Revered Adoptee Advocate and Filmmaker ZARA PHILLIPS On The Lifelong Impact Of Adoption
- Written by Zara Phillips
I was born and raised in London and adopted at two months old into an upper middle-class family, my father a judge, my mother a homemaker. I had an adopted brother, and we went to expensive schools. We had food on the table, a chatty loving mother and a distant father who didn’t communicate.
I sensed from a young age that my adopted mother struggled with my questions, so I learnt to stay quiet. My mother read me a book on the subject, in which everyone was happy and smiling, so I learnt to hide how I felt for fear of being ungrateful and even worse rejected.
I would hold my adopted mother’s hand, while wondering if the woman that walked past us in the street could be the woman that gave birth to me. I lived a fragmented life.
When I was a little girl, I truly believed that when I grew up, I wouldn’t feel ‘adopted’ anymore. I was in for a big surprise.
It became harder as I got to my teenage years to keep pretending that it didn’t matter. The closed adoption era I was living in felt so cruel and unkind, but it was accepted as normal at the time. I had no information on my birth family at all. No story, no family history.
I used alcohol and drugs, just to function and keep the anger away. The drugs helped stuff this rage that wanted to vomit out of me. They made me feel invincible until they stopped working.
My little shoulders had been overburdened with trying to keep everyone happy.
Thank goodness for recovery. At 22 years of age, I finally got the support that I needed, and I got sober. But I still did not know that I was a textbook adoptee and that we were the highest minority of people that struggled with addiction. Adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide than non-adoptees (American Pediatrics Society).
Within four months of putting down the drugs I finally was honest and admitted how much I needed to know my story. How could I move forward without my chapter one? And so continued the impact of what it really meant to be an adoptee.
I reunited with my mother at 24 years of age. I needed to understand why she gave me up. I learnt that she was a teenager, a 17-year-old Jewish girl who got pregnant by an unknown Italian man. In those days society considered that a crime. Nice Jewish girls did not have illegitimate babies. Hard to imagine that now.
I had blamed myself as a child, I had felt defective, - after all who gives their baby away. Was it my fault?
I thought that meeting my birthmother would heal me on the very day we met. And in many ways, it did but it also opened the lid that had been so tightly closed, and like Pandora’s Box I had to grapple with all the feelings that came pouring out.
There is so much grief within adoption, tons of it, and no one wants to know that part because it’s to inconvenient. After all adoption is supposed to be the perfect solution for everyone involved.
It took until I was 30 years of age to really start doing the work around adoption. By that time I had moved from London to LA. I found trying to have relationships with both my mothers who would not meet challenging.
It was suggested that I go to a workshop in Los Angeles, where the speaker talked about there being a lifelong impact from adoption. I didn’t really understand it at the time, nor did I want to believe that adoption would still impact my life in later years.
For the first time in my life I started going to adoption conferences, building a community and hearing speakers expound on the subject. I finally felt I was with a group of people who understood. It was liberating.
The lifelong impact of adoption includes not only all the joys but also the lifelong impact of grief, and the grief is what has surfaced repeatedly in my life. I have learnt to befriend it and to let grief live alongside me. I have stopped fighting with it and asking it to leave as I know this will not happen.
Over the years the milestones in life are when the impact of adoption has raised its head again. The birth of my children, such deep unadulterated joy of being a mother, and yet shadowed by all that I had lost as a baby, the most important connection in my life compromised. is there anything more powerful than watching a mother and baby together?
My adopted mother loved me, that I never doubted, but she was a stranger, she was not the mother I wanted when I was a baby and I had blamed myself for struggling to connect with her, it took years for us to understand one another.
When she died, I felt anchorless for a year. The grief brought me to my knees. It was so clear that it was not either of our faults that we could not connect. She had been lied to as much as me, the adoption industry telling her ‘Just love the baby as if it were your own, this baby will not know the difference and neither will you.” Adopted mothers that were infertile were not allowed to grieve the loss of their natural child. Birthmothers were not allowed to grieve the loss of their babies; they were told to forget the way little adoptees were.
I have now lost three parents. I finally found my birthfather in 2016 at the age of 51 - many years between reunions. I should have been an expert by now! I knew him for just over two years. My two fathers died nine months apart. The grief was back but I understood it, and I embraced it for I knew it would gradually soften and most importantly I would survive.
I have been embraced by birth families, cut out, had relationships, not had relationships. I learnt that I am the reminder of all that came before me, just my very existence can make them feel uncomfortable and that’s been hard to grapple with. But the joy in the relationships that work with my birth family continue to be wonderful. And I hope that those that are afraid to know me will have a change of heart.
So, like the speaker I heard many years ago that changed my life, I now talk about ‘The lifelong impact of adoption’ because I still hear some people say that ‘babies do not remember’ But it’s not true, babies are so wise - they carry everything inside them, before there were words. Babies are not a blank slate, they are full of every emotion the way we are as adults, they just don’t get the credit. Adoption is layered, complicated, full of love and loss and I think to heal we need to acknowledge all of it.
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Zara Phillips is an adoptee, author, actor, singer.
Her new film ‘Somebody’s daughter’ based on her book and one-woman show is now available on amazon prime UK and US.
To find out more please visit
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