They Say it's My Birthday...
My NAAM storytelling share.
I got my storytelling on again!! For a 4th time, I stood before an audience and shared a piece of my adoption story. Only this time, I wasn’t just in a room full of adoptees…
The BIPOC Adoptee organization I volunteer for and am on the Board of, held a National Adoptionee Awareness Month (NAAM) Silent Auction and Gala fundraiser last week. I helped plan every aspect of the event and unlike our usual events that are open to BIPOC adoptees only, this was an event that was open to the public. With November being NAAM, we decided this would be an excellent time to raise funds and awareness about our organization. Additionally, there has been a movement among adult adoptees to reframe NAAM from adoption awareness to adoptee awareness which provided an excellent backdrop for our storytelling. We know the general public and society view adoption through a lense that does not include the adoptee experience. This gala was a chance for us to give this wider audience - something to think about.
Despite being one of two major organizers of the event, I decided to also share because…it was my birthday. I wanted to provide a perspective on adoption that many people don’t think about and often take for granted in their own lives.
BIRTHdays.
What follows is the story I shared at the gala. What I share in adoptee spaces only, often helps give me the confidence to share elsewhere. So big thanks to my adoptee fam for giving me space all those times before…
Hello everyone! Thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate your support and interest in bringing awareness to our organization and our adoptee voices.
Speaking of adoptee voices, I am an adoptee. My name is Lisa MM Butler. I am a US domestic transracial adoptee. I was given the honor of being the first adoptee to speak tonight because TODAY IS
…allegedly…
my 45th birthday.
For many of you…I’m sure when your birthdate arrives, you don’t question it. There’s no way your Mother could forget the day she birthed you into this world. All the pain and the agony and !joy. I imagine it’s a moment you don’t forget.
You probably – if there was for some reason a question about your birthdate - also have a birth certificate. A government issued document that proves the date and time you were born.
Something official.
Something that was signed and filed with the state or maybe province or region where you were born. Something that states your parent’s names and legally binds you together.
I don’t have any of that. The birth certificate or the mother. And I’m fairly confident I never will.
I was born and raised in the state of Wyoming which is considered a restricted state in terms of an adoptee’s right to their own birth records. This means that I need a court order to unseal my birth records and access a document that is about me and that every other American has a legal right to.
And Court orders don’t come easily.
In Wyoming, court records are sealed and are not available for copying or inspection unless a “showing of good cause” is presented to the court. However, Wyoming doesn’t provide any guidance when seeking this court order so the task is – as my husband would say - a fool’s errand. My documents remain in the hands of the courts and my parents even at 45 years old.
Isn’t my right to know a good enough cause?
Spoiler alert! it isn’t.
What I do have is a substitute or amended birth certificate that states I was born to Robert and Linda Marko, my parents. A white, well-meaning, Catholic couple in Wyoming. My home state seems to think keeping my birth records confidential will conceal evidence of my adoption.
The evidence of my adoption, however, was and is everywhere.
In preparing for tonight, I thought really deepy about my feelings towards my birthday. Feelings and emotions can be incredibly difficult for me, and other adoptees I’ve spoken with, to recognize. I became resilient at birth. I was scared. I needed to survive. So I did. And one of the ways I did that was to shut down and just not feel.
Perhaps my cries went unanswered so I gave up. Or maybe the quieter I was, the better I was cared for. Whatever the reason, I suppressed my emotions and didn’t stop until well into adulthood and only after weekly therapy sessions taught me how to identify them.
Now, I use a feelings wheel now.
For those of you not familiar with cognitive behavioral therapy, many therapists use a visual aid known as a “feelings wheel” to help their clients connect with and identify their emotions. The “feelings wheel” is as it sounds…a circle, broken into spokes, with each section representing one of many core emotions or feelings.
When I looked at my therapist provided feelings wheel, and thought about my birthday, the word numb stared back at me. I had never thought of numb as a feeling or emotion.
It was categorized, on my wheel, as a feeling of anger. When I looked at other wheels – as there are thousands of iterations – I also saw numb was considered a sad or generally “bad” feeling as well.
Turns out I am angry, sad and generally feel bad about my birthday. Who knew that feeling nothing was so full emotion.
As someone who is desperate to understand the why of everything - I really needed to understand the why of this. Why was I so sad and angry, exactly? Why did I feel so bad?
I, of course, instantly recognized that the day I was born was also the day I was relinquished. I realized it was the first day I experienced feelings that I’ve never been able to shake. Feelings like fear. Sadness. Loneliness. Emotions that seem to be part of my DNA. That seem to manifest as anxiety and depression.
All of this deep thinking brought to mind a scene from a movie I saw recently. It’s a movie called, Babes. Not like Babe, Pig in the City, but B-A-B-E-S, Babes.
It’s a movie starring the actors Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau as best friends since childhood that are now facing parenthood together. Ilana’s character, Eden, is impregnated by a man who dies during the film and she struggles with the decision to keep her child.
She’s single.
She’s broke.
She has no supports.
And yet, she decides to have and keep her child.
In one of the final scenes of the movie, Eden is birthing this new human miracle into the world. Her character is overwhelmed with emotion. She is so in love. She is crying. She is so moved by the ability of her body to grow another body. She’s absolutely weeping and wrecked as she whispers “You are so beautiful” to her new baby girl and kisses her forehead.
She is in love. A life-changing love.
Now I know this is a movie. But damn if I didn’t think about my birth in that moment. About how I had no one to greet me. No one to cry over my arrival into this world. No one absolutely and deeply wrecked by my coming earth side.
To put it extremely lightly, it was a let down. And I think I’ve just been let down by every one of my birthdays ever since.
I know I can’t remember my birth with my brain – but it lives in me. And it lives in a lot of adoptees.
I informally polled a group of adoptees about their birthdays, again, in preparation for tonight. I found that 60% of the adoptees I polled weren’t 100% sure of their birthdate. I also found out over 90% of respondents agreed with my emotional assessment. They felt the same emotions as me. Detachment. Sorrow. Grief. Despair. Dread.
I want you to sit with that for a minute. Think of all your friends, neighbors and family members. How many are unsure of what month or even day they were born? How many live with falsified identities?
Birthdays for adoptees can he incredibly hard. We can feel sad. We can dread being celebrated or on display. Birthdays can trigger reminders of what we lost. They can trigger fear over what our birth families might think of us…if we were ever to meet them. Are we good enough? Are we what they expected? We often feel profound loneliness. We can feel like we desperately want to be celebrated but it’s never enough because we don’t actually believe we are loved or deserving of being celebrated. Our birthdays can even become a vehicle for our adoptive parents to remind us that they “saved” us.
I’ll leave you with a quote by an intercountry adoptee from India named Kusum. They said, “I’d much prefer condolences to “happy birthday”…It feels more like my funeral, (and) the funeral of my relationship with my beloved mother.”
Thank you.
Happy Birthday and condolences lil’ Lisa!
So moving, Lisa, thank you for sharing. You capture the complexity of birthdays for adoptees so well. Yes, the grief, condolences ❤️