Amanda: 'I'm not the person on my adoption papers'

Amanda Janssen's adoption papers contain a name and date of birth that are not hers. She still doesn't know who she is. She hopes one day to find her real mother through DNA. “If someone asks how old I am, I can't answer that question with certainty. And I don't know my real name either. Nor who my biological parents are.”

“I am not the person described in my adoption papers. All I know is that I am from Sri Lanka. It is almost impossible to explain to others what it means to me that I have lost my identity. It's in a part of my brain where there are no words at all. It has a big effect on me. Sometimes I don't even know who I am anymore. And I'm harder on myself than other people. Like I think: if they did this to me, then I should be able to handle anything.”

'Finally recognition'

“Recently it was in the news that intercountry adoption will be stopped for the time being, due to abuses in the past. People now want to make sure that things don't still go wrong. That in itself is good news, I no longer feel like a voice crying in the desert. I have presented so many facts with other adoptees before, and nothing was ever done about it. Now recognition has finally come.”

“But otherwise we are still at the same point where we were already. No concrete help has come for me and other people this has happened to. What I need is a foundation that's right, an adoption file that's right. In other words: identity recovery. A part of me now remains hidden in the mist. The way I put together, my character, the nature of the beast. It's always a bit of a gamble; from whom do I now have which traits? That applies to every adoptee, but if your papers are correct, then you have the choice to start looking.”

Sri Lanka

“I was adopted from Sri Lanka as a baby in 1985, along with my older sister, who has since passed away. My adoptive parents could not have children of their own and were very eager to adopt a baby. But because there is a maximum of forty years between adoptive parent and adopted child and my mother was forty-three, they were offered my three-year-old sister.”

“They were allowed to 'join me', so that we as sisters did not have to be separated. Apparently the age difference rules didn't apply. Somehow I've always felt that something wasn't right. That was because my sister turned out to have been older than three years during the adoption.”

Birth name

“I discovered that something was indeed wrong when I went to Sri Lanka in the summer of 2016 to look for my biological parents. I first went to the hospital in the capital Colombo, which was written on my birth certificate. My birth name did not appear in the archive there. I made another appeal in a national newspaper, but that also yielded nothing. After that, I let the matter rest for a while, because I had other things on my mind. I got pregnant and gave birth to my daughter Tess in January 2017."

Large-scale adoption fraud

“In 2018 I flew to Sri Lanka again, this time to hand out DNA test kits there. In the meantime, large-scale adoption fraud in Sri Lanka in the 1980s had been exposed by the TV program Zembla. About 2,300 of the 3,500 adoptees from Sri Lanka living in the Netherlands are said to have false identity papers. I then founded the Sri Lanka DNA Foundation together with two other adopted women. Our goal is to match the adoptees in the Netherlands with the families in Sri Lanka through DNA testing.”

Found family

“Because I knew that a contact of mine in Sri Lanka had found my name in the archives of another hospital, I went to that hospital. Then I got my original birth certificate at the town hall. There was an address on it. It turned out that my eldest brother still lived at that address, with his wife. They remembered well that my sister and I had been given up for adoption. On the one hand I was delighted, but also reluctant.”

“My sister and I had both submitted our DNA to the Family Tree DNA database a few weeks earlier, because we wanted to know if we were really sisters. I hadn't spoken to her since, we didn't have that much contact. I called her on the spot to ask if she already had the results. She had them: we weren't sisters. It made me dizzy. How could this be? I was standing at the house where a family used to live that had given up two sisters, a toddler and a baby. But who had I found? My brother or my sister's?”

Dead end

“Later it was confirmed with a DNA test that I had found my sister's family. So my own trail finally came to a dead end. The people who are my parents on paper have given up two children of their own, but I am not their child. It is unclear what exactly happened at the time. Maybe I was accidentally switched with their baby somewhere in the process, but it could also be that their baby died and I was taken from somewhere as a 'replacement' because my parents were promised a toddler and a baby .”

“I was adopted to fulfill someone's wish to have children, that's how it feels to me. Adoption as intended, from the point of view of protecting children, I can absolutely understand. I also think that it should be allowed to continue. Where things go wrong for me is if we assume 'those poor parents' who have been waiting for a baby for so long. Then the right of the child to grow up in a safe and stable family is no longer paramount.”

Adoptive parents

“It's very difficult to talk to my adoptive parents about what happened. We're not talking about what I'm going through right now. As long as I pretend nothing's wrong, I'm fine. I think it's because they're afraid I'm going to blame them or they're ashamed of not realizing that something wasn't right. But it remains guesswork, because we are not having that conversation. They didn't know anything, they say."

“And I believe that. I don't blame them at all either. No one can tell at first glance from my adoption file that it is incorrect. You have gone through a whole mill as parents and then you get a baby in your hands in a court of law in a foreign country. How can you possibly suspect at that moment that something is all wrong? For me, it's a part of my history that I want to talk to them about, without getting bogged down in a discussion about what they can remember."

Also read: Due to the Usher syndrome, Joke's children become deaf and blind

Lost my parents for the second time

“I no longer live in 1985, I am now a mother and a grown woman myself, and I regret not being able to talk to them about a painful moment, even in their lives. They keep asking me why I'm so angry. But I'm not mad at them at all, I'm mad at the situation. It is literally injustice. You have the right to know who you are descending from. I would prefer to hear from them how bad they think this is for me and that they want to help me. But unfortunately I have very little contact with them. And that is very bad, because now I have actually lost my parents for the second time.”

Finding biological parents

“The chance that I will ever find my biological parents is getting smaller by the day, because they are getting older. I'm out of leads, so my only hope is a DNA match. In this way I help other people and in this way I also heal myself a bit, I notice. With every reunion I surf the wave of joy. I secretly still have the hope that I will experience that myself one day, although I also realize that the chance is very small.”

"The feeling that my mother is looking for me is very strong"

“It is now known that bad things have happened during the time that I was adopted from Sri Lanka. Babies were sometimes forcibly given up or taken away just like that. The chances of me being robbed from somewhere are pretty high. After all, there was a baby in my "paper" family, but it's not me. Suppose she died and that another child had to come at once, then I may not have been given up voluntarily.”

“That scenario is one of my biggest motivations to find my mother again. The feeling that my mother is looking for me is very strong. I can still remember very well that I lost my daughter in an unguarded moment. It seems terrible to me to feel that feeling, that fear of the heart, for years. I would find it indigestible if I had not done everything I could to give her her child back.”

Dream

“I once had a dream about what it would be like to meet my mother. We were cooking together in the kitchen, which made language unimportant. She taught me to make a family recipe, one that is passed down from generation to generation. I remember thinking: I know that frown she has, because I see it on my daughter too. When I woke up I was very happy, it really felt like I had seen her for a moment. With a lot of luck she will come into my life for a while. But my biggest fear is that I'll be late."