The old fear of adopting a child of BAD BLOOD is still a real scenario. Blood is suspect — a carrier of what unknown entities? Madness, psychosis and promiscuity floating in globular platelets. Disease.

Yes, the child is bound to have bad blood: a clotted blood line, a pool of congealed lineage, the flow from past to present to future having been stayed. When you amputate a limb, the presence of that limb is still felt, a ghost presence, a felt absence. There is also an over-idealization of that missing limb.

In the closed system of adoption, a part of the adoptee is cut-off, amputated, and so s/he mourns a ghost parent. The adoptee is also haunted by a HEREDITARY GHOST: with little or no knowledge of her/his genealogical history, there is no way of knowing what can be PASSED ON to the next generation. Or still, what has been passed on already? 1

With today’s medicine relying on genealogical patterns to diagnose and treat certain hereditary disease, starting a family presents a whole new crop of anxieties and fear for the adoptee with only guesswork and incomplete stories about their medical history.

As the birth mother is supposed to pretend as if she never had a child, the adoptee is expected to enact the same scenario. Dead to each other. There is no formalized ritual for the mourning of a person you never met or have known as ‘real’. It is an unrecognized loss. Buried.

We are told that a GOOD ADOPTEE does not dig up the past. Will he/she have the courage to stir up the past in an attempt to face the future?