The Censorship in My Adoption

I was somewhere around 9 or 10 years old when my parents read to me a letter from my birthmother. It wasn’t the first letter she had ever sent, but it was the first one that they read to me. I remember sitting up in my new twin bed in my brand new bedroom that they had added onto the house in order to accommodate their first and only biological offspring, my little brother, so that all three of us kids would have our own bedrooms. 

If you force me to, I can arrange the letters I now have from her (which I have, of course, compiled in a binder) and pinpoint the exact letter they sat me down to listen to, but because they didn’t allow me to hold it in my hands, the memory is less than what it could be. 

“Do you have any questions?” They asked me afterward. 

“Who is this from?” I asked. 

“Your birthmother.” 

“Oh.” 

“Do you have any questions?” 

“I don’t know.” 

“You know, she made the best choice she could for you.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

And when they got up to leave the room, to turn out the lights and bid me goodnight, I held my hands out for the letter, but one of them said, “We’ll hold onto this for you.” And so I lay awake that night trying to understand both the entire loss of my birthmother and the loss of that letter, proof that she had taken the time to think about me and write to me. 

A few years later, after so much creeping around the house behind my parents’ back, I finally found a file folder marked “Shannon” in the filing cabinet in the garage where my mother kept all of her piano music. My mom was on her way home from I don’t know what, the grocery store or practicing the organ at church, and when she opened the garage door to pull the suburban in, she knew exactly what I’d found. Instinct kicked in, and I ran to my room with my stolen artifacts, she was close on my tail. Slammed my door. Screaming behind me, “Give it back! That’s not yours!” Body weight against the door, knob wiggling, thumps, crying. Shoving down as much paperwork as I could down my sports bra, getting as much important stuff as I could. Pictures and letters, first priority, couldn’t tell the difference between the rest of the paperwork. 

Of course, I was forced to relinquish (sound familiar?) the file folder back, but I’d stolen enough documents to have things to sift through after the house quieted that night, one of them another letter, a letter I hadn’t yet seen, and most importantly, one that was signed by my birthmother at the bottom and in the space where her last name would have been, a rectangular hole in the paper. 

The censorship I endured as a young adoptee was inflicted on me not only by my adoptive parents who kept my adoption paperwork, letters from my birthmother, and pictures of her away from me, but also by the adoption agency who monitored our correspondence and cut out identifying information before sending it on to me as if I were an inmate in prison. 

And to top it off, the details of my adoption weren’t the only things I was being sheltered from. I grew up in a conservative evangelical family; we were big supporters of James Dobson and Focus on the Family, we only watched PBS and Sunday night Disney movies on ABC, though we got the treat of watching the Discovery channel in hotels every summer on our way up to Montana to see family. I was forbidden from reading a whole litany of books: Harry Potter, The Secret Life of Bees, anything that disrupted the Christian teachings I could not escape. 

I was laying in bed last night, tossing and turning, when suddenly I thought of the two kinds of censorship I have endured. First, the cut out rectangle where a name should have been, complete absence of a thing that should have been there. And then, of course, the standard black bar of censorship blocking something from visibility, a thing I never actually saw until late junior high because of how successfully I was sheltered. In black and white, absence and restrictions. 

Censorship can wreak such havoc on young minds. It certainly did with me. And the trouble is, I began to understand what was being done to me the moment my parents walked out of my bedroom with that letter, the first time I asked for a book they said no to at Barnes & Noble. But as a minor, there was nothing I could do about it. 

In junior high, my friends burned me CDs to help, I began saving my allowance to buy things at the mall on school field trips, I quit going to church because that was the only time I could count on to root through the house and find the hidden pieces of my history. I did what I had to in order to fill in the gaps that I could see and depended on my friends who lived in the outside world to call out the gaps I couldn’t. 

You can’t ask me about my medical history or my Latina hair because I don’t know any more about it than you. The same goes for Nickelodeon shows or secular music in the 1990s. I was there for Bill Clinton’s presidency, but his entire tenure, I never heard his name spoken in my house once. And whatever happened at the hospital when I was born, stayed there. That vital piece of myself that entered the world, happy for just a moment before it all came crashing down, was kept away from me, hidden by my parents who knew my original surname for 30 years before giving me the paperwork, hidden by the government who wrote me a legal fiction in the form of a birth certificate. 

You can say that there are some things children aren’t ready to know, but I’ll disagree with you there. Children can feel those holes, can see your censorship bars, even if they lack the vocabulary to name them, and all that does is prove to them that you don’t think they’re worth telling anything. Or worse, that you don’t trust them to have their own opinions about things, especially if you fear the risk of those opinions running counter to your own.