Gotcha Day

It is hard to believe but it is true, some families actually celebrate the legal finalizing of a child’s great loss as something like a birthday or holiday. Gotha Day is actually a real thing. I suppose it truly is a happy moment for them. But it seems to mistake what is happy for them when it is also a very sad day for others.

This official transfer of a child is a loss for the birth parents as well as their child. It is likely the natural mom and maybe the natural dad as well have never cried harder than they ever did that day they signed those papers giving another couple the legal right to call their child someone else’s own child. It is bittersweet. Nothing more and nothing less.

Now that I know about the wounds of adoption, it is even harder for me to accept that my adoptee mom actually had the nerve to encourage my sister to give up her daughter for adoption. Unbelievable but true and that is the reality.

Our own parents (both adoptees) were not willing to risk financial responsibility and so made it literally impossible for my sister to care for her daughter/their granddaughter as she would surely have done had she had adequate support. My sister even tried to get government assistance but was told that our parents wealth made her ineligible because she was living in their home due to her pregnancy. Another unbelievable but true fact.

Gotcha day is what some adoptive parents call the day the birth parents signed their rights away and often that is the day that the adoption agency and the adoptive parents stopped talking to the natural parents. They all got what they came for – except someone else had to lose to make that possible.

The adoptive parents now have possession and control.

Speaking Out

Adoptees are speaking up about the suffering they have endured and I am grateful to each and every one of them who tells the truth at great risk to their relationships. The truth needs to be heard and healing cannot happen unless the reality is faced.

Sometimes we do what we have to do. In our heart we know that there are going to be repercussions but the truth needs to come out. Not everyone is going to appreciate it but it is always what must happen regardless.

It’s okay, and normal, to fear change. It’s going to run strong with a history of separation anxiety untreated. If you’re suffering right now, I understand that it sucks when people abandon you. You need to focus on your self and commit to healing and improving yourself. It is easier said than done but necessary. I have lost contact with people who do matter to me because their pain was such they could not face it directly but needed to blame me for the suffering I did not actually cause.

There are wounds that cruelty and separation cause that can never be undone in this lifetime. I wouldn’t know every thing I do if adoptees weren’t explaining their perspectives.

Please know this. You’re important, you’re voice and feelings are important, and although this may cause a riff with another person, it needs to be said for a better way to emerge. That doesn’t mean that the riff will ever feel good within your own heart. Hugs.

Living In The Fog

Adoption Fog – the hazy perception that everything about adoption is (or should be) simple, straight-forward, beautiful, and most importantly, not questioned.

Adoptees are told what to think, not how to think. They are told the perspective from which they should see their adoption. They are told to be grateful. They live in a fantasy land. They were too young or too afraid to realize the truth of the situation they are living in or to feel the full impact of it. I can see now that as I began to understand the stories of my parents adoptions, I was in a fog before and in the early part of that process of believing the unicorns and rainbows version of adoption.

Coming out of the fog can mean enlightenment and healing. Along the way, there are painful realizations and personal acknowledgements. Coming out of the fog does not necessarily mean searching. One can be searching and still be in the fog. Maybe simply curious about family and heritage.

Adoptees are conditioned from the beginning to be grateful. They were “chosen”. There is a story, ingrained lovingly, about how the biological parents were not able or did not want to take care of the adoptee. “They loved me so much they had to give me away so I could have a better life. I was saved by my adoptive parents from life as an orphan. Adoption is a good thing. Without it where would all the abandoned, unwanted children go?”

While such stories are meant to be comforting, it is often scary for the child. To be “chosen” by one family means to be “unchosen” or rejected by another one. And it is that fear of rejection that causes many adoptees to become people pleasers.

It is only natural, that as they come to maturity, they begin to understand that their very lives fulfill a desire on the part of their adoptive parents. Adopted children are therefore often fearful (either consciously or subconsciously) that they could become rejected again.

There really is no such thing as a well-adjusted adoptee, or even child of two adoptees, even if it appears to be so. The contradictions are simply too big to reconcile.

When A Child Kills

Learning about these statistics fascinated me the way a car accident often fascinates us (in horror) as we pass by and are grateful we are safe.

Adoptees are 15 times more likely to commit parricide (kill one or both adoptive parents) than biologic children. Of the 500 estimated serial killers in U.S. history, 16 percent were adopted as children, while adoptees represent only 2 or 3 percent of the general population.

Dr. David Kirschner has been an expert witness in 20 homicide cases in which the accused was adopted, usually as an infant, or in early childhood. In every case of these adoptees who killed, he found a remarkably similar pattern, including a history of sealed original birth records, a childhood of secrets and lies (re: birth parents and genetic history), frustrated, blocked searches for birth parents, and untreated, festering adoption issues of loss, rejection, abandonment, identity, and dissociated (split-off) rage.

This sub-group of adopted killers who he has seen consistently had a strikingly similar fantasy of the birth mother: That she was an all-giving, all-loving, nurturing, wonderful, perfect being. He had expected to find conscious anger/rage directed at a malevolent, rejecting bad mother – but instead there was this paradox of an idyllic birth-mother-fantasy image. The anger and rage toward birth parents was there – but deeply repressed, often dissociated and cut off from consciousness, and ultimately acted-out with violence toward the adoptive parents or others. In these extreme cases, the split, false, secret self described by many adoption experts, had evolved into a more malignant, clinical Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple Personality Disorder).

Adoption has long been neglected by mental health experts, as well as the criminal justice system, in the search for causes of eruptions of extreme violence. Some adoptees believe that they have been conceived out of wedlock in the back seat of a car or by a prostitute. One adoptee who has written about her search for answers was conceived in an act of rape. Regardless of the sad circumstances that lead to a person’s birth and relinquishment – truth is always the best policy. In the absence of truth (due to sealed adoption records and changes in identity details) an adoptee and even their children are left to make up stories to fill the gaps in real information. I know that happened to me and within my own family.

Not every adoptee will suffer in the extreme this way but every adoptee deep inside has issues of abandonment and rejection. For this reason, I do believe we have to find a better way to care of children who need a stable home with loving, caring parental figures. No identity changes, no hidden familial truths. Honesty is the best policy going forward.

Safe Haven Babies

How does one preserve the identity and heritage of a baby dropped off under Safe Haven laws ? Is this a case where adoption is the only recourse ?

Safe-haven laws are statutes in the United States that decriminalize the leaving of unharmed infants in specially designated places. The child then becomes a ward of the state. Safe-haven laws typically allow the original parents to remain nameless in a court proceeding to determine the child’s status.

Some states treat safe-haven surrenders as child dependency or abandonment and a complaint is filed against the parents in juvenile court. Other states treat safe-haven surrenders as adoption surrenders and void all parental rights.

Of course, eventually, the ease of accessing inexpensive DNA tests and the matching sites 23 and Me as well as Ancestry may reunite the child with some member of their original family.

Yet, in the meantime, what to do ?

Critics argue that safe-haven laws undercut temporary-surrender laws, which provide the buffer of time for parents who are unsure about whether to keep or relinquish their children. Supporters argue that anonymity protects infants from potential abuse by their parents. Fathers can find themselves shut out of the child’s life without their knowledge or consent.

And I still do not have the answer to my initial questions . . .

Second Chance

One of the saddest situations in adoptionland is a child that was adopted and the adoptive family seeks to be rid of that child and it does happen.

In one case, an adopted child had been through four failed adoptions. This child had been renamed each time and didn’t even know their real name.

Or a child adopted internationally when they were 2 years old now up for re-adoption at the age of 8-1/2. The advertisement for this child is full of glowing attributes – why then is the need to be rid of the child ? It is beyond sad that people adopt without understanding the trauma and wounds that come from separating the child from their original family.

Between 1 and 5 percent of U.S. adoptions get legally dissolved each year. Some children are put up for “second-chance adoptions.” Second-chance adoptions are children who were already adopted and whose adoptive family no longer wishes to parent them.

Accurate statistics are not available for how commonplace second adoptions are, due to a wide variety of factors that include the closed nature of some adoptions, changed names on Social Security cards and birth certificates, and other paperwork issues.

Legally speaking, adopted children are recognized as no different from biological children. And for this reason, parents who opt to put a child up for re-adoption are doing nothing more legally complicated than any parent who puts a child up for adoption in the first place.

Children who end up in need of adoption a second time have lives that are deeply disrupted and end up with lifelong doubts about their worth. Most adoptees, even when their first adoption does not end up dissolved, suffer from similar issues.

Adoption is a complicated situation that is fraught with problems. That is why many adoptees are now speaking out against the process and looking for better alternatives for cases where a child’s welfare requires a more stable situation.

If It Was So Good . . .

why am I so unhappy ?

It is a paradox and difficult to explain beyond the fact that fear and trauma put the child into a survival mechanism. Yes, even with a loving and kind, caring adoptive family, an adoptee can feel messed up a lot of the time. The adoptee may rationally feel like they should be okay with having been adopted by such nice people. Yet, they are sad. There is a trauma that exists deep down in every adoptee whether they ever become aware of it or not. Adoption by strangers is never a normal experience in reality.

Adoptive parents may say, “My adopted child is so close to me. It is like they are attached at the hip.” While this may seem like a good thing, and the adoptive parent interprets this to mean that their child is well adjusted and/or bonded to them, it is actually a fear driven survival instinct in response to an abandonment, even if the child could never define it as such to their adoptive parent.

Sadly, the perspective of many adoptive parents is something akin to owning a possession. In some adoptees, the response to the adoptive parents is similar to repulsion. While an adoptee may attach, it is an attachment based on a longing for what is not there between the adopted child and the adoptive parents. It is inescapable that all adoptees are deprived of something fundamental that affects them developmentally.

The young adopted child will eventually stop crying for the need that can never be met. Unfortunately, in this surrender, the adoptee is seen as “such a good baby”. By the time this happens, the adoptee’s attachment style has already been deeply altered. They adapt.

Adoptees know how to use all of the different attachment coping styles, and switch between them based on the specific situation they find themselves in. Very little of what they are expressing outside reflects their true internal feelings. It is not how they are really feeling or what they are really needing. Mostly it is about appeasing the adult who is caring for them. It is a survival tactic. Always, what is seen, is even so, coming out of a deep and unaddressed trauma.

Actually Not Related

This is the day my parents married in 1953 because my teenage mom was pregnant with me and my dad did right by her. They were both adoptees. As incredible as it may seem to the reader, it was only recently that I realized how miraculous it is that I did not end up given away and adopted.

Certainly, my mom’s adoptive parents could not have been happy about all their dashed hopes for my mom. No debutante ball, no marrying into the upper class. Instead her husband came from a humble and poor family. In spite of it all, they remained married for life, over 60 years, and died 4 months apart.

How to explain what it is like ? I chose to relocate myself to Missouri. Eventually, I would discover lots of connections to my chosen home state. Yet, they were not my own family connections, not really. There was the town in Missouri – Dittmer – founded by my mom’s adoptive father’s family. There was the town in Missouri – Eugene – founded by my mom’s adoptive mother’s family. There was the town in Illinois – Belleville – founded by my dad’s adoptive mother’s family. I could not claim any of these places had a real relationship to my family history. It is a weird black hole to spend one’s life within.

Now I really know what is important. Loss, betrayal and abandonment force us to let go of our attachments. When my parents died, I became an orphan. I also lost a close and loving relationship with my youngest sister, who’s mental illness that appears to be some kind of paranoid schizophrenia, caused her to distrust me as I attempted to close out our parent’s estate. I heard my mom’s voice in my head saying “finish the work.” That work was requesting the court to create a supportive situation for my sister since she could no longer depend upon our parents and was hostile towards me. A lifetime of being there for her was lost and abandoned by her. Sadly.

The Strange Case of the Ukrainian Adoptee

Not the child in this story.

She had traveled from Ukraine to the rolling hills and cornfields of Indiana, only to wind up on her own in a strange city. When police checked in with the girl in September 2014, it had been more than a year since she had seen or heard from her adoptive parents, who had changed her age from 11 to 22 on official documents and rented her an apartment before moving to Canada and leaving her behind.

This is strange enough but the story gets stranger from there.

The couple who abandoned the girl disagree about whether she actually was a child — or an adult pretending to be one. The mother, now divorced from her husband, claims that the adoption was a “scam” and that the girl was a diagnosed psychopath and sociopath, who had been an adult the entire time they knew her.

Her ex-husband tells a different story. As far as he was concerned, police said, the girl was a minor when they switched her age and left her behind in Lafayette Indiana. He also told detectives that his wife had counseled the girl to tell people that she was 22 if questioned, and to explain that she just looked young.

The family had adopted the disabled girl from Ukraine in 2010 and she came to live with them and their three sons in their cozy suburban home north of Indianapolis. The girl would later tell detectives that a different adoptive family had initially brought her to the United States in 2008. Though no details are provided in the police affidavit, there were apparently complications, because the couple in this story adopted her two years later.

The girl’s actual age was difficult to establish from the beginning. In an Indiana probate court, they adoptive parents legally changed their daughter’s age from 11 to 22 and provided a letter that purportedly came from a doctor who said that the date on the girl’s birth certificate was “clearly inaccurate,” since she had both the teeth and the secondary sex characteristics of a grown adult.

The girl had been committed to a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with sociopathic personality disorder in 2012, and, around that time, started to admit that she was over 18. Determining her true age was difficult, the letter states, because records provided by Ukrainian officials were “grossly incomplete” and her condition, spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (dwarfism), meant that the typical assessments weren’t helpful.

When her adoptive parents rented her an apartment in downtown Lafayette Indiana, she knew no one else there. What happened next is unclear. It is said that the girl’s neighbors “took her under their wing.” In May 2014, less than a year after her adoptive parents left her alone in the apartment, she was evicted for not paying her rent.

In September 2014, the Tippecanoe County Sheriff’s Office tracked down the adoptive daughter, who would have been 12 or 13 at the time. Legally, she was considered to be well into her mid-twenties. Another five years passed before her adoptive parents were finally charged with neglect.

When another couple petitioned to become her guardians in 2016, the adoptive parents filed an objection. Two years later, the new couple changed their mind about the adoption, for reasons that weren’t specified. The adoptive parent’s petition was subsequently dismissed.

Stay tuned. Authorities have hinted that there could be even more strange details to come. “This is going to end up on a TV show,” an anonymous law enforcement official remarked.

Did The Child Need Another Home ?

It’s the end of the month of August. I didn’t know there was such a thing as “Child Support Awareness” but it is probably the most crucial issue in whether a child is raised by the couple who conceived them or adopted by people who have no genetic relationship to them.

Adoption has primarily served couples afflicted by infertility who have the financial ability to “buy” a child to fill their need. One can argue the semantics but that is what it comes down to.

What are the other situations in life where we cannot have something, so we feel entitled to take something belonging to someone else ? In the case of adoption, that something is a human infant.

If it were a car in a parking lot, it would absolutely be considered stealing to feel an entitlement to take it because one couldn’t obtain one any other way.

People who adopt want to feel good about adopting someone else’s baby. They justify this by saying things like “the child needed a home ANYWAY… they were giving the child away regardless …. someone else would have adopted if not me….”.

What if, instead of selling the baby of a struggling parent to wealthier people, society decided to support the parents in keeping and raising the child ? Many of the emotional and traumatic impacts of adoption would cease to exist. Adoption is a process in serious need of reforms.