Scenes of Prison
27. An Adoption from Hell
I t was a quiet morning. Most of the inmates were off the Unit at jobs or in school. The rest were in their rooms. A few were walking on the yard. The Unit porters had finished cleaning the Unit, and I had settled myself at the desk in the office just off the pantry. I had begun working on a routine report, but without warning, my concentration was broken by a loud and angry voice.
“You had no right …” the voice shouted.
I looked up, and I found myself eavesdropping on a private telephone call. It was one end of a conversation an inmate was having with his mother. It was impossible not to listen.
The phone inmates used to make collect calls to family and friends was located next to our office door in the middle of the pantry, and the inmate was angry. He was shouting curses, threats, and insults into the phone. The gist of his complaint was that he was adopted, and he only learned of it later in his life. It had been concealed from him while he was growing up. His adoptive parents had maintained this lie throughout his childhood, and he was quite sure this was a mistake. He blamed his adoptive mother for this, and he insisted he had suffered greatly because of it. He repeated these accusations and punctuated them with descriptions of the harm he believed they had caused him.
His conversation was so disruptive that I had nothing else to do except listen and plan how I might help him when he hung up the phone.
When he finally finished, I was ready for him, and I invited him into the office for a chat.
I began the conversation with an apology for listening and an explanation why it was impossible not to listen. Next, I launched into the opening I had carefully planned which I intended to use to warm him to the topic of his adoption and his relationship with his parents. I wanted to lead him into a discussion that would help him see his adoption from his adoptive parents’ point of view, but I was stopped short by a revelation that I had not anticipated.
The knowledge that he had been adopted was revealed to him ten years earlier. This disclosure was not new. It was not fresh. His grievance was one he’d been nursing for ten long years, ten long years of repeatedly working himself up into a rage and dumping abuse into the lives of his mother and father. Ten years of festering resentment that poisoned his relationships with his adoptive mother and father.
This was beyond my counseling skills. I made a note to myself to speak to one of our psychologists about the conversation, and I ended our chat. He was happy to be excused, and he quickly disappeared into his room.
My heart went out to his mother. She must have suffered a great deal over the years. She not only had to listen to this repeated scolding week after week and year after year, but she also had to pay for the call. She must have been a saint.
Discussion
- Do you have any adoption stories from hell to describe?
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