My Adoptee Story (The Adult Remix)
As a child, I repeated my mother’s words: “My real mom is the one who raised me.” The first nine years of my life, my little body knew that submissiveness was key to my survival. So, I played along. But the series of events afterwards spiraled fast and, to be honest, I can never quite tell if I’m overly sensitive or if these events were actually as catastrophic as they felt. In therapy over the past five years, I’ve learned that feelings are valid so I’ll just say that everything hurt (and the pain escalated) from the time I was nine years old forward and, to me, it was excruciating.
At the time of those events, however, I had no words and so, there grew a rift between the parts of myself, inside and outside, which even to this day, argue profusely with each other. But I realized a few years ago that I needed to name these opposing parts of myself in order to better understand them. Naming something, after all, gives you power over the thing. One part of myself, the outside, is called Mask. The other one, the inside, is called Truth.
Truth is a nasty subject in terms of adoption rhetoric and language choices, right up there with “real family.” Tony Corsentino, in his piece, “Fourteen Propositions About Adoption,” has contended that adoptees alone have “the freedom, and the burden, of deciding whom to call family.” But I have never gotten the impression that anything related to my adoption or my idea of it was my choice.
The opposite, actually. My parents told their side of the story, they chose what details to leave out, the language they would uphold, the language they would shame. They were the ones lying and keeping secrets. How can there be Truth in a family like that?
I had their lies, I had stolen documents and sparse letters. But of the three parents I had, none of them helped me gain a new perspective about myself. That would be up to me alone. The truths I was handed down were full of shame, all sides, and none of them were whole truths. Of course, I didn’t understand any of this about myself or my family until about five years ago.
It was when I got divorced that the ball of yarn began to unravel. Divorce was a visceral reminder of losing a family before that scared me awake. The difference between my adoption and my divorce is that when I got divorced, I was an adult who could consciously experience the pain and make choices around how I dealt with it (and they weren’t always the best choices, but you know, they were mine) whereas when I was a baby, I had no words and no way to consent to the decisions that played out around me. But both of them hurt.
My therapist at the time helped me trail my life backwards from the divorce until all that was left was the event of my birth, staring me in the face. It wasn’t a sudden crash, though, more like a really uncomfortable reminder that adoption played a huge role in who I was because deep down, I knew.
I knew my anger was justified, I knew I was lacking truth. The problem was getting to a point where I valued myself enough to realize that I deserved things. “We accept the love we think we deserve,” right? I deserve things that were taken or hidden from me, but I had to feel deserving of those things first. I went with a fake it til ya make it mindset because, as my therapist said, I deserve love. Because all humans deserve love. And so, the growth of my Truth began as I began interrogating and digging. As it did, my self-worth grew along with it.
Here’s a bullet point list of events in the order that they happened after this realization because I don’t want to write a cohesive narrative series of paragraphs at the moment, but I do want to catch you up on the emotional roller coaster I’ve been on for the past five years:
May 2017 - I officially got divorced and presented a fiery divorce project in one of my undergraduate classes in which I compared mainstream rhetoric of divorce from the current day (with my own decree!) and the long eighteenth century, the days of our feminist mothers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton (one of my heroes!)
June 2017 - I composed a poetry project in which I got my creative writing voice back. Sad realization: I can write sad shit REALLY WELL.
Fall 2017 - I took a World Literature class where my professor encouraged me to be more creative & I met a creative writing buddy who took me to a writing group. This writing group saw the first very sci-fi version of Rose’s Locket and also suffered through a lot of very depressing stories I had to get out of my system.
Spring 2018 - As a journalist for the student newspaper, The Lasso, I was asked to cover and promote the library’s first hosting of the Human Library. In my excitement for the event, I volunteered as a Human Book to tell my story of adoption (mostly as a parlor trick, but it was a step in the right direction)
Fall 2018 - I was asked by the same professor who witnessed the divorce project to assist him with a project concerning Edna Gladney (who you’ll be familiar with as being the namesake for the Gladney Center for Adoption). I felt as though I’d been given permission to study myself (plus the legal and archival research was super fun because I am a giant nerd).
December 2018 - I graduated with a BA in English literature, minor in Global Studies
Spring 2019 - I began my research assistantship on Gladney and began my MA degree. I took a narrative class where I focused on attempting to write coherently on my adoption experiences. It was the first time I actively attempted to write my own counter narrative to what I’d grown up hearing from my parents. Big moment for me, but a lot of sad and bad writing that my professor had to dig through.
Summer 2019 - Interned at a FinTech company, snagged a big-girl job with health insurance, WOW
December 2019 - Eric Koester reached out to me on LinkedIn and successfully roped me into his Creator Institute program to write my book. Which book, you ask? Some idea I had written about 12,000 words so far about an adoptee girl like me, structurally based on Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated novel. Read it.
February 2020 - Bought a house, YEAH!
The pandemic? Yep, just went straight to work writing a novel and did my best to survive like everyone else. It was not pretty.
December 2020 - Published Rose’s Locket <3
April 2021 - Wrote an Op-Ed that appeared in the Austin American-Statesman about HB1386 and Texan adoptees’ rights to their original birth certificates which subsequently led me to meet all the right people including folks at Adoption Knowledge Affiliates
July 2021 - Legally changed my name to reclaim my birth name (Rose) and trade my married name back for my adoptive family’s surname (Quist)
Summer 2021 - Reunited with my biological aunt via Facebook, she’s now one of my absolute favorite humans.
Fall 2021 - Began writing my Master’s thesis. I also presented at my first adoption-related conference hosted by AKA and made some very important and lovely friends (I’ll introduce you very soon!)
May 2022 - Now-ish (though I’m posting this later). I have walked the stage and completed all tasks for my Master’s degree in English rhetoric & writing, the thesis track.
To be honest, it takes a lot of emotional energy to write and so it happens that I fall mute after an exceptionally difficult project, like here lately. I hope you’ll excuse me for the above bulleted list. As you can see, I have been very busy. And as a result of all this labor—emotional, legal, creative, public, academic—I am more dedicated than ever to sharing my perspective in hopes that it helps move the conversation about adoption along. Most importantly, I have decided that I will no longer employ Mask which will leave me free to embrace Truth.
