Rudy Owens’ memoir on the American adoption experience
© 2017 Rudy Owens. All rights reserved.
The adoptive parents must have good health, a stable marriage, exhibit a degree of maturity, and must have evidenced some ability to adjust to the reality of their childlessness. . . . While the adoptive parents will get great satisfaction from nurturing, stimulating, and encouraging the child, the primary goal in their care of the child is to help and love him for his own sake. They should be people who are warm, flexible, understanding, and with a desire to help a child develop his capacities.
— Ursula M. Gallagher, Social Workers Look at Adoption,
US Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1958
Fewer than one hundred photos exist that document my childhood through my adolescence. Looking at them now, they confirm beyond any doubt I never resembled my birth mother, my adoptive sister, or my adoptive father. Nor did I look like their extended families. Even as a young boy I could tell that grandparents, parents, children, and even cousins shared a clear physical resemblance in the families all around me. I was different and would always be different from all of them because my family members looked nothing like me. I also knew in my bones that I would never share my life’s journey with my “blood” kin.
Despite the volumes of advice given to parents about bonding among nonrelated members of adoptive families, those ties can never erase an adoptee’s self-knowledge of being genetically different. In my case, I always knew I was adopted. There is not a single “aha” point in time I can recall like those found in so many autobiographies. I never had a cathartic moment, with sudden awareness of an important and life-changing fact. That is what happens in fiction or dramatized biographies that stretch the truth and tell people what they want to believe. My life was not make believe, even if the journey to self-discovery remains mythical at its core.
Return to Chapter 4: How Scott Became Martin: A Life Told in Records
Read More: Chapter 6: Blood Is Thicker Than Water