Another "disappeared" item

N.S.: I posted this in july of last year, but it was "disappeared" into my "drafts" folder. It may yet be "disappeared" yet again, as another "disappeared" item was "re-disappeared" yesterday.

Essay by grown-up adoptee on adoption self-destructs

brit Fiona Sampson was adopted, though she doesn't say when. Her essay has a great opening. When she was four or five, sitting at a table coloring, her grandmother by adoption informed her she had been adopted.

"‘I’m going to show my mummy and daddy,’ says the little girl, about her picture.

"‘they’re not your mummy and daddy,’ says the old woman on the sofa, witchily. ‘you have a real mummy and daddy somewhere else.’"

Following, the last two paragraphs I could tolerate.

"Still, some biological parents do abandon their kids, or are forced to hand them over to authorities of various kinds, or prevented by destitution or illness from being able to raise them. Some die. Their babies get kidnapped by regimes, ‘charities’, people smugglers. Viewed this way, ‘normal’ family life – kids growing up in birth families of whatever form: step-, half-, single-parent, gay, IVF, grandparental – is scarily circumstantial. Plus, even within bio families, no one reposes entirely within the bosom of inalienability. Divorces lead to custody battles; adult siblings drift apart; parents offer addict offspring tough love.

"But we don’t really want to think about this. It’s already difficult enough working out who you are, paying the bills, and just generally hustling a living. Having something to count on through thick and thin – a touchstone of something absolute, perhaps, even within the most secular of lives – is as attractive as ever. The political rhetoric of ‘hardworking families’ – invoked by all major political parties around the world – reaches across the ideological spectrum. Though it’s the Right, of course, that crosses its fingers hardest against those it sees as lacking the social status of a nuclear family, with habitual targets including single mothers and the LGBTQ+ community."

She doesn't give any examples of the Right "targeting" unwed mothers, homosexuals, or sexual psychopaths, because she can't. They don't exist.



Sampson maintains that adoptees have no sense of an "inalienable" connection to anyone else.

"You could call it a life sentence, for this is the moment in which I learn that I am adopted."

"I will repress this memory for decades, and for all the usual reasons. Like every child, I want to be happy. Still, what makes adoption so through-the-mirror, so literally unheimlich, so ‘un-homing’, has nothing to do with unhappy families or childhood abuse. Indeed, I suspect the reason that comparatively few stories of adoptee experience make it to the mainstream is that this is not classic misery memoir territory. Instead, at its heart are existential questions of identity, about the foundations of the self."

aeon doesn't permit comments, which as a blogger whose name has momentarily slipped (he frequently wrote on immigration) my mind observed, kills the correction function that commenting makes possible. Otherwise, someone might have pointed out to Sampson that her one stab at using german was incorrect. "Heimlich" means secret, not "at home." It is "heimisch" that means "at home." Nobody would even say, "unheimlich." Forty-four years ago, we had a discussion of just that term in a german class at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, when someone mistakenly said "heimlich."

"The adoption paradox
"Even happy families cannot avoid the reality – my reality – that adoption is predicated on transacting the life of a child"

Fiona Sampson seeks through hyperbole to give a special drama to a situation that has lost much of its drama.

The majority of White children is still born to married parents, but between the already high level of out-of-qwedlock White births, and the high level of divorce among White parents, the majority of White children will at some point be in the "care" of a divorced or estranged parent.

2025 postscript: In what may now seem quaint, in 1960, lefty John Hersey published a Cold War "satire" called The Child Buyer, about a corporation that buys prodigies to use, presumably for the Space Race.



https://aeon.co/essays/even-a-happy-adoption-is-founded-on-an-unstable-sense-of-self