I’m not personally in favor of either international nor transracial adoptions and I really have no right to an opinion on either but I do realize they are both fraught with complexities that no one should enter into unaware.
Adoptees are not a monolithic variety of human being. They differ as much as any individuals do. Jillian Lauren is both an adult adoptee and an adoptive mother. With her husband, Scott Shriner, the couple adopted an Ethiopian boy.
She says that she does not love adoption because it is one long Disney happy ending. She loves adoption for the way its struggles have defined her life and made her strong. This is a realistic perspective.
Here’s her adoptee story –
My story began with my unwed birthmother stranded alone in a snow-blanketed Chicago, feeling terrified and foolish. Across the country, my soon-to-be-mother had cried herself to sleep in her West Orange, New Jersey apartment every night for years, longing for a child. A deal was struck, a baby passed from one set of hands to another. I was adopted just barely before the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. My mother says she did not once put me down during the entire trip home.
To be so unwanted and so wanted at the same time can carve a fault line in you.
She admits that at one time, her perspective on adoption was similar to what Laura Barcella once wrote – “Being forsaken by my biological mother has burdened me, for as long as I can remember, with a sense of inborn exile — a gaping hole where my identity should be.”
Indeed, adoption does not give any one who has been adopted a life that is always comfortable or easy.
Jillian Lauren goes on to describe what it has been like with her adopted son’s profound anxiety and fear. It is derived from having survived malnutrition, illness and unimaginable loss in his first year of life. For almost the entirety of his first three years with the couple – he ate little, slept less and had violent tantrums roughly 10 times a day. Lauren admits that during this time, he often bit her until she bled.
Adoption is a narrative that begins with loss and definitely trauma.
She shares that through the trials with her son of the past few years, she has come to understand herself as selfish, vain, petulant and unequal to the task of mothering. To be certain, she has also found resiliency, determination and resourcefulness.
Each person grows through their challenges. The good and the bad both have qualities that can serve our ongoing journeys.
Missing Mom 