Adoption Is Only The Beginning

Today’s blog is inspired by an article in The New Yorker – LINK>Living in Adoption’s Emotional Aftermath. From the article –

Deanna Doss Shrodes believes that a child who starts life in a box will never know who they are, unless they manage somehow to track down their anonymous parents. It distresses her that many of her fellow-Christians, such as Amy Coney Barrett, talk about adoption as the win-win solution to abortion, as though once a baby is adopted that is the end of the story. If someone says of Deanna that she was adopted, she corrects them and says that she is adopted. Being adopted is, to her, as to many adoptees, a profoundly different way of being human, one that affects almost everything about her life.

“I explain to friends that in order to be adopted you first have to lose your entire family,” Deanna said. “And they’ll say, Well, yes, but if it happens to a newborn what do they know? You were adopted, get over it. Would you tell your friend who lost their family in a car accident, Get over it? No. But as an adoptee you’re expected to be over it because, O.K., that happened to you, but this wonderful thing also happened, and why can’t you focus on the wonderful thing?”

This is the less than fairytale ending – There are disproportionate numbers of adoptees in psychiatric hospitals and addiction programs, given that they are only about two per cent of the population. A study found that adoptees attempt suicide at four times the rate of other people. Adoption begins with the ending of the connection to the people who conceived and birthed the adoptee.

“Coming out of the fog” means different things to different adoptees. It can mean realizing that the obscure, intermittent unhappiness or bewilderment you have felt since childhood is not a personality trait but something shared by others who are adopted. It can mean realizing that you were a good, hardworking child partly out of a need to prove that your parents were right to choose you, or a sense that it was your job to make your parents happy, or a fear that if you weren’t good your parents would give you away, like the first ones did. It can mean coming to feel that not knowing anything about the people whose bodies made yours is strange and disturbing. It can mean seeing that you and your parents were brought together not only by choice or Providence but by a vast, powerful, opaque system with its own history and purposes. Those who have come out of the fog say that doing so is not just disorienting but painful, and many think back longingly to the time before they had such thoughts.

Adoptees are often looking for those pieces of their lives or their selves that were missing, or had been falsified or renamed, trying to fit them to the pieces they had. I think those missing pieces were what motivated me to go looking and find out what could be found out. And I did. Families of people I was genetically related to that I never knew existed, living lives I had no idea about. Some knew my parents had been born and given up for adoption but didn’t know about me. DNA has helped with being accepted as being another one who is actually part of their family but building relationships has not proven as easy as finding out about these.

Unbelievable But

From the PostSecret App comes the story of a woman hired to be a baby-sitter. When the baby-sitter sees the adopted daughter’s photo, she realizes it is the same photo she gave to the adoptive parents when she gave up the baby to adoption. Now what ?

One woman says, as an adoptive mom I’d be more worried about the original mother finding the situation emotionally hard, if she doesn’t say anything about her true relationship. What a thing to go through alone! That being said, if I was her I’d probably it a secret and run with it, so that I could see my child. If they didn’t know who she is, it obviously isn’t an open adoption.

Another says, there was such a torrent of ignorant comments on that post. It was hard to follow or know is where to post thoughts of my own. So mostly, I just liked the adoptees’ posts and tried to support them. I did comment where it felt helpful. You adoptees are super brave – and it was great to see so many voices out there giving the alternative narrative in some of the threads. (It had been mentioned that many commenters said to adoptees “sorry you had a bad childhood but most adoptees had good ones.”)

One adoptee said – “I think she should’ve excused herself and then, explained to them why. Plus let them know she won’t bother them, etc.” When asked to explain her comment, she admitted that she is ALSO a birth mom. “As a birth mom I would feel guilty and would need to say something and hope everything worked out and the adoptive parents were accepting or at least not angry. As an adoptee, if I found out my birth mom was purposely deceptive (knowing and not saying something is deceptive), my opinion of her would not be great. And my experience as an adoptee wasn’t great – lived with a very narcissistic adoptive mom. So I just think honesty would go along further than lying in this case.

Another adoptee said – She should just make herself known. As an adoptee I would give anything to know who my birth parents are.

Another adoptive mom said – I think this is such an incredible opportunity that sadly is likely to turn into a disaster. I would give anything to have my son’s real mom that involved in his life. What an amazing gift! I just wish we could get the adoptive parents in this group to realize how valuable this would be.

Another woman points out – there is a good chance because of the trauma that the birth mom went through, she may be mentally unstable. What if some idiot is telling her to keep quiet and be happy you get to see the child? What if she decides one day she can’t take this situation anymore and wants more and try’s to kidnap the child? This is quite an unpredictable situation.

Another adoptee says honestly, I would have loved for my mom to have come into my life as a child. I always missed her.

One more, and I’ll close today’s blog –

I am the daughter of an adoptee. I have an aunt who is also an adoptee. My grandma (mom’s adoptive mom) raised me and was also a foster parent. My first reaction was ‘awwww how sweet and perfect’… and then, once I thought a bit, ‘I really hope that mom has support, that has got to be such a roller coaster of emotions’… then ‘wait a minute that means it was a closed adoption *sigh*’… and then just best wishes that she’s able to disclose her identity to the adoptive parents and that they are supportive and that everything will work out, even though I’m guessing that might be a fairytale…

When You Don’t Control The Narrative

When adoptees are little, it is natural to fixate on matters such as birth and death, and to even try to appeal to and please the adoptive parents by talking about the adoption in a fairytale way (as a safety mechanism for survival; trying to be always in good graces, and assure one’s self that everything is fine, because your identity and sense of security are fragile). Adoptees suffer complicated emotions like grief, loss, and triggers in isolation.

Some adoptees believe their feelings are always wrong. They are expected to think about everyone’s feelings but their own. No wonder so many adoptees are people pleasers (which enforces the ‘good complaint adoptee’ persona as a necessary expression and explains why so many adoptees are afraid of speaking out – fearing rejection by the larger society). It can leave them with a lot of issues related to control because they feel like their life story isn’t their own. Everyone else is defining it for them. Personally, I tend to rebel at being forced to do anything that isn’t my own idea to begin with.

Imagine the adoptee then. Effectively kidnapped at a very young age, many on their first day on Earth. It’s no wonder some infants who have been separated from their mother and placed with complete strangers scream for quite a long time. There is evidence in my mom’s adoption file that she required sedating medication to calm down. So sad.

If they are nothing else, adoptees are survivors – IF they make it to adulthood, even a little bit intact – though many exhibit behaviors that are self-harming. Many become victims of an effect similar to Stockholm Syndrome. This is a condition which causes hostages to display a psychological cooperation with their captors during captivity. Sadly, adoptive parents are a variety of captors. Adoptees must exhibit a fierce loyalty to their adoptive parents because their very survival is at stake.

Worth a few minutes to watch – Blake Gibbins, an adoptee, telling it like it is. “Kidnappers with pretty stories.” https://youtu.be/kvBHlrLuats