Big Rage

When I was 4 and my brother was 10, our mother was sentenced to two years in prison for drugs. She was the eldest of 5 siblings (my natural father was not in picture or listed on the birth certificate). At first we bounced around to various family members. Eventually my brother went to live with our uncle and I went to live with a friend of the family. My natural mother signed the custody papers, then later the voluntary termination of parental rights, from prison with her sister (a Notary Public) signing as witness. Suddenly, at 4 years old, I had a different family. We moved to another state when I was 7 where I proceeded to live a brand new, vastly different life.

I won’t go into the rest – the court trial for custody when my natural mother was released from prison (she lost); the old money, don’t-air-dirty-laundry, only blood relatives matter mindset of my “new” extended family; the shock of moving from a major city in one state to rural farmland in another (on top of everything else); having my name legally changed as a teenager, when the adoption papers were finalized; everyone in my small town knowing my story because I had a different last name than my “parents”; reconnecting with my natural mother, natural brother, and her family as an adult and discovering they’ve always felt I was “stolen” from them.

I fucking hate it.

I hate being adopted; I hate my natural family for splitting up siblings; I hate them for giving me away to outsiders; I hate my extended adopted family for hating me, belittling my experience, telling me to be fucking grateful I was taken in by someone; I hate that I am reminded of my adoption Every. Single. Day. in large and small ways; I hate that I’m fucked in the head with no concept of normal; I hate feeling like a piece of luggage; I hate having two birth certificates; I hate people thinking I’m “playing the victim” when I try to talk about it; I hate not knowing my genetic history or where I’m from; I hate my natural mother for signing the termination of parental rights; I hate my natural brother for getting to grow up with our cousins; I hate feeling like I don’t belong anywhere, with anyone; and I HATE that I cried while writing this because after 40 years it still hurts so much.

So much hate inside me. Big Rage. But I am more than that, I have just as much love. A bundle of strong emotions. I’ve always said I feel like I was born without skin – just raw nerve endings exposed to the world.

Funding Push

The latest trend in adoption seems to be crowdfunding the cost. So it is that today I learned about one such platform for hopeful adoptive parents – Adopt Together.

They claim on their website that they are a non-profit, crowdfunding platform that bridges the gap between families who want to adopt and the children who need loving homes. Hank Fortener, is the founder and CEO of AdoptTogether. He says that he understands the burden that is the adoption process. While he was growing up, his family fostered 36 children and adopted 6 from 5 different countries.

Donations are made through Pure Charity, the crowd-funding platform partner of Adopt Together — if designated, they are conveyed to the selected adopting family. All non-designated donations go towards the general fund for Adopt Together’s expenses. Pure Charity says – they work with select nonprofit organizations to grow their impact through Fundraising, Technology, Donor Development, and Mobilization Strategies. Further, they note – Pure Charity works within a “Theory of Change” to plan how and why a desired change is expected to happen in a particular context. They are focused on mapping out the “missing middle” between what a change initiative does and how these lead to desired goals being achieved.

Like many things these days the web around this is not only the Pure Charity platform but also they are a “project” of the Hoping Hearts Foundation. A review of this non-profit says – they were created to bring focus to the growing world-wide orphan problem, address the causes leading to children becoming orphans, and support families in their quest to adopt with financial assistance and timely information to facilitate the adoption process. Their website shows their focus is international – Burma, Sri Lanka, India, Haiti, Indonesia, Cuba and Kenya. They describe themselves as – a Christ-centered organization founded to meet the spiritual, medical, nutritional, and basic living needs of orphaned, abandoned, and at-risk children around the world.

There is so much that is problematic about taking children from poor countries and depositing them with usually white families in the United States that I really don’t know where to begin but often families are mis-informed about what is going to happen to their children. Many only hope for their child to get a better education but believe they will return to the family in the not too distant future. There is also a problem with children adopted this way never actually getting citizenship only to find themselves on a deportation list. These are just a few things without going into loss of culture issues.

Back to where I started – what’s the main thing I sense happening here (besides adoption) – it’s money and there are likely more than a few people making a lot of money with these intertwined organizations. Follow the money and things become clearer. Exploitation is always following very close behind.

What Makes It Matter ?

My husband said to me yesterday that even though he did years of research and knows a lot about his lineage, his ancestors don’t really matter all that much to him. I would hasten to add he only ever cared about the paternal line that carries the surname. I find it interesting that I focus on my maternal line. Maybe it is a gender difference. I don’t really know.

However, this is how I answered him. You always knew you could know if you wanted to. Nothing was kept un-accessible to you. With adoption, we know that we don’t know. There is a void we can’t get beyond. I think it is the knowledge that we should be able to know that hurts us. I told him that most people have the right to know their origins but adoptees are treated like 2nd class citizens with rights removed from them. I continue to believe this is very wrong.

A friend recently made a starting discovery that her assumed father was not her real father and yesterday she had an interesting discussion on her page. She shared – “When I was two weeks old I came out of the body and saw the man I was told was my father – and I didn’t like him! I saw the back of his head and I asked, ‘who is this man?’ That was right after I asked, ‘how am I thinking with an adult consciousness at two weeks old?’ ….and for all my life I kept bringing up the fact that it is strange you have to ‘learn’ who your father is.”

The discussion entered a decidedly metaphysical perspective that I do not disagree with. She went on to admit – “This long-term frustration sometimes eats at you. You HAVE to find the right place for all that has taken place. By working with the truth you put yourself at least back in line with truth. And even though you missed out on what YOU might have chosen, you feel back in line with it.”

A commentor on that thread said, “We sell babies (our most valuable and precious treasures) away to complete strangers! And people cheer for this and view it as a proper solution. Imagine the trauma of that infant (yes, with an “adult consciousness”) trying to work out the confusion of the lost mother? The lost voice and heartbeat and body rhythm and smell that he or she knew as THEIR OWN? And of course we know our fathers as intimately too! What a missing to be deprived of that!”

This is the inconvenient truth – adoption is SELLING babies.

She added, “Our family bonds are strong, eternal and unbreakable. We are linked in a timeless and beautiful way. I desire a society that KNOWS this. Honors this. Teaches this. Pregnancy and birth is not to be feared or hated. At the moment we live in an opposite world that is deeply out of alignment. It breaks my heart.”

There was more in that discussion, such thoughts as –

I come back to bloodline. It goes further back than your “father” or your “mother,” there are ancestors probably checking on you. You belong to a line of people – so I believe. There are things in the blood. You do have a different intelligence and inclinations according to what family you are born from. It is plain to me that your heritage is what you are and a deep and significant part of who you are. Knowing what is natural to you, what is making you you, what you can draw on, what is TRUE to your origins does matter.

Serious irreparable psychological damage could be done to a child / adult if they don’t know for certain who their biological father or mother is. What’s the first thing adopted kids do when they discover they’ve been adopted. They try to hunt down their biological parentage. It’s like a instinctual drive. People seek out their biological parents to iron out and get the real story, make a picture that is TRUE, creating images where there is a blank. and I think there can be hopes to heal.

What most stands out to me is how little EVERYONE cares about the child itself. The child’s reality and truth. People seem to think they can draw whatever they want on the child and do what they wish and that child will simply accept it. Babies and young children are NOT a blank slate.