Tag: Nuanced Thinking

The Reality Is Nuanced

Rachel on her 5th birthday

Rachel found my old blog LINK>Adoptee Birthdays (written in 2022) and left a link to hers in a comment there. She is a transracial, inter-country adoptee and adult third culture kid.

Rachel offers her own insights and compassion at LINK>New Beginnings Psychotherapy in Moreton Bay Australia. She is a LGBTQ+ woman of color. She wrote a blog on the topic of Adoptee’s Birthdays that was posted today (her own birthday was last week).

She was relinquished through abandonment and grew up with no information about her first, or biological, family. (blogger’s note – I can relate. I grew up with no original family information about my adoptee parents, they both were, genetic families. I was able to uncover those stories after both of my parents died 4 mos apart after more than 50 years of marriage to one another.)

She notes that “Many consider adoption a ‘cut and paste’ exercise into making a family; a beautiful opportunity to ‘save a child’ from poor or difficult circumstances. A happy ending, not to be spoken about further.”

She explains that speaking out about an adoptee’s struggle leads to being ostracized or shamed. However, the reality of adoption is that it is nuanced, complex, lifelong, and always has loss at its core. For a new family to be created, there is always a loss of an original one.

Please do read her blog which was posted today.

#whatabouts=derailment

In The Simpsons animated series, Helen Lovejoy often exclaims, “Ohhh, won’t somebody please think of the children!”

Something like this happens in broadly represented adoption groups (adoptees, original parents, adoptive parents and foster caregivers). “What about . . . ?” statements regarding kids being abused when issues of adoption and foster care are discussed, especially when the overall goal is to encourage family preservation only derail the effort to put forth viable solutions.

To assume any thoughtful, caring adult is seeking to justify kids being abused by impassioned support for the well-being of the whole biological family is abhorrent. I do not and never have advocated for allowing the abuse of children. What I seek to discuss through this blog in a variety of ways is how abuse and neglect stem from other factors in a person’s life. Being more pro-active on the side of helping families (and people in general) find the support they need can actually help stop abuse and neglect from ever occurring.

If you don’t believe that is possible, then maybe you are not doing enough in your own life to be part of the solution. Maybe you need to open your eyes to the simple truth of what is actually going on. You may need to stop sitting in your bubble of privileged judging of other people’s challenges.

I do believe that no one is born a terrible person. Life happens and sometimes it is a person’s path forward that results in inconvenient truths about the lack of support in our society for marginalized people. Not everyone is fortunate enough to always have goods choices that help them along on one of those better paths in life.

However, allowing people to have better choices CAN lead to a better life, a better person and a healthier, more stable family. This is not Utopian ideals. This is the honest truth derived from being open to learning about a diversity of challenges and experiences as well as the outcomes of those for many different people.

To that question, will there always be children that need someone else to care for them? Sadly Yes, of course there will.

Another question, is there an over-abundance of foster care necessitated by child removals and adoptions taking place in our country today? Maybe, maybe not. These are complex situations that deserve intelligent, nuanced thinking.

The goal of this blog is to help in educating people who may not have as broad of an access to all things adoption and foster care thinking, nor the attention that captures for me many of the stories I feel are worth sharing here.