My experience being a child of an adoptee

Origins

I grew up knowing next to nothing about where I came from.

My mom found her biological parents when I was in about 4th grade, so she was about 26-27. She seemed to care more about her medical background than her cultural one. She was raised white, and that’s the identity she chose to keep.

But I was a kid who asked a LOT of questions — especially for school assignments like family trees or World Cultures Day came around.

I latched onto the idea of ancestry and cultural identity not just because of curiosity, but because I was being abused and had this gnawing feeling that maybe — just maybe — I wasn’t supposed to be there.

That maybe if my mom had given me up, someone else — anyone else — might’ve raised me with more care. She kept me — not out of love — but because she didn’t want to face the judgment or shame of her adoptive family and didn’t want anyone else to have me.

My mom kept me as an act of control and possession. I was not a person to her.

And because of that, I grew up feeling like I didn’t belong to any culture at all.

I was raised in whiteness — not just demographically, but ideologically. There were rules — unspoken and spoken — about who was acceptable and who wasn’t.

My mom’s adoptive family gushed about my pale skin when I was unhealthy. They hated when I got a little color from the sun or, you know, ate enough to have normal skin tone.

They romanticized my poor health because it made me look more “white”. They told me it was beautiful. I told them it was disturbing; they didn’t understand.

I was never allowed to simply be a person figuring things out. Everything I liked, did or associated with was questioned if it wasn’t white enough or mature enough or neurotypical enough.

In 9th grade, I did a Spanish project with three of my Black classmates — girls who were my friends! My stepdad pulled me aside to say,

“What will your classmates think of you when they see you in a video with them?”

Like I was tainting myself by being seen with them. Then the project video mysteriously got “accidentally recorded over”. I’m still convinced he sabotaged it on purpose. My mother was excellent at record-keeping and never filmed over other video because she was too scared of losing a Kodak moment.

He would accuse me of “acting Black”, yet never explained what he meant. My aunt — my mom’s adoptive sister, also adopted — called rap “Black people music” and asked why I listed to “Korean people music”.

The only culture I was allowed to appreciate was Mexican, and only because my mom’s adoptive mother had married a Mexican man.

Once they divorced, everyone went right back to pretending whiteness was the only valid identity. Even though he wasn’t involved much, the loss of that connection still affected me. It was the only time I was allowed to explore something outside of white culture — even if it was performative and conditional.

I’ve spent most of my life feeling like I’m not allowed to claim anything. Not white, not anything else. And when I tried to explore my background or ask questions, I was dismissed. I was given the adoptive family’s twisted history.

Being a child of an adoptee means carrying questions no one wants to answer. It means inheriting secrets, silence and shame. It means watching your own identity be erased before you ever had a chance to know it.

And if you dare to go looking for it, you’re treated like you’re betraying the same people who refused to protect it in the first place.

I don’t accept that anymore.

I don’t accept the whitewashed version of my story they force-fed me. I don’t accept the idea that culture only matters when it makes them feel good.

I don’t accept that my curiosity is dangerous. It’s mine. It’s the way I reclaim who I am — even if it’s messy, complicated or unclear.

Autism

Growing up surrounded by non-autistic people was isolating.

I was an outsider in a family that treated me like the problem when I was really the scapegoat.

Being the only autistic person in an adoptive family where none of them shared my neurotype or seemed willing to understand it prevented me from connecting with them.

Instead of adapting to me with compassion, they pathologized everything that made me different. I grew up feeling like my natural way of being was broken, wrong and an inconvenience.

They refused to look at me with open eyes. They saw me for what I wasn’t, in comparison to them and how they expected me to be based on how they were.

I experienced a lot of abuse at their hands and lips because of my neurological differences that cannot ever be undone or unsaid.

What were a few moments in their lives were patterns throughout my entire childhood that shaped how and who I grew up to be. It shaped everything. It did matter.

‘Tis what ’tis

This is what being a child of an adoptee means to me. My mother found out where she came from and decided that was for her.

I don’t feel like I’m part of either one of her families — neither the adoptive one nor the biological one.

Honestly, I feel as though members of my family have always viewed me through this lens of who they thought I could be, rather than who I was or wanted to be. There have always been expectations that felt impossible to live up to, imposed on me before I had a chance to decide for myself what to do.

Sharing what I wanted to do when I grew up was repeatedly met with “that’s not realistic” or “I’d rather you do something more stable” or “you can’t have a good life as a dancer”.

I stopped sharing, so they assumed I didn’t have any goals.

I stopped trying to please them, so they called me unappreciative.

I stopped letting them control me, so they called me ungrateful and disrespectful.

My mom would’ve aborted me if she was not afraid of the shame from her family of doing so. I should have been aborted.

I’m not saying that because I’m depressed. Rather, I’m objectively acknowledging that my mother chose to have me and raise me in the same-ish life she had, regardless of my well-being, as if the bare minimum was all it took to be a parent.

No child should ever be born to parents who had sex and were left to deal with the consequence of a child, even if they gaslight themselves into perceiving that child as a “blessing”. I was not a “blessing” to loving families.

I was a consequence to teenage parents raised by equally abusive families, and raised up around narcissism and the gratitude trap.

I’m the child of an adoptee.

I wish I’d also been adopted, because it couldn’t have been worse than the childhood abuse and neglect I endured with my biological and upbrought family under the guise of “love”.

I’ll always have my daydreams.

Being in my mid-30s and estranged from my family, I miss the parents and family I’ve never had. I may always long for parents and a family I’ve never had. I’m way beyond the adoptable age.

This isn’t anything I can change. I’m not moping about over it, either. My life is as it is.

I’m a child of an adoptee, but I’ve also felt like I was the adoptee.

I used to feel alone…then I found similar experiences on Facebook and Reddit. ‘Tis bittersweet, but it helps to know I’m not the only one.