It always amazes me that people who know their family history – and often celebrate it – berate adoptees for wanting the same thing. People take for granted walking into a doctor’s office and knowing their medical history. If you’ve ever been asked if there’s a history of something in your family and have to answer “I don’t know. I’m adopted” you’d think differently, especially if it were your child you were talking about.

Ann Haralambie happens to spend her summers in the same town I live in. I saw her post about her book in a local online forum and was intrigued. She’s an adoptee who is also a lawyer, which I thought would have made her search a little easier. Alas, it didn’t.

The fact that I was later “chosen,” welcomed with a ringing bell, and loved, did not erase the profound realization that before I was wanted, I was not wanted. I was the skeleton in the family closet, the emblem of a shame I could do nothing to atone for.

Haralambie starts at the beginning and touches on the psychology of all adoptees. We’re usually told some b.s. story about being “chosen.” Like Haralambie, I had a vision of babies all lined up in cribs and my parents saying “I’ll take that one,” making me special. Of course, as we grow up we see that for the lie it is and have to face the fact that we were not wanted.

Secrecy breeds shame, and there was plenty of shame to go around in adoption in the 1950s and 1960s.

Like me, Haralambie had a good adoption. She had parents who loved her and did their best with the hand they were dealt. Still, we both wanted to know where we came from.

Typical comments greeting news of my search, and that of many others who began searching in the 1970s, were: “Didn’t your parents treat you well?” “How can you be so disloyal to your parents?” “You should get down on your knees and thank God for the people who took you in and treated you as if you were their own!” Part of being adopted meant being rescued, the object of the adoptive parents’ charity and beneficence. It created a debt which could never be fully repaid. It did not occur to me until I represented adoptive parents as a lawyer that the parents, too, got something in the bargain.

Adoption since the 1950s and 1960s “baby scoop” era was allegedly done “in the best interests of the child.” In reality, it was about filling a need for childless couples who wanted to be parents, and continues to be that today. Haralambie details the psychological aspects of being adopted that I was often at a loss for words to communicate with others.

We have known for many years that adoptees are over-represented in mental health settings. A disproportionate number of adoptees experience depression and anxiety, report feelings of abandonment and rejection, and have difficulty with relationships.

Haralabie details her search for her birthparents. There were many similarities between her search and my search despite the fact that she was adopted through an agency and mine was private. She had people she could talk to at the agency. Despite her being an adult, the people she talked with could read her adoption file and decide what information she could have from it. She had no right to information about her own birth.

Was the agency not only standing between me and my biological family but also inserting itself between this now adult adoptee and my adoptive parents? At what point would I ever stop being an “adopted child” about whom other adults had to consult before telling me about my own history?

Being a lawyer, you would think she would have more avenues to get the information in her adoption file, and she did. The result was still the same. She makes the point that adoptees are treated like children their entire lives based on the law. It was frustrating for her, and she shows it many times over.

Another similarity is the story of false leads. Haralambie gets the name “Nicholson” and searched for her birthmother based on that information. She thinks she has found this in a family in New Jersey, and the conversation she has seems to indicate the woman is hiding something. I knew my birthmother’s name and was told at the time I started searching she was in Colorado. In the early days of the internet, I got a hit on the name in Colorado and thought about going out there and asking why she didn’t want to meet me. How many women’s lives are disrupted by adoptees who are given false information and think they have found their birthmother?

There is an ebb and flow in the book to her search. At times she seems frantic to find her birthfamily, at others it takes a back seat to the rest of her life. The parts of the book about her adoption search and how it affected her life were what resonated with me. She spends a great deal of time off the topic of adoption directly, visiting Scotland and Ireland trying to get a feel for her heritage. This part dragged a bit to me and was where she lost me a bit. I have the Irish heritage too, though my birthfather (who, like hers, tried to deny that he knew anything about me), but I didn’t have the same feel for this part of the book as I did the rest of it. I suspect this was the more “memoir” part of the story and is something that is important to her.

Her perspective as a lawyer adds a lot to the discussion around adoption and adoption search. She makes the case over and over about adoption ostensibly being “in the best interests of the child,” yet closed records do not serve the best interests of the child. In addition, even as an adult, she had to have her adoptive parents’ permission to have access to her own records when petitioning the court. The courts failed her over and over again, too, despite a medical need for this information.

If we don’t have something better to offer children, when viewed in the context of the child’s entire life, we should not remove them from homes that have problems.

I recommend Not Nicholson: The Story of a First Daughter to adoptees and parents of adoptees who want to have open, honest conversations with the children they raised. Haralambie gives details from many angles: emotional, psychological, legal, and personal as to why the sealed records system fails adoptees.