Originally part of The Ex-Puritan’s special edition “Indigenous Storytelling,” guest edited by Brandi Bird, Wright’s text was also selected by Emily Urquhart to be published in “Best Canadian Essays 2025,” from Biblioasis.
Abridged version:
Imagine learning the word “adoption” at the same time you learn the words like “mother,” “father,” “home,””birth,” or “safe.” Other words you learn are “abandoned,” “given up,” “loved,” “wanted,” and “adopted.” You learn that you have a mother but she gave you up. You learn that the people looking after you are also your parents, a mother and father, who decided to keep you. You are not related to them, but you sort of are. They could not have babies of their own, so they adopted you. You are told your biological mother wanted to keep you, but couldn’t because she was too young. You are told that she loved you, and that you are wanted, yet you know you were still given up. You must reconcile the fact that you have no power to choose for yourself, that these people you find yourself with are your parents, and that you may never fully know where you came from. You don’t remember a time where you weren’t told any of this.
Your father and I always wanted kids. We tried many times but God never sent us any that stayed. One afternoon, Grandma called us from Kamloops, saying that she had met a girl named Dawn-Marie who had you in her tummy, and was putting the baby up for adoption. She asked “are you interested?” so we packed our things into the car and zoooooomed up to Kamloops to meet her.
My adoptive parents (Bob & Teresa) had raised me from the beginning with a picture of my birth mother, and her name (Dawn-Marie), but there was always a sense of the mystical about her—a present absence, not a ghost but not quite fully coherent as a person either. While I knew I was brought into this world by her, I still felt this feeling of not-quite-knowing where I came from and how I had come into this world.
Narratively, a birth comes either at the beginning or end of a story, punctuating either events being set in motion or coming to a close. Birth is rarely figured as a transformative disruption that happens in the middle of the story, a volta. This is what it felt like to me being an adopted child, that my life was beginning in the middle of other people's stories, that there was a big universe out there that I was a small part of.
I was always aware that our birth story operated on multiple levels. It was constructed by my adoptive parents to help me and my twin feel secure in being adopted. As parents who are not biologically related to their children, I suspect it also functioned as a litany of reassurance for them too. I always wondered what story Dawn-Marie told herself about her pregnancy and our birth, or even what stories she was given about her own adoption.
In a way, our birth story was a mythic speech act, where everything within the confines of its narrative had come to signify multiple things. It wasn’t so much about the birth itself, but rather everything surrounding the birth—the paperwork, the relationships, and the transition from people to parents, and girl transitioning to a mother, and then to a birth-parent.
I was standing in the kitchen when my water broke. It was 8:30 or 9 in the morning, and I had to get Grandpa Barry and Grandma Yvonne to drive me to the hospital. When my contractions sped up, a foot came out first and your heartbeat disappeared from the monitor. We think the umbilical cord was wrapped around your neck. The doctor quickly transitioned to a c-section, and retrieved you first before getting your sibling. You were taken out at 10:01 AM, and TJ came out at 10:02. I woke up much later, and the nurses put you both in my arms and I cried.
When we met Dawn-Marie, she asked us “Do you want this baby?” we said “Yes, we do.” Dawn-Marie said “I will think on it.” We drove back to Nelson. Months go by, and then we get a call from Dawn-Marie, saying “I’m having twins, do you want these babies?” and we said “Yes, we do.”
I eventually met my birth mother at the age of 5 at the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park. While 5 years passes quickly for me now, that time where I didn’t know her feels disproportionately long in my mind. It was after this first meeting that I noticed my parents started to trace features of our appearance and how we acted to our biological mother. The issue of “Nature” seemed to loom large in their minds, not recognizing what they had “nurtured” in me. This seemed strange to me because it wasn’t part of our conversations before we met her, only after.
I began to wonder if my parents also had insecurities about the adoption. I remember feeling different from my friends because at such a young age I was realizing that all parents have internal worlds complete with insecurity—that I was wondering if my biological mom was tracing features and behaviours back to herself, or to my adoptive parents. I also wondered if her experience being adopted to a white family was similar to mine.
Later in life, I began learning about the sixties scoop– how Indian Agents would steal children from community and from hospitals and adopt them out to white families. The intent was to “kill the Indian and save the child.” It was their intent to stop the transmission of culture that happens within a Native family and begin socializing native kids as culturally white. For the state, “Nurture” should and would always win over “Nature”. It reminded me of being a child and saying to my adoptive mom “I wish my skin was light like yours. Kids say I’m dirty because my skin is brown.” She said she wished she was tan all year like me, and it half consoled me. Another memory comes up of me and my twin at the beach, running in the water and then rolling in the sand while we were still wet, the white sand sticking to our skin , to try and see what it felt like to fit in, to not be so visible in a town whose BIPOC population falls under 1%. I don’t remember doing this after meeting Dawn-Marie.
I remember the first time we met. We spent the day at the Vancouver aquarium. We walked to the seawall after, and you were holding my hand when I began crying. You looked up at me and asked “Why are you crying, Dawn-Marie?” I crouched down beside you and said “I was so scared that you wouldn’t love me.” Your little hand reached up to hold my cheek and you said “Of course I love you, you’re my birth mom.”
Months go by when we get a call saying “The twins are coming, the twins are coming!” So we packed up the car and zooooomed up to Kamloops AGAIN. On September 1st, 1992, you and your sibling came into the world. You didn’t want to come out, so the doctors had to open up her belly and get you. The nurses brought you to us, and we counted to make sure you had ten little fingers and ten little toes, and you DID, you had ten little fingers and ten little toes. You were both perfect.
Luckily, Dawn-Marie had a lot of control in how the adoption went. It was an anomaly that my parents were willing to have a closed adoption on her account, and that they asked to open it up as we grew older. Friends of theirs would tell them how lucky my twin and I were, that we were “saved from poor living conditions.” When telling our birth story on a public stage, we signify the purity of our white parents and the imposed shame or inadequacy of our brown parents. We speak of the charity and goodwill of settlers, while our disconnection to our original family is erased. We signify the pain our birth parents face in having us and giving us up. We signify the fulfillment of our adoptive parents’ dream to have children. We signify the state’s ugly intent, and the persisting love of our origins.
Also absent from the narratives are the amount of children in care here on Turtle Island who can not or would not be adopted, another way in which the severance of families has always been violent. Everyone wants to adopt the tabula rasa that is a newborn baby, or perhaps the perfect idyllic orphan who is sad but ultimately just wants to be loved. Narratives of adoption, and foster care, do not leave space for messiness, for dealing with the trauma that the very system itself instills in those who go through it. Annie never acts out or breaks plates or intentionally scrapes her knee or inflicts pain onto small creatures as a way of exerting control in a world where children have none. However, these are behaviors myself and other adopted or fostered individuals I know have exhibited growing up. These reactions seem logical to me, growing up in the confusion and messiness of adopted life.
Adoption defies stable categories, as I love all my parents while also being keenly aware of the ways in which it has been used by the state to disrupt and attempt to end cultural practices of Indigenous people across Turtle Island. I do not count myself as part of the Millennial Scoop, but my adoption produced the same results–because my mother was scooped, and I was adopted, we were not able to grow up in community, practicing our culture. If she hadn’t been scooped, I would not have been born—This is not to say I wish my life had been different, or that my birth mother's life had been different, but that it was beyond my control. What is in my control is how I talk about this history. Adoption severs and forges, it gives and it takes away, it is both secure and insecure, socially and politically concerned with issues of nature and nurture, neither of which are just progressive, liberal, or conservative. It is both an ending, a beginning, and a middle.
We drove back down to Nelson, and everyone was So Excited to have you home. We drove up, Up, UP! the mountain to moms workplace and showed you to our friends Judy and Tim, and Jill and David, and Tina and Dave. We drove down, Down, DOWN! the mountain and you met Grandma Ruby for the first time. You puked all down her back as she held you.
