for me. It has always been a surgical, copy and paste exertion. The experience of feeling simultaneously grounded in history and existing in the present has always evaded me, despite all the mental gymnastics I’ve attempted to make it otherwise.

My adoptive relatives were gurus of their heritage. Every household was a shrine to it, every wall and bookshelf a museum of photographs, family trees and memorabilia. My aunt and uncle – who I lived with much of my childhood – lived in the same farmhouse and worked the same land built and cultured by their Norwegian ancestors. I grew up in a literal historical landmark. We even had tourists.

I pasted myself into their bloodline, in part because it is human nature to want to connect in such a significant way and, in part, because it was expected of me. I was chosen for this family based almost solely on my purported Norwegian background. They, perhaps, needed to legitimize our connection as much as I did, so insisted somewhere back in time our respective ancestors merged, thus legitimatizing our connection to one another. So I called myself Norwegian, and when the tourists rang I could impart the family history pitch as well as my legitimate cousins.

In my first conversation with my natural mother, I learned I wasn’t one stitch Norwegian. Of all the fictional character traits of my father she’d given the social workers to throw them off track, this one carried the steepest consequences. As an infant, I’d been slated to leave foster care for adoption by another family. But when my very Norwegian adoptive parents’ file landed on the social worker’s desk, she changed plans. She was a woman revered for creating the perfect adoption matches, for blending families by their physical and biological similarities so well that a smooth transition for the adoptee was almost guaranteed.

I struggled with the realization the abuse I suffered in my adoptive home might not have occurred had the word “Norwegian” never been uttered in front of a judge. But the bigger struggle was managing the erasure of something that had become a central part of my identity. No longer Norwegian, I tried to adapt to learning I am instead Ukrainian, Swedish and Welch (while being told to “pay no attention” to an obviously Polish name on my new family tree – or to my birthfather’s unmistakably German name.)

When my birthmother prepared a traditional Ukrainian meal to celebrate my first post-reunion birthday, the maternal side of the family gathered around a table scattered with traditional fare. They shared memories of gatherings past. They told stories. They knew how to pronounce the names of the dishes we ate (and giggled at me uncontrollably when I continually botched attempts to do the same.) They spoke of their Ukrainian grandmother, the old farm, the Old Country. Their words filled the room around me like a thousand snapshot images. I grasped for something recognizable, something to seize and call my own.

The idea I would ever feel legitimately connected to my heritage slipped away somewhere between the borsch and the knydli. I felt like an intruder, an imposter. Sitting in the midst of birthfamily tradition, I felt no less disconnected that I’d felt with adoptive family.

Growing up, my adoptive family graciously shared their traditions with me, but I lacked the bloodline to solidify it into a heritage. In reunion, my natural family genially accepted me into their bloodline, but I lacked the history bloodlines are meant to entail.

There are some things relinquishment and adoption tear apart that reunion just can’t piece back together. Part of the “adoption journey” entails letting go of the things we’ve lost, sorting out the carnage from the clash of fantasy versus reality and finding a balance between the person you might have been and the person you’ve become. At some point in the journey, you come to realize you can’t be given the things you are missing by an external force – or family. And, you learn to cherish the moments you are able to capture the sensation of historical and biological connectedness, even if its delivery is non-conventional.

That connectedness eluded me until the day I met Wyatt Earp . . .

(continue reading this piece here)