Tag: Narratives

Adoptee Voices

Once again, searching for an idea to write about, I googled these two words and found this. When I found the website, LINK>Adoptee Voices, I read this on google – “Your voice in the adoption narrative is both needed and necessary. We’re about supporting adoptee storytelling. We’re so glad you’ve found your way here.”

I am NOT an adoptee but the child of two adoptees. I am NOT the voice this site is looking for but I am GLAD I found my way to it.

The website has several portals – Writing Groups, Blog, E-Zine, Who We Are and a Published Portfolio.

If you ARE an adoptee with a story that you want to tell, I recommend you take a look today. Best wishes !!

It’s The Industry That Brainwashes

From an adoptee – Let me be clear about my position on adoption. As someone who was taken from his homeland, I have accepted a truth that what happened to me was not adoption. I now work to recover from the brainwashing and propaganda of an industry that originated from human trafficking and child slavery. Such crimes that have found a way to hide behind a more comfortable euphemism: adoption.

At this point, do I get upset when I come across someone who is still brainwashed? Absolutely! It takes me a few minutes to remember I was there once not too long ago. It’s the industry and those who have perverted the term Adoption, and have made the billions off human lives, our lives.

Those who have been brainwashed by the propaganda can not be blamed. I was caught up in the cover-up scheme as well. (blogger’s note – as I was myself, the child of two adoptees.) It is a process of deprogramming ourselves, not from the fantasies or illusions, but from outright coercion and deception. What we refer to as the narratives are in fact the messages produced by the industry’s propaganda machine.

I am fighting in this war against the adoption industry, not against adoption itself. I am saddened that so many continue to be brainwashed, ignorant and stuck in their fantasies, or willfully holding onto their denial. At times it’s overwhelming and hopeless, triggering and depressing, but truth will prevail and I am inspired by the growing number of others who are also fighting against this criminal scheme.

We were once held prisoner by our own fear, but now we are finding strength and courage in community resilience. We are learning how to unite and fight together. Where we are hundreds today, there will be millions in the future.

Busting The Myth

It’s painful to realize you have been lied to by the adoption agency you turned to in a moment of desperation. Even my own self, in leaving my daughter with her paternal grandmother for temporary care, that turned into her dad raising her and then a remarriage for him to a woman with a daughter (they then had a daughter together), could be perceived as abandonment as well. I have admitted to my daughter that there are similarities in her experience growing up with that which adoptees experience in being separated from their natural mother. At the time, I thought one parent as good as the other (even though I didn’t intend for her dad to get her). I really intended to recover her but it did not work out that way and to this day I struggle with what I did in ignorance.

In my all things adoption group, one woman writes – and then when your baby is *one week old* and you come out of the fog of the agency telling you it’s the right, selfless thing to do and realize what a terrible, life altering decision you just made – it’s too late and you have to spend the next several years in court and hope your family can lend you around $100,000 for legal fees to get your baby back from the wonderful, brave, selfless adoptive parents that have your kid.

Another wrote – this comes off extremely harsh and unproductive to me because these women do not understand the ramifications of the decisions they’ve made. And that is true for me as well. I was 22 years old at the time I left my daughter with her paternal grandmother. Life altering indeed !!

Someone else said – bottom line is regardless of intentions, the infant brain perceives it as abandonment. I’m fiercely defensive of my momma; I believe that the despicable social mores of the Baby Scoop Era and sheer desperation drove her to surrender me. My baby self was damaged either way. That’s what I believe this graphic is trying to convey.

And I agree. Sheer desperation has caused at least 3 of the 4 adoptions that are part of my childhood family (both of my parents and then each of my sisters gave up a baby). One of my sisters simply thought it the most natural thing in the world – I believe – because our parents were adoptees. Unbelievably, my mom who struggled most with having been adopted, coerced my other sister into doing it.

One noted – Just once, why not talk about how the fathers were nowhere around and went unscathed in everything. To blame a mother who was . . .

In my own parents’ case – first, for my mom, her mother was married but he more or less (whether intentionally or not) abandoned her 4 mos pregnant. After she had given birth, she brought my mom back from Virginia (where she had been sent by her own father out of shame) to Memphis. She tried to reach my mom’s father but got no response. Though there was a major flood occurring on the Mississippi River at the time (1937) and he was in Arkansas where his mother lived and his daughters were. He was WPA fighting the flood there in Arkansas. His granddaughter (who I have met) does not believe he was the kind of man to leave a wife and infant stranded. Georgia Tann got ahold of my mom and exploited my grandmother to obtain a baby to sell. My mom was 7 months old when her adoptive mother picked her up but she did spend some of that time in what was believed to be temporary care at Porter-Leath Orphanage. That was my grandmother’s fatal mistake because the superintendent there alerted Georgia Tann to my mom’s existence.

In my dad’s case, the father was a married man and an un-naturalized immigrant. I don’t believe he ever knew. My paternal grandmother had a hard life. Her own mother died when she was only 3 mos old (the original abandonment if you will). She was a self-reliant woman. I don’t believe either of my grandmothers intended to abandon their children. After giving birth in Ocean Beach, near San Diego California in a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers, my grandmother then applied to work for them and was transferred to El Paso Texas. I believe they pressured her to relinquish my dad. He was with her for 8 months.

Finally, here is one person’s experience with being adopted – Abandonment is exactly right. And it directly leads to abandonment and attachment issues later. Even with therapy and understanding what happened and learning coping strategies, I still feel this horrible gnawing black hole inside of me when I feel like someone might leave me. And it can get triggered by such inconsequential things. The worst part is that it’s a self fulfilling prophecy, especially before learning how to lessen the effects on others, because the behaviors I’ve done out of desperation drove the people I was scared of losing away. And sometimes that’s felt deliberate, like it won’t hurt as bad if it was my idea and I left them instead of them leaving me. It hurts just as bad.