’Tis the Season for Diagnoses

Around this time last year I got an autism diagnosis. Unexpected, unwanted, unwelcome. Eventually it all made sense though and I started to learn how the things I’d thought were “wrong” with me were simply neurodivergent, and that I could even undo some of them. 2021 became a year of discovery. It was also the year of texting with my biological half sister, the only member of my family of origin willing to talk to me. Neither sisters nor strangers, we had to define our relationship as we went along. I’d like to say we settled on being friends, but that would deny her bonds with our mother and our other siblings (two more sisters and a brother), bonds I do not have. It is difficult to remain authentic across the unspoken chasm of my banishment. I don’t mean my adoption, I mean the subsequent rejections, the last of which happened a mere two weeks ago.

My sister and I could stick to sending funny and encouraging memes to and fro in perpetuity if it weren’t for my autistic disinterest in superficiality. Instead, an exchange of recent photographs of our mother led to my yearning for recognition and need to complete my history becoming so overwhelming that I decided to risk heartbreak once again. I suspect the latest refusal came more from our other sister than it did from our mother, but the result is the same. I remain persona non grata with my birth family, punished for my need to know and sentenced to lifelong exile from the truth. This is the worst place for an autistic adoptee to live. My sense of justice and need for truth are so strong they border on the pathological. It is common for autistic people to fight injustice and advocate for truth on a societal level (think Greta Thunberg). Imagine how deeply I feel being denied my own history as a human being.

Psychotherapist and adoptee Karen Caffrey writes:

I very roughly divide people into two camps: the “let sleeping dogs lie” folks and the “truth will set you free” folks. Generally, people gravitate towards one or the other camp depending on whether their life experiences have taught them that secrets are helpful or harmful. If you believe secrets have protected you, you will tend toward the “let sleeping dogs lie” camp. If secrets have hurt you, you’ll be wearing a “truth will set you free” T-shirt.

My birth mother and I belong to these opposite sides. She dealt with the events surrounding my adoption in the fashion of the time (1968) and place (conservative, Christian, small-town South Africa) of my birth, which was not to deal with them at all. We used to have contact, which she severed after sharing the truth of my conception. Our decade-long correspondence up to that point of truth-telling had been built on a lie. I was shocked at first and eventually overjoyed when the truth came out. I had the benefit of ongoing psychotherapy, which values truth and authenticity in emotional healing. The truth will set you (psychologically) free. I thought we could heal together, my mother and I, and for a while, when she told the truth, it looked like we would. Then she suddenly severed contact. In the decades that followed I tried again, and again, and again, with long stretches of silence between attempts.

“Why this accursed need?”, I asked myself after the latest disappointment. Everybody seems to be telling me some version of the following:

“Your adopted parents loved you more than anything. Build on that.”

“It is time to accept what you cannot change.”

“Your birth mother did what she thought was best for you and she has left that chapter of her life behind her.”

“Forgive and rest in the fact that you had a loving childhood.”

“You’re an adult now. You should be able to deal with it by now.”

“Stop fretting about your needs.”

“Forget about it. Remember the good.”

“Why don’t you just believe that your life started the day you were adopted?”

This last clunker, astonishingly, fell from the mouth of a Christian psychologist, a person who would, in another context, contend most fiercely that life started at conception.

So I did what most autistics do when they don’t understand: I started to study this wretched need to know that makes other people so uncomfortable. And for the first time I came across the contention that adoption is inherently damaging, intrinsically traumatic even if you were adopted at birth. My therapist had told me that I could have experienced an absence. I did not realise how far-reaching this void could be. A fetus can process rejection in the womb [citations to follow; I’m sifting through several days’ worth of reading] as well as stress from the raised cortisol levels of the mother. This was undoubtedly the case with my mother and I. She was hidden away in a home for unwed mothers far from her hometown and would have not only failed to bond with the unwanted inside her; she would have actively hated its inhabitancy. This is why I advocate for abortion on demand: no human being should be forced, whether by law or by religion, to gestate something they find abhorrent. It is inhumane and if the trauma remained unattended in the mother’s life more rejection is almost inevitable for the adoptee should they search for a reunion. At birth I was whisked away to protect my mother from the sight of me — I know this because she told me — then spent about ten days in the hospital with, I surmise, insufficient full-on skin contact by today’s standards.

My adopted mother is the only mother I have known. She was the only person to cater to my whims and needs, without even knowing of my autism (there was no such thing in small-town South Africa in the 1970s). I cannot emphasise enough that nothing I say should be received as criticism of her, nor of my birth mother. My adopted mother’s dad had died six months before my arrival. She was also an alcoholic who abused narcotics and prescription medicine to relieve her psychic pain. In retrospect this makes me love her even more: because she realised her own frailties she was able to comfort others, her strange little girl included. She was soft, and warm, and accommodating, and she always had my back. But, and this is a big but, she was absent at times. Physically when she spent time in mental hospitals (one of my earliest memories is of my mother’s hands tied to the sides of a steel hospital bed to subdue her) and emotionally when she lay in her darkened bedroom with yet another migraine and I had to tip-toe on the old farmhouse floorboards past the closed door.

It’s not difficult to see the absence was never filled. (This is NOT the time to suggest Jesus. Neither is any other time.) It’s a miracle I’m not an addict today. I may not abuse substances, but I do not feel like I deserve to live. Author Betty Jean Lifton, quoted by writer and adoptee Elle Cuardaigh, said adoptees often feel like they were never born, only adopted.

It was why I hated my birthday. It was why I could not imagine having children. It was why I felt expendable. Because I had not really been born, only adopted. When you are not part of a chain, it is so easy to just float away.

Society in general and my natural mother in particular seem to want to erase my birth. The overwhelming majority of people close to me buy wholesale into the fairytale adoption myth. They don’t want to hear it has a dark side. My adopted family want the fourteen years I had with my mother to be enough. It wasn’t. When she died of kidney failure caused by years of Mainstay and handfulls of pills I, too, was no more.

I started to re-inhabit myself only when I was lucky enough to find therapy. We put me back together over the course of a decade. I feel most grounded and authentic when I am in touch with the few memories of my adopted mother that I am able to stretch across 38 years. They’re wearing thin. Sometimes I fail to mother myself. Mostly I just don’t want to live. I continue to exist, but I don’t actively want to. Oh, I feel joy, and love, and wonder, even fulfilment; I live with the man of my dreams in a private paradise, in gratitude every day. But if you told me tomorrow I could check out quietly and painlessly, like slipping into another room, I probably would. I attend to my own mental health, take my antidepressants, see the necessary healthcare providers, etc. without loving life.

I am not emotionally illiterate. I do not expect a meeting with my birth mother to undo all of the above. Only I can grow me, if that makes sense, and I have not been a slacker in the self-development department. I take responsibility for my own wellbeing. I have worked hard to eliminate shame from my being and I have succeeded. I am not looking to her to heal me; she barely has the resources to heal herself. Still, I want her to see me. It would not fix everything, but it would help. I don’t ask for mothering or even to be part of her life. I only want to experience my mother’s gaze. The gaze we were both denied at my birth. I want her to look at me without turning away.

The latest refusal of contact, delivered via my sisters, broke something in me. The unused hunting rifle my partner keeps in our bedroom started to seem seductive. We grew even closer with my outpouring and he supported me beautifully, bringing a renewed tenderness and intimacy between us. Shortly after, I went for a mammogram in a neighbouring town. I was not worried about the painful lump in my chest as my gynaecologist had said it was a cyst and I had read that cancer is rarely sore. We were both wrong. This time, my end-of-year diagnosis was hormone-receptive breast cancer. I would be lying if I said a part of me is not rejoicing. Finally I have something that belongs to me only, that lives inside me and will, eventually, take me with it. A part of me doesn’t even want the tumour removed. It’s mine, don’t you dare take it out! At the very least I have no fear of dying. Alas, I am not a complete idiot. Right now I await a surgery date. After that I’ll make a decision whether to continue with treatment. It is, finally, my choice and mine alone.

Because really, it’s so easy to die when you were never born.