Mind Moves: Relationships are complex. Family relationships are particularly so. The relationships between adopted children and adoptive parents carry extra emotional dimensions that require particular understanding, sensitivity and psychological accommodation.
This is because along the convoluted continuum of kinship, assorted family configurations and diverse affectionate affiliations, adoption has held a special and evolving place in family compositions; a place that at times has been poorly understood, misconstrued and insufficiently supported.
Adopters, adoptees and birth parents are intimately linked in a unique triadic relationship chain. When legal adoption was initiated in Ireland in the 1950s, when secrecy and subterfuge prevailed, this chain contained misplaced links and corrosive disconnections that did a disservice to all parties. Sad that it should have been so when the intent was benevolent: a means of meeting the needs of couples to parent, of children to be parented and of birth mothers to ensure stable socially acceptable parenting for their particular child.
The start of legal adoption coincided with a time of societal silence, with regard to sexuality and infertility, in addition to the stigma and scandal surrounding non-marital birth. This meant that the "choice" of adoption was too often an imposition rather than an option and that family fears, psychological coercion and societal sanction helped shape these events.
This enforced a shameful silence on all, isolating each participant in their inevitable curiosity and in their worst imaginings. It often denied adopters information that would have reassured them and prepared them more for their parenting role. At a time academically when genetic and nature/nurture cautions predominated, adoptees' childish misdemeanours or adolescent challenges were sometimes misconstrued as more ominous signs of unfortunate genetic unfolding.
Additionally, this was an era with less insight into the significance of the intrauterine environment, the perinatal climate, the realities of ruptures of attachment in infancy, of the psychological development of the child, of adolescent identity issues, of family dynamics and of the impact of peer and cultural contexts. This meant that many adoptive parents blamed themselves for what were normative child and adolescent struggles overlaid with the average anxieties and questions of any adoptive child.
The early ethos of adoption also severed and surrounded in secrecy the past of the adoptee, condemning many children who inadvertently discovered their parentage, to believe that they had been carelessly abandoned, rejected, tainted and contained defective traits that made them dangerous or unlovable.
For some, adoption implied that they were second choice for those who would have preferred to have had their "own" children if they could have done so. It suggested secondary citizenship when they discovered the meaning of "illegitimate" or when subjected to cruel adjectives describing their status.
Most of all it denied them the dignity of their entitlement to their personal past, to their family medical history and their right to know who they were, from whom they came, in what circumstances and by whom and why the decision that they be adopted was taken.
Secrecy, the source of more pathology than most stories it conceals, prohibited many adoptees from asking questions of their adoptive parents, lest that would imply rejection of their rescuers. Imagination, the substitute for information, often constructed stories of epic nature or grandiose generosity to account for their adoption. This made the routine reality more difficult for those who would later manage to track down birth parents ill-prepared for the sudden appearance of an adult child last seen in the throes of a terrible time in their lives.
Adoption in the distant past also condemned birth mothers to ignorance of the outcome of their decision. For some this fed their worst imaginings, for others it allowed their fervent hopes that their child had received a better life than they could have provided. For many it ensured a life of guilt and grief.
Many birth mothers feared their child would not understand with what sacrificial love they relinquished them. Many annually remembered their child's birthday, wondering what their child might look like, with what colour hair, what happiness in their hearts and whether they would also think of them with love or anger, sadness, yearning, indifference or rejection.
The past was sad. Its stories have overshadowed the stories of success; the stories of many childless couples gifted with children, children lovingly embraced in families and many birth mothers who selflessly made their best decision for their child and for themselves.
The new National Adoption Contact Preference Register, which facilitates contact between adopted people and their natural families who mutually register their desire for such contact, addresses past silence and reassures future participants in adoption. The intensity, integrity and special affinity between children and their adoptive parents within new societal and psychological parameters of adoption will be the subject of next week's article.
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital Fairview, Dublin