Too often adoption facilitators are more concerned with socioeconomic factors than psychological, emotional or intellectual considerations. There are better indicators for adopting a child than providing a nursery or having enough money in the bank for a college education.
What there is a need for is emotional stability, honesty, and the willingness to become truly informed about what this process means for the adopting parents and the child they adopt.
Prospective adoptive parents can help by making certain the child they are considering REALLY needs to be adopted.
~ The Primal Wound
When asking how to best raise an adopted child, the experts in the 1980s said there were no unique needs and that being adopted (though I should be told as soon as possible) would mean nothing to me.
There is no post-adoption support.
You will not know why I feel so drawn to the ocean if my original family is from Tennessee.
I will tell you that you are not my “real mom” a handful of times out of frustration and not feeling understood.
I will make you prove over and over again that you love me.
I will spend too much time with people who don’t care about me because I will not be able to stand rejecting anyone.
When I become a mother, the adoptee in me will awaken. You will be bewildered when I start talking about being adopted, missing my first mother and my interest in my roots.
When I embark on reunion, you will support me, but feel as though I am rejecting you. I will have to tell you over and over again that I am not leaving you, but regaining part of me that was left behind.
~ Letter to my Prospective Adoptive Parents in The Declassified Adoptee
Much that I have read resonates with what I have seen in my own family. Both my parents were adopted and each of my sisters gave up a child to adoption. Inform yourself. Don’t create a false identity for the child you adopt. Be prepared for perhaps the hardest choice to parent a child. Apply love liberally.
Missing Mom 