Liz- On- My Father's Daughter...

My Father's Daughter, by Hannah Pool, is the memoir of an adult adoptee who grew up in England believing she was an orphan with no living family before being adopted as an infant from Eritrea*. When she discovers that not only is her father still alive, but that she has a huge extended family in Eritrea, she decides to travel to Eritrea to meet them and learn about the family and the country she has no memory of. It's an amazing book about identity, family, and coming to terms with the paradox of adoption.

When I first began the book, I wasn't sure that I would get much out of it. Pool's writing in the beginning is reminiscent of Bridget Jones' Diary - every time she is about to face a difficult situation, she prepares herself by putting on another layer of lip gloss - but she writes courageously about wrestling with some of the most difficult aspects of international and trans-racial adoption. She may need to fortify herself with lip gloss along the way, but she does not flinch from putting one foot in front of the other on the journey to find the answers she is looking for.

Pool confronts head-on the complicated emotions that go along with her decision to re-connect with her birth family. The process is filled with contradictions and ambiguities, from desperately wanting to search for her birth family but worrying about whether her adopted family will somehow be offended by her desire; to dreaming of and planning for the meeting with her birth family for most of her life - before she even knew they existed - but feeling completely unprepared when the day actually comes; to loving and appreciating her adopted family for the life they gave her but feeling that she was somehow robbed of the life she might have had with her birth family, even though it would have been a life full of hardship and poverty and war; from being overjoyed at the thought of meeting her birth family but being afraid that agreeing to meet them will give them the opportunity to reject her all over again; to feeling guilty about the way she lives compared to the way her birth family lives but being angry at them for giving her up in the first place. Pool conveys all of this in a straightforward, no-nonsense way, but also with humor and in a way that makes these complex emotions completely clear to those of us who have not experienced them.

This paragraph, for me, made reading the whole book worthwhile:

It is no coincidence that I know a lot of adopted adults. We have a habit of gravitating toward one another, so, as the saying goes, some of my best friends are adopted. Yet, even though I know more than most, I have never heard the words "I am glad I was adopted." Many are happy with the result, glad they got the adoptive parents they did, but not one person doesn't wish it hadn't happened in the first place. No matter how much love we many have for our adoptive parents, no matter how much we don't want to hurt them or how guilty we feel for having these thoughts, we all wish we hadn't been put up for adoption. My mother died. My father was a farmer in a village, who was left, I now knew, with five other children plus a newborn. H couldn't look after me and work the land. So he put me in an orphanage. Because of this one decision he made, my life took a completely different course. Unlike the rest of my birth family, I have never gone truly hungry, I have never prayed for rain, and I have never been displaced by war. I have a wonderful adoptive family, a brother and sister I adore, a job I love, an apartment in one of the world's most expensive capitals - in fact all the trappings of Western success. Looking at the facts, if anyone should be relieved to have been adopted, it should be me. My adoption has meant I escaped terrible hardships and the likelihood of early death. Even I know that a motherless child does not last long in the villages. Had I not been placed in that orphanage, assuming I made it past infancy, I would have had a normal Eritrean peasant girl's life - complete with a stint on the front doing my national service, an arranged marriage, and children in my teens. But I still wish none of it had happened, I still wish I had never been adopted, and most importantly, I still want to know, Why? Why me?"

To be honest, I got a chill when I read that paragraph, and started to think I was doing a terrible thing by adopting a child internationally. How could I inflict that kind of emotional turmoil on another human being? And there were so many other points during the book where Pool described, in her blunt way, what it's like to be adopted - having no information about where you come from, and not knowing what you will look like as you become an adult or grow old because there is no one who looks like you in your life; losing your name; always wondering why you were given up for adoption, and always feeling like love is temporary because the first people who loved you decided they didn't want you - Pool is brutally honest about all of this and more. I gained tremendous insight from My Father's Daughter into what my adopted child is likely to feel about his or her own adoption, and for awhile it scared me enough to contemplate calling the whole thing off.

But while Pool doesn't sugar-coat anything, I also found a measure of hope and optimism in reading her story. First of all, I realized that everything my child will feel and experience is completely normal, and that trying to avoid or squelch those feelings will not do him or her any good. Secondly, by the end of the book Pool has come to terms with her own identity and writes: "I am fiercely loyal and proud to be Eritrean, but this does not seem to have diminished my British identity. If anything, embracing my Eritrean side has made me more comfortable in the United Kingdom...The two identities are not mutually exclusive; they coexist, and I'd even say that they complement each other." What I learned from Pool is that the most important thing I can do for my adopted child is to learn as much as I can about his or her birth family and circumstances, to share these details with him or her when the time is right, to help him or her stay connected to the culture and country and people of his or her birth, and to support him or her in returning there as an adult if that is what he or she wants to do.

I think My Father's Daughter could be a difficult book for adoptive parents to read, but I urge you to be as courageous as Pool in confronting the harder aspects of adoption. If she (and your child) can live through it, the least you can do is read about it so you can gain a better understanding of what she (and your child) have experienced.