The Darling Man Syndrome

“Where is your gratitude?”

A parent’s first choice is for their own child: The child as opposed to a child.

Part 2 of 2, The Altruism Bonus series.

In a 2022 court case, a Massachusetts mother discovered an embryo mix-up. The child she was carrying was not genetically related to her or her husband. Fearing a custody battle after childbirth, the couple terminated the pregnancy at six months:

Ms Doe and Mr Doe are haunted by questions about what became of their embryos. They have needed to worry about whether their embryos were transferred to another unwitting couple and whether they have another child or children out in the world whom they have never met.

Another report said the couple demanded “to know where their real child is.”

There are similar cases. Each reminds us that, given the choice, a parent’s first choice is for their own child. The child, as opposed to a child.

Yet, because these cases involve the use of science, we mostly fail to link them to stranger adoption.

My adopter once described this dynamic perfectly:

Your father’s workmates told him not to do it. They said you don’t know what you’re getting, mate. They told him he was a good man, taking on another man’s child.

In that moment, I better understood the dynamic in their relationship, her indebtedness to him, and his lip service to fatherhood.

Years later, as he was dying, she glanced across his bed to me and said: “The darling man, he did it for me.” As if her wound of infertility had never healed.

The idea of investing so much in the survival of another man’s lineage as something only a ‘good man’ would do is ingrained in adoption rhetoric.

A 2016 encyclopaedia chapter, “Function of Adoption”, defines it this way:

The most widely familiar modern function of adoption is as an altruistic substitution for biological children, typically due to infertility or child mortality.

The chapter’s synonyms for adoption include adaptation and nepotism. It describes the adoption of an unrelated child as an attempt to replace biological parenting with socially equivalent parenting:

The adaptive function of this behaviour is questionable as it typically does not translate into the transmission of one’s genes. Instead, it may represent a mismatch between an adaptive, evolved desire to have a biological child and the inability to do so. Interestingly, parents who adopt unrelated children are often keenly motivated to create social and psychological impressions of relatedness and incorporation into their kinship circle.

Intent on casting adoption in a positive light, the author reframes loss and substitution as moral virtue:

Yet it is the most socially altruistic expression of the evolved human desire to protect, care for and spend enormous time and energy raising biologically unrelated, relatively helpless infants and children.

My memoir, Tree of Strangers, came out in 2020. A bookstore held a launch. This was the town where I was born. The place of my mother’s travails, and I wanted to bring her spirit into the room with a reading:

In the late stage of pregnancy, you are lethargic and drenched in dreams. I imagine her facing the wall, whispered incantations rising from heart to mouth.

I’ve had four children, so what comes next is easy to imagine. The way a contraction rises, feathery as a shadow, stealthy as a rogue wave. Each surge breaks through the silent conversation you’ve been having with your baby. It is only as your body splits itself in two to expel the child that you understand what it truly means to be pregnant. To hold life within and feel it grow till it might break through your blue-veined skin.

I want to believe we had some time together as I lay in the curve of her exhausted body, my mouth inching instinctively toward her breast.

But I think she woke in an empty room bright with light, groggy from the drugs they would have given her. She was alone on a distant beach far above the high-tide line with the sure knowledge her baby was gone. Removed from her bruised body as if it never belonged there.

As if I had had no right to be there.

About halfway through the reading, I noticed a tall, white-haired man staring at me.

After, as people gathered for the book signing, a woman, the age my mother would have been, held out her copy and whispered:

“I’ve never told anyone about this. They took my baby. I don’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.”

We hugged and cried. I asked if she was at Napier Bethany, the Salvation Army maternity home. She nodded. She’d come from Wellington on the train and never left, her life spent looking for her missing child.

Another woman tapped my shoulder. She held a glass of bubbles and a savoury hors d’oeuvre, its eggy edge nibbled away. The tips of her soft, grey hair held the remnant of brown dye. Her lips contracted to a tight knot:

“You’re the most disgusting person I’ve ever met. How dare you. The good doctor and the matron cared for those women. They cared for your mother. They give you a chance at a decent life, and this is how you repay them. Where is your gratitude?”

The white-haired man stood nearby, nodding his approval. Perhaps she was doing his bidding. As they left together he mouthed, “Fuck you.”

He followed up with letters of complaint to the bookstore (which sadly supported his position), the local newspaper and my publisher. Of course, he’d been a doctor, working with the doctor who took me from my mother. Other letters arrived. Handwritten screeds from adopters praising those who provided them with children – the maternity homes, matrons, and doctors ­– not the mothers. Most were anonymous; all considered me a public menace.

A nurse who’d worked at a Salvation Army home found my number and called to tell me every baby was calm when given to their new parents. “Like they were grateful,” she said.

When asked how they responded after being taken from their mothers, she paused: “We always waited.”

I could hear the wind at her windows in the space between her words. “Until they stopped crying – two days, maybe three.”

She hung up. I tried to call back, but she’d blocked my number.

To be adopted is not fate.

It is a social and legislative construct that targets individuals based on the circumstances of their often intentionally unsupported mothers.

It demands that the adopting woman suppress her own losses and - at least in the home I grew up in - defer always to the man whose permission ultimately legitimised her right to parent another woman’s child.

And for the darling man, the loss of genetic continuity was transformed into a selfless act of service.

Next week: Maternal Separation Syndrome - “exposing humans to the considered risk factor of maternal separation is not possible as it disagrees with the principles of research ethics.” (unless you are adopted)

Coming up:
My Current Name Is…
That One NZ TV ad.
The Wrong Royal Commission series

Tree of Strangers is now available directly from the author, signed with an inscription of your choice. There is a limited supply.

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