A Choice in Name Only
“You’re so lucky that your birth mother chose adoption,” the man at church said to me with a smile.
I didn’t ask how he knew that I was adopted—everyone knew that I was adopted as soon as they saw me with my white parents. I don’t remember how old I was; old enough to understand what he was really saying. You’re lucky to be alive. I wish I could say that I always found statements like this monstrous. They did make me uncomfortable, for reasons I couldn’t have expressed then. But I’d heard such things so often that I believed them myself.
Was adoption my birth mother’s “choice”? Growing up, that is what I was told—everything I had in life, everything I knew, flowed from that one far-reaching decision. A deep reverence for my adoption had been passed down to me since I was still toddling, and at its
