Not Defined by Origin

By Features and Opinion’s Editor Cian Walsh

“I never held any animosity towards the situation.” Those were the words uttered by the gentleman whose brain I picked going into this month’s theme of articles. Heritage. A concept defined by origin. He, however, is quite the opposite. This gentleman who will remain nameless told me his story about recently trying to get in contact with his birth mother after being adopted in 1970. His is a story of understanding heritage and origin and the way it cannot be changed. Heritage in the sense of who his birth family were and still are, but heritage is maybe not all that matters. We can’t choose where we come from, or who we are born from, but maybe we don’t need to know in the end.

It was a snowballing curiosity he had maintained in the midst of The Birth Information and Tracing Act that had been put into place in July of 2022. The act submitted that “It confirms the right of a person to know their origins. People who were adopted, boarded out, the subject of an illegal birth registration or born in a Mother and Baby or County Home Institution, will have clear and guaranteed access to information and records about their birth and early life,” as per the BITA Public Information Leaflet. By the time that the access to birth and early life information had been fully amended on October 3rd of 2022, this gentleman in question was in his early fifties with two kids of his own. Just over two years later, he’s been in contact with two out of his seven half-siblings. 

His first thought however, was contacting his mother who also will remain nameless. There was only a record of her once he had received his document. The gentleman had found out that his mother was twenty-two when she had him and in fact that he had a half-sister sixteen months his elder. With this, came a lot of context to the situation. It didn’t seem overly difficult to understand the challenges of being a woman in her early twenties now pregnant with a second child. Add the fact this was rural Ireland in the 1970s and it starts to make a lot of sense. But still, there was much to make sense of for this gentleman. There was much to understand, and to accept over the situation. What I never asked him was what he would have said if he ever got to meet his birth mother. It seemed a step too far for the time I had to speak with him. The truth is I’ll never know and nor will he. His mother passed away a number of years ago. 

What he did say was that he never regretted being who he was–stating that “I can’t regret the things I never had. I never had any animosity towards the situation. And I never let it define me.” I couldn’t even begin to put to words how much I was moved by what he said. Me being the person I am, I wondered about the impact of seeing that woman’s face and hearing her voice would have had on this gentleman who never got to. I thought about his own two kids who would have seen a grandmother they never knew or his wife who would have the privilege of meeting another in-law twenty five years into their marriage. I wonder most of all how long it takes to call a stranger ‘Mam.’ How long would it have taken for her to no longer be a stranger or until she could see herself as his mother. What I found the most beautiful part of this gentleman’s story besides receiving a text from his half-brother reading “Hey, I hear your my brother from the same mother!”, is that he never felt he needed to know any of that. 

“I’m grateful for the parents I did have. Not regretful of the ones I didn’t.” 

He then went on to discuss the fact that he wouldn’t have a single notion of where he would’ve ended up if not for his adopted parents. He understood the trajectory of his life was altered the moment they took him home. He told me there was never any reason to ask questions about a life he could’ve had when he was so in love with the life he ended up with. It’s bizarre the way we attach ourselves and our familial relationships to the phrase “blood is thicker than water,” when blood was out of the question to the people this gentleman would call his mother and father. They looked at adoption believing they couldn’t have kids themselves. It was as clear as day that they couldn’t conceive. A few years later, his mother was pregnant. As bizarre as the situation was, there is something beautiful knowing that they were ready to be parents no matter what. That they were ready to love and care as much as a child requires you to regardless of blood relation.

In my opinion and as I’ve found out sometimes the hard way in my own life, family is simply what you make of it. Family can be an F word to some. It has been for me in some cases like I’m sure it has been for many people. We are all born into this world innocent and naive, they say. We are blank canvases waiting to be painted by the virtues that those who bring us into this world carry. Is it strictly those who bring us into this world that can instill those virtues? I’d like to think that familial roles like mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters are found anywhere. I, for instance, am one of the many men in this world burdened with having just one older sister. It’s brought me great levels of anxiety and guilt about who I am as a person but I don’t feel like getting into that right now. Jokes aside, despite lacking any blood related siblings besides her, I think I’ve found myself with many people in my life where the term ‘friend’ seems like an understatement. Family is a term that we, as a society put all this weight into and I ought to believe that its application can spread wider than what the typical definition allows. 

I learned a lot about what family means to me from that gentleman. More than he could ever realize. He told me about this recent development in his life that would quite honestly, make shit of me if I were in his shoes. I know I’m too young to have an idea of what things like marriage and children do to one’s perspective on the rest of the world. I unfortunately can’t even say for certain that I’ll ever see either of those things in my life. I’d like to think however, that the best traits in the families we make for ourselves are just as inherited as the traits in those with whom we share blood.