Tag: Adoptee Parents

Today’s Tricky Situation

Regardless, they are not your mom and dad. When I was growing up, the close friends of my parents were called Aunt Nancy and Uncle Amos but they were NOT related to us. Truth is, because both of my parents were adoptees – none of the grandparents or aunts and uncles were actually related to us. Such relationships are often referred to as fictive kin – a relationship that a child has with “an individual who is not related by birth, adoption, or marriage to a child, but who has an emotionally significant relationship with the child.” Still the situation in today’s story comes up repeatedly and can be difficult to handle delicately.

Here is the story – We’ve had our neighbors’ children placed with us on emergency action this week. We have been heavily involved with them for about two years and the children are often here for dinner/breakfast and life in between.

Out of nowhere today (day 5 with us), they’ve started calling us Mom and Dad. How do we gently push back and encourage them to use our names or something else, without hurting their already confused hearts ?

My 7 year old (who came to us from foster care) brought her friend to me and said so & so “wants to call you mom, you don’t care if she calls you mom, do you?” and my heart sank for her and her actual Mom. I said “Well, there’s lots of names you could call me! You could call me by my first name or add ‘Aunty’ to it. You could even come up with a silly name for me. Totally up to you.” Her reply was “no thanks, Mom.”

Without Secrecy or Shame

The mom’s group related to my youngest son once divided ourselves into tell/don’t tell. After that, we could no longer discuss, within the whole group, the medical technology that had brought all of us together. Our children were all born within a 4 month window of time. We’ve only gotten together once (and not all of us made it to the event) when our children were 2 years old. One woman who gave birth to twins developed a rapid breast cancer and is no longer with us. As to the others, I often wonder how the ones who were “don’t tell” will manage the reality of inexpensive DNA testing and matching services that are ubiquitous today. Though I never ask . . .

My family was always open about the truth but also did not make a big issue of it. Locally, I really didn’t think it was anyone else’s business. After our egg donor did 23 and Me, I got my husband a kit. Then we got both of our sons kits. That gave us an opportunity to talk over one Sunday night dinner about the whole circumstance of how we came to have them. They seem to understand that they would not exist any other way. As their biological mother (though they don’t have my genes – at least not from the egg that became them – who knows what all goes on in the womb ?), I don’t detect any difference in our relationships with one another – thankfully.

So, yesterday, I read this story that, of course, spoke to me in very personal ways. I suppose part of my own reasons for honest transparency had to do with the fact that I am a child of 2 adoptees and until after they had both died, I knew next to nothing about our origins. My only regret is that I didn’t uncover those details while they were still alive.

The story was part of LINK>Huffpost Personal and was submitted by Julee Newberger titled – My Parents Hid The Truth Of My Birth From Me. I Almost Did The Same To My Own Daughter. It is subtitled – “The longer we waited, the more anxious I became. If we didn’t tell her soon, I feared it could do lasting damage to our family.”

She explains – “When I was my daughter’s age, I believed I was the biological daughter of my doting mom and dad, who said they tried to have children for more than 10 years until, at last, I arrived. But I always sensed that something was amiss. There were no pictures of my mother pregnant or stories about my birth. Nobody in the family had my crooked smile or blue-green eyes. I’d overheard some whispered conversations about adoption, but whenever I asked my parents, they shut it down.”

“By the time an older cousin confirmed that I was adopted, I was in my early 40s and both my parents had passed away. This midlife discovery left me with tangled emotions and no way to work through it with the two people I’d loved and trusted most. It’s possible that my parents thought they were saving me from stigma or that they feared I’d abandon them in lieu of my biological family.”

Regarding the conception of her daughter, she notes – “I also experienced something I hadn’t anticipated ― a sense of shame, as if I had cheated nature. At 44, maybe I wasn’t supposed to be a new mother, and by extension, this beautiful baby wasn’t truly mine. . . . feeling like an imposter, somehow less ‘legit’ than the other moms.” Up until her daughter’s questions about ethnicity, she had told herself that it was too soon to explain donor conception to a child who was too young to understand how a baby was made.

So, this is how it proceeded – “As soon as she started asking about her ancestry, I bought a book called ‘You Began as a Wish’ by Kim Bergman, which talks about all the different ways kids are conceived. My husband and I planned for all of us to read it together, but my daughter preempted that by pulling the book out of a box of Amazon purchases after school.” The author continues, “My whole body tensed as she began reading aloud and asking questions: ‘So all kids are made up of sperm, an egg, a womb’ … ” So, Julee came out with it – “Remember we told you that Mommy had trouble getting pregnant at first?” I said matter-of-factly. “Well, an anonymous donor gave us an egg so that we could have you.”

“After a while, I could see recognition in her warm brown eyes, different in color and shape than my own. “So, I’m related to somebody else,” she said. The author notes – “A recent study on third-party reproduction. Results showed families have better outcomes when parents tell kids about their conception early on, ideally by the time they’re 7 years old. The longer we waited, the more anxious I became. If we didn’t do it soon, I feared it could do lasting damage to our family.”

blogger’s note – I don’t regret any of our choices. The situation is simply my family’s reality and we are far from alone in our circumstances. It is a whole new world thanks to medical progress.

My Life’s Purpose

In 2012, I participated in an online course with Jean Houston titled Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. In 2016, I spent a week at her home in Oregon with other participants attending what was titled Electing Yourself. I remember that she was certain that Trump would not be elected but as we all know, he was (regardless of how one might interpret the validity of his election).

In the August 2016 Salon, I took the “hot seat” and commented that I had not discovered my Life’s Purpose previously. I didn’t discover it at that Salon either.

But beginning in the fall of 2017, I began a personal roots journey to discover who my genetic grandparents were, since both of my parents were adoptees and both died with almost no knowledge of their origins (1930s closed, sealed adoptions). I succeeded beyond any of my wildest dreams and now feel whole in ways I did not feel for almost 6 decades of my life. Now that I and my related family members know who these people were, no one can take that back away from any of us. I am still integrating my own new awareness and this has had to include re-owning my relatives via adoption. Once I knew my family’s truths, for awhile, the adoptive family no longer felt “real” to me. Now I can embrace all of them (personally known and never having met) as important in my own lifetime.

Part of that new understanding was realizing what a minor miracle it was that my unwed, high school student mother had not been forced to give me up for adoption.

I believe I was preserved in the family I was conceived within to reconnect the severed threads of my family’s origins. Having done that, I continue to educate myself about all things adoption and that has led me to write this daily blog (with some gaps unavoidably occurring). Sometimes, I think I have written enough, sharing what I learn with anyone else who is interested for whatever reason. But there always seems to be something more to say. My daughter once said to me – it seems like you are on a mission. I accept that is true – I do what I can to spread the word about the trauma and unintended consequences experienced by adopted persons. Until there isn’t anything more to share, I will continue to write here.

The late Dr Wayne Dyer wrote in Staying on the Path, pg 68 – “A purpose is not something that you’re going to find. It’s something that will find you. And it will find you only when you’re ready and not before.” Dr Dyer actually died just before my own mother did in 2015. My dad died a short 4 months later. They had been high school sweethearts and remained married for over 50 years. Both were gone before I could share my own family origin discoveries with them.

Ancestral Reverence

It is the final Dia de los Muertos and my thoughts are on my ancestors. The image comes from LINK> Christiane Pelmas site for Women’s Ancestral Reverence Group – Weaving Our Radical Roots In These Darkening Times. It is an Autumnal Equinox Kiva. I have scattered roots of American, Mexican and Native experiences in my life having been born in Las Cruces New Mexico and growing up in El Paso Texas. My family often vacationed on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation campgrounds in Ruidoso New Mexico. Once my sons, husband and I spent Christmas Eve at the Acoma Sky City Pueblo.

My ancestors include my deceased parents, their original parents and their adoptive parents. Therefore, I have 8 grandparents instead of the usual 4. The original grandparents are people I never knew but that I now know had lives – information that was kept from me until after my parents deaths. I like Christiane’s site because when adoption is part of one’s core self there is trauma. It can’t be helped but it can be healed. I believe much of what I have been doing since I set off on my genetic roots journey in the Autumn of 2017 has been to heal the broken threads.

So for today, I will share some excerpts from Christiane’s site. I would add that I am aware that many people have uncomfortable relationships with one or more of the members of their family. She writes – “Nearly all human cultures (with the exception of western industrial, capitalist culture) practice complex rituals designed to foster on-going intimacy with, and healing of, their ancestral lineages (deceased relations of our blood lines). In western industrialized culture (and increasingly around the world, as Patriarchy colonizes more, and more, of the globe) we suffer from a devastating orphaning.”

Christiane writes of 3 intentions for practicing Ancestral Healing –

[1] to make connections with people of our blood and bone; those ancestral relatives who are vibrantly well and eager to provide us with their support, love and guidance as we journey through our lives. And in the case of my adoptive grandparents, I will add the people of my heart.

[2] to heal the significant trauma burdens woven deeply into most human lineages today; trauma burdens caused by endless war, poverty, social and economic injustice, environmental devastation and the diaspora it causes, racism, sexism and all forms of intolerance and violence toward the multiplicity and diversity of Life’s expressions. So much pain. In this healing process, the brilliance and medicine of each lineage is excavated and brought forward into its present-day expression, which is my very life, the life of my daughter and the lives of my grandchildren. We all live because they lived.

[3] to do the intimate ancestral healing work necessary – so that we are capable of turning our attention to the tremendous harm we continue to cause the ability of the Earth to sustain us all. I remember within my online social networking community there was developed what was called the Gaia Minute. A daily communion with the Earth (I often did mine in the darkness at night under the stars). From that practice I came to see the Earth as my deepest core mother. Not to leave the Sun out, I acknowledge the father energy that sparks all life with existence.

In my Science of Mind magazine Daily Guide for today written by the Rev Dr Dennis Merritt Jones, he shares this affirmation – “Everywhere I go, I see only the sacred presence of the Beloved One clothing itself in a multitude of divine disguises.” He also writes that Ernest Holmes dined with a vase of weeds on his table. A reminder that the only difference between a weed and a rose was the value we place on one over the other. Through a long reckoning in my own heart, I am balancing my genetic grandparents with those who adopted my parents.

Short And To The Point

I wanted to make a point that I did not in yesterday’s blog – Conveying Personhood to Embryos. Who is motivated to adopt babies in the United States ? Infertile couples. Due to the overturning of Roe v Wade, there is now much more uncertainty now upon the best path to parenthood for such couples – that is – using IVF and having children with one or both of the parental inputs donated. If this avenue becomes inaccessible (as abortion already had in much of these United States, even though federally protected), more of these infertile couples will be seeking to adopt any available baby.

My husband and I considered adoption to build our family but decided against the uncertainties of taking on someone else’s baby. That was even before I knew my own adoptee parents’ origin stories. In the 5 years since I started uncovering that story and along the way learning so much more about the trauma associated with separating a child from its biological parents, I have turned against adoption for the most part, even though I owe my very existence to that method of creating a family on the parts of my adoptive grandparents.

We know that increasing the supply of domestic infants available for adoption factored into several of the Supreme Court Justices thinking, I have to wonder if they considered further pressure on that supply if assisted reproduction becomes more expensive and/or inaccessible.

Conflict of Interest ?

I got seriously triggered with my husband yesterday. I need to work through my thoughts and I’m sure this is going to prove a lengthy process of contemplation.

Some background –

Both of my parents were given up for adoption in the 1930s. Their circumstances were somewhat different and somewhat similar. My mom’s genetic biological parents were married but at 4 mos pregnant after 4 mos of marriage for reasons I’ll never really have reliable answers to (but a few theories given what I have learned), her husband left her. He didn’t divorce her for 3 years, so there is that as well. With no husband in sight, she was sent to Virginia from Memphis TN to give birth and I would assume expected to leave the baby there but she did not. Instead, after her return to Memphis with my infant mom in tow, she became a victim of Georgia Tann.

My dad’s mom was unwed. She had an affair with a much older married man. Then, she went to a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers to give birth. After about 2 or 3 months, she was released with my dad still in her custody. It appears my dad’s father never even knew he existed. When my grandmother found no support for her and the baby with her cousin, she returned to the Salvation Army seeking employment and was transferred with my dad still in tow to one of their homes in El Paso Texas.

My mom’s adoptive parents relocated to El Paso Texas and in high school, my adoptee mom met my adoptee dad. Probably during the summer after my dad’s graduation from high school before entering a university my parents had sex and my teenage mom discovered by Autumn that she was pregnant. My dad’s adoptive parents supported him marrying her and quitting his hopes of a university degree to go to work and support his new family. I’m pretty certain my mom’s adoptive parents, had they had a chance, would have sent her off to have and give me up. Thankfully that didn’t happen to me.

So the truth I cannot deny is that had my parents NOT been adopted and had they both not ended up in El Paso TX and attended the same high school where they met at a party through mutual friends, I would not exist at all. I owe my very existence in this life to ~gasp~ adoption. I think I once described this situation as imperfectly perfect.

Until about 5 years ago, when I was able to uncover the identities of all 4 of my original grandparents (something that both of my parents died still not knowing), I thought adoption was the most natural thing in the world and that my parents were orphans. I had no idea there were people I was actually genetically biologically related to living out lives as unaware of me as I was of them. I knew nothing about the mental and emotional impacts of the trauma of my parents being separated from their mothers may have caused. I’ve learned a LOT about that since then – as this blog very frequently shares. To be honest, I now would prefer to see vulnerable women supported, so that they could raise their own babies.

So what is my conflict of interest ? My husband’s desire that my writing add some revenue to our family. Of course, I would love for that to happen as well. I have developed a negative attitude toward Christian Evangelical saviorism as it applies to adoption. My husband wants me to make my next book oriented towards Evangelical Christians (I have just finish a revision of my parents’ adoption stories for the 3rd time and will go about trying to obtain a literary agent for that work).

What !?! I accused him of asking me to betray my values for monetary reasons. He spoke of “witnessing.” That stayed with me all afternoon. I reflected on the kind of people my adoptive grandparents were. 3 of the 4 were religious. My dad’s were fundamentalist in the extreme. When one church wasn’t as strictly interpreted per the bible as they wanted, they changed churches to a stricter one. My mom’s adoptive father has been described as morally ethical but not religious. I see that same characteristic in my husband. My mom’s mother however had a surprisingly enlightened spirituality – especially when I consider what I have heard of her own very bible religious mother (to the extent of neglecting home and family). This grandmother’s spirituality was not far different than my own (which was what surprised me when I discovered it). My husband has a negative perspective on religion in general and believes vulnerable people are exploited by it. So I could not believe that HE would suggest such a thing to me. He admits that he is a bit like Mr Krabs in the SpongeBob episodes – all about the money (only really he is incredibly down to Earth, he just worries about supporting this family as he ages).

Yet, aside from the last 5 years of having it banged into my consciousness through my favorite adoption triad group, where the voices of adult adoptees are given preference and describe all that is wrong with adoption and foster care in general, what is it that I actually know from my own experience ?

My parents each felt differently about their adoptions. My dad never spoke to me of his but cautioned my mom against her efforts at locating her birth mother – who had already died by the time she was actively seeking that. One of the last things she wrote to me before she died was an explanation regarding why she couldn’t complete a family tree at Ancestry.com – “it just wasn’t real, because I was adopted but I’m glad I was.” Though I cannot say that she truly was “glad.” She didn’t know any other life.

Both of my sisters gave up a child to adoption. I cannot honestly say that my niece or my nephew would have been better off being raised by my sisters. They are good solid people – both of them – now married in their own adulthoods.

So the question is – can I find a way to target a Christian Evangelical audience, who is going to adopt anyway – regardless of how much I might preach to them about all of the impacts of trauma in this child they desperately want for whatever reason (I do believe there is a bit of missionary purpose in those desires) – and gently prepare them for reality and hope this brings about better outcomes for the adoptee ? Honor fully my evolved values in the effort ?

Separations

An adoptee wrote – “I hate not belonging anywhere. I hate that I have multiple families, but also really zero. I hate needing to earn my place in people’s lives.” I could relate as I recently shared with my husband and he understood. We both come from small nuclear families and there is no extended family geographically close to us and honestly, few of those as well anywhere else.

Much of this feeling for me comes from the realization that those who were my extended family growing up aren’t really related to me. Those that are genetically biologically related to me don’t really know me, have no real history with me and though I am slowly without too much intrusion trying to build these new relationships . . . sigh. It isn’t easy.

My first family break-up was one I initiated. I divorced the man I had married just before I turned 18 and a month before I graduated from high school in April 1972. By November, more or less, I was pregnant with our first child. She remains the joy of my life and has gifted me with two grandchildren. However, finances separated me from my daughter when she was 3 years old and she was raised by her father and step-mother who gave her a yours-mine-and-ours family of siblings, sisters, just like I grew up with. It has left me with a weird sense of motherhood in regard to my daughter. One that I often struggle with but over the last decade or so, I have been able to bridge some of that gap- both with regard in my own sense of self-esteem and in a deepening relationship with my daughter, primarily since the passing of her step-mother (not that the woman was an impediment but understandably, my daughter’s heart remains seriously tied to that woman even today).

The trauma of mother/child separation lived by each of my adoptee parents (while skipping my relationship and my sisters’ relationship with our parents) passed over to my sisters and my own relationships with our biological genetic children. I seriously do believe it has proven to have been a factor. Both of my sisters gave up babies to adoptive parents and one lost her first born in court to his paternal grandparents. Sorrows all around but all us must go on the best we can.

Since learning the stories of my original grandparents, I have connected with several genetic relatives – cousins mostly and an aunt plus one who lives in Mexico with her daughter. Everyone is nice enough considering the absolutely un-natural situation our family histories have thrust us into. So really, now I find myself in this odd place of not really belonging to 4 discrete family lines (one set of grandparents were initially married and divorced after the surrender of their child to adoption and one set never married, in fact my paternal grandfather likely never knew he had a son). Happily, though a significant bit of geographical distance a factor foe me, my paternal grandfather was a Danish immigrant and I now have contact with one cousin in Denmark who has shared some information with me that I would not have but for him.

Regarding estrangement, I’ve had no direct contact with my youngest sister since 2016. In regard to looking out for her best interests, her own attorneys in the estate proceedings encouraged me to pursue a court appointed guardian/conservator for her – as both of our parents died 4 months apart and she was highly dependent upon them due to her mental illness of (likely) paranoid schizophrenia. The effects of that really destroyed my relationship with her (which had been close until our mother died and then, went seriously to hell, causing us to become estranged). I just learned the other day that the court has released her conservator. I guess she is on her own now. She survived 4 years of homelessness before reconciling uneasily with our parents. I guess the survivor in her will manage but she most likely also now believes the guardian/conservator proceedings were my own self being vindictive, for some unreasonable purpose. Sigh. I don’t miss contact with her – honestly – it was cruel and difficult being on the receiving end of her offensives after our mom died. I do wish her “well” in the sincerest meanings of that concept.

It could also be that without these great woundings I would be less vulnerable and available, less empathic and compassionate, with the people I encounter as I live my life each day. Maybe it is precisely my reaching out, in an effort to connect, that causes me to share my own personal circumstances. A sacrifice of the heart.

Shame

We feel shame when we violate the social norms we believe in. At such moments we feel humiliated, exposed and small and are unable to look another person straight in the eye. We want to sink into the ground and disappear. Shame makes us direct our focus inward and view our entire self in a negative light.

I came upon the powerful graphic above yesterday and felt there was more that I could personally say about it. On my Facebook profile page yesterday, I shared – I have owned up to this before. I had an abortion at the age of 23 or so – mid 1970s. I am glad it was safe and legal. I was not being reckless. I was driving an 18-wheeler with a partner. Our dispatcher didn’t get us home to where my pharmacy was in time and I ended up pregnant. Neither he nor his family were the kind of people I would be glad to have been tied to through a child today. At the time, I had breakthrough bleeding. My ex-SIL and ex-BIL had a child with serious birth defects. I just felt the pregnancy was not progressing normally. Also, to be honest – I didn’t want to commit my life to 7 more months of going it alone with no financial support. I’ve never regretted it but pro-Life propaganda has definitely haunted me. In writing this, I searched my memory for all of the reasons why I chose that course of action.

The mothers and women in my family, and to whom I am genetically related, chose other courses of action. Back in the 1930s, the mothers of both of my own parents, chose to carry their pregnancies, spent the first few precious months with their babies, and one way or another lost that first child to adoption. I wrote, and it was true, “I didn’t want to commit my life to 7 more months of going it alone with no financial support.” In some people’s minds I was simply being selfish and I will accept that judgment, though in truth I have no regrets about doing what I did and for the reasons I did it at the time.

Yet, I felt enough shame for having chosen a different path (both of my sisters carried unplanned pregnancies to term but also gave their babies up for adoption) that it was a long time before I admitted to anyone what I did earlier in life. It was my private decision which no one but the circumstances influenced. Maybe influenced in no small measure by the legality and safety of the choice at the time. Only as Roe v Wade has come under increasing opposition have I started sharing my own story of what it was like to have made that choice and my gratitude that I had it available to my own self when I felt I needed that.

The father of my own conception made it clear he would not stand by me if I chose otherwise but I don’t think that was my major motivation. In reflecting on my statement that I would have had to “go it alone” above, I also know my parents supported one of my sisters throughout the pregnancy and then, remarkable to me now that I know more about adoption in general, my own adoptee mom coerced my sister into giving up the baby she wanted to keep and then, encouraged a lie to me that the baby had died. Intuitively, I knew it had not and concocted fantastical stories about what had actually happened to the baby believing it had been stolen and taken into Mexico (my sister had delivered at a hospital in El Paso TX very near the national border). Because of this, my mom finally admitted her truth regarding the whole situation to me.

Many women bear a cross – maybe they suffer their whole lives knowing their child is out there somewhere out of their own reach. Many of these original mothers suffer a secondary infertility and never have another child. Many struggle as single mothers to keep and raise their child. Our society does nothing to help them. My sister actually sought financial support during her pregnancy but was denied it based upon our parents financial condition. It was not my parents seeking financial support but my sister and not in increase my parents financial condition either.

After I divorced the father of my first child, I had to go to work and that meant child care. When one “family style” child care that she loved at first became a tearful battle, I left work to check on her and discovered through the window of a half door, an older child bullying her and no adults in sight. I pulled her out that day. I often had to go to my mother to beg $20 to make it through to payday. She never denied me but financially it was always difficult. At the time I divorced her father, he told me he would never pay me one cent of child support because I would just party with the money. Such a horrible perception he had of my own integrity and ethics. I didn’t want to spend my life in court fighting him for it even though the judge insisted in awarding me $25/mo “in case” I changed my mind and wanted to seek an increase. I never did. Instead, I left my daughter with her paternal grandmother while I tried to build a financial nest egg for the two of us by seeing if I was capable of driving an 18 wheel truck cross-country.

I always intended to return for her and would have never given her to her father to raise but his mother did that. He remarried a woman with a child and then they had a child together. Unintended consequences of financial desperation. And now, in a sense my story has come full circle, my shame – not even listed above – is that I gave up raising my child for financial reasons. Back when she was in day care, I couldn’t hardly answer the pediatrician’s questions, because she was away from me all day. After her father and step-mother raised her, I struggled to find birthday cards for her that reflected the lack of a daily, physical relationship I had with her. There were no role models for an absentee mother back in the mid-1970s, even though the absentee father was a standard reality.

Shame. Oh yes, I am well acquainted with it. As my daughter knows, I have struggled to find peace with not having “stuck it out,” as my own mother said to me that she would have done, to do the right thing by my daughter. It is a work in process. Recently, I reflected on all the things I did right by her in the brief early years she was physically under my care. I told her, I realize that when I was mother to you, I was a good one. And the abortion ? I atoned for it, by giving up my own genetic connection to have two egg donor conceived sons (same donor both times), that my husband might be able to have the children he desired, even as we both realized I had gotten too old to conceive naturally. Even so, they are now almost 18 and 21 years old. They have proven to me that I can “mother” children 24/7 throughout their own childhoods. At least I have no shame in that. I even breastfed both until they were just over 1 year old. I also have the knowledge that I didn’t put adoption trauma onto the fetus I aborted early in that pregnancy.

Your Trauma Is Not Mine

Came across this interesting discussion between two adoptees –

I am having to confront my own biological son about this very thing – how people dismiss your adoptee voice by telling you – you need healing. It is almost useless because he does not understand being adopted or that he is the first person in my life I am biologically related to. He keeps telling me to lose my EGO, when he has no idea I barely have one….He is on some spiritual trip about losing one’s EGO, which I was on in my 20’s and 30’s as I searched for my own biological mom at a time when adoption records were closed. I was on the street and reading and exploring every religion I could find to help me find her. I was channeling her through my art without knowing it and after finding her had a telepathic connection with her. I am, for once, fighting back at his total ignorance but worry I may lose him because he does not want to understand my traumas. He thinks his are worse than mine and that is just not true. I never thought this would happen to me. How in the world can he give me a choice like change or he will abandon me. I don’t get it…..

Here was the response from another adoptee –

I am sorry you are in strife with your son. The only thought I have around that is this….as his parent he has no obligation to understand your traumas, nor would he have the context to understand them. I would go a little more grey rock with him and try to take the emotionality out of it. Sometimes we just have to be a container for our kid’s emotions, even when they don’t feel good or seem to be directed at us. I try to look at it his way…when I was in my teens and 20s and had literally no idea what was up and what was down….what do I wish my parents had done for me? My adoptive mom got into push and pull with me and it was no good at all. My kids are all teens now and I need people that aren’t ME and therefore not in the experiencing of the thing to remind me ALL THE TIME about this. So I hope my unsolicited advice doesn’t offend ❤️. Just speaking from one adoptee mom to another.