The Sickness of the Herd
I was my mother’s scapegoat.
From the moment of my arrival, I was cast as the sacrifice, the creature bound to carry the weight of her grief, her unspoken shame, and the hollowed-out memories of another child. A child she lost ten years before, ripped from her arms by the machinery of forced adoption. When they gave her me – a replacement, a consolation prize – they assured her it was for the best.
In her mind, perhaps I was a balm for her wound. But for me, I was merely an object caught in the liminal space between her tragedy and my own. There is no joy in being someone’s remedy; there is only the suffocating knowledge that you will never be enough.
In the chaos of this arrangement, I morphed into my family’s black sheep. If I could not carry her grief in silence, I would bear their collective disdain. My refusal to assimilate – to simply accept my prescribed role in the family drama – marked me as difficult, ungrateful, and, in their words, “broken.” I became a symbol of everything they couldn’t fix, a reminder of the original loss they could not reconcile.
Eventually, I came to understand that the problem wasn’t what kind of goat or sheep I was. The problem was the sickness of the herd itself.
Adoption, as it was practised in this country for decades, was a brutal calculus: a child taken, a mother condemned, and another family constructed out of artifice and pain. The sickness was systemic – a national act of violence masquerading as benevolence. They stole us from our mothers under the guise of giving us a “better life.” But there is no better life to be found in an ecosystem of lies.
I am the child of forced adoption, stolen and given to a woman whose pain had already eclipsed her ability to love freely. It was never her fault – not entirely. She, too, was a victim of the machine. But when you live your life as a placeholder for someone else’s child, you begin to feel as though you don’t exist at all.
This realization did not come suddenly but rather as a series of quiet devastations. Memories of the way she would cling to me and then push me away, always keeping a distance as though she feared I might vanish just as the first had. Memories of my adoptive father, a man who never wanted children but tolerated me as a necessary part of her healing process. And memories of the unrelenting pressure to perform a version of myself that I did not recognise – one that would make me worth the suffering I had inherited.
The sickness of the herd infects us all. It whispers that we must conform, that we must erase ourselves to fit the shape of someone else’s grief. It tells us that love is conditional, that acceptance must be earned, and that the wounds of the past are best ignored.
But I refuse to ignore them. My existence is a palimpsest layered with stories of loss and erasure. The child who was stolen. The mother who was broken. The sheep who would not stay silent.
To reckon with this history is to confront the ways in which we have failed – not just as families, but as a nation. Forced adoption was not an accident; it was a deliberate act of cruelty justified by moral superiority and the desire to erase what was inconvenient.
And yet, the scars remain. For me, they are woven into my very identity, a map of the traumas I have carried and the truths I have uncovered.
In the end, I am not a goat or a sheep. I am simply a survivor of a system that sought to erase me. And in telling this story, I hope to reveal the sickness of the herd – not to shame it, but to heal it. Because only by acknowledging the depth of our collective wound can we begin to imagine something better.
