The Apple Doesn't Fall Far from the Tree

Our Best Interests: Adopted - Life Lessons from Childhood Trauma to Adulthood

This time Jack and I welcome Dr. E. Kay Trimberger, Professor Emerita of Women’s and Gender Studies at Sonoma State University and author of Creole Son: An Adoptive Mother Untangles Nature and Nurture, published by LSU Press 2020. The guiding adage for this episode is “The Apple Doesn’t fall far from the Tree.”

Kay’s memoir recounts transracial adoptive motherhood using insights gained through the field of behavioral genetics. Using this body of research, she revisits key inflection points in raising her biracial adoptive son - who was born to Creole and Cajun parents - as a single white professional woman raised in an upper-middle class family. The key challenge Kay seeks to better understand is the development and persistence of Marco’s addiction. What could she have done differently? What are the limitations of her influence as non-biological kin? In the case of her son Marco, “The Apple Doesn’t Fall far from the Tree” may be an apt adage but don’t be surprised to learn that the story isn’t quite that simple. Nature and nature are inseparably tangled in their combined influence on the relinquished child. Still, we negotiate the relative weight of each in our conversation with Kay, with some attention given to the contribution of the primal wound as an alternative explanation for outcomes such as addiction and mental illness. In in the end, we had a thoughtful and honest conversation - not with a fellow adoptee this time but rather – with a social scientist and dedicated adoptive mother hoping to share what she’s learned from a field of study whose roots were nearly antithetical to her sociological training.

Among its other contributions, the book is a call to integrate findings from behavioral genetics into adoption practice and scholarship. A key point is that adopted kids and families may benefit from re-imagining the post-adoption family as an integration of the two existing families in a way that is more integrative than is typically seen in even today’s open adoptions. Kay advocates for providing appropriate weight to those genetic influences that my predictably pose challenges and opportunities when raising an adopted child.

-Michael Rocco

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