unrelated thoughts: on being an unruly adoptee
the podcast by wes unruh
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There is a phrase that I first encountered in Betty Jean Lifton’s book Journey of the Adopted Self, the term “genetic bewilderment” and “cumulative adoption trauma.” Becoming a father, meeting someone, finally, who looked like me, even if it took a few years to really become apparent, was a kind of anchor.
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You probably have not seen Warlock III: The End of Innocence (1999). Not a lot of people have. It was an outlier to a franchise that had marginal popularity in the 1980s and – to be clear – it was direct to video. It neither fits with the previous films from the Warlock franchise, nor is it particularly remarkable as a stand-alone horror film. It is, one might say, a “deep cut.” Unless you were looking for it, you likely have not seen this film. Yet, as an adoptee film, Warlock III does some remarkable things.
Throughout my search I would give up for months, convinced that there was nothing more for me to discover. But what I’ve learned directly from my biological mother and biological father did help anchor me into my own narrative, I found the threads of my own story. Before I came into contact with them, I was left pondering a series of unconnected and yet interrelated facts, struggling to see if there might be meaning within those bits of data. And in wrestling with these fragments of narrative I find a unique, almost absurdist void of meaning that challenges my very notion of selfhood.
The Magic Valley landscape is broken apart by canyons and fences. The land around the town is a harsh, disrupted space, fueled by an agricultural boom generated from irrigation and lack of oversight in genetically modified organisms, pesticide usage, experimental fertilizers, and likely countless other environmentally unsound practices encouraged by the state of Idaho. My identity within that community never fully gelled, and I can remember when I first curdled, when I became unruly.
There are millions of adoptees “in circulation” in the United States, and nearly all of them live with their biological histories erased and sealed away by the states in which they were adopted, at least during their formative adolescent and teenaged years. This episode is a narrow slice of one very particular example of that experience.
