That ‘I must be adopted’ belief is more widespread than I thought

SO THERE we were, cooing over a photograph of the little boy a friend has just adopted from Russia and imagining what it might be like to welcome him, when one of the people in the office announced that, when he was growing up, he always wondered if he’d been adopted.

Which, in turn, drew a chorus of “me, too,” from the rest. He looked relieved to find he had not been alone in this experience.

What was startling was the almost general distribution of the “I must be adopted” belief. It wasn’t just that some of my colleagues had at some stage imagined that they might not be the natural offspring of their parents. It was that the overwhelming majority had gone through this process. For different reasons.