Living In The Fog

Adoption Fog – the hazy perception that everything about adoption is (or should be) simple, straight-forward, beautiful, and most importantly, not questioned.

Adoptees are told what to think, not how to think. They are told the perspective from which they should see their adoption. They are told to be grateful. They live in a fantasy land. They were too young or too afraid to realize the truth of the situation they are living in or to feel the full impact of it. I can see now that as I began to understand the stories of my parents adoptions, I was in a fog before and in the early part of that process of believing the unicorns and rainbows version of adoption.

Coming out of the fog can mean enlightenment and healing. Along the way, there are painful realizations and personal acknowledgements. Coming out of the fog does not necessarily mean searching. One can be searching and still be in the fog. Maybe simply curious about family and heritage.

Adoptees are conditioned from the beginning to be grateful. They were “chosen”. There is a story, ingrained lovingly, about how the biological parents were not able or did not want to take care of the adoptee. “They loved me so much they had to give me away so I could have a better life. I was saved by my adoptive parents from life as an orphan. Adoption is a good thing. Without it where would all the abandoned, unwanted children go?”

While such stories are meant to be comforting, it is often scary for the child. To be “chosen” by one family means to be “unchosen” or rejected by another one. And it is that fear of rejection that causes many adoptees to become people pleasers.

It is only natural, that as they come to maturity, they begin to understand that their very lives fulfill a desire on the part of their adoptive parents. Adopted children are therefore often fearful (either consciously or subconsciously) that they could become rejected again.

There really is no such thing as a well-adjusted adoptee, or even child of two adoptees, even if it appears to be so. The contradictions are simply too big to reconcile.

Clueless Questions

Quite a long time ago, I learned not to ask potentially embarrassing questions. In fact, I rarely ask what could be defined as a “personal” question. If someone wants to tell me about whatever, it is their prerogative not my right.

So I was reading about some of the clueless questions adoptees sometimes receive –

Where are your real parents ?

Couldn’t your parents have their own kids ?

Are your adoptive parents angry you reunited ?

“Was your birth mother on drugs ?”

In the book The Declassified Adoptee, she gives those who just have to know better ways of asking these kinds of questions. She suggests that “Good questions are strengths first, person first. They consider the feelings of the person answering a question first, above the necessity for information.”

She adds “It is ALWAYS important to validate an adoptee’s membership within ALL of the families that she identifies with.”

As the child of two adoptees, who after 6 decades of life, has only recently discovered my biological, genetic relations (mostly cousins and one aunt), I get it. I love the adoptive families I grew up with and have shared life experiences with. I love that I now know people who share my DNA. I love them all, differently, for different reasons but love is love.

A Sacred Quest

Art by Stephen Delamare

If every life is actually a sacred quest to know who and what we really are, mine has certainly been easily viewed as just that.

I feel as though the “real” me has finally emerged out of the broken family tree that once concealed my true origins.

Now I know that we never were what we were forced to pretend we were due to adoptions.

We now have family, always had family, but that family was intentionally hidden from us until I was able to discover it in only the last year and a half.

Certainly, there are shadows and unanswered questions and it may be impossible to shed light on them now that so many years have passed.

But I am grateful for what I know and the “new” family I can build relationships with now. They are no more “perfect” than the members of the adoptive family that I still consider my “relations” as well.

It’s just that I know the same blood that runs in the “new” family’s veins, runs also in mine and for that I am eternally grateful.

I feel that I have fulfilled some part of my life’s purpose now.

The Wound Never Heals

In her book – A Hole in My Heart – Lorraine Dusky notes “You would be surprised how many little blond girls there are in the world when you are not looking for them. They are everywhere, filling your sightline like a chorus line of charming little dolls, reminding, mocking, making you aware of what you are missing, what you have done.

You stare at them, check out their clothes, absorb their little-girl movements and words.

The girl in the coffee shop with her mother. Another at the supermarket. Creating a scene at the mall. The daughter of a friend of someone you are dating, you can’t take your eyes off her, blonde, fine-bones and only a few months older than yours.”

Questions haunt a mother who has given up her child to adoption – Are my daughter’s parents good to her ? How is she ? Who does she look like ? Is she blonde like me ? Does she have my flat feet and his blue eyes ?

It is more than the girls themselves – an invitation to a baby shower. A picture of a baby in a magazine. Forsythia in a flower shop window. A family reunion.

I have this secret that makes me – different. Alien. Deep inside me there is a gnawing sense that I must find my daughter one day. Surely I am not the only one in this private hell.

It is good that the trend now is for – at the least – open adoptions. And there are activists among those who were adopted themselves trying to reform the system to make adoption rare, if at all.

It is good. It will stop some of the pain . . . as a society, we should care about our mothers and children more than we do.

A Private Hell

Surely I am not the only one in this private hell.

Are my daughter’s parents good to her ? How is she ? Who does she look like ? Is she blonde like me ? Does she have my flat feet and her father’s blue eyes ?

~ some thoughts from A Hole in My Heart by Lorraine Dusky

When my mom tried and failed to learn about her own origins, since she was adopted as a very young child, she said to me once “As a mother, I would want to know what happened to my child.”

And that is a valid need in a mother who has relinquished her child for adoption.

Even if one didn’t do that but life changed the custody circumstances, I know myself, that when I would try to buy a birthday card for my daughter, so much of what it said simply wasn’t true of our experiences as a mother and a daughter who spent that childhood separated.

I didn’t have any role models for how to be an absentee mother during the years that was my involuntary experience.