What is a brother? What is a sister? An adopted person's thoughts
I find it difficult enough to talk about my sister who was brought into our family when I was almost two and she was around 7 months. We went to court around five years later to make the adoption offical. I was asked to stand up in court and say whether I wanted Karis to be my sister. I was confused as she already was my sister, wasn’t she? All very confusing for a 6 and 7 year old! I didn’t realise that the reason the adoption took so long in comparison to mine is that her mother (birth mother, first mother, Christina) was contesting the adoption.
My parents put Karis into respite care when she was 14 and she never came back to the family home. She went to a series of foster placements and her adult life was tragically full of several big traumas such as losing her own children to adoption, incaceration and addiction. Whether this was ‘caused’ by my parents sending her away (an adoptee’s worst fear made real?), or whether it links back to her early months with her birth family and then in an residential care unit for babies, I do not know. What I do know, is that when I talked about my worry and concern for my sister all these decades later in an interview by Al Coates for his podcast, he said “some might ask is she really even your sister?”
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I got very confused when we applied for our marriage licence and they asked if I’d ever had another names. I wasn’t 100% sure if having a different name at birth counted (it didn’t) and I got myself into a tizz in the council offices.
As part of the piece of writing I was doing, I googled marriage and adoptees. What came up made my head spin. The official gov.uk website told me that an adoptee was legally allowed to marry their non-birth/non-blood sibling.
“Adopted children may not marry their adoptive parents but they are allowed to marry the rest of their adoptive family, including their adoptive brother or sister.” (1)
So, in effect, my brother who my adoptive mum gave birth to when I was 4 and who has been my little brother since then and who I speak to every week, and incidentally did a Lemn Sissay reading at HIS wedding, IS NOT REALLY MY BROTHER. Right, ok. Thanks gov.uk. So what was all that about being legally severed from my birth families for life, including rights to inheritance and citizenship, and being legally merged with this new adoptive family for life?
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I recently had a bombshell where my adoptive dad revealed he had a child who had been adopted. My siblings and I were keen to track this person down and see if they wanted to connect. I was researching which relatives can contact an adoptee they believe they are related to. It used to be only birth parents who could legally contact the adult adoptee, through an intermediary* and now that’s been opened up to siblings too. EXCEPT … you’ve guessed it … if you are adopted. Yep, that’s right. So I am not my blood siblings’ sister because that link has been severed, and I’m not my adopted siblings’ sister really either.
What am I? Answers on a postcard please.
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash
*I’m sure Pam Hodgkins knows this to the letter.
(1) https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/family/living-together-marriage-and-civil-partnership/getting-married/
