*Article* **Class, Shame, and Identity in Memoirs about Difficult Same-Race Adoptions by Jeremy Harding and Lori Jakiela**

#### **Marianne Novy**

Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA; mnovy@pitt.edu

Received: 25 June 2018; Accepted: 31 July 2018; Published: 6 August 2018

**Abstract:** This paper will discuss two search memoirs with widely divergent results by British Jeremy Harding and American Lori Jakiela, in which the memoirists recount discoveries about their adoptive parents, as well as their birth parents. While in both cases the adoptions are same-race, both provide material for analysis of class and class mobility. Both searchers discover that the adoption, in more blatant ways than usual, was aimed at improving the parents' lives—impressing a rich relative or distracting from the trauma of past sexual abuse—rather than benefiting the adoptee. They also discover the importance of various kinds of shame: for example, Harding discovers that his adoptive mother hid the close connection that she had had with his birthmother, because she was trying to rise in class. Jakiela imagines the humiliation her birthmother experienced as she tries to understand her resistance to reunion. Both memoirists recall much childhood conflict with their adoptive parents but speculate about how much of their personalities come from their influence. Both narrate changes in their attitudes about their adoption; neither one settles for a simple choice of either adoptive or birth identity. Contrasts in their memoirs relate especially to gender, nation, class, and attitudes to fictions.

**Keywords:** adoption; search memoir; identity; adoptive parents; class; shame; secrecy; birthmother; orphanage; Irishness; immigration; Jeremy Harding; Lori Jakiela

#### **1. Introduction**

British and American TV shows regularly ask, "Who Do You Think You Are?" and answer in terms of heredity. On Facebook and in marches, adoptee rights activists sometimes protest that the sealed records in most of the United States (US) deny adoptees the right to know their own identity. However, memoirs in which adoptees seek and contact a birthparent often do not show this contact, important as it is, of itself giving an answer to identity questions (Novy 2012). Two recent search memoirs, indeed, complicate the story further by intercalating and at times foregrounding a quest to understand their authors' now dead adoptive parents and those parents' influence.

Jeremy Harding writes in his memoir *Mother Country*, "It is one of the axioms of adoption that when you go looking for people you don't know, you begin to discover the people you imagined you knew" (2010, p. 42). This may be an axiom, but it is rarely documented as thoroughly as does Harding. And in Lori Jakiela's memoir *Belief is its own Kind of Truth, Maybe* (Jakiela 2015), a discovery about her adoptive father's childhood experience and how it may have motivated her adoption is climactically placed, and the memoir, even more than Harding's, is full of speculations about which of her qualities come from nature and which from nurture. These two search memoirs, one by a London-born man who lives in France and one by a woman born and living near Pittsburgh, both professional writers well-known in their respective worlds, also portray and analyze strained relationships with less educated adoptive parents. Harding's previous books include *The Fate of Africa* (Harding 1993) and *The Uninvited: Refugees at the Rich Man's Gate* (Harding 2000), which won the Martha Gellhorn award for journalism in 2002. Jakiela wrote previous memoirs, *Miss New York Has Everything* (Jakiela 2006)

and *The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious* (Jakiela 2013). She won the City of Asylum Pittsburgh Prize in 2015, and that year, *Belief* won the William Saroyan International Prize. The outcomes of their birth family searches are strikingly different. But both of them reject for themselves the idea of finding identity in birth origin alone.

While in both cases the adoptions are same-race, and thus the adoptees do not have to deal with racism directed at them, both provide material for analysis of class and class mobility, exploring what has been called "the identity politics of ... class" (Hipchen and Deans 2003, pp. 168–69). Both searchers discover that the adoption, in a more focused way than usual, was aimed at improving the parents' lives—impressing a rich relative or, at least in part, distracting from trauma. They also find the importance of various kinds of shame: Harding learns that his adoptive mother broke off the close connection that she had had with his birthmother1, because she was trying to rise in class. Jakiela imagines the humiliation her birthmother experienced as she tries to understand her resistance to reunion. She also discovers her adoptive father's early sexual trauma and how this shaped his personality. Perhaps surprisingly, the British birthmother is much less injured by her past than the American one. Both writers, however, conjure images of their adoptive parents at their best as they find narrative closure.

Both Harding and Jakiela make careful and emphatic choices about adoption language. Jakiela, from a working-class background, where "real mother" is a term often used by contrast to "adopted mother" (for example, by a policeman, p. 124), opens her memoir by writing, "When my real mother dies, I go looking for another one. The Catholic Charities counselor's word for this other mother I want after decades to find is biological" (2015, p. 13). Soon after, she refers to "My mother, the mother who raised me" and says that "biological" makes her think of "warfare". (14) The phrase "the mother who raised me" continues until p. 95 and resurfaces once at the end. The other one is almost always "birth mother"—"birthmother" in the Catholic Charities reports she quotes and builds on later. (In the fictional improvisation on them, she becomes Marie). Harding, by contrast, rejects the term "birth-mother" (2010, p. xxii). He says he "wouldn't really want to say 'my mother' about either, even though I do" (2010, p. 5). Sometimes he calls them "Mother One" and "Mother Two", but most often, they are Margaret and Maureen, respectively. Otherwise, he uses "natural mother." Many adoption professionals have discarded that term because they think it implies that adoption is unnatural (American Academy of Pediatrics Council on Foster Care, Adoption and Kinship Care 2014). For the more intellectual Harding, the opposite of "natural" is "cultural", and he writes, "Adoption is one of the modest triumphs of human culture" (2010, p. xvii). However, he breaks down this opposition by continuing, "Another . . . is the fact that a mother may feel something like love for her biological children throughout her life, whether they are insistently present or torn away from her by circumstance at an early stage." Retrospectively, Margaret comes to exemplify this; close to the end, she becomes "my first mother, also my last" (p. 177), while Jakiela's birthmother does not.

#### **2. Ancestry Search Stories**

The ancestry search story in *Mother Country* begins with Harding contemplating his original birth certificate, which lists Margaret Walsh as his mother, with an adoption counselor. He is in his fifties, his adoptive mother, Maureen, is in the throes of dementia, his adoptive father, Colin, is dead; so, he assumes, is Margaret. He explores the addresses listed on the certificate and begins the adoptive family search as well, interviewing Colin's sister Rosemary and old friend Boris, who tells him that Colin was able to get family money after he produced a child. Harding goes to the Family Records Center to find marriage and birth records and then to the Kensington Public Library for voting records. He looks for neighboring houses and sees the name Privett, mentioned by Rosemary as someone who

<sup>1</sup> Outside direct quotations, I will use "birthmother", which reform activist Mary Anne Cohen (Cohen 2010), says was popularized as one word by Lee Campbell in 1976 when CUB [Concerned United Birthparents] was founded.

had been an intermediary in the adoption. He visits Peter Privett and discovers that Peter's now dead wife, Lillian, had once been a close friend of Maureen, but had totally broken with her after adopting a little boy, who was Harding himself. This break was motivated partly by the desire to keep the adoption a secret from the aunt who would provide money and partly by Colin's desire to solidify Maureen's rise in class by removing her from her previous working-class friends. He sees a friend of the Privetts' who knew Maureen and wonders if this man is his father. He hires a professional tracer and starts calling people living near or perhaps related to some of the many Margaret Walshes he finds in the records. Eventually one calls back and identifies herself as his cousin and Margaret as a lively seventy-year old. The three meet for a very long lunch and talk, so successfully that near the end Margaret says, "We were all nervous ... and now we're none of us nervous" (p. 177). The relationships are clearly to be continued. Other adoption memoirs show that such a meeting is the beginning of another story. It is not always a happy one, but a post-book interview suggests that his has been (Novy 2012; Kellaway 2006).

Jakiela's birth family connection story begins in a Catholic Charities office with a counselor interviewing her, first in person and then with a questionnaire with questions such as "What is your expected outcome?" (2015, p. 17). She returns home to find an e-mail saying, "I am your sister" (p. 29), but the timing is coincidental, and the e-mail is the result of gossip. The e-mails, from someone with the username Blonde4Eva, continue, and their semi-literacy dismays Jakiela. The counselor tells her not to answer. In a few days, she calls to say that the birthmother has refused any kind of contact and swore and screamed at her, as no one else ever has. About a week later, Jakiela finds many angry 3-a.m., and thereabouts, phone messages from her sister on her voicemail.

Some time later, she gets an e-mail from her brother. He has read her first memoir, which mentions her birth name and her birthmother's name, told to her long ago by her parents. He is more rational and welcoming, and they talk, first on the phone, then in person, and then with spouses and the other sister. Not long after, she receives more angry social media messages from her birthmother, oddly beginning, "I will pray for you" (p. 215). She names the birthfather, hostilely calling him "the Jew". Hate-filled messages from her birthmother and the first birth sister continue, while her brother and her second sister warmly accept her as part of the family.

After the first contact with her brother, Jakiela places an imaginative reconstruction of the early pregnancy of her birthmother, whom she calls Marie, hiding out in her older sister's closet, humiliated by the family members who knew and by their priest. Then, she provides three other imagined narratives: one of Marie's father's violence, lack of love, and paranoia; a second of the appearance, deceptions, and smooth dancing of the man who got her pregnant; and a third of her time in the home for unwed mothers, mocked by a multitude of statues of the Virgin Mary, repelled by her new baby's clubfeet, which remind her of her father's leg injury. The reconstructions come in part from Jakiela's official record, in part perhaps from what her siblings have told her; they are her attempt to understand her birthmother's rejection of her as a reaction to shame and other suffering.

Jakiela continues to be obsessed by this rejection and the hostile messages, in the hope that the mood will change, and she will get at least a family medical history. Concern with them becomes as obsessive for her as is her usual concern for her children; she later identifies her mood as grieving. Looking for her birth mother's "buried softness" (p. 239), she examines the records again and finds it. In the last reconstruction, Marie returns to the orphanage about a year later, touches the child's belly, asks if the child seems happy, and asks twice if the child will have the necessary surgeries. Jakiela writes her a long e-mail, thanking her birthmother for a good life and saying that it was the right thing to give her up to a "woman who loved [her] and who [she] loved" (p. 247). The first response she receives is the most civilized that her birthmother has ever sent: "I've thought of you often. It's just too much after all these years. What's done is done". But the second one is that she wishes she had had an abortion. After this, Jakiela finally asks her husband to send a message to stop the e-mails, and they do stop. In the epilogue, she tells us that her relationship with her brother, and to a lesser

extent, with the sister she met with him, continues, and even Blonde4Eva sends her a non-hostile message that she has a new job and is happy.

The summaries I have given of the development of the birth family connections in these two memoirs leave out much of the books, for both are filled with vivid memories and thoughtful analyses of adoptive parents. Both memoirists are trying to make sense of the meanings of adoption and family, but Harding evokes more visually his family home and routines and London's various geographies, as well as the subtleties and large patterns of class relationships and Irish immigration history. Jakiela, by contrast, recounts more of the day-to-day vicissitudes of child-rearing and partial parallels to her life in the life of other adopted and/or working-class friends and family members.

#### **3. Class, Shame, Irishness, and Religion**

The genealogy search in *Mother Country* reveals a story of class scorn and class shame, while the narrative in *Belief* reveals two stories in which class disadvantage and shame and sexual shame are combined. Harding remembers Maureen's fascination with the musicals *Oliver* and *My Fair Lady*, and this takes on special meaning as he discovers that she grew up in working-class poverty, though marriage had raised her out of it and her first husband had even paid for her to have elocution lessons (p. 106). Colin, her second, "was fiercely opposed to any social arrangement that might keep disadvantaged people alive too long and put a burden on more fortunate families like ourselves" (p. 16). Hating working-class people in general and wanting to keep away from them as much as possible, he was the crucial force in barring her from her early friends. However, her memory of their friendship may have affected the sympathetic way she described his birthmother to young Harding—as a "little girl", he came to think of as "frail" (p. 55). Harding spells out the consequences of Colin's general exclusionary attitudes in spatial terms: they were "moat people" (p. 15); when they visited other parts of London, it was important to avoid public housing projects, which, even if well-built, Colin detested (p. 14). As memoirist, Harding gives almost without comment the monologue in which Colin's old friend Boris reveals the mercenary motive for the adoption, not intervening but letting the reader imagine his feelings, to which Boris is clearly insensitive. When he tries to get more information, asking about Mrs. Privett, who had been mentioned as a possible go-between, Boris is scornful and changes the subject to Colin's bridge game, and deflected feelings emerge: "I felt unusually, pathetically eager to defend my father and perhaps inflict pain on Boris's poodle" (p. 51). Maureen had continued to be friendly to working people and temporarily enjoyed becoming a flower seller (more connections with *My Fair Lady*), but Colin stopped this job and stopped such interactions as much as he could. A few moments after telling Maureen's former friend John about the end of the flower trade comes one of the few times in which Harding stops the narration of conversation and events to reveal his feelings directly: "I suddenly felt very blue about Maureen, sad about her life" (p. 107).

Though the economic and cultural deprivation of her birth family was worse, Jakiela's birthmother and her adoptive parents are all working-class people. Her parents were, as she writes, "too old to qualify for a healthy baby girl" (2015, p. 111) but were given her because she had two clubbed feet, which required many operations. Although she knows this now, they always presented the adoption to her as their choice and growing up she often felt good about it. They were open about it, telling her her original name and that of her birthmother, but there were times when suspicion of her origins emerged. When she used at the dinner table new words she had learned by secretly reading the dictionary, her mother would say, "I don't know where you came from" (p. 34). Later on, she says, "You probably get your smart mouth from *her*" (p. 119). Though she sometimes encouraged Jakiela's search for her birth family, wishing that children and adoptive families could be better matched in personality, at other times she was hostile to them, whether because of a sense of moral superiority to a presumably unwed mother or because of fearing competition for her daughter's love with another family or, indeed, the outside world. She would say, "I want what's mine to stay mine" (p. 35), and "She'll get ideas" was an ominous prediction to her. Many of these attitudes can be associated with

anxiety about a child leaving a class, ethnic, or religious group (Rubin 1976, p. 208; Kagan 2007, p. 146; Kelly and Kelly 1998, pp. 264–68).

The idea that Jakiela had inherited her interest in words is quickly deflated when e-mail contact with her birth family begins and her sister writes, "I all ways KNEW" (p. 31). One of their mother's hostile messages, showing ignorance of how strongly Jakiela feels about her working-class identity, says, "Your ancestors were hard working and proud individuals and you just beat that down" (p. 222). All she knows about Jakiela, besides her desire for contact, probably, is that Jakiela has published a book that reveals her name and therefore the history that she has been trying to keep secret. As with the other mother, it seems, it is partly the interest in words that marks Jakiela as different. Her new brother's e-mail is more articulate and formal than her sister's, but he has "a distinct working-class accent [she's] heard all her life and tried to escape" (p. 137), because so many of its Pittsburgh speakers have treated her badly. Fortunately, his voice is softer and "sounds like [her] father" (138). They can find a commonality in singing Irish songs, but he admits to envy at her growing up without "the deadbeat piano playing father, his mother, her troubles" (p. 183).

Jakiela draws on an environment not totally foreign to her, as well as on the Catholic Charities files and information from her brother, when she imagines the humiliation of the woman she calls Marie. Hit herself in childhood with a wooden spoon by her mother and a belt by her father (p. 102), she can easily imagine that Marie's more violent father "would beat the child out of her if he knew" and that "sometimes Marie becomes her father and beats her own head" (p. 145). Jakiela's father, a mill worker, mistrusted people in general and much preferred dogs (2006, pp. 34–36); she hypothesizes the same of Marie's father, a construction worker (2015, p. 152). Such conversion of class shame into depression and generalized anger is quite frequent (Turner 2014, p. 186; Kagan 2007, pp. 146–47). Perhaps Marie's father was especially bitter, because he had lost a leg, presumably in a work accident. Similarly, she writes of her father, "Because of the terrible things that happened to my father, he called people cockroaches" (2015, p. 234). She sees much of her birthmother's shame as coming from Catholic tradition, writing of "the Irish Catholic horror I was born into" (p. 80) and imagining the many images of the Virgin Mary in the Rosalia Foundling and Maternity Home as meant to say "You can pray to us for salvation because we are what you'll never be" (p. 173). She writes, "Marie grew up in the church with her parents and their parents and so on. She knew cruel" (p. 173). She thinks of the church-run Irish Magdalene homes, which exploited unwed mothers and mistreated many of their children (p. 45), when Blonde4Eva writes that her mother, an immigrant from Ireland was raised "Very proud Irish. Catholic" (p. 48). Jakiela still ambivalently identifies as Catholic, by contrast to her "born-again Christian" in-laws but writes of the "American Catholic [perhaps implied from the above phrase, horror] I was raised in and thought bad enough" (pp. 80–81), and remembers her pastor Father Ackerman's advice that parents should make their children grateful by using "their hands for beatings, so children would feel that physical connection" (p. 115).

The Irishness of the birthmothers is emphasized in both memoirs, though with the significant difference that for Harding, who does not interview anyone Irish until he hears from his cousin near the end of his search, it has no particular associations with religion, beating, or shame. But indeed there would have been contrasts in the experience of mid-century Irish immigrants to London and children of earlier Irish immigrants to the US. Since the 1930s, many more Irish people have immigrated to Britain, especially women to London, than to the US, and they probably felt less embattled (Travers 1995, pp. 149–50; Gray 2004, p. 107). Looking through various records for Margaret Walsh, Harding sees many Irish names and notes the areas of London where they are found. Their listed occupations give him a social history of the change from immigrants to "first-generation exiles" (p. 126), and he tries to envision the lives of those in the "tough immigrant drama". He finds "Irishness" attractive but more relevant to understanding Margaret than himself. Later, when his cousin Mary asks him about Irishness, he thinks of rooting for an Irish rugby player, Mick Doyle, Irish writers, and Irish songs (pp. 174–75). He learns that Margaret had been able to keep another son before she got married, so somehow she had become able to deal differently with social stigma. It may be partly a matter

of the fact that the meeting with Margaret and Mary occurs so late in the narrative, and few details of their lives actually appear, but in *Mother Country*, apart from the pressure to have him adopted, shame appears much more in his adoptive family than in what he would call his natural one. There are traumas in their world—giving up the baby was hard, Margaret did not want to talk to the social worker afterwards (p. 34), and the father is still not to be mentioned—but she has got beyond them.

The second story of sexual shame that occurs in *Belief* is one that Jakiela actually discovered not during her search for her birthmother, but more than five years earlier. She includes it in this book, close to the end, as part of the lead-in to her father's death; the revelation occurred about a month before, as if he wanted to make sure she knew while he could tell her. He tells the story as if he were a child (he was 9 or 10 at the time): "He touched my peepee" (p. 269). It was his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Whitey. Jakiela's mother had known about this for a long time, it turns out. Jakiela's father had a beautiful voice as a child and sang in the church choir. Whitey was in a band and so had an excuse to listen to his singing, alone. Afterwards, the boy cried for a long time. No one noticed. He told no one. He stopped singing. His submission to Whitey and his failure to tell may have resulted in part from the deference to authority emphasized by both Catholic and working-class cultures, obviously overlapping (Kelly and Kelly 1998, p. 262; Wilkins and Pace 2014, p. 391). Whitey's attentions are probably paramount among the terrible experiences of her father mentioned a few paragraphs ago. Her mother tells her, "I think that's why he's always been so miserable ... . We thought maybe adopting you would help ... . I think it helped, having you" (p. 271). Depression is indeed frequent among child abuse survivors, so combining that shame with his class shame, it is remarkable that he was able to feel and express love for his daughter as much as he did (Kagan 2007, p. 147).

Just as Harding does not react explicitly to the news that he was adopted to help his parents' finances, Jakiela never comments directly on the revelation that she was adopted as therapy for her father. Her mother had unsuccessfully tried for years to persuade him to get real therapy. But in this case, any possible anger on her own behalf is far outweighed by compassion for her father and anger at Whitey and at his sister, who has always refused to see any signs of the abuse. The story is relevant to this book not just because of the light it sheds on the reason for her adoption and the psychology of her father, but also because of the connection she makes between her father and her birthmother: "He called people cockroaches. I think of my birth mother like that, a hard shell, refusing to die, scaring everyone she crawls past" (p. 234). She is like a cockroach but at the same time like Jakiela's beloved father in that mistreatment makes her lash out. As Jakiela writes earlier about her sister, "Cruelty is a bandage" (p. 88). Sociologists support this analysis: sexual abuse and deprivation due to class both lead to shame, repressed and sometimes expressed anger, and depression (Turner 2014, p. 186; Kagan 2007, p. 147).

#### **4. Adoption and Identity: Changing Interpretations**

Harding and Jakiela both narrate changes in their ideas about their identity related to adoption and the events of their search. Harding had, for much of his life, thought of himself as "a free spirit" by contrast to his "marooned" parents (p. 8) and "impartial" by contrast to "most other people ... condemned to peer at the world across the obscurity of the breeding hutch" (p. 153). He had rejected the maxim "blood is thicker than water" (p. 5) and identified with water, but as he meets John Webb, who had known his mother and who he wishes were his father, he realizes that he would like to be saved from watery fluidity. The issue of possible hereditary similarities in appearance comes up briefly at that point, earlier with regard to his wonder how his parents thought they could keep the adoption secret when they were short and he was tall, and at the end with regard to his cousin, though not his mother. More importantly, he comes to realize ways he has been influenced by Colin, and in some cases, by Maureen, that he regrets—he is not as impartial as he thinks. He compares himself to Colin in letting Maureen down by not showing her affection—"a pair of undemonstrative men" (p. 80). As he walks through a public housing project near where Margaret used to live, he realizes that he shares some of their anxiety about such projects (pp. 88–89), thus having some of their class

feelings. But his attitudes begins to change. When he interviews someone who lived in Margaret's neighborhood long ago and cannot read where she belongs, he feels he has "begun falling aimlessly, or gently rotating in zero gravity, with the familiar markers of class and social identity turning gently about me like luminous debris in the aftermath of a space-probe disaster" (p. 146). And when he finally meets Margaret, he feels "robbed of the words for ... difference or affinity by social group and background; wealth and poverty" (p. 176). While he had earlier critiqued Colin for his "them and us" attitude, it is clear that he shared some of it, even if with different divisions, but now, he feels that he is getting beyond that, ready to picnic with Margaret over "the battle lines of the British class system" (p. 176). He suddenly sees his worldly success as a sign of limitation: "I'd been able to pile up wealth, incapable of functioning in the world without the thought that it was there to fall back on" (p. 175). On the other hand, he realizes that Margaret's large family, and her closeness to them, constitute another kind of abundance.

Through most of the memoir, he describes how what he learns has made him more sympathetic to Maureen and more critical of Colin for cutting Maureen off from her friends and her flower-selling. However, he makes a point of evoking a farewell image of each in relation to his affection for them in early childhood. He imagines Colin in his gardening clothes, off on the boat to do the shopping. "We both liked the river" (p. 141). He sees that if he had just met them briefly, "they'd have seemed bracingly eccentric" (p. 172). His last image of Maureen is of her quickly reaching out to save his two-year-old son from falling into the water, showing her motherliness—the image of the falling boy is one he had applied to himself earlier in the memoir, in analyzing a photograph of his christening party.

Jakiela remembers having often said and felt that adoption was not an issue for her and even having felt good about the idea of having been wanted and chosen. However, she includes many memories of times in which it was an issue, such as a vignette of how she and her African-American cousin, also adopted, looked and felt out of place when some family photographs were taken (pp. 110–11, 114, 119–20, 121). She often felt sad about not identifying with any of the ethnicities in her adoptive or her birth family. "Until I married and had children, I was single, solitary, someone who most days wanted to take up no space at all" (p. 47). In *Miss New York Has Everything*, which includes a narrative of her time as an airline stewardess, she feels uncomfortable about the fact that the ethnicity people are most likely to attribute to her, from her appearance, is German (2006, pp. 162–69). When her birthmother refuses contact, Jakiela realizes even more fully how much she felt deprived by being adopted. She had really wanted "to know something that looked and moved and laughed and loved and was sad like me" (2015, p. 99). She often feels that whatever similarities she has to either her adoptive parents or her birthmother are painful. Hearing about her birthmother's screaming at the social worker, she thinks, "I've found my roots, the map of what I was born with" (p. 94). For decades, she writes, "I've tried not to be like my father" in his suspicion of the world (p. 265). She understands her mother's worries and fear of loss. Sometimes, she thinks, "There is so much of my parents in me I barely believe in blood" (p. 77). But when she neglects her children because she is obsessed by her birthmother's rejection, she thinks, "I am a terrible mother. Like the birth mother before me, and so on and so on. And this time my mother, my real mother, a good mother, is not here to tell me otherwise" (pp. 236–37). She does not conclude with this attitude, however. She resolves, "If paranoia and cruelty run like cancer in my birth mother's bloodline, I am hoping something else will show up to provide balance and grace" (p. 240), looks at the Catholic Charities report again, and finds the memory of her birthmother's final visit and touch. Here is the hidden kindness that she had hoped to find in her bloodline, as a sign of her own possibilities, even if her birthmother can no longer extend kindness to her.

Jakiela's memoir many times recounts with annoyance people telling her that she was lucky and should be grateful. But toward the end, she accepts these words. In escaping her birthmother, she *was* lucky and more like her birthfather. "We were both, my father and I, lucky. We made it over the wall" (p. 220, she has just referred to her father as "a German and a Jew" so implicitly crossing the Berlin wall is made an image of their other escapes). She tells her birthmother that she is grateful to her for

giving her up to a mother who would love her, and she recalls with gratitude her last days with each of her adoptive parents. Before the epilogue, updating relationships and also what has happened in her hometown of Braddock, a steel town near Pittsburgh, she writes about her daughter's perfect pitch, a tie to her father's early singing, and her daughter's hope that the last caterpillar in her daughter's science experiment will transform into a butterfly. Can she and her children keep the good things in their family history and leave behind the bitterness?

#### **5. Gender and Nation**

The contrast in what each author includes and excludes relates to their contrast in gender and nation. Although class is important in Jakiela's memoir, Harding is even more explicit about its influence, as British writers often are, and extends its discussion in larger social analyses. It is striking, in comparison to Jakiela, that Harding says very little about looking for similarities to himself in his children, just "I'd had only a few years practice in the arts of physical comparison based on kinship" (p. 100); this may be British reticence, which could also be seen as reluctance to violate their privacy. But it is also related to the general expectation and experience that children are more likely to be important to a woman's identity than to a man's. Jakiela is living with and taking primary responsibility for her children during the time recounted here. Harding apparently is mostly not; his wife and three children are in France, where he usually lives (Kellaway 2006). He says in his preface that he thinks of this book as in part for his children and particularly to "show that people were joined up, and separated, in all sorts of ways" (p. xix). But they do not figure in the book much. Jakiela frequently discusses similarities between herself and her children, as well as recounting her care for them in crises; Harding, by contrast, mentions two occasions on which he intended to buy Christmas presents for his children and bought other things instead and has them with him only on two visits with family members. The image of maternal care is important to both of them: Harding several times repeats the phrase "good care" (p. 28) found in the social worker's report on his condition in his adoptive family, and almost the last image he evokes of his mother is of her instinctive reaching out to keep his two-year-old son from falling. But this iconic memory of her does not have the same two-sided personal meaning for him that it would for Jakiela. When Jakiela recalls her adoptive mother's speaking of anxiety that the social worker would find her unfit for motherhood, she identifies with this anxiety (pp. 73–74). As her mother is dying, she says, "You were a good mother", and her mother responds, "You're a good mother" (p. 246). Harding explicitly says that he chose his title as an analogy to "Indian country" (pp. xxi), suggesting, as does the work's origin in a BBC series called "Another Country" (p. 191), that the world of mothers is foreign to him. Indeed, this may be part of the impact on him of male socialization: most of the memoirists who have written about their search for birth family are female. If Harding is unusual as a male writing about this topic, Jakiela is also unusual among female search memoirists for the large role of her own children in her narrative. Many of them have no children at the time; a few, B. J. Lifton and Jean Strauss, mention their children occasionally during their books, and A.M. Homes describes her relationship as a mother of her almost-three-year-old as more important to her than her relation to any of her four parents near the end of hers, but Jakiela's ongoing care for her children is much more a part of her story (Lifton 1998; Strauss 2001; Homes 2007).

Gender and national differences may also both be relevant to the difference in the kind of research both authors do. Harding's book was originally published in 2006 in the United Kingdom (UK), where adult adoptees can see their original birth and adoption records. He wrote a new introduction into the American paperback edition of 2010, in which he explains this national contrast: whether adult American adoptees have the legal right to see their original birth certificates depends on the state in which they were adopted. Crediting Wayne Carp's scholarship (Carp 2009), he gives a history of adoption secrecy in the US, argues that sealed birth records are outdated, and suggests skepticism about the resulting American industry of 'intermediary programs' and parent–child registers (pp. ix–xiv). Jakiela's story reinforces such skepticism. Because Pennsylvania was a closed-record state, Jakiela had

to go through Catholic Charities to get her birth certificate. While her parents had long ago told her her birth name and her mother's, she did get more material from her Catholic Charities file. However, for a long time, she felt locked into allowing their social worker, whom she did not like, to be the intermediary in any contact that she initiated. Obviously, her birthmother did not like this social worker either. By contrast, Harding had a practical and generous adoption counselor who made suggestions for research. He consulted family friends and relatives, the Family Records Office, the voting rolls, and the street directory. Theoretically, Jakiela could have, for example, gone to a records office to try to locate her birthmother's married name by looking up years of marriage records, but that probably looked like an impossible task. She did have to take care of her children. And of course, those e-mail messages from her birth family started right after her meeting with the social worker.

#### **6. Overall Experience, Personalities, and Beliefs about Adoption**

Putting these two memoirs together suggests something of the great range of results that a search for birthparents might produce. It is ironic, considering the traditional belief that class barriers are stronger in England, that the English birthmother had a much happier life and thus was much more open to reunion than the American one, though there is much evidence that the US has become increasingly economically stratified, with a theoretically possible happy poverty difficult to find. The memoirs also suggest a great range of contrast in the personalities that adoptees might have. Jakiela portrays here a life very lonely before her marriage, full of shame and self-doubt. None of her adoptee friends or relatives has a good relationship with either adoptive parents or birthparents. They are all apparently working-class, and this depression could certainly be seen as caused by growing up in an atmosphere of economic and educational deprivation, as Turner (2014, p. 193) and Kagan (2007, p. 188) would see it. But not surprisingly, she seems drawn to the theory that separation from a mother to be adopted produces a "primal wound" (Verrier 1993, p. 218), though she does not commit to it. Harding mourns the loss of his easy relationship with his parents in early childhood, but they had the resources to send him to excellent boarding schools and Cambridge University (Kellaway 2006), and he has managed to turn his sense of "never quite [being] what anyone had in mind" (p. 154) into an advantage. At times, his introspection suggests that his search is shaking up a self-confidence that might even have been excessive. In his introduction to the US edition, it is clear that he prefers the "civil rights" argument for openness about birth records to an argument based on Verrier (1993) that adoptees are necessarily wounded (pp. xiii–xiv).

These contrasts are easy to map on to the contrast between the experience of a man raised in a privileged atmosphere and that of a woman from a family with less money and little educational guidance in her youth. But it is also relevant that Jakiela was in the Rosalia orphanage for close to a year—perhaps longer than many other children, because her clubfeet made her less "adoptable"—and that year probably did have the experience basic to the primal wound theory, as she explains it, of "scream[ing] and scream[ing] for mothers who never come" (p. 218), in addition to much lonely time spent in the hospital because of operations for her legs, while Harding was transferred to Maureen's care at the age of eleven days or less. This speed may have been possible, because it was a private placement, "organized outside the normal channels" (Harding 2010, p. 28); ironically, reforms in the Adoption Act of 1976, implemented in 1982, would make this against the law (Keating 2009). However, Verrier (1993) believes that he still would have missed his first mother.

#### **7. Fictions and Truth**

Hipchen and Deans (2003) point out that adoption life writing "blur[s] the boundaries between fact and fiction", p. 167), and Margaret Homans shows that many adoptees' memoirs involve creating fictions about their origins (Homans 2013). Jakiela creates such fictions in the vignettes in which she imagines her birthmother under the new name of Marie, not to pretend that she has found the identity of a birthmother, as is often all that can be achieved because of closed records, but to help understand and forgive her. Crucially, she says, "I choose to believe in my birth mother's underground tenderness

and mercy" (p. 245). For Harding, by contrast, fictionality is mainly associated with the stories that Maureen made up for him—that she was an orphan as he was, that she had a grandmother who gave her rides in a carriage and took her to Egypt—as well as with her identification with Eliza in *My Fair Lady*. He analyzes her story of adopting him as a class fable, notes that her favorite books are about families getting separated and then reunited again, suggesting that she wanted to believe that this could happen, and calls her "terrific with make-believe" (p. 102); his discovery about her previous life shows the falsity of most of what she told him about himself and herself. When his cousin contacts him, it is important that to him that when he says, "I've no way of knowing if any of this is true," she answers, "Sweetheart, it's all true" (p. 163). This contrast maps readily onto the fact that Harding's previous books are journalism, while Jakiela's previous books are memoirs and poetry. It is in Harding that we see "the work of the genealogist and the autobiographer ... intersect[ing in what reads like] investigative journalism" (Hipchen and Deans 2003, p. 168).

Jakiela's title, *Belief is its own kind of truth, Maybe* (her own capitalization indicating some ambivalence), indicates from the start that she has more tolerance of fiction. For her, all family life, indeed all life, involves wishful thinking. She quotes her mother as saying, "People believe what they need to believe" (p. 182) and observes this in her mother's belief that the survival of her dogwood tree is a tribute to her care (p. 58), as well as in her parents' inventing "a movie version of their meeting" (p. 182), which is a little like Maureen's stories about her childhood. She acknowledges that her own beliefs may often not have objective grounds and does not feel objectivity is always necessary: "I believe a lot of things because it's better to believe them than to believe their opposites ... . [My parents] loved me enough to make me believe I was beautiful. The truth is, I have one of those faces people don't remember" (pp. 199–200). But for her, most important now is her relationship with her husband and children, and she thinks of this as to be maintained to a large extent by stories. As she anticipates retelling the story of the hospital room where the doctor discovered that her daughter had stuffed a toy reindeer's nose up her nose, she thinks, "This story will become one of our favorites. ... We will tell them the way old ladies at church tick off prayers on rosary beads, which is how I think of family now, the most sacred thing" (pp. 255–56). But she is aware that sometimes family stories that are not true "are called true and these stories shape a life and that life is handed down in more stories and so on" (p. 289).

There are just a few points that suggest some appreciation of wishful thinking and family fictions in Harding. He remembers that when Maureen picked him up after his graduation, she asked him about his studies with just the word and tone a duchess might use—"for a moment there you were the real thing" (p. 184). And at the very end, after having discovered that her father was a "wine and spirits merchant's carman," when he thinks he has found the "genealogy" (using that word for the first time) of her stories of riding in her grandmother's carriage, he likes to imagine that her father "would have let her up on the dray when she was a little girl. Once or twice, surely, by way of a treat" (p. 189). With this playful use of "genealogy" to apply to stories, he signals again his view of the inadequacy of an exclusive focus on biological heredity to explain identity and implicitly concurs with a critical view like Julia Watson's of genealogy in the sense of defining humans by pedigree (Watson 2016, p. 108).

#### **8. Conclusion: Reconstructions of Identity**

Both of these memoirs turn away from the idea of finding identity in birth origin and toward something more complex—what John McLeod calls "adoptive being," which treats "bio-genetic and adoptive modes of kinship as concomitant instances of 'being with'" (McLeod 2015, p. 27). Strained as her relationships with her adoptive parents have often been, in the course of her memoir Jakiela realizes that her birth parents provide very little material through which to construct her identity. She has tried the genetic roots fantasy and found it unlivable—she is related to her birthmother's life primarily as someone who has escaped it. She has also escaped some of the limitations of her adoptive parents' lives; while she can honor what they gave her and put her efforts into the family she and her husband have created and into her writing, she can maintain relationships with some sane

people in her birth family and her working-class loyalties. The hope for her daughter's caterpillar's metamorphosis into a butterfly is significantly placed at the end of the memoir proper, while the last page of the epilogue is about Braddock, where her mother was a nurse and her father a mill worker and where they are buried.

Harding has a less self-doubting personal and professional identity. He never mentions in this book how he used his sense of being an outsider in writing a thoroughly researched and grippingly written book on refugees. He began the book assuming his birthmother was dead and wanting to write a brief tribute to her, knowing her life must have been difficult; he briefly thinks of what sort of life he might have had if she had kept him, based on the lives of his brothers: "I'd have been the father of five children (4.3 to be exact) conceived with two partners. I'd have left school at an early age" (p. 175). None of them sound like they believe in roots, he writes, adding, ironically, "this much we had in common" (p. 174). Clearly, he, like Jakiela, prefers his current life to that one; but at the same time, meeting Margaret provides him with new relationships entirely different from those he already has, structured as they are by class and professional expectations, and he values this discovery.

These two memoirists both go through a process of reconstructing themselves in the time portrayed in their memoirs, in which they revise what they think about their relationships to all of their parents, not choosing an identity based exclusively on either birth or adoption. Though John McLeod is writing about transcultural adoptee experience and theirs is transcultural only in their partly Irish ancestry and therefore much less visible, his conclusions about the multiplicity possible in adoptive being apply to them as well. While a recent summary says that the typical adoption memoir "valorizes origins and troubles the primacy of social construction" (Smith and Watson 2010, p. 255), many other adoption memoirs also emphasize "the construction of families out of something other than sheer biology" (Hipchen and Deans 2003, p. 166). Many conclude with the acknowledgment that both their adoptive and their birth families and ancestries have contributed to their identities (Homes 2007, p. 238; Strauss 2001, p. 201; McKinley 2002, p. 288). However, few adoptees put as much stress as Harding and Jakiela on the details of adoptive family life.

Part of the reason for this difference in stress is that relatively few adoptees write search memoirs soon after their adoptive parents are dead, though that is a time when many searches begin. While in some memoirs adoptive parents figure primarily in terms of their perceived lack of understanding, Jakiela and Harding move beyond this point, and both end their books paying tribute to three-dimensional people whom they love and miss. Harding began wanting to write a tribute to his birthmother, assuming she was dead, but in the process became so moved by what he found out about Maureen that he decided not to carry the story of his relation with Margaret further after he met her. And, for even stronger reasons than with his children, because she is alive he may also want to respect Margaret's privacy. Jakiela begins her narrative writing "When my real mother dies, I go looking for another one", mocking the idea of the adoptive mother as a substitute by framing her search for her birthmother as a search for a replacement for her dead adoptive mother. In her epilogue she says, "I've never met my birth mother. I could, but I don't need or want to any more" (p. 290). Even if her birthmother could relate to her with less hatred, her dead mother is irreplaceable.

Many adoptees tell stories that put more emphasis than these on an experience of finding their identity by finding their ancestry. However, Harding's and, especially, Jakiela's memoirs give a caution against seeing identity in purely biological terms that might well be heeded by more people than white same-race adoptees. Roberts (2011) reminds us of the complex interactions in which environment determines which genes are activated (p. 203) and writes, with regard to African Americans in particular, "defining identity in genetic terms creates a biological essentialism that is antithetical to the shared political values that should form the basis for unity ... we have considerable freedom to decide how much importance to give our genetics, family history, and social relationships" (p. 255). With regard to the desire that African Americans might have to use genetic tests to find and connect with their relatives, either African or white, Alondra Nelson writes, "DNA can offer an avenue toward reconciliation, but cannot stand in for reconciliation: voice, acknowledgment, mourning,

forgiveness, and healing" (Nelson 2016, p. 164); this is also relevant to adoptees. In these memoirs, we see acknowledgment, reconciliation, mourning, forgiveness, and healing mostly on the part of the authors in relation to their adoptive parents, though there is some of each with regard to birth family in both of them.

Harding's final discussion of his ancestry search story breaks down the distinction between adoptive and blood relationship: "The process that Margaret and I had begun turned into a second adoption ... What mattered was to want to engage with another person, and to continue believing this was a good thing to do" (p. 176). With her birthmother, Jakiela can no longer believe that it is a good thing to do. Of her brother, who has his own place in her epilogue, she writes, "That I met him is its own miracle" (p. 221). She says of him, as she says of no one else, "We'll high-five each other when we say or hear something true" (p. 289). But the last sentence of her epilogue is an ambiguous tribute to the steel works of Braddock, a tribute which resonates with what she has said about her parents' love of her, the title, her continued working-class solidarity, and the power of wishful thinking: "People who are born here find it beautiful" (p. 291).

**Funding:** This research received no funding.

**Acknowledgments:** I received help from the University of Pittsburgh Library System.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

#### **References**


Gray, Breda. 2004. *Women and the Irish Diaspora*. New York: Routledge.


Kagan, Jerome. 2007. *What Is Emotion? History, Meaning and Measures*. New Haven: Yale.


Nelson, Alondra. 2016. *The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome*. Boston: Beacon.

Novy, Marianne. 2012. New Territory: Memoirs of Meeting Original Family by Seven Adopted American Women. *Adoption & Culture* 3: 124–40.

Roberts, Dorothy. 2011. *Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century*. New York: The New Press.

Rubin, Lillian. 1976. *Worlds of Pain: Life in the Working-Class Family*. New York: Basic.

Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. 2010. *Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives*, 2rd ed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Strauss, Jean. 2001. *Beneath a Tall Tree: A Story about Us*. Claremont: Arete.

Travers, Pauric. 1995. There was nothing for me there: Irish female emigration, 1922–71. In *Irish Women and Irish Migration*. Edited by Patrick O'Sullivan. New York: Leicester University Press, pp. 146–67.

Turner, Jonathan H. 2014. Emotions and Social Stratification. In *Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions*. Edited by Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner. New York: Springer, vol. II, pp. 179–98.

Verrier, Nancy Newton. 1993. *The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child*. Baltimore: Gateway Press.

Watson, Julia. 2016. Ordering the Family: Genealogy as Autobiographical Pedigree. In *The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Reader*. Edited by Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen. New York: Routledge, pp. 108–16.

Wilkins, Amy C., and Jennifer A. Pace. 2014. Class, Race, and Emotions. In *Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions*. Edited by Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner. New York: Springer, vol. II, pp. 385–410.

© 2018 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

## *Article* **Close Relations? The Long-Term Outcomes of Adoption Reunions**

#### **Gary Clapton**

School of Social and Political Science, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK; gary.clapton@ed.ac.uk

Received: 14 July 2018; Accepted: 30 September 2018; Published: 2 October 2018

**Abstract:** There has been a number of studies on the outcomes of adoption reunions, most of which have focussed on relatively 'fresh' reunions. Very few studies have looked at long-term outcomes. Fewer still have discussed reunions and kinship with controversy over firstly, the longevity of reunions, and secondly, what such reunions might engender regarding the relative kinship statuses of adoptive and birth families. This paper critically discusses the existing literature on reunions and kinship, and then reports on the long-term outcomes of 200 'matches' on the Adoption Contact Register for Scotland between 1996–2006, presenting qualitative detail from the 75 respondents who completed questionnaires and sent in stories. The paper invites us to think about how adoption can form an adoptive family and deform a birth family, and how adoption reunions re-form both and everyone included. However, it will especially focus on what a coming together of two people separated by adoption means for the way that they frame their relationship with each other and those around them.

**Keywords:** adoption reunions; kinship

#### **1. Introduction**

There is a growing amount of literature on adoption reunions (March 2014) 1. As can be expected in a relatively new body of knowledge, certain areas and concerns have dominated, with consequent gaps in our understanding. The experiences of adopted people have traditionally made up most of the literature (Baden and Wiley 2007), followed by those of birth mothers (Evan Donaldson Institute 2006), adoptive mothers (Feast et al. 2011), and then, far back in the field, birth fathers (Passmore and Feeney 2009), adoptive fathers (Feast et al. 2011), and other birth relatives such as siblings (O'Neill et al. 2018). Other gaps include perspectives from within sets of reunions, e.g., the experiences of both the birth mother and the adopted person (March 1997). A dearth of knowledge also exists in relation to the time frames for explorations of the reunion process. Most studies have focussed on the experiences of the early weeks and months. A small minority of studies have explored longer outcomes (Browning and Duncan 2005; Howe and Feast 2001; March 2015).

This paper explores the long-term outcomes of reunions, and has a specific focus on kinship that examines debates surrounding the identity and status of birth family members, especially birth mothers, and the nature of the 'new-found' relationship between adopted adult and birth mother.

For decades, writers and scholars have been struggling with what sort of kinship is formed when adoptions take place. Kirk's notion of adoptive families as different, neither the same as families created by biology, nor more deficient than the latter (Kirk 1964), has been lastingly influential. With the rise of

<sup>1</sup> The word 'reunion' will be used here for ease of flow; however, its usage is discussed later. Secondly, the adoption reunions that are referred to in this paper are those that have involved the 'closed', mostly infant, adoptions of the 20th century, and are not related to the contemporary adoptions of children from state care.

studies of adoption reunions, the meaning of adoption has come to the fore again. Is the adoption of a child a legal change of kinship relations (Jones and Hackett 2012)? Is it a temporary occlusion of birth relations, a question concretely posed when adoption reunions occur (Robinson 2002)? Does adoptive family life create indissolvable kinship ties that suggest a hierarchy of kinship relations with some families that are deemed to be 'primary' (the adoptive family) and others (birth family) secondary (Browning and Duncan 2005)? Do the emotions released in some reunions indicate the strength of a persistence of biological ties (Verrier 1993)? Are these complementary emotions (Verrier 1993)? Adoption reunions raise these issues (Leinaweaver 2018). This paper offers a contribution to the debates by reviewing the literature with a specific eye on kinship discussions, and shares the relevant insights from a study of long-term outcomes of adoption reunions.

#### **2. Adoption Reunions: An Overview**

The reunion of birth parent and adoptee constructs an unparalleled relationship, and is truly, *sui generis*, a totally unique emotional experience (Bailey and Giddens 2001, p. viii).

A first thing to be noted is that most writings have come out of the experiences of 'first flushes', the early days after adopted people and birth mothers have met (Browning and Duncan 2005). Another observation is that there are considerable disagreements about reunions, some of which relate to the first point, that it might be too early to assess their value (Cavoukian 2005), and about whether or not the relationships that are formed at the point of reunion will endure (Carsten 2000).

Various measurements have been applied to determine adoption reunion outcomes. Sachdev's measures are often cited to determine successfulness: how often meetings took place (frequency), the nature of the initial relationship and changes over time (intensity), the degree of satisfaction with the relationship, and overall feelings of accomplishment within the relationship (Sachdev 1992). Overall, the literature relates mostly to adopted people, and this seems occupied with two main themes. The first theme is that the reunion outcome is defined as a success, because no matter how the relationship turns out, the meeting with the birth mother was worthwhile in itself for the assuagement of curiosity, access to medical information, and acquiring the "story" of their conception and birth so as to "complete the jigsaw" and develop a more cohesive sense of identity (Browning and Duncan 2005; Howe and Feast 2003). The other theme relates to, in the event of continuing contact, the meaning and definition of subsequent relationships with birth families. As we shall see when we look at work relating to the experiences of the different parties in an adoption reunion and how this relates to familial ties, issues of time (significance of time spent in, and with, the adoptive family, time spent pre and post-birth with the birth mother, time spent in a relationship after reunion), hierarchies of families, and notions of the psychobiology of parental and filial ties recur. An interesting feature of the bulk of the literature is that it is taken up with the dynamics of the dyad of the adopted person and birth mother (Evan Donaldson Institute 2006), and neglects the other parties that are invariably involved in the coming together of two adults (e.g., their respective families, Müller et al. 2003). One thing seems settled: adoption is a process and not an event, and in keeping with this, the negotiations that follow a reunion are also likely to be a lifelong process for all involved (Browning and Duncan 2005).

As for kinship issues, it is difficult to find a substantial body of work compared to the vast amount of reunion-related literature that deals with the experiences, motivations, and feelings of the various parties. The next discussion identifies and examines the key threads in the extant literature.

#### **3. Adopted People: The Question of Kinship Relationships with their Birth Parents**

The work of Modell (1994, 1997, 2002), Carsten (2000), and Melosh (2002) represent an influential—and sceptical—perspective on adoption reunion outcomes and the (re)formation of kinship ties insofar as these writers argue that at the point of reunion, there ought to be no promise of the (re)establishment of kinship between the adopted person and their birth mother, as is often depicted in popular media accounts.

For Modell, adoption as practiced in the Western world provides a lens through which it may be seen that all kinship is made or constructed, rather than the product of biology or blood relations. In this sense, she argues, relationships created by adoption are not *sui generis*, or givens; rather, they are "made" (Modell 2002). Modell goes on to, I would argue, set up a straw man. This is that the relationships formed from reunions do not approximate that of parent–child, and at best, the biological parent (mother) might develop a role along the lines of "favourite aunt", or relative in general rather than a parent in particular (Modell 1997, p. 58). The straw man to be knocked down, I suggest, is that of the reunion as re-igniting kinship ties between the parties and displacing the adoptive parents in some hierarchy of parenthood. Perhaps this was a reaction to the literature on reunions in the 1980s and 1990s that, mostly from a birth mother perspective, celebrated a "coming home" of their adopted out sons and daughters (Hughes 1995), and is also exemplified in adopted adults' accounts: "I immediately felt a kinship with her that had no parallel in my adoptive family", (quoted in McColm 1993, p. 203).

Carsten's paper discussed her study of 13 adopted people who had met their birth parents in the "relatively recent past" (Carsten 2000, p. 688), and concluded that, "In just a few cases, my informants described being able to establish some kind of harmonious relations with their birth kin", (Carsten 2000, p. 690), and observed that, "In the majority of cases, I would say that these relations had a doomed quality about them" (Carsten 2000, p. 691). In addition to the limitations that Carsten's sample is too small to talk of majorities and there were no experiences of long-term outcomes on which to draw, there are a number of additional observations that engage with issues not already referred to in the discussion of Modell's paper. The first is the comment that Carsten's respondents had a "strong disavowal of the notion that, in the absence of such sustained nurturing, there is an automatic bond of kinship given by the fact of birth ... interviewees strongly assert the values of care and effort that go into the creation of kin ties... In the context of adoption, birth does not imply certainty or endurance or solidarity" (p. 691). This reference to the "fact of birth" somewhat downplays the relation between mother and child that is formed during pregnancy. It also neglects that for most birth mothers, there was contact between themselves and their baby following the birth, and this carries significance of a relational nature not only for birth mothers, but also for adopted people (see for example, the words of 'Ethan' in Browning: "We didn't have a relationship for the first 20 years of my life, but we did have a relationship for the first nine months", (Browning 2005, p. 124). To return to Modell, it is suggested that the diminution of the birth mother–child tie is present in her comments about the adopted people in her study that had met their birth mothers: "the thinness of a purely biological relationship became apparent" (Modell 1994, p. 164).

Fonseca pointed to the way that official and judicial adoption processes can marginalise the birth mother and terms this "de-kinning" (Fonseca 2011, p. 307); minimising birth mothers' birth and the surrounding experiences is a common feature of many accounts of birth mothers (Kenny et al. 2012). Carlis pointed out that, "It is widely accepted in both traditional and contemporary psychological research that the earliest relationship does not begin at birth" but rather before, and this is a two-way phenomenon (Carlis 2015, p. 246). Carlis quoted Verny: "The unborn child is a feeling, remembering, aware being", and that the "nine months between conception and birth molds and shapes personality, drives, and ambitions in very important ways" (Vernay 1981, p. 15). This is in alignment with the more populist work of Nancy Verrier that posits adoption as a primal wound that separates birth mother and adopted child, resulting in the lifelong urge to mend this and re-establish ties (Verrier 1993).

Melosh is the third of the writers from the sceptical 'camp' on adoption reunions and kinship relationships that includes Modell's views that "love does not play a central part in the enduring solidarity between adoptee and birth parent" (1997, p. 63), and the best that might be is possibly that of favourite aunt/niece/nephew relationship and Carsten's 'doomed'-ness. Melosh's view is bleak: "reunited kin do not establish close or sustained relationships ... Rarely do reunions result in radically reconstituted families ... Faced with the daunting prospect of assuming all the mutual obligations associated with two sets of kin, many adopted persons back off" (Melosh 2002, p. 252). Again, there is a feeling of tilting at windmills here with the declaration that reunions do not result in "radically reconstituted families". Howe and Feast provide another example of answering a question that was not articulated when in their study of long-term outcomes of reunions, they observe that adopted people's "primary relationship was still with their adoptive mother" (Howe and Feast 2001, p. 364).

This group of sceptical views towards ideas of birth family kinship ties rekindled by reunion rests on the argument that "Ties to birth kin required time as a necessary but not in itself sufficient input to establish themselves" (Carsten 2000, p. 693). The expenditure of time and effort, the "steady accumulation of everyday events" (p. 697), it is argued, is what creates kinship, and this is not bestowed by biology alone.

So, what does the literature tell us about the kinship and the biologically related parties in adoption reunions?

#### **4. Birth Parents: The Question of Kinship Relationships with their Adopted Child**

The literature on birth parents in adoption is increasing, and in the main, it has concentrated on birth mothers. The 300-page report by Kenny et al. (2012) offers one of the more recent and useful reviews of pre-1980s adoption, and includes a study of over 500 birth mothers' experiences. The report spans over 30 years of writing on the issue, and in the discussion of birth mothers, concludes and echoes all of the previous literature: the birth mother experience is chiefly characterised by abiding emotions of grief and loss that deeply affected their lives and those around them, and that their (adopted) child is rarely far from their thoughts. This is echoed in a major United States (USA) review of research relating to the experiences of birth mothers that concludes "research on birth parents in the era of confidential (closed) adoptions suggests a significant proportion struggled—and sometimes continue to struggle—with chronic, unresolved grief" (Evan Donaldson Institute 2006, p. 5). Similar emotions have been found in the few studies of birth father experiences (Clapton 2003).

#### *4.1. Birth Mothers*

It seems axiomatic from the literature that birth mothers will feel that they have a kinship connection with their adopted child. This is based on not only the blood relation that they have, but also the period between conception and adoption when they carried their child and, in most cases, had contact with them that may have included nursing and care. Comments abound relating to the problems and solutions to the question of how many children a birth mother has and the dilemmas this poses (Battalen et al. 2018), but also the commonly expressed need to include the adopted child as in "there are three children in my family" (when the first of the three has been adopted; see for example Council of Irish Adoption Agencies (2012)). This declaration of felt familial ties can be found in both the birth mother and birth father literature (Clapton 2003). Another constant feature of the literature is the frequency in which the issue of whether a birth parent is a mother or a mum (or father or dad), and this too seems to have been settled in that birth parents acknowledge that whilst they are the mother, they are not "the mum" (Kelly 2006). See Passmore and Coles (2009) on fathers: "I would love her to call me Dad, but I haven't earned that right" (p. 6).

What of the few studies of long-term outcomes of reunions for birth mothers, and what can they tell us about kinship connections once contact with their child-as-adult develops (or not)? In the study by Kenny et al., 80% of the mothers had been in contact with their adopted child for over 10 years. When asked to describe the type of contact they had with their son or daughter, almost two-thirds of mothers said they had "an ongoing relationship (64%); however, one-quarter of mothers said that although they had met their son or daughter, they did not have an ongoing relationship" (Kenny et al. 2012, p. 56). In another study of the experiences of 33 birth mothers in reunions up to 12 years old, which is "long past the honeymoon stage in their reunion relationship" (March 2015, p. 110), March discusses the conflict experienced by mothers who had a felt bond with the infant they had relinquished for adoption and contact with their adult son or daughter. March saw the conflict arising from a disconnect between the birth mother's belief in the "essentialism of motherhood" from which they had derived a sense of a lifelong bond with their baby (p. 114) and meeting an adult

stranger. This disconnect has to be negotiated if the contact between them is to develop. Although 28 of the mothers in March's study were in a relationship with their son or daughter, there were considerable differences in how these relations were viewed, from "sporadic" to similar to that of a "mother–child", with the majority describing the relationship as a "friendship" (p. 115). When asked how they saw their role, March quoted one mother who exemplified the majority: "My family is complete now. But, for me, it's not exactly a parental role. She sees us as family. That's how I think of us and our relationship. But, she has another family, too" (p. 118). So, two families, two sets of kinship relations? March concluded that whilst adoptive family kinship ties are a matter of history, present, and future, and as such are more or less set in stone, ties that birth mothers form with their adult children after reunion are experienced as provisional (there is "boundary ambiguity") in that the relationship formed at reunion could cease at any time.

#### *4.2. Birth Fathers*

Clapton (2003) and Coles (2011) pointed to instances of men "holding their child in mind" and, similar to birth mothers, dealing with the dilemma of being asked how many children they have. In Clapton's study, a number of the birth fathers had meetings with their (now adult) sons and daughters, and according to them, they were in the process of establishing relationships with each other. However, as indicated earlier, they respected the difference between themselves ("I didn't bring her up, her dad did, I'm her father"). Half of the men in one of the very few studies that has looked specifically at the reunions of birth fathers and their adopted children reported that they "had established a reasonably close relationship with their relinquished child, though more described it as a family relationship" (Passmore and Coles 2009, p. 7). The reference to "family relationship" was not explored any further, although the writers went on to note that in relation to the question of biological and social father, "these roles did converge for some birth fathers as the reunions progressed" (p. 8).

Hughes (2016) cited one of her birth father respondents as offering his adopted daughter "a safe space in which she could explore her genealogy and form her story". She goes on, "But the idea of exploration is markedly different from notions of 'homecoming' and *hierarchies of kinship systems* and knowledge to which the canon is committed" (p. 162—emphasis added). Here, Hughes implicitly critiqued both the notion of a reunion as a 'homecoming'—there had never been a physical connection between the birth father and adopted daughter, but she also referred to hierarchies of kinship systems that do not fit the relationships formed with birth fathers, and also siblings. This suggests that reunions with birth fathers (and those with siblings) both disrupt any fixed essentialist ideas of kinship between adoptive people and birth mothers, but also poses the question, as Hughes did, of the helpfulness of ideas of kinship hierarchies.

This brief overview of adoption reunions and kinship raises two central issues. The first relates to kinship in adoption as requiring time and effort, on which the emergent literature on long-term reunions might shed more light. The second refers to the notion of hierarchies, which is a more contested and sensitive matter.

#### *4.3. Time*

If kinship consists of time and effort, what happens to the relationships borne out of 'reunion' that continue for 10 years or more? Do these not (because of time/work) make this 'new' kinship earned and therefore real? On the other hand, without the daily work of mutual transmission of kinship and its memories, is the gap between birth and 'reunion' unfillable for adopted adults and their birth mothers? What happens when the amount of time spent in a post-reunion relationship is the same or longer than the time spent separated, creating another 'past' (though not as lengthy as that of adopted persons and their adopted parents)? Are the views of Modell, Carsten, and Melosh premature and speculative, because the reunions that were explored in their studies had been relatively short-term in duration?

Bergin speculated that the rule rather than exception is that post-reunion relationships benefit from the passage of time. She suggests that less than one year represents very little time in which to develop a relationship: "After three years, and more realistically around five or six, significant turning points are reached, and a sense of resolution may ensue for both parties"). Browning countered: "The idea that growing a shared history resolves all issues falls short in terms of the experiences presented in this study" (Browning 2005, p. 190). Indeed, Cavoukian (2005) argued that if a more longitudinal approach was taken, it might be found that many reunions will not continue on to become relationships. However, much of the work on long-term outcomes suggests the opposite.

Throughout the 2000s, a number of studies appeared and supported the finding of continuity of relationships after contact. Howe and Feast (2001) surveyed the experiences of 48 adopted people whose first meeting with their birth mothers was at least eight years previous, and found that 65% were still in touch with each other. Triseliotis et al. (2005) found an even higher percentage of successful relationships when they asked 93 birth mothers (70%). Kelly researched the experiences of 10 birth mothers contacted by their adopted children (as adults), and in eight cases, they were still in touch with the adopted person, although most of these relationships were under two years in length (Kelly 2006). In a large study, Sullivan and Lathrop (2004) surveyed the views and experiences of 575 birth parents and 432 adopted people who had been in touch with each other for between 12–20 months. When asked about their expectations of ongoing contact, 94% of birth parents and 91% of adopted people said that they expected to sustain a relationship. However, does 'ongoing' contact, being 'in touch' mean the (re)establishment of kinship ties?

Despite her reservations about the limitations of "growing a shared history", Browning (2005) chronicled invitations to join birth family gatherings that situate the adopted person as "a family member amongst the wider kin network". By this means, "they are often treated no differently from other family members. In this instance, the adoptee is in a 'family' situation" (p. 117). Browning's respondents were explicit about the nature of the relationships that have developed with their birth families: "I fit, I belong" (Browning 2005, p. 106). For 'Maia', "hearing family stories made her feel as if she had a 'lineage', (p. 169), "everybody's just kind of relaxed and I'm part of the fold" (pp. 169–70).

Browning's reservations were made clear when she stopped short of considering these family situations and the kinship ties that they evoked to be on a par with that of adoptive families: " . . . all others considered their birth parents to be 'like extended family', an aunt, uncle, closer than good friends, but not as close as Mum and Dad" (p. 170). She concluded that her findings "support the idea that social and biological relatedness are complementary rather than imply one is more important than the other" (p. 63–64). Although she employs the 'primary' nomenclature as in here: "The participants in this study have shed light on this question by illuminating the importance of a sense of genetic relatedness and identifying with similarities and likeness. However, by retaining a primary relationship with their adoptive parents, they have also highlighted that the social ties forged in childhood, and a shared history, are more important" (p. 194), she also opens a door to a revised model. This model is something closer to the adoptive family being primary, and the birth family being secondary additions when she comments: "It is clear too that biological relatedness with the birth family is more than a set of rediscovered relationships" (p. 194).

This status issue of adoptive family and birth family will now be explored.

#### *4.4. Primary or Secondary Family?*

The conclusion that is common throughout the literature is that the adoptive family is 'primary' and the re-discovered birth family is 'secondary' or just not primary. In other words, as posed in the discussion of Modell et al., there is a suggestion of a hierarchy of families, including ideas about their fixed order being disrupted by reunions. Jones (2008) argued against a binary (primary/secondary) approach to familial relationships by suggesting that it is possible for both biological and adoptive kinship to be experienced as real and enduring, fictive and fragile. She concluded that all forms of kinship are fictive in the sense that they are made and remade over time and have the ability to endure

or be lost (2008, p. 201 cited in Logan 2013). This opens the way to thinking about the quality of adoptive person–birth family relationships when seen over the long-term, and suggests that there may come a point where quantity becomes quality; that is, in long-lasting reunions, the primary/secondary hierarchy may shift, not to displace the adoptive family, but to become a *horizontal* set of families and familial relationships that are different but equally valued.

Anthropologist Yngvesson (2007) wrote about people who have been adopted transnationally and their reunions with birth families, and discussed the concept of 'plasticity' in relation to understanding and recalibrating kinship in adoption in terms of its helpfulness in transcending the "biogenetic versus adoptive" debates. She argued that "biogenetic kinship is both realized and complicated through what begins as a search for or 'return' to origins" (p. 571) by the adopted person. A reconfiguring of kinship inevitably takes place in reunions: "This refiguring reaches back to rework the past and reaches forward to construct the future, as well as stretching 'across' the national borders that transnational adoption has both secured and unsettled over the past half-century. Refiguring both incorporates familiar dichotomies of Euro-American idiomatic kinship ("nature" versus "nurture"; "blood" versus "law"; "biogenetic" versus "adoptive" families) and reworks them in ways that have the potential to create new forms of consciousness as well as transform everyday practices of relatedness" (p. 576). This idea of plasticity posits new forms of consciousness and transformed practices of relatedness that may transcend the binary unhelpfulness of categories such as primary/secondary families.

So, as discussed, we can surmise from the literature that whilst our knowledge of the reunion experience is growing, less research has explored the long-term outcomes of reunions, and very little research on reunion outcomes has focussed on what kind of kinship has developed, if any (Logan 2013).

#### **5. Our Study**

Our study was by means of a four page, semi-structured questionnaire containing 13 questions for adults that had been involved in an adoption reunion. The limitations of data gathering by the mail-out of questionnaires have been well rehearsed. These include a reduced ability to explore sensitive issues, poor response rates, and a tendency for non-reply from those who have not had a positive view or experience of the matter being studied (Denscombe 2014). Another limitation was that because of the predominance of studies of reunions that were under 10 years old (Browning and Duncan 2005), we chose to look at reunions that were at least 10 years old with the consequent possibility that the people who had been involved in these reunions may have moved address. The choice of length of time since the reunion was made on the basis that very few of the existing studies of long-term outcomes had looked at those of this age. Finally, regarding the limitations and influences governing questionnaire content and data analysis, the author has over 20 years of conducting research on the topic of adoption, 40 years as a practitioner, and 50 years of being a birth father. This lived experience necessarily informs my approaches. As a counterpoint to this, a birth mother and adopted person assisted in the drafting of the questionnaire, and in this sense, a member of each of the categories most directly involved in reunions was instrumental in content design.

Over 220 links that had taken place via the Adoption Contact Register for Scotland<sup>2</sup> were identified between 1996–2006 (i.e., at least 10 years old with some being over 20 years since link)3. The paper work was then sifted and inadvisable contact links were removed from the sample, e.g., those that had ended in severe acrimony and had no wish for further contact. This resulted in a settled sample of 203 links, and a list of names and addresses was compiled, resulting in 405 separate sets of names and

<sup>2</sup> A database where expressions of mutual wishes for contact are held and at the point when the second party registers, a 'link' occurs and both registrants are placed in contact with each other. This mutuality dimension provides another possible limitation on the findings in that the responses are all from a population that, at least at the point of registration, shared a wish to meet each other.

<sup>3</sup> It should be remembered that the adoptions involved in this study date from the pre-1980s period of 'closed' adoptions in which there was no adoptive parent-birth parent contact post-adoption.

addresses. For reasons of survey mail-out complexities (e.g., having to include a USA-stamped and addressed return envelope), non-United Kingdom (UK) addresses were omitted. In total, we sent out a covering letter, the questionnaire, and a stamped return envelope to 368 people.

#### **6. The Findings**

The study findings are in two parts. The findings from the first part, which focusses upon the value of using the Adoption Contact Register, have been reported and published elsewhere (Clapton 2018). The second part gives in-depth voice to those who responded to our questionnaire, and is discussed here. We received 75 replies to our mail-out. We believe that over 20% is a successful rate of return, given that the links in our study were at least 10 years old, and some were from 20 years before. Many letters were returned 'address unknown' or 'addressee gone away'. However, those that did come back arrived in all sorts of ways. We received photographs, short notes, lengthy covering letters, follow-up emails, and a dutifully completed questionnaire. Due to the uneven nature of people's circumstances—e.g., some birth parents were deceased, they and other parties could not be found or declined to respond—there were very few returns from both parties in the initial link.

The following is drawn from three central questions that invited qualitative responses: "What happened after the link, did contact continue onwards or did it cease? What has happened in the ensuing years, does contact exist and what does it consist of? Did contact cease, and why?" These were followed by an invitation to say more, which was taken up by 58 of the 75 that replied. A specific relevance to kinship has been sought in the data.

Of the 75 returns, 58 were indicative of the continuation of a relationship). The following are exemplary extracts from the accounts of adopted people and birth mothers, and are discussed in turn.

#### *6.1. Adopted People, Kinship, and the Long-Term Outcomes of Reunions*

A large majority (37/40) of the links of adopted people with birth mothers continued onwards from the first meeting, and remained "in touch" with one another4. Eighteen reported that both parties participated in each other's family events such as weddings, described contact as regular, and talked of "being in each other's lives" and meetings with wider family in other parts of the world.

One respondent was jubilant:

"I see my birth mum as much as possible, we have an amazing relationship. It has been 17 years now and I feel like I have known her all my life. I treat her like a mother and I treat my step dad, B., like a father. It couldn't have gone better for us. We meet up at least every two months and I stay at their house in Yorkshire for weeks at a time. We are very alike in a lot of ways. My kids, who are 13 and 15 have always known S. and B. as their Grandparents 100%. My husband is also very close to them both."

Being in each other's lives meant a variety of what resembles kinship work: "We shared some very poignant experiences together, for example the death of my (birth) grandfather when I felt I was at last able to be a daughter to my father and support him and my (birth) grandmother". Some are as decisive about having found a family: "we have become a family 18 years on", "there is a great bond between us all". The endorsement by children was also interesting: "My children are very accepting and consider it normal to have three sets of grandparents". Greater self-knowledge was bound up with the recognition of familial traits: "I know myself so much better now from knowing my father and grandparents. Being able to recognise familial traits has meant so much to me now that they, my birth family, have gone".

For one of those reunions where contact had ceased, there was an account that was painful to read:

<sup>4</sup> 29 women and 11 men. Space precludes fuller demographic description of e.g., age, marital, and parental status.

"Got on with mother but sister was jealous, a nightmare. Mother was weak, sister had power over her so I told them to stick it. Time later was asked back, told sister sorry. Stupid me went back. In that time father died. As older brother, I helped them. Found out my brother getting married but I was not invited. I confronted my mother, knew it was my sister's doing. Told them it's over and they disgust me. Total waste of time, they're dead to me."

Arguably, this is not so much a failed reunion as more a complex account of kinship matters, notwithstanding the negative outcomes. If our questionnaire had been more pursuant of these, or if we had the opportunity to interview this man, he might have agreed that his found family were kin to him (as well as 'dead to him').

Other expressions of loss were present: "With the highs of 'reunion' also comes deep feeling of loss at the life you didn't have with the people you were meant to be with". There is also regret: "My birth mother is now in a home with dementia and I can only visit infrequently, but I am in contact. My sister has emigrated to Florida, but we are in touch and have been out to stay. I feel we are a family although maybe not as close as we would have been if brought up together". Also, given the time span covered by the study with some reunions having first taken place over 20 years ago, and involving mature adults, deaths feature: "I am certain that if my sister was still alive, we would be in constant touch. Found we had many things in common, felt I at last 'belonged'. My brother welcomed me too, but he died in Australia—met him and stayed with him on two occasions. Discovered many similarities—genetically too". One respondent updated her questionnaire response to add that she had been left a legacy by a member of her birth family.

The comments about destiny, loss, and regret also sit alongside a point made frequently, which is that, "Obviously my adoptive parents will always be my parents". Another respondent made a comment about terminology relating to when she met her birth mother, and it is often found in the literature: "My mum is the lady who chose to have me and has brought me up".

A 'provisional' quality was detected in the nature of one or two of these relationships, with one woman wondering: "It would be interesting to find out what my birth mother's relationship with me is. I have never had the courage to ask this". This emerges more in birth mothers' accounts below.

Overall, it seems that contrary to any notions of a tailing-off contact, for the adopted people in this study, the majority of relationships that began at reunion continued, and closely approximated those in the lives of non-adopted people in that they became involved in the births, marriages, and deaths of their birth families.

#### *6.2. Birth Mothers, Kinship, and the Long-Term Outcomes of Reunions*

Unlike the positive reports from the majority of adopted people, birth mothers' accounts and assessments were more varied. Ten mothers reported that the link with their child had developed into a satisfying relationship ranging from absolute pleasure ("in each other's lives") to regular meetings and contact between both sets of family members. Five mothers reported a mixture of "positive/mixed" feelings. These were the result of post-link relationships levelling off to occasional contact by email or Facebook. Six mothers were unhappy, and reported the link and subsequent experience to have been a negative one.

The mixture of mixed feelings or dissatisfaction was the result of the cessation or dwindling of relationships where it had been expected that these would continue. Those relationships that endured produced a mix of accounts that conveyed familiarity in all senses of the word:

"It is a good feeling to know that my daughter comes and goes freely to my house and she doesn't feel left out. We remember to include her in everything and I see her about every three weeks".

and:

"My son met my sister and husband on several occasions. As time passed we met just the two of us, fairly often. We shared a lot of views about life and philosophy. After about five years, our contact diminished and he became understandably more engaged with his young daughter. I anticipated this development and always took the view that this was not only appropriate but was representative of the rhythm of normal family life."

Expressions of a sense of kinship are often demonstrated with reference to other (birth) family members: "My whole family welcomed my daughter with open arms. She was introduced to my husband (not her father), my two daughters, my sister, brothers, aunts, cousins, friends, and people in the small village where we live. And, of course my mother—my father had by this time passed but he knew about her beforehand". And: "My son is a good uncle to my daughter's two children and a good brother to my daughter—they are very close." A sense of joining up comes over in one account: "My family were delighted to welcome her to our family and so very pleased that our relationship is as close as if we had never been apart. I always told my spouse and friends that I had had a daughter adopted. My spouse could not love her more". An endorsement by a birth mother's children echoes that of the children of adopted person cited above: "When I told my sons the news in 2001 one said: "That's great mum, I've always wanted a sister!" Both boys have become close to their half-sister".

Some of these relationships had a provisional or delicate nature, even at a minimum of 10 years after first contact emerged. Some mothers reported insufficient contact in their relationships; others wrote of the relationship being subject to external and negative influences such as hostile partners. Still others wrote of bonds, but with differences: "We keep in touch at Christmas, but we have little in common. My family ethos is quite different to the one in which she was brought up. For example, I taught English, and she has poor literacy. I found her to be quite suspicious and lacking curiosity about the facets of her adoption. So, a strange bond exists, with little affection". Another mother wrote: "Contact is occasional, which is fine for both of us. We aren't close geographically, and transport is a problem. Generally, we keep in touch by mobile phone—he's abroad a lot. It's tricky, I think we are both aware of the awkwardness of the history. And we disagree strongly about politics and various other things. Have to tread carefully. And I'm still guilty about it".

This mother captures the awkwardness that is present more than a decade after first meeting her son, but she also expresses something about the long shadow in her life that was cast by adoption.

Of the seven siblings and two birth fathers who experienced links up to 20 years ago, three brothers or sisters reported that after meeting, contact was at a "minimal" level ("Met twice—text at Christmas and birthday but no other contact"), but one went on to add that, "Even though it's only Xmas cards, it's nice to know he's there. I always thought I was an only child so knowing I have a brother is comforting". Three other siblings were very happy after they had met their birth brothers or sisters, with one making an interesting point about terminologies: "I feel so lucky to have found an amazing brother and sister. We don't like to say half brother and half sister. From the first day we all met each other, we just clicked. My brother comes to visit once a year and I find it difficult when he leaves. My sister comes over once a year with her family and I have been to Texas and stayed for four weeks".

Of the two birth fathers that joined the survey, the first reported that he and his daughter often met, and were "now a part of each other's lives"; the daughter of the second father lives overseas, but visits him when she holidays in the UK and stays overnight along with her partner and their son.

So, as far as the birth mothers in this study are concerned, less of them compared to the adopted people reported satisfaction and longevity of post-reunion relationships. March's point about reunions causing a resurfacing of grief emotions for birth mothers, and thus experiences of ambiguity towards the event, may be relevant here (March 2015).

#### **7. Discussion**

#### *7.1. The Language of Adoption Reunions*

#### 7.1.1. Reunion

"Reunion" is often used by professionals to describe the meetings between an adopted person and birth relatives. The widespread use of the term is also notable in the academic literature. A reunion between birth mother and her adopted child is arguably, in the physical sense, an accurate description, given that the birth mother carried the child for nine months, and may have cared for their baby in a mother and baby home for days and weeks. However, reunion applies much less to meetings with birth fathers and other birth relatives such as brothers and sisters. Neither is it a word in widespread use by adopted people to describe their meetings with birth parents. More importantly, the word "reunion" implies joining together again, and therefore imposes and raises expectations all round that may not be fulfilled (Clapton 2003; March 1997; Trinder et al. 2005). Interestingly, just two of the study's 75 respondents used the word, and in one of these cases, quote marks were placed around it.

#### 7.1.2. 'Mum' or 'Mother', 'Half-Brother'/'half-Sister'

One adopted woman wrote about her birth mother: "I didn't feel anything for her as she is not my mum. My mum is the lady who chose to have me and has brought me up". This echoed a familiar theme in the literature of the distinction between mums and mothers (Tattenbaum-Fine 2013). However, she was in a very small minority of the 37 adopted people who reported that they remained in a relationship with their birth families. The words "adoptive mum" and "birth mum" were often used, with one woman referring to her birth mother as "bio mum". As also indicated in the literature on siblings' relationships in reunions (O'Neill et al. 2018), there were very few complications in developing relationships between the adopted people and their birth brothers and sisters. Reports ranged from social media connections to "we have settled into being brother and sister as if we had grown up together", with frequent uses of the word "half" as in "half-sister". An interesting remark was made in one of the accounts about the wish to dissolve awkward nomenclature: "I feel so lucky to have found an amazing brother and sister. We don't like to say half brother and half sister".

#### *7.2. Kinship Ties: Displacement, Replacement, or Additional?*

Yngvesson (2007) challenged the long-standing viewpoint in adoption that "a child can only be one thing or the other and whose adoptability requires the cancellation of one identity, so that identity can be replaced by another" (p. 569). This paper has drawn attention to notions of displacement and hierarchies of primary and secondary families in the literature. On close examination of the dynamics of long-term adoption reunions, it has been found that displacement of the adoptive family by the birth family is extremely rare, and that what seems to be emerging are horizontal kinship networks whereby adoptive and birth families co-exist, to a greater or lesser extent for all parties. Although research has concentrated on the adopted person–birth mother dyad (Howe and Feast 2003), in reunions that continue down through the years, the role of siblings, birth grandparents, spouses, and the children of both parties has been neglected (Passmore and Feeney 2009). This research has uncovered that these groupings may play an instrumental part in the development and maintenance of kinship ties. They also may not.

We have also seen that long-lasting reunions produce a shared history of their own, and that whilst this does diminish the work of kinship involved in raising an adopted child, the relationships that develop after reunion can be as expressive of familial ties as any other.

#### **8. Conclusions**

The study of the adoption reunions discussed in this paper sheds greater light on the complex dynamics that are set into motion (or tapped into) when reunions occur. The accounts from the study suggest that over the long-term, most reunions develop into some form of relationship that is neither a replacement for adopted persons nor as lacking in depth and meaning as simply that of "favourite aunt". A binary approach to the kinship of primary family (adoptive) and secondary family (birth) seems an inadequate characterisation. This paper has suggested that ties of a more horizontal nature seem to be forming rather than any hierarchy, and when reunions are assessed over a lengthy period, it can be seen that for most, these ties deepen and develop a longevity that carries with it many expressions of kinship.

**Funding:** This research was funded by Birthlink, a Scottish after-adoption agency.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

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© 2018 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

*Article*
