My SO told me about a couple of his classmates in elementary school. They were aunt and niece, and the same age within months. They were even in the same class, which was apparently hilarious on back to school night.
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Two lls only for officers.
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My kids enjoy playing with some of their cousins that are the same age as them, but I always have to remind myself that they’re first cousins once removed. The cousins’ parents are my nieces, and their actual first cousins.
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This is interesting. Apparently those of us who grew up in so-called “broken” or “mixed” families get a bit of protection against shocks like this.
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Yeah. I’d like to empathize, but I don’t understand why it would seem like a big deal, wish the article had explained that better.
As a kid, I called a girl from school and her dad answered the phone in the form of “Hello, this is Bob Dobbs” with a different last name than hers. I mentioned it when we were talking and she said something like “He’s my dad. He raised me and loves me and takes care of me. My father didn’t and doesn’t, so he’s irrelevant.” I’ve kind of always thought of it that way since.
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I’m definitely more in the “family you choose” over “family you’re born with” camp. We have a few adoptees in my extended family (but oddly few step-parents, now that I think about it), and the general consensus is that the people who are there for you are more important than the people who happened to sire and/or birth you. And I don’t think that should be surprising, as we are, after all, social animals.
But it seems undeniable that blood matters, too. Most of the folks I know either have a relationship with their biological parents or at the very least know (or have known from a fairly young age) that they were adopted. I kind of get the curiosity about who your “real” parents are, but I can’t really truly imagine what it’d be like to be in that situation. I mean, my parents are just unquestionably my parents.
What I took away from that article was that the surprise factor was a big part of people’s distress. Especially with things like affairs or other deceptions, where you’re basically learning that your mother1 etc. has been lying to you your whole life. I can see how that might make you question some assumptions.
Then there’s things like this, where I have a really hard time reconciling the utter despair of losing a newborn with the complete lack of empathy for the experiences of that child after finding them.
Justice delayed is justice denied, as they say.
1. or is she your mother, really?!?!?
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It does, but in weird ways. As in:
I know someone who was adopted at birth. She always knew, and in fact lorded it over her siblings a bit when she was little because she was chosen by their parents, while they just happened (gotta love the kid logic of that) .
When she was older she decided to look for her birth mother, and her parents were happy to give her all the information they had. She did track down her birth mother, who refused to speak to her, and an uncle, who asked her and “the other one” to stop trying to contact the family.
And that’s how she found out she had a half brother. Her birth mother had been pregnant twice as a teen, and given the baby up for adoption both times. Different fathers.
She managed to track down her brother, and they are now so close he calls her adoptive mother “Mom”.
So yeah, blood does count, but context counts for a lot too.
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Totally agree.
I could have been clearer in expressing my confusion as to why blood matters as much as it does, though. Is it biological? Or Cultural? Or some weird psychological blind spot? How does (in your example) a blood affinity between half-siblings translate into a genuine familial affection between a half-brother with no biological connection to his half-sister’s mother?
And while the adoptees I know have some sort of relationship with their biological parent(s), they’re pretty messy relationships, as often as not. This is totally anecdotal, but I suspect that babies simply given up for adoption at birth are a minority, overall; what I see are children who end up in the system due to neglect or abuse, and who have some memory of their birth parent(s) and/or being fostered. Sometimes our blood relatives are just plain bad for us, and yet we’re drawn to them anyway.
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My totally-by-experience working model goes like this: we don’t just inherit eye colour and other physical attributes from our ancestors, but personality traits as well.
And then there’s factors like this:
A friend of mine broke up with her boyfriend/father of her son before the child was born. Eventually the son started visiting his father, but for the first several years there was no contact (father wasn’t interested but came around).
My friend noticed that her son, around the age of five or six, started using some of his bio father’s catchphrases. They lived 300km away – it wasn’t regional. Neither she nor the boy’s stepfather used those phrases. Yet somehow the kid knew them.
As for my friend who was adopted – I’ve met her (half) brother, and you would never have guessed they didn’t grow up together. They just click, in a way we usually attribute to knowing each other all their lives. And both of them clicked with the adoptive mother as well. It’s like she just had the right X factor.
The brother didn’t have any big animosity to his own adoptive parents, but he wasn’t as close to them as my friend was to her adoptive parents. No reason, just that X factor.
So from where I’m standing, there’s something else going on, something we don’t understand yet. But it helps you find “your people”, even when “your people” have a totally different ethnic, social, etc. etc. background from you.
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I think proximity has a lot to do with it (especially if there’s more or less agreement on some important things). Just being around someone, and talking to them, means a lot. My siblings are far away, we don’t see them much, we don’t talk at all, we agree on nothing, and are basically strangers, even though I grew up with them. The fact they married uncaring/awful people didn’t help.
My friends are around here, we see them often, we can talk about personal stuff, and we agree on lots of of things. They are much more important to me.
ETA: Same for my in-laws, except for the “around here” part.
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We had an uncle/nephew combo in my elementary school class. I forgot about that until now.
My daughter became an aunt at age 9 (or rather, actually, a half-aunt but we never counted things that way).
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Honestly, my experience has been the exact opposite. I’ve thought long and hard about how to reply to this, about how I have a strong desire to forge lasting connections outside of family, but have found it impossible to do any such thing. But it’s rather painful and embarrassing to write about and it’ll just come off as self-pity, so I won’t write any further on this.
I just felt it important to note that this interconnectedness isn’t a universal thing. Maybe we aren’t islands, but the route off the peninsula is often tortured and twisted.
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Hope you are okay.
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