The Lost Atlas of Belonging

Those imagined selves sit like dusty ornaments discarded at the back of my life.

When I hear, “I come from a long line of: …musicians, singers, authors, police officers, gardeners, lawyers…” it causes a flicker in my brain, an awareness of what it means to fly blind.

All adopted people, no matter how we individually feel about our adoptive status, must navigate the unknowns inherent in these unnatural pairings.

For some, this is not an issue. For others, the need to travel without a map renders many of life’s junctions treacherous.

I used to imagine the person I might have been and the things I might have accomplished if not for adoption.

I suspect everybody imagines the life they might have had if they had taken a different turn, or made a different choice at any critical point: married or not married that person, or if they’d followed or not followed that career path.

But for adopted people, it is the choice made for us, a choice that locks us in to a fictive identity for all our lives. For me, those imagined selves sit like dusty ornaments discarded on a shelf at the back of my life. Each one represents unrealised potential, not from laziness, inertia, or a lack of ideas. But because I was consumed by a lost atlas of belonging.

Here is an idea so self-evident that most of us do not pause to consider it: we are born into a continuum.

We proceed from those before us, the narrativity of our lives fitting within a known context. Even in an unknown one, such as orphanhood, we understand we are part of something. To be an orphan is to lose your parents, not necessarily your entire identity.

Unless we predecease our parents, we all become orphans at some point in our lives.

In an article about the new TV series about the Mitford sisters, the journalist says: “How long must a bloodline endure the misdeeds of its forefathers?”

Oh, the privilege of an intact bloodline. Even the most problematic or dysfunctional biological family holds a place in the wider story of where we come from and where we choose to go. And that place is better than none.

Human adoption disrupts that sense of an unbroken line. It starts with physical severance and proceeds by creating a permanent legal fiction, something instinctively and intrinsically outside normal human experience.

When we attempt to articulate that experience, we begin to understand that the family stories told to us are not our own, and it is as though we ourselves are fictional. Estranged from ourselves, many of us suffer from a kind of genealogical bewilderment.

Belonging signifies a kind of permission, an initial direction, a way forward. Even if you take a side road along the way, it’s the starting point that matters.

Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an oil heiress, once said of her inheritance:

“We are born into traditions, and it becomes our task to keep making sense of the world through those traditions, improving them as we go” [2].

But how can we, the adopted, improve or expand traditions that don’t belong to us? How do we reconcile a legal ancestry that is false in every other way?

When we search for our biological family, through government agencies, DNA tests, or fragile paper trails, we’re not just after names and records.

We’re chasing affirmation as we try to unravel our mystery. We want permission to imagine other versions of who we might have been, and to grow into the adults we were meant to become.

We reach for a palimpsest, an archive of history. Something to saturate the blank slate of legal anonymity imposed on us.

The blank slate child is a seventeenth-century idea, with its modern expression evident in 20th and 21st-century stranger adoption.

In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), English philosopher John Locke explored the idea that there are no innate principles, newborn sapience or intuitiveness.

Locke famously said that the mind is like a blank slate (tabula rasa) and has ideas only by experience.

This debunked theory of the blank mind of the infant is still active in our adoption legislation.

By extension, the theory posits that, with diligence and love, the adopter can transform the acquired child into a facsimile of the one they might have had.

But if newborns are blank slates, are all babies interchangeable? If so, does it matter which child a mother takes home from the hospital? And why is “switched at birth’ such an enduring headline?

Some time ago, a child showed me their school project on stick insects.

“They spend their life blending into leaves and bark,” she said. “Like camouflage.”

We were looking closely at a tree trunk, trying to find one as she described how they hide in plain sight.

“They sway, so they look like a twig moving in the wind. When they are scared, they jettison their limbs to blend in.”

I liked how she paused on the word "jettison."

I know this feeling—the way adopted people are required to blend into a family that offers no reflection back, no shared features or familiar echoes. A life lived without a mirror.

I jettisoned myself early and often and learned the art of imitation as a way to survive.

My deep fake life-course was so altered that I appeared, even to myself, to be someone else.

Image ‘Drive In’ (12x36") courtesy of the Canadian photographer, Trig Singer. Please message me for purchase details.

John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, first published 1690, full essay available on https://historyofeconomicthought.mcmaster.ca/locke/Essay.htm