Buying A Human Being

Every single adoptee that is some part of the family I was born into was adopted because the mother was financially desperate (not for the money itself but for the ability to provide for her child). People with financial resources have been buying these kinds of babies for a very long time (in my family’s case – 90 years now).

Exchanging money for a human being is morally objectionable or it should be (though the unicorns and rainbows pro-adoption community does not find it so). There is an objectionable word for it – “human trafficking”.

There is a deliberate blindness in some prospective adoptive parents that cloak the practice of adoption as some kind of altruism. A human being is not an object or someone’s property. Human beings NOT possessions to be bought, sold, gifted or traded.

There are those who dress adoption up in religion as somehow God’s will to take a child from the womb of the woman God put it into and give it to complete strangers because God made some kind of mistake in doing that ? I don’t think so.

Like God wants families ripped apart?

It is all trafficking – adopting, placing, fostering, being a social worker, gal, casa, family court personnel etc. Where a mom loses her child to Child Protective Services. Or a woman never really had a choice. No matter how you try to dress it up – it is still paying money to buy a baby.

A Different Universe

Coming to terms with the loss of one’s natural mother within an adoptee’s awareness will not be complete in a lifetime.

This is what I believe is true.

On the surface, an adoptee placed within a decent family may not show any signs of deep though subconscious trauma but I believe this is always embedded deeply within.

From all I have unexpectedly learned, after discovering who my original grandparents were and something about their lives at the time each of my parents’ adoptions occurred, I now know the wound of separation is always there. It is unavoidable. It is the natural truth of the matter.

Often adoptees behave in ways while they are growing up that confuse the adoptive family and their closest friends. Some of this confusing behavior even occurs during their adulthood. I have seen it with my own parents.

The truth about adoption is that the wounds are not visible in the way a physical accident would leave obvious impacts. They are psychological, emotional and mental. You can’t see them by looking at an adoptee.

All the love that an adoptive parent is able to give will never touch this pain that will always be deep inside the adoptee – caused by having been given up by the one person most of us believe we will always be able to depend upon. It really isn’t possible to simply exchange one mother for another and life then goes on as though no disruption ever happened.

Being adopted is similar to being put into a forever box of different than, not the same as, all of the non-adopted people around you.

It is a good thing that adoptees are finally trying to understand the pain of relinquishment and speaking honestly and out loud about their suffering.

There isn’t really a solution to the situation but it is the beginning of awareness and that may yet bring about reforms to the practice of adoption that will spare at least some children in the future from suffering similarly.

Why do people adopt babies ? It comes from a deep desire to protect and love a being that is capable of loving you back. It is useless to expect from an adoptee what a parent expects when they give birth to a child naturally and then raise that same child.

Adoption is an entirely different universe. That is a story that may not be capable of delivering the happy ending you as an adoptive parent had hoped for. This is the reality. Time to accept the truth of it.

The Better Option

There is such a thing as privilege. It is a privilege to have enough wealth that if you can’t have a child naturally, you are able to adopt someone else’s. Is wealth a better option than keeping a family intact ? There are cases where a child is going to need a safer environment but no child needs to have their identity erased and cultural heritage hidden from them.

It is weird to grow up with all these relatives and then reach an age in advanced maturity when one knows who their true genetic relatives are. Both of my parents were adopted. That means the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were never really my relations. It is a very weird feeling to know that with certainty now.

Of course, I acknowledge that there were these couples who provided for and raised my parents. They were the people I knew as grandparents growing up and they were without a doubt influential in my life. Now that I know who the real ones were, they are who I think of when I think of who my grandparents were, even though I never had the privilege of knowing them in life.

One of the expectations is that an adoptee is supposed to be grateful and acknowledge all the sacrifices their adoptive parents made to raise them. On the adoptees part there is this lifelong requirement to live up to the expectations of the adoptive parent. I know that my mom felt this and I know that she felt like she had failed to equal those expectations.

All parents expect something from their children but most children are quite free to ignore those parental expectations. An adoptee often fears being returned to a no-family state if they don’t live up to the expectations of the people who purchased their very lives.

It may be hard to read but it is a real thing for those who’s roots have been cut off from underneath them.

Words Of Encouragement

Life changes, never forget that it can.

It is perfectly acceptable to wish for better days to come.

There is nothing wrong with wishing for better income, more stability, and an ability to give MORE.

Years from now, you may realize something startling –

Your wish came true.

You will realize that those “better days” that you once could only dream of are now your reality.

It can be so easy to feel discouraged and just want to give up. Keep your hopes for better alive. Dreams can come true. I know. I’ve seen my own come true in amazing ways.

I remember one Christmas with my daughter when she was just a toddler. I bought the tiniest tree. I painted little wooden ornaments. I bought her a little bra and underwear set, patent leather shoes and lacy socks and one of those children’s microphones she could sing through. We didn’t have much but we did have a Christmas. Life is full of ups and downs. Change is constant and can be a source of hope when nothing seems hopeful at all.

HUGS of encouragement for you, who in a season that can feel so discouraging and depressing for a lot of people, must somehow carry on. You are never truly alone in difficult moments. Others are struggling and some are overcoming those same kinds of struggle.

I’m OK With It

The truth is, some adoptees will tell you they are okay with having been adopted. Far be it from me, to say they are not sincere. My own father was like that and my niece and nephew probably were as well.

With my niece and nephew, they did want to discover their own origins and both were able to do that. And it was their own initiative. One can be okay with how they were raised and even come to understand the reasons why it may have been for the best in their particular circumstances.

That does not deny the reality that separating children from their parents causes deep psychic wounds. It simply does.

And that doesn’t dismiss the possibility that as a society we can do better than we have in regard to children’s welfare – because I also sincerely believe we can.

For one thing, there is no justification for taking a child’s identity away from them and for falsifying the information on their birth certificate. That is simply wrong.

There is also no reason for keeping adoption records sealed and locked away from adoptees after they reach adulthood. There are real reasons – such as family health history – for an adoptee to know their background.

And it is every person’s right to know their true story, even the sad stories, even the hard stories. No person has been handed a perfect, comfortable life. Even if it appears they have. There are always issues, even when we don’t know they are there.

Infertility Grief

Regarding choosing adoption after giving up on conceiving a child, it appears that all the screening in the world isn’t going to heal infertility grief. It isn’t going to magically turn a stranger’s child into the one you couldn’t have. It can’t predict how well you can actually love an adopted kid, even though you *really, really* think you can. It’s not going to account for a genetic mismatch between adoptee and adopter. Most importantly it doesn’t turn the adoptee into a robot, capable of bonding to any old genetic stranger at will. That’s the one thing I find never, ever gets talked about.

My husband and I tried and failed and did consider whether adoption was the way to go. At that time I knew nothing about the wounds associated with adoption. Yet, we felt we would rather begin from scratch than take on the unknowns of a pre-exiting child. So we turned to assisted reproduction.

I will always believe that this was a better choice than adoption. I already had a child that was genetically related to me and grandchildren too. My husband wanted that for his own self and I was sympathetic and understanding to his own need to become a father – even if he really waited way too long.

The advent of inexpensive DNA testing has brought it’s own unique reality to deal with but I am okay with it. My sons seem to be okay with it. They simply would not exist otherwise. Any other children that my husband might have conceived would not be these children. I believe in dealing with realities.

Turning to assisted reproduction meant these children were implanted and grew within my womb. The bonding of mother and child begins in the womb. These children nursed at my own breast for just over a year each. No one can be more their mother than I am.

I do see our donor and her own genetic children mirrored in my sons and we do not withhold access to that family though our sons seem disinterested in pursuing it at this time. Since we are older parents, someday they may reach out to establish a new genetic connection, just as I have in discovering my own.

I remember encountering my own infertility grief when I fully realized the natural method simply was not going to happen for us. I regretted my husband had married such an old woman. Even so, we have a good marriage and it would not have made good sense to simply throw that away to allow him to become a father. He is a good one because he waited until he was actually ready to commit himself to parenting.

Love Isn’t Always On Time

Since I believe reality is never wrong, I know that my parents conception, birth, adoption, marriage, parenting was all just as it was meant to be. No one escapes this Life without wounds and some are more wounded than others but we were not promised a rose garden when we agreed to spend some time incarnated upon this planet.

So the romantic relationships and/or marriages that conceived my parents were not wrong. I do believe my grandparents all loved one another. The Great Depression and a lack of social safety nets certainly played it’s role in separating my grandparents and in separating their children from them.

In learning about my true, genetic roots, one of my joys has been to discover that every one of my grandparents eventually found a lasting love with someone else. Every one of them remarried and stayed married until death.

So in a bizarre paradoxical way, I accept that all the sadness and grief were somehow necessary for me to be conceived. It was also necessary for the souls of my grandparents to learn and grow into better people who could find love and stay married after their early failures.

Love. It is what we are here to do.

An Un-fill-able Yearning

Now my adoptive grandparents did love us. It is true and I’d never say they did not. My adoptive grandmothers were both deeply religious too.

One of those Facebook quizzes that goes around quite a lot asked –

14. If you could talk to ANYONE right now who would be?

My answer was –

My real grandparents – never got to know them alive

Hearing about them from newly discovered “real” relations does help these nebulous persons become more real for me but nothing can fill the deep desire in my heart to be in their presence, to feel their personal energies and to be held and in deep conversation one-on-one with them. That will have to wait for the great reunion that can’t occur while I yet live and breathe on the Earth plane.

The closest indications I have of their natures, is what my own two parents were like in life, and I do believe they embodied the deepest core characteristics of the parents that my own parents never had the opportunity to know because they were each given up for adoption and raised by strangers – even if the strangers were entirely well-meaning (which I acknowledge they were).

Speaking Out

Adoptees are speaking up about the suffering they have endured and I am grateful to each and every one of them who tells the truth at great risk to their relationships. The truth needs to be heard and healing cannot happen unless the reality is faced.

Sometimes we do what we have to do. In our heart we know that there are going to be repercussions but the truth needs to come out. Not everyone is going to appreciate it but it is always what must happen regardless.

It’s okay, and normal, to fear change. It’s going to run strong with a history of separation anxiety untreated. If you’re suffering right now, I understand that it sucks when people abandon you. You need to focus on your self and commit to healing and improving yourself. It is easier said than done but necessary. I have lost contact with people who do matter to me because their pain was such they could not face it directly but needed to blame me for the suffering I did not actually cause.

There are wounds that cruelty and separation cause that can never be undone in this lifetime. I wouldn’t know every thing I do if adoptees weren’t explaining their perspectives.

Please know this. You’re important, you’re voice and feelings are important, and although this may cause a riff with another person, it needs to be said for a better way to emerge. That doesn’t mean that the riff will ever feel good within your own heart. Hugs.

The Lies That Bind

I finished reading this book yesterday evening. On Saturday, it absorbed my entire 4 hour writing session because I simply could not stop reading. That was the first time a book truly did that to me. It is a page turner, at least it was for me, because having been on my own journey to discover my family roots – I understood empathically the disappointments and the excitement of being on the hunt.

There are differences in our experiences. Laureen is an adoptee and she definitely offers a clear-eyed and honest expression of the issues that most adoptees face. It was easy for me to recognize the truth in these descriptions.

I am not an adoptee but what I have discovered is that as the child of two adoptees (and neither of my parents knew much at all about their origins or heritage when they died after 8 decades of life) I am almost as impacted by the issues adoptees face as the one who is adopted is. My situation has only been slightly better because I do know who my parents were but nothing beyond them until very recently.

There is a bittersweet aspect that I won’t give away but I do highly recommend the book – even if adoption has not impacted you. Why ? Because it is written so very clearly about why reform is needed in adoptionland – from the practice of placing children to the unsealing of adoption records in all 50 states. This is a situation with societal impacts which all people should care about.