This 70-year old man is not my father.
He’s raised me since I was a few weeks old, I share his surname, I call him Dad and the state legally recognizes him as my parent. But we share no genetic material, because I am adopted.
Does this matter? To some people, it matters a great deal.
Professor Nick Tonti-Phillipini, for example, Associate Dean and head of Bio-Ethics at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family. In writing for the Sydney Morning Herald last year to decry same-sex marriage, he said:
“A child’s relationship to both mother and father is inherent to marriage. Children conceived by other means may find themselves with people in parental roles who are in a same-sex relationship, but such relationships are not the origin of the child. It is likely for children to be loved and nurtured in such a household, but however good that nurturing, it will not provide the biological link and security of identity and relationship that marriage naturally demands and confirms.”
I am a gay man, and I found this paragraph deeply insulting. Not because of the claims about same-sex couples and parenting – I am used to hearing such ignorance – but at the implication that, as an adopted child, I have had an inferior upbringing because I am not biologically linked to my parents.
It was the man in the picture above who sat with me, lovingly drawing and labeling objects from our home when I got my first packet of felt-tip pens.
It was the man in the picture above who cheered from the sidelines in the one and only season of rugby that I played for a local club, telling me how well I’d done when he knew damn well that I didn’t measure up.
It was the man in the picture above who calmly drove me to hospital and held my hand when I overdosed on sedatives during an episode of mental illness.
We didn’t always get on when I was growing up. Finding out his only son was gay was a dreadfully difficult time for him, and I remember hearing him crying from the other end of the house when I told my mother I’d met a man and was in love with him.
But when we married five years later, it was the man in the picture above who helped us blow up balloons and decorate the reception hall, and laughed at my shaking hands as I put the ring on the finger of my husband-to-be.
I don’t know who deposited the sperm into the woman that gave birth to me. I have met her, though. Fed on the fantasies that people like Professor Nick espouse, I was expecting a genome-shaped hole to be filled in my life, that everything I didn’t understand about myself would suddenly make sense because my blood relative would instinctively know me.
I’d been jealous of the physical family resemblance between the boys I went to school with, and their brothers and fathers. They look like a family, I thought, and I could imagine them all going on fishing trips together like something out of a cheesy American sitcom.
Those illusions were shattered when I met my birth mother. She was nothing like me.
Had she decided not to put me up for adoption, I wouldn’t have had a father at all, as he was well off the scene by the time she found out she was pregnant.
I don’t know if he’s aware of my existence. I know nothing about him, and when Father’s Day comes around he is not on my mind. I suppose if I ever met him I would thank him for being horny and deciding to have sex in the back seat of a car one random night in 1977. But for everything else, I know where my gratitude truly lies.
Truth is, I choke on my opening sentence. The man in the picture is my father, because true fatherhood is a lifetime commitment of love, not an ejaculation.
For seven years my father waited, along with my mother, to find out if a child would become available for them to adopt. His devotion to parenthood was a true choice, and not a mere circumstance that he had to adapt to.
I am 34 years old now and feel more connected to my dad than at any point in my life. Children don’t get to choose their fathers, and most fathers don’t get to choose their children – but mine chose me.
And today, I am the man that he helped create.
i read this with a feeling of what if? see i didnt know my mum and my dad was not able to raise me . so instead i was raised in childrens homes and fostr homes . i can tell you now that if i had been adopted the only regret i would have is that perhaps my siblings would not have been so close . believe me there is no love in the care system as it is just that a system .
That’s really beautiful.
One of the arguments against same-sex couples adopting a child because they cannot (as yet) be the natural parents goes against hetero-sex couples who cannot have children too. Is Professor Nick Tonti-Phillipini saying that there should be no adoption at all? So what does he think should happen to orphans, for example?
My mother was adopted with another 13 girls from several European countries by two women, a countess and a baroness in Belgium who taught them French, as aristocrats do, even though everyone in that part of Brussels spoke Dutch. If anyone mentions tp me that these women were like nuns, as in the children’s story ‘Madeline’, I correct them saying, “No, not nuns. They were lesbians.” It was clear to my mother that the two women could not live without each other and one died in grief soon after the death of the other one. The girls however did grew up with one male figure around them, they called Père Louis (father Louie), who was the gardener.
After my mother died, I was able to make contact with a Belgian half-cousin. She explained that I would not be welcomed into the Belgian side of the family because our grandmother had my mother as a result of what would be now called a ‘date rape’. My cousin knows who my grandfather was too but she will not tell me in respect to our grandmothers ‘wishes’. Sadly, when my grandmother with her husband and my mother’s little half-brother came to bring her home at 5 years of age, her foster parents left it to my mother to decide, and of course not knowing who they were, chose to stay with the 2 women and the other girls. She only saw her again at her (official) marriage, as in Belgium they required a parents consent even at 21 years of age. (Probably only for women.)
My father, on the other hand, witnessed the aftermath of his father’s suicide at a young age, so the only grandparent we had was a grandmother who I never knew, as our family immigrated from Scotland to Australia when I was 2 years old.
My companion of 23 years was adopted too. He wasn’t happy with his adopted parents or the reaction of a remaining sister of his mother when he finally went looking for his relatives. Again, it was something to be kept in the closet. His adopted parents only adopted him, he feels, to keep up with their siblings who have children. He felt more at ease with my parents than his own who we now refers to as the ‘step-parents’ and my parents happily accepted his calling them mother and father.
My parents finally divorced while I was in my teens, over 30 years ago.
All this says to me that heterosexuals whether biological parents or not are certainly not any better at providing a stable environment than any other combination of adults or a single parent.
A friend, over dinner, just informed that Denis Altman was for abolishment of marriage altogether and then he read to me from Kahlil Gibran, “Your children are not your children”. I was about to say the same thing. I feel that a variety of supportive adults, a tribal extended family or a communal approach could be a more wholesome way of bringing up children.
I don’t want to marry my companion; he is more like a brother or a mother to me. What legal union do we have? Can we adopt each other? I think a ‘family union’ or partnership could be the way to go.
Thanks for this one, re-read it and share your sentiments (and more)
Being adopted, bipolar & gay what you say makes a lot of sense.
I’ve not contacted my birth mother, although I did find her on facebook & now have a pic of a woman in her 60s with a family rather than the one I’ve always carried of a teen mum in the late 60s having to give up her baby as the state & her parents made her make the choice.
I couldn’t have had better parents to grow up with than the ones that close to take me home from a Children’s Home and maybe my nature & nurture come from 2 different sources, but I wouldn’t be who and where I a no if it wasn’t for both
)
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I too am adopted, and feel nothing towards any of my adoptive relatives or blood relatives. I was able to meet my biological mother and my half-siblings that she had years after me. My bio mom was 18 and my bio dad was 19 and they had sex in the back seat of car.
This post made my eyes all watery!
Having read Professor Nick Tonti-Phillipini’s comments above, am I to presume also that a married male/female couple “will not provide the biological link and security of identity and relationship that marriage naturally demands and confirms” for children w
hom they have adopted. Professor Tonti-Phillipini makes it clear that children whose parents are not the not “the origin of the child” cannot enjoy “the biological link and security of identity and relationship that marriage naturally demands and confirms.” Thats clear, isn’t it? Adoptive parents of any sex, married or not cannot provide security of identity and relationship. What a plonker, what a bloody minded, narrow minded, bigoted and morally bankrupt plonker. How Christian of him. It’s a good thing Jesus never died (as the good professor must believe) because he (Jesus) would be spinning in his grave to find this junk being uttered in His name. This man is an academic, a Professor no less, and the logic is so faulted, so easily stupid, it once again points out the complete moral failure of the catholic church to discover sound scriptural grounds for their objections. They resort to such faulty logic, logic that insults everyone who has adopted and loved a child. Swine, pure swine!
Beautiful post bro, you are truly blessed. I have a guy that is genetically my father but that is all. I’m grateful to be alive for sure, but there are times when I think some pretty terrible thoughts about him and often wonder how different my life may have turned out if he were a part of it. Thankfully my psychiatrist gave me a exercise to do to process all the anger and turmoil that has slowly been bubbling under the surface for three decades unchecked and often drunk away in my alcoholic years. Enjoy what you’ve got Chris and hug that beautiful man mate. What a legend!
A lovely tribute to your Dad. He looks so proud in the picture. As he should be.