My mom was the finest person tat ever trod the earth.
She raised a slew of 7 hyper-intelligent (read: troublesome) kids and gave her values to all of us, wich we share in adulthood.
If DNA or anything else suggested there was no bio link it would mean exactly zero.
People who obsess on DNA are fools who don’t have any sense of values.
Two of my cousins are adopted and knew they were adopted from a fairly early age, were told by their adoptive parents, my aunt and uncle, as soon as they were old enough to understand what that meant.
Several years ago my cousin Sally became interested in finding her birth parents and has reconnected with her birth mother and her extended birth family. I understand my aunt and uncle were a little hurt by this; not for her wanting to find her birth mother and meet her and her possible other siblings, cousins, etc. but in the way in which she went about it; basically cutting off her adoptive family from her life for a time after she reconnected with her biological family, from her adoptive parents who were so good, loving and kind to her and her adoptive brother. I understand it has gotten better recently.
Her brother, my cousin Steve on the other hand has absolutely no interest in finding his birth mother or his biological family and does not want to be found by them. It’s also sort of interesting that my cousin Steve relates so much with our family’s Scandinavian ancestry, Scandinavian culture and history, Viking history, belongs to a Scandinavian ancestry group, when it is pretty obvious, even to him that he most likely has no biological Scandinavian ancestry/DNA. If you were to look at a picture of him, as opposed to his blond haired blue eyed adoptive sister, you’d probably ask, “Who’s the Jewish (or even the Lebanese or Sicilian or Greek) guy in that picture”. He looks more like Jerry Seinfeld or Richard Lewis or now that he’s gotten older, Henny Youngman, than he does Leif Erikson. LOL!
FWIW, his DNA ancestry is of little interest to him as he sees his adoptive parents as being his only parents and his family as he knows them, his only family and their history and ancestry his.
Interestingly my cousin Sally and her husband adopted 3 kids of mixed race, two of them special needs kids (and I applaud her and her husband in this) and they have one biological child. My cousin Steve and his wife have two biological children but his wife was also adopted at birth.
On the other side of the coin, some years ago I knew a woman through a mutual friend who gave up a child for adoption when she was a teenager.
I remember her telling me how painful it was for her but how she knew it was the right thing to do at the time. She had in her early teens gone down the dark path of alcoholism and drug abuse, had gotten pregnant possibly as the result of a rape (she didn’t remember the details or even who the man was). Her family was highly dysfunctional, her father was abusive both physically and sexually to her and her sisters when they where children, her mother was also an alcoholic and verbally abusive and barely functional as a mother. After she gave her daughter up for adoption, she spiraled even further down the dark path of drug addiction, ended up living on the streets for a time. It’s a wonder she survived.
But years later she got clean and sober through AA and through finding a Christian church and got married to a wonderful man who was also in recovery and had IIRC, two children with her husband and together they ran a very successful business.
She was very conflicted about it, but ultimately decided that she didn’t want to be found by the child she gave up for adoption so many years earlier, wanted to keep her identity unknown and not wanting to meet her in person.
Not because she didn’t love and care about her; she told me she thought of her and prayed for her every day and knew something about the adoptive parents and knew she was greatly loved and well cared for, given a great life and strong moral upbringing and a “family” that she could have never given her had she not allowed her to be adopted, that she had even received some letters and pictures from them the first couple of years after the adoption.
But she also told me she didn’t want to re-live or try to explain that very dark part of her and her family’s past, not only to the child she gave up to adoption but also to her two other children who knew very little about her past and who also had no contact with her biological grandparents and other family members and why she wanted to keep it that way. Her husband knew about the child she gave up for adoption and all about her past and supported her decision not to be found.
She explained to me and our mutual friend that she felt that no good would come from the daughter she gave up for adoption knowing about her biological family and how messed up they were and that she actually feared her that her daughter, not so much in her daughter finding her per se, but in her eventually finding her biological grandparents and other relatives who were some, as she said, “very bad, very sick and immoral people, some of them active criminals and con-artists” – reasons why she actually wanted to protect her daughter and her other children from them and their poisonous influences.
I can understand why some people would disagree with her decision but I also understand why it was the right thing for her and why she thought it was best for her daughter.