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People aren’t adopting like they used to. Adoption rates have been falling fast since the 1970s, and according to a survey by Adoption UK, thousands of children are waiting, even ‘languishing’ as the survey puts it, in care. Bureaucracy, a turgid courts process and unworkable political correctness mean that itinerant stays in foster homes are a common fate for increasingly older children. Too much is being done to fix children up with an ethnically picture-perfect family, when in the longer game there are processes and realisations that an adopted child must go through to come to terms with their existence, and their heritage – which an adoption agency can do little about.

I was adopted as a baby. My birth mother died not long after, so I was never actually orphaned, but I never knew the people you could call my ‘real’ parents. When I was eighteen, my adoptive parents and I had The Talk. I found out where my birth mother lived, how she suffered and why she couldn’t have raised another child. It was a chaotic life that spanned several continents, several families and one instance of fairly awesome violence, and it all ended pitifully and painfully in a London hospital. As a child I can’t remember ever struggling to dual-process the existence of two mothers, one adoptive and loving, the other biological and dead, because I always knew about my origins; hearing my prehistory, then, was no Theban shock, but it gave new context to my early life.

The sudden characterisation of a dead mother was new and awkward, and I sensed my adoptive parents’ apprehension at what might happen next. Film and literature fetishise blood ties so much that a hysterical sense of betrayal in an adopted child almost becomes a prerogative, but my reaction was cinematically uninspiring. I mooched, thought it over, and couldn’t even find it in myself to cry. I studied the few photographs of me, the lipidous grub in the arms of my birth mother. There was also the one of my soon to be absent father, who was about my age in the picture. You knew he was my dad; same slouch, same cigarette, same asymmetric leer. But these were just murky snaps of people I didn’t know; the eulogy of this semi-mythic mother was no more than that; she was bigger than life, but not equal to it.

My birth parents were Dutch and Chinese, and my adoptive parents are English and Indonesian. By traditional adoption guidelines this is a big success and the rule-makers would probably be high-fiving each other to know that everybody says I have my adoptive mother’s features. This is more important to some children than others. I have a friend who wasn’t told she was adopted until just after her eighteenth birthday, and for months thereafter she pored over family photographs, identifying every iota of mismatch between her physical features and those of her now-counterfeit family. She, and her parents and brothers, are Caucasian Americans, but in the upheaval of the revelation ethnic homogeneity came to nothing.

Crucially, my friend discovered that her mother was still alive, but not fit to have seen her daughter. She didn’t have what I did: a conclusive tragedy, a conveniently dead mum. The Greeks called it the pharmakos, an individual who would be symbolically laden with all the ills and wrongs of the people, and whose death would act as sacrifice and purgation. It might sound perverse to speak of parents this way, but you can’t get that same release, that distance from a deleterious history, when you are grieving for a living person. In these circumstances an obituary is kinder than a missing person’s list, and a vague myth is even better; you want to read the words THE END, wipe your eyes and put the book away.

A far as I know my father still stalks the earth making poor decisions. Let him get on with it. I think that ‘biological father’ sounds like a sort of washing powder, but though I strut all indifferent, I still find it easier to think about my mother; the confirmed dead parent, the commemorative statue. The living one is too unpredictable, too malevolent in its volition. The few photographs I have of them are enough. You know them the way you know a bust of Beethoven, or the face of a famous actor whose films you haven’t seen. This is why adoption agencies should put rapid placement before intricately tessellating children with ethnically similar parents; the artifice of adoption is a reality that shouldn’t be concealed except for a child’s protection. Not even the most orthodox adoptive family photograph can ameliorate the grieving for lost parents.