Adoption Leaves a Mark Every Time.

There's a new study out of Winston Salem State that looked at over 1300 people, adoptees, birth mothers, and birth fathers. The short version is this. Adoption leaves a mark that doesn't go away just because a child ends up in a loving home. Adoptees and birth mothers are significantly more likely to struggle with their mental health long term, including thoughts of suicide, than people who weren't touched by adoption at all. My birth mom died at the age of 36 due to drug addiction. She was also in foster care.

I read that and I didn't feel shocked. I felt seen. Because adoptees have been saying this for years. We just don't usually get believed until a study says it back to us in a language everyone trusts more than our own mouths.

Here's what I think people miss though. Nobody walks around grieving in a way you'd recognize. It doesn't look like sadness with a name tag on it. It looks like a hundred other things first.

You grow up and it doesn't look like grief. It looks like becoming a chameleon, someone who can fit into any room because you learned early that being noticed wasn't always safe. It looks like saying yes to everything and everyone because some old, quiet part of you is convinced that if you're not needed, you might get left again. It looks like never being able to sleep alone, not because you're being dramatic, but because your body remembers what it felt like the first time closeness disappeared, even if your mind has no memory of it at all.

I slept in the bed with my grandmother who adopted me off and on until I was 16 because I hated sleeping by myself. Truth be told, I still do. When my best friend and I go out of town, she knows this and we always end up in a room with a king size bed. She doesn’t have to touch me, I just need to know she’s there. I also watch it happen in real time with one of my sons.

Every so often he needs to sleep with me. Not every night. Just sometimes. And you can see it coming before he even asks. He gets irritated over things that wouldn't normally bother him. Snappy. Edgy. A little lost, honestly, in a way that's hard to put into words if you haven't seen it. Then he sleeps next to me one night and it's like his whole body resets. The next day he's lighter again. Calmer. More himself.

That's not a behavior problem. That's a nervous system asking for proof that it's safe. Once it gets that proof, it settles.

There's a theory in adoption psychology called the primal wound. It says that separation from a birth mother, even as a newborn with zero conscious memory of it, still registers as loss deep in the body. Babies bond before birth through heartbeat, voice, smell, all of it. When that bond breaks, something in a person learns very early that love can vanish without warning. You don't remember it happening. Your body remembers anyway.

Being adopted is hard, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. You spend a lot of your life explaining yourself to people who were never going to understand in the first place. You get asked the most ridiculous, invasive questions like they're just casual small talk. Do you know your real parents. Aren't you grateful someone took you in. Do you ever wonder why they didn't want you. People ask these things standing in line at the grocery store like it's the weather.

Underneath all of that, a lot of adoptees are quietly carrying a loss nobody ever gave them permission to grieve. Because on paper it looks like a success story. Loving home. Good life. What is there to be sad about.

Plenty, actually…and it's allowed.

I'll be honest with you, rejection and abandonment still hang over my head some days. I am better but they haven't fully packed up and left, and I'm not sure they ever fully do. It's something I work on every single day, sometimes multiple times a day, catching the thought before it convinces me of something that isn't true. The difference now is I don't let it run my life anymore. It doesn't get to make my decisions for me the way it used to.

That's really what this research is putting numbers to. Not a life sentence, not something that means you're doomed, just an honest look at what separation does to a person and how long it can quietly follow them around if nobody ever names it out loud. The study isn't saying adoptees are broken. It's saying the wound is real, it's common, and it deserves to be taken seriously instead of brushed off with a be grateful.

If you're an adoptee reading this and any of it felt somewhat familiar, I want you to know you're not broken and you're not alone in it. If you're a parent raising a child who came to you through adoption or foster care, and you're watching behaviors that don't make sense on the surface, consider that what looks like an attitude problem might actually be a very old fear asking a very simple question. Am I safe. Am I going to be left again.

Sometimes the answer isn't a lecture or a consequence. Sometimes it's just letting them sleep next to you until their body believes you.

And if anything in this brought something up for you that feels heavier than you expected, please don't sit with it alone. Reach out to someone you trust, or a mental health professional who can actually walk through it with you. You don't have to carry it by yourself, and you never did.

Heather (Mare) is the founder of Low Tide Lighthouse and Saraphina Mare LLC. She writes about healing, identity, foster care, and the long work of becoming yourself. Find her at saraphinamare.com or lowtidelighthouse.com