Monday Notes: How Being an Adoptee Taught Me to Lie

November is National Adoption Awareness Month, so I’d thought I would kill two birds with one stone today: discuss adoption and answer a common question I’ve received after people have read Salve. After reading my memoir, Grandma Hunny said, “You’ve lived two lives when most people don’t even live one!” Similar to my grandmother, many people have asked me how I was able to live a so-called double life. At first, I didn’t have an answer. I just thought I possessed a natural ability, like curling your tongue. It wasn’t until I was immersed in the adoption community and adoption literature, that I realized lying was something I’d developed as an adoptee. Here’s what I know I learned:

LESSON #1: Lying about your life is okay.

I learned lying was okay when I was ten years old. I remember it like it was yesterday. I had just discovered that I was adopted, that I had been raised by strangers and wasn’t biologically related to anyone around me. I had been lied to for several years, and what’s worse, everyone was in on the charade. I remember wanting to express sadness for learning these details. I wondered where my birth mother was, and I wanted to understand my origin story. But being strong was a virtue in this family, so my adoptive mother didn’t allow for any emotion other than gratitude. I was encouraged to “get over” these life-changing events and move forward with life. Here is where I learned that lying must be an acceptable and normal way to live. My adoptive family told and showed me this lie was no big deal. Subsequently, I not only perceived lying about adoption as okay, but I also began to lie to myself about who I was and how I felt about it.

LESSON #2: Disassociating is a necessary lie.

Nancy Newton Verrier is a scholar who wrote a seminal book called The Primal Wound. In this book, she explains how unnatural it is for a baby to be separated from her mother. She says this separation creates an adoptee’s first pain, or primal wound. Subsequently, Autumn Sansom produced a documentary based on Verrier’s book called Reckoning with the Primal Wound. This documentary summarizes the primal wound concept and describes how common it is for adoptees to disassociate due to this unnatural occurrence. According to Sansom’s documentary, disassociation is a shared trait because many of us are implicitly or explicitly asked to pretend the family we are being raised with is, indeed, our natural family. To be clear, disassociation requires disconnecting from one’s body and feelings; it requires living in an alternate reality. As an adoptee, to disassociate, one must lie to oneself over and over again, until the lie becomes a natural state of being. In a way, I learned that disassociation was normal, too, and I began to use it in my young adult and adult life as a way to cope with discomfort.

LESSON #3: Lying to fit in is fine.

In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown says, “authenticity is a requirement for belonging” and “connection” (p. 172). Brown makes a really big deal about how important a sense of belonging is for human connection. Another characteristic that adoptees share is a lack of a sense of belonging. I’ve repeatedly said I never felt as if I belonged in my adoptive family. Growing up, I tried hard to, though: I mimicked laughing at the right jokes; I learned to be just the right amount of sarcastic; and I tried to become as stoic as everyone else when it came to emotional experiences. But it never felt quite right. Now, I know why. Brown says, “When we work to fit in and be accepted, our “belonging” is tenuous” (p. 158). Furthermore, Brown’s research shows that people equate a sense of belonging as a matter of life-or-death. Now, imagine being adopted. If a non-adoptee thinks not belonging is like dying, then how might an adoptee feel? In my case, I suspected my adoptive family was the only group of people I could count on. If I lost them, then I had no one. I became proficient at lying, so I could belong. But as Brown noted, attempts at fitting in don’t work if you’re trying to belong. They only create illusions of belonging.

Oof.

I don’t want to inundate you with information, so I’ll stop here. Next week, I’ll share how I’ve unlearned these lessons, so I could be a more authentic version of myself. Until then, let me know what you think in the comments. And if you know an adoptee, give them a hug.

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