Yes, This Is A Thing

This celebrates a child leaving foster care because they have been adopted.

To be certain, any sort of celebration of adoption day is only for the adoptive parents… adoption day for adoptees is a loss. It’s a legal severing of an adoptee’s ties to their biological family and biological roots. It is the culmination of trauma, and is the start of new traumas. It also feeds the savior image of foster/adoptive parents, which is terribly insulting to adoptees and isn’t accurate. In the cases where non-kinship adoption is unavoidable, it should be done privately and discretely. The story belongs to the adoptee, only they never had the power to decide or say what they actually wanted – in most cases, an intact family into which they were born.

Children’s brains and emotional intelligence that aren’t fully developed yet. Their nervous system is screaming “yay permanency! Woot woot!” And the only way a kid knows how to celebrate is a party; or a certificate; or gifts; or social media posts; and whatever else they’ve seen other former foster youth or adoptees do.

What they ARE NOT able to process is 1) adoption DOESN’T guarantee a ‘forever home’ at all 2) what’s happening to them is trauma– not a celebration 3) even if they DO end up with a forever home, it may be an eternity of pure unadulterated hell (mentally, emotionally, relationally) 4) the “permanence” also means their actual biological family history and heritage and traditions, etc are now permanently gone and the list goes on and on. They’re unable to look at it from a 30,000 ft view and understand the gravity and finality of it all.

Really the issue comes down to NOT celebrating a child’s adoption publicly and not even within the family if possible. This doesn’t mean to invalidate whatever feelings and emotions a child may be having – especially about getting out of the uncertainty of foster care and multiple placements. However, adult adoptees will tell you that as they aged and could reflect from a mature perspective – being adopted is always fraught and traumatic – even in the best of circumstances.

Many adoptees spend much of their life in a “happy fog” trying their best to be grateful for this un-natural thing that happened to them – not in their control nor with their conscious approval – usually by adults and the legal system. Best to go as minimal and low-key about it all as you possibly can, no more than privately within the immediate family, if celebrated at all.

Adoptive Parents Being Bad

This is sad and cruel but this actually happened in a group of adoptive parents. Their answers will stagger you –

hugging a porcupine!

Or Superman holding cryptonite!

Trying to row a boat with one arm

Speaking a different language

Having a root canal with no anesthesia

Talking to a brick wall

Talking to a room of screaming monkeys who throw things at me

Talking to the wall and it doesn’t respond

Panning for gold

Reasoning with a rock

How repulsive. These women shouldn’t have any children in their care.

These comments occurred in what is termed a “safe space” for adoptive parents to vent their frustrations.

An adoptee shares in response to one I didn’t include above – “I dont know (cause thats the only response i get!)” that this is an adoption trauma response. If an adopted child doesn’t feel safe, they learn not to give opinions because that puts them at risk for abuse. To those who thought that whole experience was a lark (or a laugh) – Your adopted child is showing traits of trauma, that isn’t a funny joke.

One women admitted – I’ve joined some of the RAD (Reactive Attachment Disorder) groups. It opened my eyes to how much a large number of Adoptive Parents seem to really hate their children. And have zero clue how the typical child behaves. Always ranting and raving about how bad their “rad” is when half the behaviors are things my neurotypical zero trauma biological kids do. I’m so disgusted by these people but I can’t make myself leave the groups.

So . . . this is just one reason why adoptees are forever scarred by the experience.

The Sad Stories Just Keep Coming

A mother writes –

I am the mother of 2 daughters. My rights were terminated and my children have been adopted by their step mother. I lost on a technicality. Originally, I had a shared custody with my ex. He took off and I couldn’t find my kids. I couldn’t seem to find the right help or didn’t have the $ or connections. Finally, I found them [many many years later] and went to court.

The judge literally said “I believe you but I have to rule on the law and you didn’t provide support for the last four months.” [How could I ?, since they were on the run].

I found out that the girls father and step mother were divorcing. Something told me I should try again. So, I called him. He said he would ask my girls if they wanted to see me. He held true and my oldest daughter said “no” but my youngest said “yes”.

He made me agree that I would not tell them what really happened. My children have been completely brainwashed. I am not allowed to defend myself [not that I want to bash anyone – that isn’t healthy either] but I am trying to build a relationship. My daughter just doesn’t trust me at all. And she is very back and forth. I don’t want to push her and I want be there for her.

I have also found out that my children suffered a lot of abuse from both step mom and dad [dad was abusive with me as well when we were married]. I’m trying my best to prove myself without over stepping their father’s rule. I fear he would just yank her back from me again. He doesn’t want to be the bad guy.

I’m just trying to figure out how to handle this appropriately. It’s a hard line to walk but I’m willing to. My younger daughter is almost 15. I have completely respected the older daughter not wanting anything to do with me. I just pray maybe one day she will change her mind [she is almost 18].

Sadly, I don’t believe this is a unique story. Just one of a multitude about how children become separated from their mothers.

Addiction Is A Sad Reality

The issue of drug addiction is close to my heart because I have seen it’s effects up close and personal. Losing physical custody of one’s child as a mother never feels like a happy outcome. Today, I was reading the sad story of a woman who lost 3 of her children when Child Protective Services took them from her due to her addiction.

She was promised by Child Protective Services that her children were going to go into a safe home, a God fearing home, wealthy, and she knew this couple had been the foster parents for the last 2 years she was able to visit her children prior to their adoption. She signed the adoption papers because she needed to survive the addiction. And she needed to save her children from her own self. She believed as she recovered that her children were safe. It was a closed adoption and so she lost contact completely.

Somewhat recently she learned that her children were so severely abused by those adoptive parents for a number of years that they were taken back into the foster care system for a subsequent 2 years. Then they were adopted a second time. These children are now 20, 18 and 16 years old. This woman had 2 more children as she was recovering from her addiction and she is raising them. Though she has tried to reconnect with her older children, they rebuff her efforts.

Some of the things we do in our youth and ignorance will never free of us of the consequences of our choices. The effects are permanent. One can understand how these older children might blame this mom for their difficult, even painful, childhoods. And while, it is sad that there is no happy resolution for this shattered family, it isn’t difficult to understand the damage that has been done.

She asked adoptees for advice on whether she should keep trying to reach out to these older children. One was brutally honest (as adoptees often are if you are willing to listen). “As an adoptee we don’t owe anyone anything, not a explanation, not a relationship, not communication not even a hello. You gave up that right. You need to respect their wishes, don’t reach out again, they know how and where they can reach out if they choose to. From what you have said they have lived a horrendous life and they as adults now deserve the right to make the decision to have any contact with you.”

The fact is – adoptees had no say in what happened to them. They are totally within their rights to take back control when they are old enough to exert it.

Reproductive Rights

The woman on the left is Norma McCorvey, the woman who was Jane Roe in the legal case that came to be known as Roe v Wade and made it possible for women to have an abortion. I did not know it until this morning, but the pregnancy that caused her to seek an abortion, ended up in adoption.

Norma grew up poor and abused. She was the daughter of a single alcoholic mother. She got into trouble frequently and at one point was sent to a reform school. She married and became pregnant at 16 but divorced before the child was born; she subsequently relinquished custody of the child to her mother. In 1967, she gave up a second child for adoption immediately after giving birth.

At the age of 22 and unwed, she was mired in addiction and poverty, she was desperate for a way out of an unwanted pregnancy. It was her third child and she was so desperate to have an abortion, that she made up a story that she was gang raped, thinking that might legally entitle her to one. To my own perspective, she is the sad example of the trauma a birth mother experiences as Norma repeatedly lost custody of her natural children.

Roe v Wade became law in 1973, just after I graduated from high school. In the latter part of the 1970s, I benefited from a safe, medically induced and legal abortion. It has surprised me how many adoptees will say they wish they had been aborted. That tells you something about how not happy becoming an adoptee can be for many, not all, children as they become mature adults.

Roe v Wade built on earlier decisions legalizing contraception. The right to plan wanted pregnancies (and in my own experience a wanted child is loved and treated better in general, I say that because all of my children were wanted, and my reasons for having an abortion, while haunting me most of my life, I still believe were the right ones) and the right to end unwanted ones has freed women to pursue more fulfilling lives than the old barefoot and pregnant model of married life.

When women are able to choose when and whether to have children, they are more likely to finish their education, more financially stable and less likely to remain in and endure abusive relationships. In states that have fewer abortion restrictions, there are lower rates of maternal and infant mortality.

In 1984, Norma McCorvey revealed herself to have been Jane Roe. This resulted in the ugly side of the Pro-Life movement as she was harassed and someone even shot at her through her window. Even so, she was undaunted for years and remained an abortion-rights advocate. However in the 1990s, she announced she was 100% pro-life. One has to wonder after what she suffered, if she just wanted safety, security and peace. She died in 2017.

Today in 2020, the right to choose is under a strong attack and given the increasingly conservative nature of our judicial system thanks to the Republican party, young women may once again only have the option of illegal and unsafe access to ending an unwanted pregnancy. Women could be forced once again to have children against their personal desire to bear a child.

Love Is Staying Home

This blog is really NOT as frivolous as it may appear. It really is a matter of life and death. I will admit that this is easier for my family than it is for most people living in this modern world. We live in rural isolation and have always worked from home and our children have been educated at home. In this scary new reality we have been thrust into globally, I see the blessing of what has always been our reality.

True, there have been some changes for us too. My yoga class has been cancelled indefinitely. Some non-essential medical appointments must be cancelled as they come up and re-scheduled though those future dates may have to be yet again postponed and re-scheduled. New rules at the grocery store that limit the number of customers allowed inside at any given time will make the weekly trip to replenish supplies take longer. And of course, there is the mask, googles and gloves needed to protect not only me but the other people I will have some INDIRECT contact with who could become infected if I am asymptomatic.

There are families unlike my own that are not used to so much togetherness time. This is a worry. Stressed parents could become abusive towards their children or married couples separate because they discover they had less in common than they believed when they first married. There are financial difficulties with the sudden cessation of business activities. There is a need to prepare one’s meals at home and some people have lost that skill.

The common good. It may be that this virus has come to unite us. We had become so polarized and divided and terribly tribal. Not that being threatened with death is going to change all of that quickly. Even so, we will come to see that overcoming the current circumstances will require a new perspective going forward. This won’t happen quickly but there are some of us who are beginning the process of holding a vision of a better and brighter tomorrow in our heart’s minds for a trajectory going forward to guide us all.

Without Us

It is difficult being a woman. It is difficult being a mother. It is difficult being a wife, a daughter or a sister. Sometimes it is difficult having women friends. Today is International Women’s Day.

I was in a difficult romantic relationship with a dangerous man. He lived in dangerous ways and he was dangerous for my own self to be with. More than once he physically hit me. I’m not denying that my own behavior may have pushed him over the edge those times but I also know that whatever holds a man back from harming a woman, if he is able to break through that barrier even once, the risk then exists that it will be easier for him to go through that same barrier the next time. So eventually I left his physical presence. I planned my leaving carefully to be able to safely go. I saved money from what was allotted to me for groceries by buying wisely over a long period of time and I left without saying goodbye. After I was safely at a distance, I notified him that I wasn’t coming back.

It took that courage of leaving to put me into alignment with meeting my husband, so I could live in this deeply nourishing place where I feel very safe and am contented. And it took other actions too, like being brave enough to place a personal ad in a weekly entertainment newspaper in St Louis, without which I would have never come in contact with the man I married a little over a year later. Traveling through life is a lot like being in a car where I always know that I can never actually get truly “lost”. All roads eventually go somewhere and one can always backtrack and find a “somewhere” that we recognize. Leaving can be like backtracking to where you were comfortably confident in your own self, after the damage an abusive relationship can inflict upon a person. I know that all experiences – the good and the bad – end up somewhere else eventually. In that there is a great deal of comfort and a real confidence for living through it all.

My family supports the regional women and children’s shelter. They support women and their children to survive domestic violence and end up in a better place. They help keep mothers and their children together. If you have the opportunity to do anything that will keep a mother together with her children, please consider doing so. The future of our humanity depends on us being here.

Better To Have Been Aborted

It may surprise a reader to know this, but many adoptees actually wish they would have been aborted. That is how painful it is to be given up for adoption and doubly painful if the adopting parents prove to further damage an already damaged soul.

I am pro-Choice and pro-life. Not pro-Life like most of those are. They are only pro-Birth, truth be told. They are not willing to fund adequate financial support to struggling mothers so that they can keep and raise their children.

The world has enough people already. We do NOT need to be fruitful and multiply any more. In fact, we have not needed to do that for a very long time. The population explosion first occurred on a small scale and with a relatively moderate intensity in Europe and America, more or less between 1750 and 1950. Enough is enough. If a couple wants to have children and is willing to fully support raising them, I’m all for it. Otherwise, trust women to make the best decision and stop stressing over the babies you imagine they have killed.

I fully understand what it feels like for a child to be born into this world unwanted and unprepared for. My maternal grandmother never had any other children because of the shame and guilt she felt at having surrendered a child for adoption. She died too young and I fear what happened to separate her from my mom haunted her for her entire life.

I am a woman who chose to have an abortion. The timing was wrong, the father was wrong to make any kind of commitment and the pregnancy was not developing normally. I am grateful I could go to a clean clinic, where I received counseling and good treatment. It still haunted me. I had a child before the abortion who I am forever glad I kept (even though some circumstances at the time of her conception suggested I should not have – I knew she would be just fine and she was/is). I am a woman who went on to have two very wanted sons when I entered into a marriage to a good man who wanted to be a good father and he is.

Birth Order

My husband and I are both first borns and I see the personality traits are present in us. We both have a middle and a youngest sibling of the same gender that we are. Siblings are raised essentially in the same environment, so it could be assumed that we might be more like our brothers and sisters. Yet it appears that the same home environment makes up only 5-10% of our personality. Many of us would agree that we are somewhat or very different from our siblings. Genetic factors have more impact on our personality, maybe as much as 50%. Nurturing, how we are cared for must matter a lot.

Does birth order matter in adoption ? That is a question that I came to this morning’s blog with in mind. Does it matter if children are adopted out of their birth order ? My mom was the first born of her original mother and also the only child but was the youngest in the home she was raised in with an older brother who was also adopted. My dad was the first born and the oldest in the home where he was adopted. He grew up with a younger brother who was also adopted.

One study concluded that the rearing order of the children had little impact on personality except for conscientiousness, which was higher for children who were raised as first-born. The child’s sex had more impact than did rearing order.

Most adoptive families do not consider the impact that rearing order will have on infants who are first born to their biological parents, if they enter an adoptive home as the second or third child. If a child is an infant, it is assumed that such a child will have the characteristics associated with the rearing order in which they are placed. More often, adoptive families want to know the impact of adopting children out of age order on the children already there— especially on the oldest child or on several younger children when adopting an older child.

Sibling rivalry and the need for attention are very real factors in any multi-child home. I have seen it up close and personal with my two sons and have experienced a misplaced idealism upon my own reality that simply was not real by my youngest sister. I have seen frequently that the younger children often look up to the oldest. I have experienced first hand that parents expect the oldest to be an example of a “good” person – whatever that means in any family’s context.

Here is one reality some adoptive families face – maybe you have a larger age gap among your genetic/biological children. So you chose to adopt a child who can fill in the gap in age differences. Neither the oldest nor the youngest child’s position in your family is displaced by this decision. However, in any adoption of an older child, the chronological age of that child can be quite different from the child’s emotional age due to the trauma they have experienced. The reality you may find is that this new “middle” child is more like the youngest child in the family.

In any adoption – it is all about your expectations as an adopting parent. If you adopt a child who fits nicely into the age range where your children are right now, this newly adopted child may not blend in as well as you anticipated. Some precautions will be necessary when adopting an older child or when adopting a sibling group.

Helping Families Stay Together

We’d be better off spending the money upfront, whether that’s in the form of early childhood education, preventative healthcare, or helping families get the support they need to stay together. It would cost less overall and be more beneficial to those who truly need it. There will always be cases where throwing more money at a scenario doesn’t help, but overall, it makes more sense financially and emotionally.

If we really cared about children, we would want to do everything in our power to keep them out of the foster care system.

I am so grateful no one ever reported us as having children out of control. There was a time in our lives when I worried about that. I even cautioned my children to try to be on their best behavior out in public or they could end up like that episode of The Simpsons when the children are taken away.

I was happy to read that there are efforts underway to totally rewrite how child welfare works.

As a society, we should be helping children BEFORE a caseworker shows up at their house. We should be supporting that family BEFORE anyone feels inclined to call a child abuse and neglect hotline on them.

As a society, we can be spending taxpayer funds more effectively by spending them on prevention. Many believe it would be cheaper to intervene earlier. It would be less traumatic for the children and their parents. Therapists, parenting coaches (children do not arrive with an operating manual) and mental health professionals could help families avoid bad outcomes.

A good goal to begin with is to find families at risk but not over the edge yet. Families that lack secure food and housing because of poverty. Those young parents who grew up without good attachment to their own parents (in my case, my parents were adoptees and I can see now that they were strangely detached as parents, though overall good parents who did love and care about us).

I remember my mom telling me how she didn’t know how to cook or clean house when she first married my dad because her mother lacked the patience or tolerance for flaws to teach her. My mom made certain her daughters had such skills.

Here is the shocking statistic for only ONE of these 50 United States –

In 2019, in the state of Colorado there was a $558 MILLION dollar budget and 8,820 children were taken out of their family homes and placed in foster care.

I find that staggering and very very sad.