Reconciling Adopted and Biological Identities

This is an archive of the original Bastard Quarterly newsletter, edited by Damsel Plum and Charles Filius. It was published in print and on the web between 1997 and 2002.

Reconciling Adopted and Biological Identities

by David Torsiello

(This article first appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

In the spring of 1978, when I was still not quite 9 years old, The Who released their last album before Keith Moon's death, Who Are You. I remember this well because of the effect the album's title track had on me when I first heard it. I began asking myself the same question Roger Daltrey kept repeating throughout the chorus: "Who are you?" I had always known I was adopted, but for the first time I was feeling the full weight of just what it meant. It was the first time I began to comprehend that I had this other identity apart from my adopted family.

Growing up adopted, I suffered all those same conflicts that all adoptees seem cursed to share. Chief among them is that nagging doubt that your adoptive parents don't love you as much as they would if you were their blood child. In my case, this conflict was greatly magnified by the fact that I have an older sister who is the biological daughter of my adoptive parents. Every argument and fight I ever had with my parents was colored by this knowledge. Likewise, every good and generous thing they ever did for my sister was also colored by it. I had to grow up knowing that she was truly "their" child; in a way that I never could be. And while I obviously can't know this, I have always imagined that other adoptees gained at least some degree of esteem from the knowledge that they were their adoptive parents' special "gift"— that without them, their adoptive parents wouldn't have any children they could call their own. But my adoptive parents already had a blood-child of their own when they decided to adopt; they didn't really need me. I was a total charity case, with nothing to offer them in return for taking me in.

Of course, in later years I'd learn better. Just as people can naturally conceive a child under the wrong circumstances or for the wrong reasons, they can also adopt a child for the wrong reasons— like as a means to save a failing marriage, as was the case with my parents. But I neither knew nor understood this most of the time I was growing up. I counted myself lucky for anything my parents gave me because I believed that they owed me nothing and that I owed them everything.

So when I started the search for my biological family in 1989, I promised myself I wasn't going to go overboard. I wasn't going to change my name, move in with them and start my life over. The primary factor behind this promise was the guilt I'd spent 20 years conditioning myself to feel. But part of it was also because I was, like most adoptees in the midst of a search, desperately afraid of rejection. As far as I was concerned, it had hurt bad enough to be given away 20 years before; I wasn't sure I could take it if I was turned away again. So I wasn't about to get my hopes up with fantasies of being "rescued" by my biological parents— of riding off into the sunset with them to live happily ever after— no matter how seductive those fantasies were.

As it turned out, I didn't have much to worry about. My biological father died in a car accident in 1972 and my mother had married another man and had three children. Hearing my caseworker tell me this over the phone was rather numbing to say the least, but it was also healthy for me in as much as it had put to rest any fantasies I may have secretly harbored up until then.

Then I met my mother and the emotional rollercoaster started another upward climb. She told me all the things I had wanted to hear: that she loved me and that she wanted to be a big part of my life. And for the first time in my life, really, I felt like I was worth something. Then I introduced myself to my father's family and my self-esteem soared even higher. I never did share much in common with anyone in my adoptive family and the more I would learn about my blood family, the more obvious my differences with them became. I was becoming the person I felt I should've been all along— the person I felt my adoptive family had kept me from being. My adoptive parents began to notice the changes in me and naturally felt threatened. We began to fight. A lot.

But even as I was growing closer and closer with my biological family, reminders kept popping up that I could never completely belong to them, either. I found that the more I loved them, the more I resented having to live my first 20 years without them. I wanted those years back, the years I now felt I'd been wrongly cheated out of. The time I spent with them began to feel like a lie— like I was trying to pretend I was never really given up for adoption at all, that it never happened. Before long I was fighting with them as well.

Every time I turned around, something new would be further alienating me from one of my families. In 1991, my older sister gave birth to a son. In the months following the birth, my adoptive parents shared many joyful discussions, with each other and with family and friends, over who the baby most resembled and whether or not they could see any of themselves in him. Naturally enough, I began to think about what it might be like if and when I ever had children of my own. What would they say about my children? Would they debate each other over which one my birth parents he or she most resembled?

My biological mother has three other children, all girls. My half-sisters. Which means they're only half mine. Even if I could magically make up those 20 years I missed— which I can't— there would still be that wall of paternity between us. They still wouldn't be my sisters in the same way they would if we shared the same father. My mother and their father divorced just over a year after our reunion. On some level at least, I know my sisters will always blame me for their splitting up.

Holidays are still a difficulty, even after being reunited 8 years. In that time, I've spent just about every major holiday with my adoptive family, but in my heart I wish I could spend more of them with my birthmother and my sisters. I guess I still feel a lot of that guilt which compels me to be loyal to my adoptive family, but maybe in the back of my mind I'm also punishing my biological mom for giving me away. She calls and wants to know if I can spend Thanksgiving with her this year, for a change. It rips my heart out to have to say it, but of course the answer is no. Maybe Christmas, then? Yeah, right. Easter? Keep dreaming. Mother's Day?!? Have you been sniffing glue, Mom?

"Be sure to get your mother something for Mother's Day," my father recently ordered me. Even before the reunion, Mother's Day had been hell on me. My relationship with my mother has always been the worst in my adoptive family and I find it extremely hard to find a Mother's Day card that doesn't say too much, emotionally. Just getting her a card that says "mother" on it is hard enough— she hasn't felt like any kind of a mother to me since I was probably six or seven years old. It's no easier finding a card for my birth mom— so many of them refer to "all those years we spent together," or serve as a thank you for the great job she did raising me. Naturally, none of those apply to her.

Things were better between me and my father throughout most of my childhood, but in the two or three years before my reunion, that relationship had begun to sour as well. Not coincidentally, this was at the same time my high school career was winding down and I was beginning to prepare for college. My father was in his fifties, thinking about retiring and not too thrilled about having to pitch in and help pay for my education. During one candid conversation, he told me that I was "holding him back" and that I'd have to start paying for school out my own pocket once the spring semester of my freshman year came around because he could no longer "help me." Of course, my older sister never had to hear this when she went to college. Still, my adoptive father had put food on the table and clothes on my back all the years I was growing up, so I didn't feel as though I had the right to challenge him. My blood father had never done anything for me, so I felt fortunate to get as much as I did.

Then, after learning about who my biological father really was, I no longer found it quite so easy to take such abuse with good humor. My biological father was not the callous, unfeeling creature I had always imagined; rather, he was a good kid who had simply made a mistake. He was scared, confused and just too damn young to know how to take care of me when I was first born. Who can say what kind of person he may have become had he not tragically died? And can I blame him for dying?

Despite that promise I originally made myself, I couldn't long resist questioning who I really was and to which family I really belonged. Recently, I reached a compromise of sorts— I write under the pen name of my biological father, Sorrentino, but my legal name remains that of my adoptive family, Torsiello. But even this doesn't feel quite right. Deep inside, I feel like David Sorrentino is who I really am, but again, I feel that for me to take that as my legal name would be like I was trying to re-write history. How could I live under the name of this man I've never even met? Despite all I may feel I have in common with him, the fact remains that he is a total stranger to me. I can never know what it feels like to look him in the face or hear his voice. How can I even know how he'd react to me if he was here? Everyone I've talked to has painted a very positive portrait of him, but how can I know for certain who he really was? How could I be sure he wouldn't turn his back on me again?

But I also feel less and less like a Torsiello every day. Every day, I find more and more distance between myself and my adoptive family. And yet I can't bring myself to betray them. I feel like I can't say no to anything they ask of me because I owe them my life. They paid for me, I'm theirs. And even if I could erase that 20 year gap, would I want to? After all, not all my memories from childhood are bad ones. There are a great many good memories I have as David Torsiello, as well as many members of my adoptive family with whom I get along with very well and care about— could I really walk away from all of it and not look back?

Who are you?

The song never does answer the question.

David Torsiello is a member of the New Jersey Bastard group.

(This article first appeared in the Fall 1997 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)