What’s In A Name ?

What is it that a hopeful adoptive parent is seeking ? For many, they can’t conceive naturally and really want to parent. It is much more about what they want, than what the child needs. Many children who are adopted didn’t actually need to be. Their mom’s were NOT well enough supported to make the choice to raise their child that almost every mother would.

So what’s with changing the child’s name and cutting all ties to their original family ?

It is an attempt to create a fiction. A fiction that the child was born to you and is related to you as much as they would be if you had birthed them yourself.

In cutting ties, it is an attempt to erase the origins of the child.

Who do these actions really serve ? The adoptive parents or the child that they adopt ?

If it truly served the child’s needs they wouldn’t go searching for information and even contact with their original family if it didn’t matter to that child. Just saying . . .

Family That Isn’t

Ohana is a Hawaiian word which refers to a person’s extended family, which can include friends and other important social groups. In the case of adoption, “family” is a complicated concept. Growing up, because both of my parents were adoptees, I knew that my grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins – while perfect stand-ins for the real thing – were not actually related to me.

I was reading about one adoptee’s experience of having an older brother who was also adopted. She says, “Even though we grew up in the same household with the same parents, I’ve always had difficulty thinking of him as my brother. He’s my family and I love him, but family is such a weird thing for adoptees. My brother and I are so different. So far apart in personality, thoughts, interests and goals. We didn’t have a single thing in common.”

And I reflected on my mom’s relationship with her brother who was also a Georgia Tann baby and I could see the truth of this. They were never close as near as I could tell, though she did date one of his neighborhood friends in high school. She once drove over this young man’s foot getting into the car when she knocked it out of park. On a date with him, she met my dad at a party – and although she went to the party with this guy – she left with my dad. It is hard to think of my mom as a teenager but I guess she was about as wild as the three daughters she later birthed. LOL

Having learned who all 4 of my original grandparents were has totally changed who I think of as my “grandparents”. Oh, I still appreciate the people who raised my parents and they were influential in my own life growing up. I still love 2 of my “adoptive” aunts dearly, having become close to them all over again when my parents died. And cousins are still in my life from those relationships.

However, I am keen now to slowly, without too much pressure, create these new relationships with an aunt and some cousins who represent most of my grandparents, though my paternal grandfather seems to have fathered no more children after my dad. DNA and the matching sites – 23 and Me as well as Ancestry – make possible finding one’s relations that many states who still maintain sealed adoption records seek to block. It is a new day and thanking all that is good that it is so.

No image can describe what of our fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers, remains. ~ Rumi

And yet, it does matter that they are there within us always.

#NotMyNAAM

It was almost two years ago now, that the door opened for me on my parents adoptions. I had already lived 6 decades of my life and both of my adoptee parents had passed away. In this brief amount of time, I have been able to become “whole” as regards my parents original parents – ie I now know who my grandparents were and something about each of their individual stories but thanks to adoption, I’ll never know them.

As I began to educate myself about all of the aspects related to adoption, I also truly began to understand there was something rotten in adoptionland. I have also begun to learn about better alternatives for seeing to the well being of children and hopefully to the healing and repair of their original families. Society has a long way to go. I digress and not really.

The paradox for my own self comes when I consider the reality of my own existence. Two major aspects of that have become crystal clear for me in the last two years. [1] I would not exist but for adoption – my parents would have never met. [2] It is a miracle that I was not given up for adoption as well. Conceived by an unwed teenage mother in the deepest part of the Baby Scoop Era, I believe it was my dad’s adoptive parents who insisted that he quit the university he had only started to study at and do the “right” thing, marry my mom and go to work.

So becoming aware of ALL of the problems with adoption presents quite a quandary for me personally. Even so, I am a #NeverAdoption convert now. November is National Adoption Awareness Month. It is NOT a time to celebrate the ripping apart of families to support a profit-driven and often ignorant practice but a month to begin to educate yourself if you believe adoption is all unicorns and rainbows, ie happy endings always.

#NotMyNAAM

It Wasn’t Real To Me

My mom had her DNA tested at Ancestry because she hoped to find some of her original family. Since she had a membership, she started creating a family tree but all she could base it on were the adoptive families (both of my parents were adoptees).

Eventually, wanting to know my own heritage, I got my DNA tested. I didn’t even know at the time she had done hers. I think she was always a bit apologetic about wanting to know her origins because my dad was not supportive. He warned her she might be opening a can of worms if she learned anything.

My dad had this idea that once you are adopted, your original family ceases to exist and the adoptive family is all you should be concerned with. Sadly, he died with a half-sibling living only 90 miles away from him. She could have told him so much about his original mother.

When my mom and I compared notes about our Ancestry DNA results, she told me regarding the family tree, “I just had to quit, it wasn’t real to me.” I do understand.

I haven’t had time to get all of the work done but I did start new family trees for each of my parents and I am recording their bloodline information along with their names at birth and a recognition that they died under an assumed name given to them by their adoptive parents.

I loved my adoptive grandparents and my aunts and uncles and cousins through them. I’ve not lost anything, I gained a whole world based on truth. My family tree is an orchard, not so simple as the conventional ones are to complete.