The Emptiness And Inadequacy Of Not Being Enough

I feel very sad this morning. Many women who give up children for adoption did so because in whatever way they did not feel like they were enough. Strong enough, wise enough, financially sound enough. It doesn’t help that often this is a true and honest assessment of one’s condition.

I left my first husband due to issues of addiction. He honestly tried very hard, more than once, in a variety of ways to change his behavior so that his addiction was not a part of his life nor our life as a family. I tried to stick it out. Because our family’s financial resources were being poured into satisfying his addiction, I eventually believed my daughter and I would be better off if we separated from him.

I tried to handle the divorce in an enlightened way for our 3 year old daughter. Telling her that her father still loved her and I still loved her but that we would not live together as a family any more. Financially, I wasn’t able to pull it off. I wasn’t able to financially support us. I went to my mom for tiny bits of money to get by. I took on roommates to share the cost of providing shelter. None of it worked.

In desperation, I left my daughter with her paternal grandmother, who because I had to go back to work when she was only a few months old, had always cared for her. I didn’t know if I could drive a truck but I knew the money was good and if I could do it for a little while and save it up, then I could recover her and we might make it.

Often, life does not work out as we plan. Her father remarried and he took physical custody of our daughter. Her step-mother had a daughter and together my ex-husband had another daughter with this wife. My daughter had a family and I know the issues of addiction continued to weigh heavily on this family. I don’t have easy answers.

I had a reconciliation of sorts with my ex-husband not that long ago. No recriminations. Only an acknowledgment of how lucky we both are that our daughter is in our lives. She is an amazing person. In spite of all the challenges, somehow we did something right along the way and both of us would say, mostly the work of becoming amazing deserves 100% credit by our daughter.

Let’s Get Real

I know what I am going to write about here, will seem like shocking hyperbole to the average non-adoptee, to anyone who hasn’t spent time listening to the stories of adult adoptees, who has seen adoption only through this beautiful adopter lens, and the seemingly happy adoptees in their own community.

Adoption is not heroism. It does not fight poverty, disease nor the root causes of inequality.

Adoption doesn’t even raise awareness about the real causes of poverty, inequality, parent-child separations, disease or social immobility. Instead it creates an idolatry of those who seek to adoption to counter a world that stigmatizes infertility, disease, poverty and poor access to education.

Adoption publicity silences the voice of adoptees, trapping them in a pernicious web where they are expected to show only gratitude.

The outcome of showcasing a false savior-ism in adoption is to make adoption fashionable and highly desirable to the upper and middle classes and wannabe saviors.

Anonymising family history is at the center of the process. This creates a commercial market for baby farms, coercion and kidnapping and provides a kind of diplomatic immunity and witness protection for all agencies and families under the magic umbrella of adoption.

The false story about adoption, that adopters are saving children, disguises the reality of parenting adopted children. Children who’ve experienced the trauma of separation from their natural family cannot replace the missing biological children of infertile couples.

The failure to address this grief by all parties and to instead speed towards wishing for the separation of babies from families, helps no one. Instead, the process leaves everyone having to repress forbidden feelings. That never ends well for anyone.

In the context of adoption, people frequently confuse being pre-verbal with being pre-feeling and pre-memory. It is the myth of the blank slate. In truth a baby comprehends without words. In children raised by their natural parents, there is a sense of safety and connection that lays a foundation for the forming of strong attachments, robust relationships and resilient immune systems.

It is time for a good change in how society handles these situations.

You Should Be Grateful

Of all the unreasonable expectations people tend to put upon an adoptee, the demand that they be grateful for having been adopted is perhaps one of the most painful.

Do you realize ?

The adoptee lost their complete family in one foul swoop. They lost their mother, perhaps as soon as the day they were born. They also lost their identity, background information, heritage, genealogy, birth certificate, familiarities, equal rights, similarities, health information and a knowledge of where their inherited traits came from.

Adoption is the only trauma for which the traumatized are told by society that they should be grateful for it’s occurrence. Compassion that it happened to a person is a better expectation.

What Was And Never Should Be

~ 1997 ~

Growing up, I had something my parents didn’t, my real genetically related mom and dad. I don’t know at what age I first learned that both of my parents were adopted. It was just a fact of life and one that I never judged to be good or bad for my entire childhood. Their adoptive parents were my grandparents and aunts, uncles and cousins I acquired in that manner were just that.

Adoption was so accepted in my family that both of my sisters ended up giving up a child to adoption. Parenting was seen as something any adult human being with good intentions could do. So my nephew ended being raised by his paternal grandparents and my daughter ended up being raised by her dad when he remarried a woman with a daughter and they had a daughter together, thus creating a family for her that I could not give.

Though I felt a piece was missing in my life – my cultural heritage that had been passed down by those unknown people who gave my parents life – it wasn’t until my mom started investigating her own adoption – after learning in the early 1990s, the story of the scandal that surrounded Georgia Tann’s work – that I became aware that all was not as it should be in adoptionland.

By the grace of a loving energy, I have been able to discover who all 4 of my original grandparents were since my parents died. It saddens me that they didn’t have the opportunity to know about these people themselves. I now know of cousin and aunts that I am genetically related to. I still cherish the family adoption brought to me as well.

What I never expected was the education I would receive along with learning my genetic roots about the damage done in the name of a profit-motivated industry taking babies from their mothers and giving them to the people who had money and could not have their own children for whatever reason.

What once was accepted and “natural” in my understanding – adoption – is now seen for the travesty it has been but thankfully, even that is changing in this world that continuously does.

Secrecy

Secrecy in adoption was always meant to protect the adoptive parents from the original parents after a child was taken in adoption.

These concepts were not true –

Actions once thought natural, such as attempts by adoptees to learn information about their birth families, came to be socially disfavored and considered abnormal.

They were the psychologically unhealthful product of unsuccessful adoptions that had failed to create perfect substitutes for natural families created by childbirth, and they indicated adoptees’ rejection of and ingratitude toward adoptive parents.

Secrecy was viewed as an essential feature of adoptions in which birth and adoptive parents did not know one another.

Here is how hiding an adoptee became the law of the land –

Edna Gladney who was an illegitimate child but later went into the adoption profession and Georgia Tann whose name became associated with a scandal of stealing and selling babies were the prime movers for concealing an adoptees identity by falsifying their birth certificates and allowing adoptive parents to change the name the child was born with. Then, the original records were sealed.

In the 1990s, a renewed media attention on the Memphis Tennessee Children’s Home Society scandal resulted in activists finally breaking open the secrecy contained in Tann’s adoption files for those persons affected (including descendants).

There are still many states who continue to maintain sealed records. In my own efforts to discover who my own original grandparents were, I bumped up against the solid walls in Arizona, California and Virginia.

It’s NOT A Rescue Mission

Wendy’s Dave Thomas

I don’t eat fast food and so I wasn’t aware of the huge push for adoption that Wendy’s is a part of. It turns out that the founder, Dave Thomas, was himself an adoptee. To the extent that his foundation seeks to move children out of foster care, I suppose that is somewhat commendable.

Images of waiting children the foundation uses in it’s promotions play into the “rescue the child” attitude so prevalent in adoption marketing. There is a strong emotional pull to pick up this lonely child. Many prospective adoptive parents begin from a “missionary” mindset which is why an adoptive mindset is also prevalent among Christians. They expect the child to be forever grateful and well-behaved – after all the adoptive parents have “saved” a child from squalor.

No adoptee wants to be pitied or made to feel that they are getting a handout or are some kind of charity case. It’s demoralizing.

Adoptive parents often find that the child has complex issues they didn’t expect. They are surprised that the child is often angry or resentful. There are other complicated emotions as well – rejection, abandonment, confusion, fear, isolation . . . the list goes on.

The best advice for anyone who seeks to get involved in such a situation is always respect the child as a full person. Don’t take away their name or identity. Don’t falsify their birth certificate. If there is any opportunity for them to be reunified with their original family, do your best to support and encourage that.

Adoptionland

There is a game similar to Candyland that I became abundantly aware of as I expanded my own understandings about the impacts of adoption.

There is an overly romanticized and idealistic love affair going on with adoption that brings to mind unicorns, rainbows and puffy hearts. In Adoptionland, clouds are made of spun sugar and the roads are lined with red licorice – nothing bad every happens in Adoptionland. All of the adopted children feel nothing but gratitude and their only goal in life is to make adoptive parents dreams come true.

The truth is that is marketing bunk. Follow the money applies here as it does in many other situations. The goal of the game is to take a newborn baby from its mother and give it to complete strangers who have enough money to pay for the baby. The game has been so entrenched that this selling and buying of babies has been legalized and hidden as fees, etc.

For many adoptees, adoption is an extremely complicated experience rife with confusion and mystery – mostly because the adoption industry doesn’t respect adoptees nor seek to serve their needs.

It may seem unbelievable but there really are people out there fighting against the restoration of an adoptee’s right to obtain her own, factual, birth certificate.

There are adoptive parents who relegate the original parents of the child they are so privileged to be raising into the role of “birth parent” only – like their only role in the life of their child was to give birth to that child – so they could adopt it. Much like a surrogate mother in some reproductive situations.

Some adoption agencies charge higher fees for white newborn babies but much less for black infants. There are states who work to make open adoptions unenforceable.

All of these unbelievable but true aspects of adoption are totally acceptable with most of the people in our adoption-focused culture. One has to intentionally seek to inform themselves to begin to understand the truth.

My Birthday Is About My Mom Too

These are things I found among my mother’s stuff after she died that I keep. The photo is probably close to how she looked when she conceived me less than 3 years later (I was born in 1954 and turn 65 today). The card and cross remind me that she is as close to me always as my heart’s mind.

It is fitting, I believe, to think of one’s mom on their birthday. This holds true whether or not our mom was able to witness our growing up after leaving her body.

I have learned that the time in utero is a sacred period of total union between a mother and her child soon to be. They share a bodily space that as human beings we will never achieve again in our limited physical lifetimes – though many try through sexual relations.

I believe I remain in contact with my deceased mother. I feel her especially strong today and know she is proud of me – not only how I handled the difficult family responsibilities after she died but also how I have retrieved my family’s origin identity since then (both of my parents were adoptees).

I love you mom. Thank you for gestating my life’s body for me.

Gratitude

Sadly, there seems to be an unreasonable standard that expects an adoptee to be grateful to the people who adopted them for having saved them from a worse fate.

Generally speaking gratitude is an important spiritual practice in my own life but I get it.

In truth, while parents are mostly grateful to have received the children born to them and to have the complicated, difficult and ultimately satisfying job of mentoring the next generation into the ways of the world until they are able to navigate it on their own, that does not mean that their children are obligated to be grateful to their parents for having done what parents are supposed to do.

An adoptee has a complicated situation. They are expected to give up any attachment to the people who gave them birth, allowed to have the basic details of their identify changed and more accurately falsified and then expected to be forever grateful to the strangers who took them in and raised them.

This is not a realistic expectation. I understand so much, so much better now, that learning about my own parents’ adoptions has also encouraged me to learn more deeply about all aspects of this human practice.

Whose Perspective ?

She wonders – “Who explained adoption to my peers ?”

Her adoptive parents always told her she was chosen and special.

Yet her peers thought of her as something that someone bad had discarded.

What had their parents taught them about adoption ?

It could have been not their parents but messages about adoption
and pregnancy in the world surrounding them all.

Really great adoptive parents are NOT all an adoptee needs.

A great deal of the grief an adoptee experiences is the result of
the societal shame associated with being adopted.

It is painful to be seen as unwanted, almost aborted, and needing
to be grateful just because one has been adopted.

~ from The Declassified Adoptee

I know my mom’s adoptive parents felt likewise. They were over the moon happy with their two children – thought them brilliant and attractive. They were selected by gender and “supposed” traits (though Georgia Tann played them on that one).

Later in life, my mom had a tense relationship with her mother. She never felt as though she lived up to her mother’s expectations regarding her life and it was probably actually true. My mom got pregnant out of wedlock, therefore, she was never the debutante my grandmother probably hoped for.

Societies perspectives on women and chastity and who’s responsible (hint, it’s never the men who impregnate them) all add up to an adoptee’s whose origin story is founded in rape or incest being automatically impure. What did that baby ever do to deserve such a judgement ?