Searching for one’s origins

Adopted children are forced to integrate the duality that has shaped their personal history: on the one hand, they have their family, the parents who have raised them, with whom they have identified, with whom they live day in day out and, on the other, the progenitors, as absent as they are real, about whom they often know nothing at all. While some adopted children do not show any interest at all in contacting or finding out more about their original parents, others go to various administrations trying to find the answer to the many unanswered questions, trying to find that piece they feel is missing from the jigsaw of their life. Hardly anyone, whether from Government authorities or the Justice Department, helps them out very much, often not even their own families.

What is it that makes an adopted child want to, or not, inquire into his/her biological origins? Why is it that the mere possibility that an adopted child might want to find his/her original mother is still too often a taboo subject among adopting families? How important are one’s origins in the development of one’s identity? What do we call «origins»? What is it that shapes the «identity» of an individual?...

All these questions clearly show the complexity of the subject. What is true is that, at the onset of adolescence, when the individual starts thinking of himself/herself independently from his/her own family, the question «who am I?» becomes a central pivot of his/her life. If this adolescent is, in addition, an adopted child, he/she will inevitably start asking, as well as «who am I?», also «who could I have been?». And it is at this point, faced with this lack of information, this black hole, that different individuals conditioned by their own particular history and their own experiences develop different attitudes ranging from mild curiosity with no active effort made to find the answers, to a real need to find the answers using all possible means.