Genetic Mirroring. Yep, it's real for me!

October 7th 2023. 52 years old.

Sometimes I sit in front of the mirror. In fact, nowadays I do it every day and find it comforting, affirming. Today was a little different: I sat in front of the mirror and remembered the first time that I realised that my baby son looked like me. He was only hours old and I was slightly delirious after a long labour and emergency C-Section. I was washing my hands in the hospital and looked up into the mirror above the wash basin. I thought “that face looks like someone I know…my baby!”. It was the first time I knew that I really looked like someone because of biology and not adaption. It felt strange because in that moment I knew that I had dutifully believed and embodied a lie all my life: as an adoptee I was told that biology, genetics, didn’t really have a bearing on anything. I had a family (my adopted family) and that was all that mattered. Genetic mirroring, and the vital place it has in the development of babies, was not a term I was familiar with until many years later.

Today, as I sat in front of the mirror as that memory surfaced I just cried and cried. I can never put adequate words on the emotions that flow when I cry like that; the tears come from the depths of my being, from a pre-verbal time. I know, as I observe myself in a slightly disassociated state in these moments, that these tears come from the relinquishment wound. I can rationalise about the feeling, but it doesn’t make it any less real or raw. And, always, it comes with another voice, that of my culture, my society, which tells me two things: “you were too young to know what was happening to you when you were relinquished”, and “you should be over this by now”. However, this is my lived reality, and through my reading and my research I know that I am not alone. This is how I feel, I am not intentionally being dramatic, ungrateful or delusional. This is my truth, and I have read the echoes of my experience in the words of countless others who grapple for their whole life with this weird experience called ‘adoption’.

In times like these I wonder what kind of a planet we live on when we get emotional and decry the taking of puppies or kittens from their mothers before a certain number of weeks after birth and yet think that adoption of human babies immediately after birth is and was a good thing. Just saying.

And don’t get me started on the word ‘gratitude’. Like many other people I have actively practised gratitude and kept a gratitude journal. But the word itself is tainted for me and for many adoptees, and during the times where my wound is weeping I cannot even utter it, nor contemplate it. Gratitude, and the inference of well-meaning people that adoptees should feel grateful for having been rescued from a family incapable of providing them with what was deemed necessary for a baby at the time, is salt to the relinquishment wound. I do feel what I think is gratitude and love for my adopted family, for all the wonderful experiences I have had. And then, there is the statement I found on Pinterest by a Paul Whittaker which feels truer at times of being in touch with my trauma than all the love I received, all the material, educational and societal advantages that being adopted gave me:

“Adoption is a way of redistributing children to people with resources instead of redistributing resources to those with children”.

Ain’t that the truth?