Guest post - The Hidden Voice - Searching Was Never a Vote Against My Family

13 Oct

Recently, I received an email from someone asking if they could submit an article for the blog, sharing their experience of reunion. After reading it, I felt that it aligned with my own in some ways and would also be a great fit for the blog. They also seemed very keen to conceal their identity; this I found absolutely fascinating.

The Hidden Voice is the pen name of an adult adoptee and the author of Love Isn’t Born. It’s Built. – Children Beyond Blood. Born in Epping, Essex, and raised between England and Sicily, she writes from lived experience about adoption, origins, family, grief, belonging and the meaning of love beyond blood.

So, The Hidden Voice, over to you …

There is a question that seems to follow adopted people more than most:

Did you ever search for your birth family?

People often ask with genuine curiosity. But behind it, there can sometimes be another question:

If you searched, did that mean something was missing?

For me, the answer is no.

Searching for my origins was never a vote against my family.

I did not begin to wonder where I came from because I doubted who my parents were. I did not need biology to tell me whether the people who raised me were "real". That question had already been answered by my life.

They were my parents.

The difficulty is that adoption is often spoken about as though two truths cannot exist at the same time.

If you love your adoptive parents deeply, perhaps you should not need to search. If you search, perhaps your adoptive family was not enough.

I have never experienced it that way.

For me, wanting to know where I came from and knowing where I belonged were two different things. They did not cancel each other out.

One was about understanding the beginning of my story.

The other was about the life I had actually lived.

I was adopted at nine months old. My parents raised me, protected me, worried about me, and built a life with me. I did not spend my childhood wondering whether they counted as my family.

They simply were.

Later, when I began searching for my biological origins, I was not choosing between one family and another.

I was trying to understand one part of my story without rewriting another.

That distinction matters because adopted people are often expected to explain themselves in ways other people are not.

Someone can research their ancestry without being asked whether the family around them was somehow insufficient. But when an adopted person searches, the act itself can be given enormous emotional meaning from the outside.

Sometimes that meaning may be accurate.

Sometimes it is not.

In my case, the reasons were personal and complicated.

I lost both of my parents when I was sixteen, within six months of each other. Grief changed many things for me, including the way I thought about biological connection.

But I was not searching because I had discovered that my adoptive family was somehow false.

Quite the opposite.

I knew what it meant to have parents because I had already had them.

I wanted to understand a part of my own beginning. I wanted to know who had come before me. And because I was young and grieving, I also carried hope into that search that only made sense to me much later.

None of that altered the relationship I had had with the people who raised me.

This is where I think the language around adoption can become unnecessarily restrictive.

We often talk as though origins and belonging are competing claims.

But why should they be?

My biological history belongs to me.

So does my adoptive family.

One does not need to disappear for the other to be legitimate.

I can recognise the importance of the woman who gave birth to me without pretending that biology created the relationship I had with my parents. I can value information about my origins without treating it as a correction to my childhood. I can ask questions about the beginning of my life without suggesting that the life which followed was somehow less real.

For me, searching was not an act of disloyalty.

And loving my parents did not require me to remain incurious about my own history.

Yet adoptees are often placed in precisely this impossible position: if we search, we may be seen as ungrateful; if we do not search, we may be told that we are avoiding something essential.

Either way, someone else can end up deciding what our choices are supposed to mean.

I think adopted people deserve more room than that.

One person may feel an urgent need to search. Another may have no interest at all. Someone may experience reunion as healing. Someone else may find it unsettling, disappointing, complicated, or simply informative.

There is no single emotional destination waiting at the end.

And there should not have to be.

My experience belongs only to me.

I would never use it to argue against an adoptee whose story is very different. For some people, adoption is bound closely to trauma, loss, or a lifelong sense of disconnection. For others, biological family may become an important part of adult life.

Those experiences are not threatened by mine.

Nor is mine threatened by theirs.

What I resist is the idea that there must be one correct narrative.

My own search taught me something simple: knowing where I came from did not force me to reconsider where I belonged.

It added information. It added context. It added another part to a story that was already mine.

But it did not erase the family I had lived inside.

That is why I no longer see adoption as a choice between blood and love, between origins and loyalty, or between the past and the life that followed.

Human relationships are rarely that tidy.

Sometimes we carry more than one truth.

Sometimes we search without rejecting.

Sometimes we ask questions without wanting a different answer to the life we have already lived.

And sometimes understanding where we came from simply helps us understand ourselves a little more clearly.