I named it DAY ONE.
In my personal narrative, my date of birth is known as DAY ONE. I don’t know when I started calling it that, but it’s been a very long time.
You might be thinking, well the day you’re born is Day One for everyone. But I don’t think that’s quite the same as my definition – specifically when compared to non-adopted people.
If you weren’t adopted or abandoned, your arrival was probably anticipated, celebrated, and documented. There are pictures of your mom pregnant. There are family stories about your older brother being so excited while waiting for you to arrive. Your parents can share how they felt as they brought you into the world. There is family history that already exists, and you added to it. Your story began before you did. You can learn about the people you are tied to and part of, how they lived before you were born, the familial line you joined, the great-uncle you so closely resemble.
And while some of these things are also true for adopted people, the tie to the adoptive family is a different animal. That’s not a statement of one type of family or the other being ‘better’, it’s just an observation. They are different. The fact is, adopted people started out in one story, then switched and joined another one. And the stories of both families were radically and permanently altered as a result.
Having no information about what happened before I showed up hours old in a cardboard box, it kind of always felt like I just … appeared. Like there WAS nothing before that moment. It was DAY ONE.
In these days of open adoption being the norm, the stories of biological and adoptive lines are perhaps joined together more fluidly and seamlessly.
Maybe it’s not quite so much of an issue as it used to be. The two stories are woven together before the baby is even born in most cases. The bio family is involved and able to answer questions for the adopted child.
But for those like me, born in the many decades where closed adoption was the norm and secrets were plentiful, little to nothing is often known about origins of adopted people. Records exist but are often redacted, wrong, sealed, or missing.
As time goes on and views change, adoption records are being opened in some states in the US. Some adopted people are getting that paperwork, and finding out where they came from all those years ago. They’re weighing the pros and cons of reaching out to biological family and forging new – yet also very old – connections.
For abandoned babies, changing times and unsealing records isn’t going to help much.
Records are scant, usually just police reports and maybe a newspaper clipping along with legal information about the adoption. Birth certificates are mostly blank, and sometimes listed under John / Jane Doe.
That was my situation. I knew what happened after I was found – the police, the hospital, the orphanage, the adoption, the family – but until consumer DNA testing, I had no possible way to find out what happened before DAY ONE.
Oh, I tried.
- I got what little paperwork existed from the orphanage and the adoption agency.
- I tried to contact the person who found me. No luck.
- …and the cop who wrote the report. No luck.
- I found every high school in a 5 mile radius and I scoured yearbook pictures looking for any physical similarities to myself in the faces. Again, no luck.
When DNA testing came along, and my research options expanded immensely, I eventually did solve my puzzle.
I learned a little bit about what happened before I was born, and I have information about my origins that I believed impossible to discover.
However, I’ve found that my date of birth continues to be DAY ONE for me.
The details of the stories I learned when I solved my biological origin are, to a large degree, not my stories.
Learning a bit about their lives, their families, their histories has been an amazing gift.
Knowing my ethnicity, that I’m 2nd generation American on one side and 3rd generation on the other, that I have bio aunts and uncles and cousins and half-siblings, where my biological grandparents lived and worked – those are details a grown-up abandoned baby thinks are out of reach.
But as nice as the details are, and as hungry as I am to acquire them, they feel like facts that are still somehow separate from myself. Like a story I heard, rather than my own history.
It’s like watching a TV show with a lot of character development, and you’re intrigued as hell, but you can’t quite GET INTO the story for some reason. It’s just not clicking for you. Maybe there are subtitles, or thick accents you have trouble understanding. You keep watching, thinking that maybe in Season 2 you’ll identify a little more with the characters, but it all just seems so foreign.
Maybe it gets easier over time. Maybe I’m so used to DAY ONE being my story that it’s hard to change that.
I am essentially rewriting part of my identity as I knew it. That’s never an easy thing.
My story used to start out “Once upon a time, a two-hour old baby was wrapped in a sheet, placed in a cardboard box, and abandoned in a cold apartment hallway.”
It’s not pretty, but it’s what I lived with for over four decades. It was succinct and simple, if somewhat tragic.
Now the story starts “Once upon a time, in a city far far away, there was a boy and a girl and some bad things happened and some more bad things happened and so they made some choices and ran away across the country and soon they ended up abandoning a two-hour old baby in a cardboard box and also more bad things happened afterwards too.”
And that story is also not pretty, but it’s more complex, and far, far more tragic.
Nevertheless, I don’t regret a thing.
I am glad I searched and it’s great to have the information that I have. I’m happy to have solved puzzles, reached out, made connections. For me, it’s better to sometimes have to grapple with that information, than to not have the information at all.
