Review: "You Don't Look Adopted" rips away the fairy-tale image of adoption to reveal the painful truths of being adopted

Heffron's book at home
on my desk

Anne Heffron's searing memoir "You Don't Look Adopted" is not a book that I, a woman who relinquished a child, could read at one or two big gulps. Too painful. Way too painful. It's short--only 159 pages--but in those pages, Heffron plunges the depths of the long-term impact of being given up for adoption, and growing up in a new family, with such relentless pain in the prose that I had to do it in a long couple of weeks, a few pages a night.

For what Anne Heffron has wrought is nothing less than a full-blown indictment of taking a child away from their* natural mother--the one whose body has nurtured this being, the one whose DNA the baby shares--and sent it out into the world, tetherless, tied to no one. Despite the fact that Heffron was adopted by good people who she loved, nothing has ever overcome or diminished the deep sense of abandonment that courses through her veins and onto the printed page.

I thought I understood quite a lot about the pain of being given up and adopted, having spent the decades since I gave up my daughter in 1966 studying and learning and writing about adoption, but nothing prepared me for passages like this:

Anne Heffron

"As an adopted person I am a silver ball that just happened to land on Red 9, Anne Heffron. I could so easily could have landed on Black 4, Jessica Silverstein, say, or Heidi Stork. and so maybe I just keep reliving the crap shoot of my life.... There is a wild familiar feeling of anything is possible when I can jump from my life into someone else's.... The tricky part comes in the unconscious need to feel in control....It's like this fantasy of going back in time and rejecting the birth mother before she can reject you."  (p. 35) 

We who are not adopted never have this running dialogue, that who we are is a crap shoot. Even if we wonder if we are adopted when we are young, ultimately we have clarity about our connection to our family--whether we like them or not, whether they are good to us or not--that Heffron never can feel for she has always been: adopted. In writing about being the "good adoptee" in her family at a time two boys were giving her parents a terrible time, she writes that when her father said she was the "good" child, she felt both proud and awful:

"The only problem was I both loved and hated everyone in the room. They were my family, but they were the wrong family, and there was nothing I could do about that, I was completely powerless."(p. 23)

Lorraine

My daughter has said something similar when I talked to her for Hole In My Heart so I could have her voice, and I was taken back to that hour in her parents' living room in LaValle, Wisconsin, late at night. They were good to her, she knew, but they were the wrong family.

Heffron talks about it being necessary for her to always be the one who leaves, something that started when she was very young and after three days could stay no longer at summer camp. Later it would be parties, relationships, college, jobs, places, all in defense of leaving before she can feel unwanted, unwanted as being given up for adoption. I battled tears over and over again as I read because I knew that my daughter had so many of these same feelings. I remember asking her if she wanted to contact Patrick's children--her siblings--but she knew that they had not even come to their father's funeral, so angry were they with him. "I don't need any more rejection," is what she said. "I don't need any more rejection."

"You Don't Look Adopted" is a not a linear memoir in the traditional sense.  Divided into short sections, one after another, with headings such as "Hello, Daddy" and "Please Come Back," and "What Will I Look Like Later," it barely follows a time sequence until near the end. Her two marriages are dispatched early on, we learn she has a grown child, but late in the book she reminiscences about feelings and that occurred when she was young.

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Near the end there is some resolution when DNA reveals her birth father's family, and she eventually meets her birth father. (To differentiate between the two sets of parents, she always refers to her biological parents as her birth parents, and her adoptive family without the use of the qualifier, adoptive.) She does find her birth mother, but the woman lied to her, and her children, Heffron's siblings, and thus spoiled the possibility of a warm relationship with most of them (save one brother) by denying Anne was her first child. Both of her mothers are deceased.

I have so many sticky notes on the book from passages that seem crucial to relate that I am ignoring them and simply diving into those that come to mind as I write. This passage, near the end, is about secrecy:

"So many adoptees don't even realize the secrecy that is part of their lives. They think it's normal, to have a life that they aren't free to talk about at home. My mother's friend was telling me how much my [adoptive] mother hated to think about my birth mother. she couldn't bear to think about her, is what my mother's friend said. and I knew this as a child, as an adult, and so I talked about my birth mother as little as possible, but my birth mother was part of me, and so denying her was denying myself, and that meant that when my mother said she loved me, I knew she didn't mean she loved all of me. she loved that part she considered hers." (135)

Having had a reunion not only with my daughter, but with her adoptive parents as well, that graph made me sad all over again for my daughter, for I knew that her mother could never forgive me for giving her a daughter who was less than perfect, not with her epilepsy, her penchant for lying, her not being a copy in some respect of her, the adoptive mother, the one who raised her.

While that is sad enough, elsewhere Heffron wishes her mother could have understood the depth of her loneliness of separation, and held her as a child and cried with her over the loss of her own, her original family. "I wanted us to grieve my adoption together so that then we could love each other with our whole hearts." (143-144) WOW is what I wrote in the margin there. How few adoptive mothers, I wonder, can truly grieve with the child for having lost their first family? Certainly not when they think of a child as a "gift" from god.

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She delves into the sticky issue of inheritance for adoptees; the people who always ask--But you were adopted by good people, right?--as if that makes the initial abandonment disappear; the feeling that you were brought into a family to fix it; the difficulty in becoming your own person.

Heffron's writing is straight-forward, clear, bracing as ice water on a sweltering day. She manages to tell of her well of sadness writes without self-pity or bathos, and that in itself is a feat. She disperses small gems of insight that feel like electric shocks to the heart: "Having sex is so complicated. Sometimes people get left behind." (156)

Yet through all the stories she tells about herself and other adoptees she has interacted with, you end the book feeling that you do not really know the person she is, and that may be the nub of her story: she is always hiding and making herself up, and this goes directly to the initial abandonment she feels:

"The fear that becoming your own person equals losing your parents equals losing safety equals dying. I think this is the glitch in the brain many adopted children have that the world at large doesn't understand. It happens quickly and it doesn't get talked about, but it is there." (79) 

So much for putting down The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child.

Anne and I were both at the Indiana Adoptees Network conference in April, but both us apparently can be shy and don't foist ourselves on others--perhaps that fear of rejection--and so we managed not to meet, something we are now both upset we didn't do. We recognize our books are kind of a package--both of our books are about the deep and lifelong negative impact adoption had on our lives, and the lives of millions of others, from our connected but opposite points of view, mother and child. If people knew, really knew, would adoption still be so popular? Would there still be "proud birth mothers"? We think not.--lorraine
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*We shall be switching away from "her" and "his" to use the gender neutral pronoun "their" more and more. "Their" is becoming accepted in such cases, since no singular gender-neutral possessive pronoun exists.
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