Indian Late Discovery Adoptee

Five years ago, on a seemingly ordinary Saturday like today, the results of a DNA test I took for fun shattered my world. For 34 years, I'd built my identity on a foundation of sand. Biracial, half Cuban and half Indian, that's who I was told I was. That Saturday, I was putting my daughter down for a nap when my phone buzzed with those DNA results. I called out to my wife, and together we looked at the results on the screen. Speechless, I stared at the screen. 100% Indian. Thinking about it now, I wasn’t surprised by this. I felt a strange sense of understanding. It explained so much - my upbringing, the outsider feeling I'd carried for years, and so much more. Then came the shock. Shocked by the weight of this revelation. It meant I'd been lied to, deceived repeatedly. I was flooded with all the moments in my life when I questioned the nature of my being, only to be dismissed as imagination. I was gaslighted more times than I can count and made to feel gui...

I've been away from social media for a while now. Even blogging. Last year I took a break from a lot of it. And as 2023 slowly rolled in, I still took my time. There was just too much going on. Trying to be present and in the moment while still balancing all the emotions. In 2021, I was working with a lawyer on getting any paperwork via FOIA request from US Custom and Border Protection, and the Department of State. USCIS turned up empty. On May 4th of this year, after nearly 3 years of when I initially started all this, DOS responded and they had nothing on file for me, aside from one passport application from 2002. I suddenly found myself in a position where my citizenship status in this country was unknown. I wondered if my adoption was done correctly. And I was even advised not to vote. Anxiety. Stress. Worry. Would I be deported? Could I be? What about my job? So many unknowns. And anger. All this because what? Two people adopted me and then lied. And proceeded to lie still, an...

It's been a while. It's been hard.  Mother's Day is tomorrow. And today I came across this poem. I don't know who wrote it. It reads: Isn't It Cruel If I had one hundred lives to live, I would want to live every one of them with you. And isn't it cruel, isn't it cruel, that the only one I get - I have to live without you. There's so much unfairness when it comes to being an adoptee. So much loss. That's all I got for now.

Back in March, I wrote about anger for Lynelle to share on her website . Here’s that post: In 2019 at the age of 34, I learned that I was adopted. Since then, I have become insanely familiar with the grief cycle. In a non-linear fashion, I have been relentlessly experiencing all the emotions associated with grief. Of all the emotions, anger, however, has become the one constant emotion when I think about adoption. In the case of my experience, as a late discovery adoptee, I am angry for being lied to for 34 years. I feel deceived. Conned. Duped. Whatever words I can think of to describe it, ultimately for 34 years I was manipulated into believing I was someone that I’m not. Manipulated into believing strangers were my biological and genetic kin. The identity I was given never seemed to fit with the person I knew myself to be, and I was gaslit into feeling like the crazy one for my thoughts.  The thing about anger though, is that it is perceived as a negative emotion. All my life gr...

 Every now and then I get asked the question. “Hey Kris, I know someone that’s adopted, but they don’t know it. Should I tell them?” This is a question that I have given a lot of thought to over the last few years. And what I’ve realized is that it’s not a matter of IF you should tell them, it’s WHEN and HOW. I firmly believe that everyone deserves to know their truth. It is, without a doubt, abusive when a “parent” lies to their ward leading them to believe that they are their biological parents. So what then? Honestly, you really just have two choices. You either don’t tell them and let things run their course, or you do tell them. Just know that sooner or later, somehow or the other, they will find out. There is no good way to go about it. Whether or not you tell them the truth, there is absolutely no way in which this experience won’t be traumatic. This is an upending, identity-shattering mindfuck. When I think about my experience as an LDA, it infuriates me at times to think a...

 I read this today on Reddit. "It's your parent's job to raise you. Your adult relationship with them is their performance review." * Father's day is coming up (this Sunday). I've been thinking a lot about it. Not just from the context of being a father, but also as a person who doesn't know their father. I was raised by strangers. By people who made the conscious decision to lie to the children in their care. By definition, they were people who parented. As a late discovery adoptee, it's difficult to see them as parents. The lying and deception make it feel that way. Whatever the case, my adopters raised me. And while that technically makes them parents, they had a job to do, and they did not do it well. My adoptive father never wanted children for starters. The day he told us this, is a memory that lives clearly in my mind. It was about 14 years ago. I was 23. Sitting at the dinner table in a Texas apartment that we once lived in. Just knowing that e...