Adoption is like ethnicity. It arrives as a plot point before we enter the story

When my pugnaciously no-nonsense granny set about constructing our family tree, she cut through the ambiguity of my place on it by adding (grafted) after my name. It was a fair, if blunt, acknowledgement of the otherness that adoptees navigate throughout life. I’ve recently tried to disentangle the implications of my adoption in a memoir Whose Song to Sing?, and it’s illuminated a weird paradox. Everyone agrees that adoption is a big, immovable fact in someone’s life, but it’s considered awkward if adoptees mention it themselves. 

TV writers love it as a plot device. If you want an off-the-peg backstory for your villainous wrong ’un, have them adopted at birth! Recently, Harlan Coben’s Run Away on Netflix has an embittered adoptee deliberately hooking his birth sister on heroin. Fortunately, though, his birth mother (Minnie Driver) manages to slit his throat before he can do any more damage. 

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In the BBC’s Riot Women, an ungrateful adoptee nearly drives his adoptive mother to hang herself. Had his birth mother not joined forces with her to condemn his attitude, who knows what might have happened? Perhaps they had been alerted to potential danger by Yellowstone, in which a disloyal adoptee wreaks havoc upon his family.

As the Duttons struggle to hang on to a decent, natural, American life, the biologically alien interloper, Jamie, tries to ruin them. Interestingly, he often seems as if he’s acting against his will – driven solely by a genetic predisposition to cause harm. He is, as his birth sister points out before stabbing him through the heart, irredeemable. 

Adoption is a fundamental factor in someone’s personality. In my book, I liken it to ethnicity, meaning that it sits with us from the outset. It arrives as a plot point before we enter the story. While birth parents and adoptive parents have a timeline to contextualise the situation, the adopted child knows nothing else. 

What then, does adoption create in a person. Obviously, it’s different for everyone, and my rather tumultuous early years owed as much to the breakdown of my adoptive parents’ marriage as they did to my adoption. There are, however, traits that seem common among adopted people I’ve known, and they aren’t all as negative as TV writers might have led you to believe. 

Unsurprisingly, there is often anxiety about fitting in. Adoptees learn the fundamentals of life from people with whom we don’t share physical traits. So, the aping of characteristics like the gait, timbre of voice, and facial expressions of parents we tend to watch carefully, developing mimicry as a skill. Impressions were my party piece as a child and I still enjoy mastering someone else’s voice or walk today. 

Read more:

• Adoptees share the ‘extreme emotional challenge’ of meeting birth parents decades after adoption
• Cost of living crisis is causing adoption rates to decline – but every child deserves a loving home
• ‘Adopted identity is often invisible to society, like it’s something to be ashamed of. But it’s something to be proud of’

There is, whether we like it or not, an element of performance to adopted life that fosters useful transferrable skills. If you’ve spent your early years learning to walk and talk like a person you aren’t related to, becoming a convincing goth as a teenager or parroting company values at a job interview is child’s play. 

This is not to suggest that an adoptee’s life is inauthentic. Our families are as real as anybody else’s. We just need to learn how to adjust to our environment earlier than most people do. In today’s world of online personalities, physical enhancements and personal reinvention, the adopted experience seems to mirror a good deal of what non-adopted people seek out for themselves. 

Interrogation of identity has become a literary fixation in recent years, with authors seeking to disentangle their selfhood from the cultural factors that shaped them. Ethnicity, religion, and nationality intersect with a human personality from birth and, in adulthood, many people become interested in how much of their personality was shaped by such factors, and how much belongs to them alone.

Adopted people are consciously confronting this conundrum from the moment we find out that we are adopted. Our identities are constructed consciously as we measure our similarities with and differences from our family. We are canaries down the mine for the examined life. 

When my son was born, his were the first eyes I’d looked into that reflected my own. Later, when I traced my birth parents, I saw that familiarity through the other end of the telescope and felt the same thrill of kinship. That tribal aspect to family life is a gruntingly animal aspect of our natures that sits uneasily alongside compassionate values. It shouldn’t matter, should it?

When, as a six-year-old, I asked my mum if I had two mummies, she looked utterly bereft. I still feel the sting of it. People spend fortunes on IVF, however, because looking into familial eyes is so overwhelming, and passing on our genes so imperative. 

I sometimes see photos of myself looking disconcertingly like my adoptive dad. With my eyes narrowed when I’m thinking, and lips slightly pursed, the ghost of him is alive in me even after his passing. We are all the sum of genetics and environment. Adoptees just do the maths earlier than most.

Whose Song to Sing? by Ben Wildsmith is out now (Calon, £16.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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