Adoptee Suicide in The Umbrella Academy

Content Warning and Spoilers: This blog post contains spoilers to The Umbrella Academy and includes discussion of suicide, murder, mental illness, substance abuse, and other serious ramifications of adoption. 


The Umbrella Academy, a four-season Netflix series adapted from Gerard Way’s comic book series, is the modern adoption story America needs. The storyline begins with seven of forty-three women across the world giving unexpected and supernatural birth to babies they didn’t begin the day pregnant with. And you know what? Sometimes pregnancies ARE unexpected, and in the current world, predatory crisis pregnancy centers and abortion restrictions only fuel the fire to pregnancies that are unwanted. But not to worry, there’s always adoption. Right? So, on with our story. A rich and influential white man, Reginald Hargreeves, seeks out these women to acquire the children, often by force and with large sums of cash. The seven he comes home with are raised in what he calls “The Umbrella Academy,” where he trains them to utilize their varying superpowers because, duh, these babies have superpowers. This training is less fatherly and more dictatorial. And let’s not forget about the mother figure, a literal robot programmed to take care of the children, who eventually succumbs to dangerous [and eventually fatal] amounts of blind faith in an anomaly she mistakes for God. 

If you’re an adopted person, maybe you recognize the themes of the story already, the tones of imperial colonialist assimilation through the strong undertow of ministry that erases entire histories. At least, that is, if you’ve reckoned with and deconstructed what it really means to be adopted in post-colonial late stage capitalism. Some adoptees call this awakening “coming out of the fog,” which means that they’ve opened their eyes to the ills of adoption that run counter to the fairytale happy ever after that surrounds the cultural story of adoption. If you’re not an adoptee, let me continue the story so you can understand what I’m talking about. 

The seven children all struggle with not only grasping full control of their own powers, but also with other recognizable maladaptive behaviors that stem from their adoptive situation. Each severed from their biological kin, they are raised in an academy where they are pitted against each other and ranked by their father, each of them given a number instead of a name to denote their status. Their father is rich and powerful, he erases their memories, he forces them to perform for his plans, plans he never shares with them. Their lives are anything but a fairytale. The four primary stress responses (fight, flight, freeze, and fawn) all show up along with other coping mechanisms like repression, manipulation, perfectionism, substance abuse, and attempts to fly under the radar with mimicry. Each of the characters struggle in one way or another, much like real adoptees who are often not given their full histories by their adoptive parents or the state, who are more vulnerable to abuse of all kinds including murder, who are more likely to struggle with mental health and substance abuse, and who are much more likely to commit suicide

But it isn’t just that the characters in The Umbrella Academy reveal depressing truths about the ways in which adoptees cope with the pre-verbal trauma of adoption and the ongoing identity crisis as they try to find where they belong. The storyline of these characters introduces several different timelines. Five, the character who can time travel, initiates this major plotline by running away as a child to an apocalyptic timeline, then returning as an adult with the intent to stop the end of the world that he witnessed in the future. Several other timelines emerge as the group tries over and over to stop the end of the world until finally, they realize that each timeline is broken in some way because of them. At the end of the series, they collectively agree to erase themselves from all the timelines in order to restore balance to the universe. Some viewers may interpret this act as heroic, but knowing what I know of adoption and the way we adoptees are prone to imagining counterfactuals to cope with and make sense of our lives, this is less heroic and more suicidal in my interpretation. Despite the numerous timelines they experience and the countless more they become aware of, the only option left to them is to remedy the order of the universe by erasing themselves. 

This is the story of adoption we need to pay attention to. It’s a matter of life and death. 

 

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