Exercising the inherent right to know and tell my story has been a hard won battle. Sharing my story has invariably subjected me to prurient voyeurism and pernicious response due to culturally conditioned false narratives held tightly around the family separation experience. The search for my story began with attempts to telepathically communicate with my absent mother when I was a child, and has been a work in progress since.
Born in 1967, I was relinquished at birth, but my congenital cleft lip and palate disrupted my mother’s plan. I had no primary caretaker and slid into failure-to-thrive status the first month of my life. My mother and grandmother subsequently resumed care for me until I was seven months old, when I was relinquished a second time, due to the lack of resources or support to provide the life they wanted for me. I was legally and permanently displaced and reidentified into the loving, stable family that raised me.
I first reunited with my mother and met my maternal brother in Montreal in 1989, South Dakota in the early 90’s, and finally California in 2016. That same year, a DNA test revealed that I had been misled about my paternity. My father’s 2005 L.A. Times obituary called him “the most successful unknown songwriter in rock and rhythm and blues.” A Forbes article revealed I had paternal siblings, all of whom I’ve met, except my late (2001) brother, also a musician.
My roots in the diaspora’s reform movement include workshopping the seminal Primal Wound with Nancy Verrier, prior to its 1993 publication. Thirty-plus years later, I fully disavow the industry terms “adoptee/adoption” to describe myself or my experience, and reject other qualifiers like “birth parent.” I use descriptive and neutralizing prefixes “cis-” or “allo-family” when necessary. The pervasive fallacy that family separation and reidentification is about parenting has left the diaspora to solve its own problems, absent the diagnostic tools and clinical methods available to most other populations. True liberation begins in the language used to describe our experiences, dissolving cultural conditioning, and reclaiming our full humanity, without apology.
