We have adopted him. I taste the foreign word and it certainly feels unfamiliar. Did it ever make any real difference to us? Occasionally I meet someone expressing doubt that you could possibly love an adoptive child as much as an "own" or a "biological" child or whatever it is usually called. I don't feel inclined to try to compare, even less to make an exchange. I answer that we feel grateful that we could not have a child in the normal way. For in that case we would not have had John!
Yes, did it make any difference? Certainly not when he kept us awake at night; then we were far too tired to ponder whether he was awake because he was "a child that had gone through a separation and therefore has special needs" or not. In spite of that I used to, almost through some kind of a reflex movement, rush into his room whenever he cried. If anyone spoiled him, I was the one. (But in this respect I at least seems to have resembled the parents that he might have had in Sri Lanka. For Sinhalese people it is said to be a sin to let a child cry.)1 That he was sometimes shy and timid was an apparent fact but were not Ingrid as well as I myself shy and timid as children? Which is to be regarded as "heritage" and which as "environment" in the case of an adoptive child?
We read, too. By now there is much written about adoptive children and every time that we read the perspective shifted and the questions pressed in upon us. Thus, for instance, a recent report stated that a striking lot of adoptive children - especially those that have been adopted between the age of one and a half and three and a half - experience difficulties when learning languages, mathematics, abstract thinking on the whole in school. The conception of time may be problematic; there are adoptive children who never really learn to trust that a Monday is guaranteed to be followed by a Tuesday. One day I counted to nine calendars on the walls of John's room and did not know what to think.
He grew and started going to kindergarten and day nursery and school. He read Bamse2 and sat with his fair-skinned playmates on our sofa and played Nintendo. Most of the time none of us attached any importance to his extraction. Yet he might have grown up in another country under another name and - my mind boggles at the thought - it would still have been him. I refuse to believe that it would not have been possible to recognize the boy that was born 9 February 1983 in a convent in Sri Lanka.
It was we who received his life as a loan for a few precious years. (Could we really have had another boy and have called him John instead!?) At the same time as I am overwelmed by gratitude I feel fear. Then I, all of a sudden, see a little nameless refugee boy in our sofa. He has been given a video game to play with. Then I notice that he is dark - although he, in fact, is fair-skinned to be a Sinhalese - and that his hair is black.
"I feel like I am born in Sweden", John said to me the other day. He is now nine years old. It is years since he used to glue brightly coloured Sri Lankan stamps beside the Swedish ones on his letters and since he wanted to stick the Lion flag between the blue and yellow one3 in his birthday cake. Too late I tried to retell some Sinhalese myths to him; he listened but was no longer impressed. (Did he descend from a lion? Really.) And could he really have missed that Emma and Ludvig - children of the same age that he had known for years - also were from Sri Lanka? He seemed almost surprised.
As for myself, I find it harder to grasp that we did not even know about his existence before the day that our telephone rang. I have saved the paper where I jotted down his Sinhalese first name. He is baptised Sanjaya but our contact in Children Above All had distorted it into "Sanjaga". Thus we went to Sri Lanka without even having the correct name of our child. Absurd.
"Have I got a Sri Lankan dad as well?" His father's name is not even mentioned in the adoption papers. And his behaviour is so anonymous in its heartless ordinaryness: he seduces the servant maid of his best friend and when she gets pregnant he withdraws his promise to marry her. Without doubt or agony? He saves himself to his side of the impossible obstacles that separate different social classes and castes. And what then happens is also, in some respect, absurd: he dismisses the new life that is already, at the end of 1982, growing in the body of the servant maid. Thus it is now Ingrid's and my son lying there.
"Didn't he like me?" We try to tell the best possible version of his story to John. It is so easy just to judge! Sometimes I indulge in fantasies about his father and imagine seeing him irresolutely walking along the shore walk in Colombo. He halts and presses a handkerchief to his damp forehead. Because of the heat. Because of his agony. But after all, it is only the handkerchief that I see. And the man himself we will never meet. But he exists, somewhere he must exist or at least existed, for some time after we left with John for Sweden. John's mother also exists, hidden behind the most common surname of Sri Lanka, swallowed up - has not been in contact with the convent for years. "Do you want me to try to find her for you"? a Sri Lankan friend asked a few years ago. I instinctively thought I understood that she would not want at all to be found and have her secret revealed. But every 9th of February, I am certain that she thinks of him.
Our traces disappear. Our story stiffens. It can only be added that we know the name of the town where John's mother grew up and that John's fair skin - his mother was much darker - at least hypothetically has a story to tell. That his father was fair-skinned. Fair-skinned Sinhalese come, at least in the world of stereotypes, from the highland of inner Sri Lanka. From the region of Kandy, from the last independent Buddhist kingdom. There John's ancestor fought bravely on the side of Keppetipola and Madugalle4 against the English, let us believe that.
Thus he has to be fit into the story of our own Swedish families, the already dead have to be called back into life to welcome him. I signal to my paternal grandfather in his youth when he goes to the Cathedral School in the city of Lund. I force my grandfather up to the 1906 edition of Nordisk Familjebok5, get there and read as if you already know John will be your descendant, read what you can about John's people: "The natives of Sri Lanka have complexions ranging from pale brown and olive coloured to dark; their eyes are pale brown or black, their hair almost always black, long and silky." Read about your great grandchild that you will never meet!
An adoption is a mystery.
In four years time he is to become a teenager. Then he, according to all calculuses of probability, is going to hold us responsible. Then he is going to grope for his life and his value and then he might not feel at all as if he is born in Sweden. All books on Sri Lanka in my bookshelf, my own eagerness to discover and my magazine articles, will not be about him. (I can even hear him say: "You built your career on me.") Not the batik prints, the mask of an evil spirit, the wooden ice cream car from Colombo and perhaps not even the photo album.
It is, of course, impossible to know exactly what the teenager is going to throw into the face of his parents and nothing we can do will prepare us for it. Every new generation is equally brutal in its dispute with the older one, whatever the dispute is about. And the adoption itself emphasizes that which applies to all ties between parents and children. That the ties that bind us together are accidental and frail, contexts impossible to survey. That it is difficult to live and so will be. How poor his background story will seem in the eyes of himself! He might not even want to acknowledge it, even less want to people it with ancestors, half-brothers and half-sisters.
And racism, will it be as widely spread in four years time as today - or even more widely? Then, John will definitely be able to understand the words of hate on the walls. (A few years ago I read about a teenaged adoptive boy who was furious because he - as coloured - was not allowed to become a member of the Sweden Democrats. He also hated the "blackskulls"6!!...) By now the Korean adoptive children have already organised themselves into an association. I would be very surprised if the children from Sri Lanka and India will not do the same some day.
Worries about future will always be there. Still, I feel quite calm at the thought of John taking over adulthood and responsibility some day. When the Roman Empire was at its strongest, during the third century AD, the ruling Emperor used to chose a capable man as his successor and adopt him as his own son. Thus Rome got some of the Emperors that have received the highest marks in the history books: Trajan the commander, Hadrian the great builder, the gentle Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius the philosopher... Adopt originates from Latin adopto, "select", "to find a substitute of a child".
We have adopted him.
Anders Sjöbohm
2 Popular comics for children; Bamse is the strongest bear in the world. Gets especially invincibly strong when he eats 'thunder honey', made by his grandmother. Comics read by all decent middle class children, approved of by librarians like me...Here's an unofficial web site for Bamse.
3 The Swedish flag is blue, with a yellow cross.
4 Two of the major leaders from the rebellion in 1818. See Milestones on the Road to Freedom for more information.
5 Nordisk Familjebok = Nordic Family Book. In spite of being old-fashioned, the "owl edition" of this encyclopedia is still considered to be one of the best that has ever been printed in Sweden.
6 'blackskulls': a racist term in Scandinavia. Akin to 'wog','dothead' etc. in America.