Adoption was the farthest thing from my mind that day. I’d gotten my original birth certificate (OBC) and adoption decree in 1980, and been rejected by my birthmother, Mama Dot, the following year. In my own way, as a trained historian, I’d begun to accumulate my bio family history and documents as a matter of genealogy. A hobby. I was pretty sure nothing else could really piss me off about adoption. Little did I know. This was way before Bastard Nation, deformers, and the adoption industry ate my life.

So there we are in a little room tucked away in the Salem, Ohio branch of BancOne. Lawyer JR, who always struck me as rather self-important and definitely patronizing, opened the box. It was full of stock certificates, deeds, legal papers, that he and I thumbed through and made small talk over. But, there, at the very bottom of the box lay something that looked like a birth certificate. My birth certificate. The original, original birth certificate. But something was wrong with it Parts of it looked to be missing–as in cut-out missing!

Before I could grab it for myself, Lawyer JR, with Houdini-like skill and a smarmy smile, slipped the cert in his pocket. (Gordon made a move towards the offending hand, but thought better of it; snapping his wrist might be a good idea, but didn’t fit into our timetable.). Then incredibly Lawyer JR says:

Mom wanted to protect you. She had me razor it out.

Razor it out???

The razored out, “it” of course, was my identifying information. .

My mom had once mentioned that Lawyer JR was an adopter himself. His chortle, imaginary or otherwise, verified it.

All this took place in a matter of seconds.

As I saw it at the time, I had two choices. I could demand the OBC or play it off. Right or wrong I chose the second. Today I’d do both.

Oh, that’s OK. I know all about it. I’ve had my own copy for years.

His face fell like he’s just been struck with Bell’s Palsy.

I’m not satisfied with my response at all, but I did have the satisfaction of getting his goat. I should have pressed, though, but my mom wasn’t even buried yet, and I had a funeral to do, and the cert, beyond general principle, had no value in its state of abuse. Today my acquiescence looks like an excuse.

This little moment brings us back to adoption pathology again. I am absolutely positive that my adoptive mother did feel that she was protecting me. She was that way. I am pretty sure she wished somebody had protected her from truths about her own dysfunctional family which included multiple divorces, foster care, insanity, attempted suicide, and the horrible accidental death of her baby brother–the last two events I believe she witnessed as an 8-year old.

That she asked Lawyer JR to do the dirty work for her, also makes perfect sense. She was a nitpicker, and probably somewhere in her mind she thought it might be illegal for her to deface MY birth certificate, but if an officer of the court did it, it was OK. Razoring up a document is serious business; not like just crossing or blacking out. Once it’s cut, it’s gone. I’ll leave that bit of business between my mother and me. This is about Lawyer JR.

That the bad doc was found so late is a little bit interesting. The mutilation most likely took place in the late 1960s and no later than the early 1970s. As she got older my mom took a different turn about adoption (not that she was ever really harsh about it, just sensitive) and suggested that if I wanted information she’d help me. By then, though, I’d gotten my OBC searched, found, and been kicked down the stairs, so it didn’t make any difference. The razored OBC was a relic from our past, though not Lawyer JR's.

The impunity with which Lawyer JR swiped my OBC still digs deep in to me. If I had not already had my OBC–-gee, issued by the State of Ohio with no questions asked–I would have reacted differently. For sure, I enjoyed sticking it to this self-righteous prig. Still, what right did he have?. That was my OBC mutilated or not. And besides, as the heir to my mother’s estate, the documents and what they represented, were mine. Would he have pocketed the GM stock? The deed to the house? Probably not. (I mean, he was a prominent local lawyer not prone to Bar Association suspensions). But adoption makes it all different. Adoption is the exception. Adoptees are the exception. Obviously, my mother had no moral right to cut up the cert, but he had no legal or ethical right to take it.

Adoption is one of those areas where people who have little or no direct interest in the individuals involved think they have the privilege–no–duty–to interfere. To confiscate papers, to monitor relationships, to pick around the private lives of the adopted “for their own good.” Trade lobbyists, political ideologists across the spectrum, lawyers, parents (of all varieties), churches, bureaucrats, politicians, the state itself continue in the second decade of the 21st century to demand that their vague (if any) “interests” supersede our right to not only our birth records, but to be treated like everybody else. Our right to not be robbed, demeaned, insulted, infantalized, and pathologized due simply to our adoptive status, by bureaucrats and technocrats with fancy titles. If this isn’t diversified industry, then what is. Henry Ford would be proud.

Of course, any day can be Gotcha Day in AdoptionLand. It’s not limited to the adoption industry-created holiday NAD, the highlight of National Adoption Awareness Month (NAAM). The mass destruction of identity though always makes for cute local news stories. so a coordinated effort is a good idea. It encourages business.

I first heard about Gotcha about 20 years ago. I was immediately squicked. Gotcha sounds like trapping a rat under the stove or grabbing up the last flat-screen TV on Black Friday at Wal-Mart. It’s a predatory term. A scary term. A cheap term. A violent term especially today with kids in cages at the Mexican border being siphoned into the Christian adoption system. Gotcha relates adoption to aggressive consumerism; and that consumerism to a public act of virtue. Adoptee rights activist and theorist Daniel Drennan ElAwar writes that Gotcha moves the private into public space:

It fundamentally reduces something very complex and multilayered into a cartoon parody; it forces something private (especially to a young child–I remember not wanting anyone to know about my adoption when I was younger) into a public sphere that is not always welcoming of such a fact (the first question I was asked in school was: “Why are you brown?”).

Despite the majority of adopted adults finding Gotcha offensive or worse, Gotcha has gone mainstream. Parties and other public events are built around it, marking the new adoptee as a “special” person for whom special expectations are forecast. It’s sort of a baptism into the American cult of adoption complete with Gotcha cakes, paper plates, greeting cards, banners, t-shirts, and commemorative jewelry. Pinterest pages are dedicated to fun-for-adopter stuff.

My adoptive parents celebrated Betsy Day, always phrased as “the day you came to live with us.” (Old-timers will remember that I used to be Betsy–an OK name, but one that never fit me.) Marley is a shortened version of my birth name Marlene Sue–a name I’m not real fond of either.

Betsy Day was celebrated on December 21, a preview of Christmas to come. There were usually two gifts waiting for me on the dining room table when I came down to breakfast. When I was in the third grade I got a pink cashmere sweater. Cashmere was big that year.

The “celebration” if you could call it that, was low key and private. No banners. No cake. No neighbors. No bragging or saviorism. It was–and I expect to get some flack for this from several sources–Betsy-centered. Back then personal business was considered just that: personal. Reticence was the custom. The commercialization of the intimate was frowned upon.

I have mixed feelings about Betsy Day. When I was young adoption made me feel like a freak. I bounced from liking Betsy Day to moderately dreading it, and back again. All adoptees are freaks, of course, and I didn’t want to be one. As far as I know, I never met another adopted person until I was out of college and working. I was surprised to find him. Now there were two of us in town. Unlike a lot of adoptees I didn’t feel a loss outside of a loss of information, which I was obsessed with) nor feel traumatized like some adoptees describe their experience. I imagined my mother wearing a brown suit and working in an office, a sort of Katherine Hepburn type. I learned later, she didn’t and wasn’t.

As I got older, Betsy Day mellowed out. I came to appreciate it as a symbol of what I meant to my parents. I was an adored and much- loved child and was rather spoiled. While Betsy Day could be interpreted by some, as something that was done by my adoptive parents for themselves it was very much for and about me I doubt that today’s Gotcha Day has anything much to do with the object of the brouhaha. It’s a freak show and a media op for over-sharing adoptive parents and a fund-raiser for the adoption industry.

My mom never forgot Betsy Day, and every year I continued to get a present. Usually, it was a check, but when I visited at Christmas there would always be a special Betsy Day present waiting for me–a sleeping shirt, some jewelry, or a book on local history. I miss that.

Sentimentalism aside, Betsy Day did not present the avarice, the braggadocio, the narcissism that I see in the contemporary Gotcha and paper pregnant crowd. My first mother, Dottie, as I would learn years later, never had any more biological children, but adopted a boy and a girl 10 and 12 years after I was born. They were LDAs, not learning they were adopted until they were nearly teenagers. I cannot imagine Mama Dot throwing a Gotcha party. My two moms would have put their heads in an oven before they made a spectacle of their children or themselves, much less social status points.

And that’s the difference. Both mothers understood the personal. Today we live in a confessional culture. In the attempt to over-“normalize” adoption and the state-constructed family, adoption is fetishized and romanticized. Adoptees are objectified in mediazed public fantasy.

Being adopted is not fun, and having your business on Front Street when you are too young and too powerless to stop it is not fun. As children, we cannot control our narratives or privacy. We should not be paraded to prop up egos or to push social and religious agendas. As adults, we should control our narratives and own our agency. We should not be expected to be fundraisers and poster children for the adoption industry or narcissists.

Speak truth to adoption.