Just Don’t

But you will. You believe you won’t make all the mistakes the others have made. You believe you know a better way.

Don’t be one of THOSE adoptive parents or hopeful adoptive parents who think they know better and their kid won’t be like those angry adoptees, the thousands upon thousands that have struggled with adoption. You don’t even KNOW what to teach them as an adoptive parent.

You do not raise adopted children like you raise biological children and that has nothing to do with love.

An adoptee said to his adoptive mother, “It doesn’t matter how loving and good your parents are and it doesn’t matter that you have a wonderful home….at times it isn’t enough and I am still very unhappy!” When you hear this from your adopted child, it will break your heart. Adopted kids are going to have pain and there isn’t anything an adoptive parent can do to erase it. Understanding that this is the reality is very painful!

You can’t erase the sadness lurking where you can’t reach it.

It would be better if you didn’t adopt but if you already have, the path forward is complicated.

So, if you already did it, then create a home where your adopted children know they can feel however they need to feel and that they know you’ll be there to listen, love, and support them through it.

Whatever your adopted child feels is the reality, don’t dismiss it. Your feelings are yours to deal with.

The trauma of adoption doesn’t stop existing because you want it to. If you think you can love that trauma away, as an adoptive parent you still have a lot to learn.

Love is not enough, good intentions are not enough. No amount of love or honesty can resolve the deep challenges an adoptee faces from being isolated from their biological identity.

Not A Choice

Imagine. You are just born. Immediately, your tiny self is thrust into the chaos of foster care and/or adoption. You had no say in what was done to you.

Your newborn self wanted no one else in the world but the mother who carried you in her womb, who’s blood ran through your veins, who’s heartbeat was your lullaby as your neurons formed and connected. You wanted her. You cried for her. You experienced the rush of cortisol and adrenalin as your primal need was denied.

You did not sign up to be involved in adoption.

You did not volunteer to become an adoptee.

Those choices were made by others, and that was that. It is the common plight of all people, when they come into the world. Infants cannot dictate who cares for them – or the quality or lack of it that is administered. Infants cannot control where they are taken, what sort of environment they are raised in, or the people around them.

If you were adopted, when you are old enough, you can speak out about your feelings. You can speak about what you experienced, you can speak about the feelings you have had, the life you have known, and the pains you have felt. Tell your own truth honestly.

Find other adoptees, so that you know that you are not alone in having these feelings.

Do not be ashamed that once upon a time, you told other people that you were happy to have been adopted. You had nothing to compare it to.

Do not be ashamed, if you often cry in private. You carry a profound grief. Do not think it wrong to try and find your original family. If you are able to do that, the experience may (but that is never guaranteed, as people as very complex creatures) be healing. If nothing else, it will be the reality you were once denied. The truth of your origins.

You have my sincere compassion. I am not an adoptee but my family of birth is full of adoptees – for one reason or another. You truly are not alone.

If It Was So Good . . .

why am I so unhappy ?

It is a paradox and difficult to explain beyond the fact that fear and trauma put the child into a survival mechanism. Yes, even with a loving and kind, caring adoptive family, an adoptee can feel messed up a lot of the time. The adoptee may rationally feel like they should be okay with having been adopted by such nice people. Yet, they are sad. There is a trauma that exists deep down in every adoptee whether they ever become aware of it or not. Adoption by strangers is never a normal experience in reality.

Adoptive parents may say, “My adopted child is so close to me. It is like they are attached at the hip.” While this may seem like a good thing, and the adoptive parent interprets this to mean that their child is well adjusted and/or bonded to them, it is actually a fear driven survival instinct in response to an abandonment, even if the child could never define it as such to their adoptive parent.

Sadly, the perspective of many adoptive parents is something akin to owning a possession. In some adoptees, the response to the adoptive parents is similar to repulsion. While an adoptee may attach, it is an attachment based on a longing for what is not there between the adopted child and the adoptive parents. It is inescapable that all adoptees are deprived of something fundamental that affects them developmentally.

The young adopted child will eventually stop crying for the need that can never be met. Unfortunately, in this surrender, the adoptee is seen as “such a good baby”. By the time this happens, the adoptee’s attachment style has already been deeply altered. They adapt.

Adoptees know how to use all of the different attachment coping styles, and switch between them based on the specific situation they find themselves in. Very little of what they are expressing outside reflects their true internal feelings. It is not how they are really feeling or what they are really needing. Mostly it is about appeasing the adult who is caring for them. It is a survival tactic. Always, what is seen, is even so, coming out of a deep and unaddressed trauma.

Opioid Orphans

It is so sad that medications meant to relieve serious pain have become such a travesty that people who might benefit from them find it hard to receive a prescription. I understand the complication. I have been prescribed such medications and though I never became addicted, I could see the temptation and how the drug fixes itself upon the person.

I have experienced the awareness that my ex-husband overdosed and gratefully survived the experience. When he came home he told me his friend dumped him out at the emergency room. Not long after, that friend actually died of an overdose himself. His family lived next door to my in-laws and they quite obviously, and reasonably, distanced themselves from my ex at the time – though he was not at all responsible for his friend’s death. Parents have a hard time accepting such a hard truth at the time they lose their child.

Today, many grandparents will be forced to rescue their grandchildren after such an event. Fortunately, the death I described above was a person without children. Though perhaps a few years away from retirement, they find themselves full-time parents again. This is the collateral damage caused by the opioid crisis.

As the opioid epidemic has spread across the country, through all age, gender, race and economic categories, the number of children who have lost their parents to drugs—either to death by overdose, to jail, prison, homelessness or disability—has skyrocketed. Those children wind up in one of two places: either with relatives, or in an already overburdened foster care system. In 2015, the child welfare system saw a three-year national increase of more than 30,000 children entering foster care. That number is likely much higher now as the nation finally begins to face the truth and pharmaceutical companies are being held to account.

In West Virginia, the hardest hit state in the opioid crisis, the number of foster care children grew 24 percent from 2012-2016. The numbers escalate as the number of overdoses increase; they mirror the number of addicts in treatment programs, incarceration or living day-to-day on the streets. Babies are born addicted to opioids or other drugs. More often than not, addict parents, living or deceased, have made little or no provisions for the ongoing care of their children.

Adoption – A Mother’s Sorrow

I can relate, though I didn’t give up a child to adoption, financially I lost the ability to raise my first born precious daughter. There are no words for the lifetime of regret and sense of loss that never ends. I remember looking through commercial greeting cards for something to send my daughter on her birthday and nothing related to the kind of relationship I have with her. Eventually, I simply started making them my self where I could modify the text to be more accurate.

At least I knew where she was and who was raising her. Not so for a mother who relinquishes her child to a closed adoption. Open adoptions are more frequent now but adoptive parents can and often do close the door to contact.

It is difficult to generalize about the feelings or experiences of all of the parents who surrender a child. Many may feel that their child will have a better life in an adoptive home and often that may be true if the mother is homeless or financially destitute. Money and love and biological connection are not one and the same. Even so, some parents who surrender a child do so believing that they are putting the child’s best interests ahead of their own, when they make the decision to place the child for adoption.

Grief and guilt are often the outcome for such a mother. I know, I suffered both and still do. Even though my daughter is now 46 years old and we have what I would consider to be a pretty good relationship with each other, I still struggle with the reality that I was not there for her growing up. There is no changing that no matter how I feel about it.

Shock and denial, sorrow and depression, anger, guilt, and acceptance are the various feelings that a parent who has surrendered their child may experience at any given time, very dependent on the overall circumstances.

When the loss of a parent’s child is viewed as a “choice” that parent voluntarily made, there may be little sympathy or compassion and indeed, a strong inclination to ignore the pain and encourage the parent to go on with their life. If only it were that simple . . .

Each Small Death

. . . is just a season where a part of us is shed to make way for a new one. ~ Jonas Ellison

This quote captured something in my heart. When I was already into my 60s, I lost first my mom and then 4 months later, my dad, to the normal processes of life that end in one’s death. When they died, none of us knew who their original parents were. They were both adopted and their adoptive parents were also dead.

Turns out my original grandparents were all dead as well.

But there is “new” life in me because I now know so much more about my authentic family history. I know there is a lot of Danish in me because of my paternal grandfather who was an immigrant. And there is a good deal of Scottish in me because of my maternal grandmother.

On my paternal grandmother’s side is a long history that includes an ancestor who wrote a journal that is still in print. It is considered to be one of the best records of early colonial life in New London Connecticut spanning a 47 year period from 1711 to 1758. Yes, before our Revolutionary War. His home is on the national register and a museum now.

That leaves my maternal grandfather. His own grandfather was 2nd Lieutenant in the Confederate Army from 1861 through 1864. He fought in the battles of Shiloh, Chattanooga and Spring Hill, as well as other less notable engagements. There are actually Confederate connections on my maternal grandmother’s side as well. Not that I take any real pride in that, it just is the honest truth.

All of this is “new” to me. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever expect to know about these people but learning about them and meeting some living descendants has made me whole again. Even though it was too late for my parents, losing them opened up the path for me to know these things about my family history.

All that to say, if you are in a similar circumstance by all means push ahead. Inexpensive DNA testing and the matching sites that include 23 and Me as well as Ancestry are making it possible for many people who’s past was clouded by adoption to finally know who and from where their roots are grounded in reality.

Hard Questions

Adoption makes this true.

The questions carry a completely different weight than they did just months ago before we adopted. A place where my heart screams that he is mine forever but that same heart plummets into a deep ache knowing the gravity of loss he has already faced. The loss of the mother in whose womb he grew.

He will always know he’s adopted. I tell his story to him every night at bedtime. I ask all the normal questions.

I wonder about the day he will ask about his birth parents. Will there be a constant ringing in his ears to know them? Will he feel the guilt of reassuring us, as the adoptive parents, that the ringing has nothing to do with us?

Will I be able to honestly, deeply, and fully lock arms with him while he searches for answers?

I can wait for the hard questions but know when you start to ask, your worth is immense, your value is priceless, and I will always and forever, be right by your side.

A true story. One worth pondering if you are planning to adopt. Someday, that child will want to know where they come from and why they are not being raised by the people who conceived them.

Unintended Consequences

The narrative around adoption is often described as Unicorns and Rainbows by adult adoptees. That is because the stories that hopeful adoptive couples buy into are not the reality they are likely to live when they take another woman’s child as their own.

They honestly believe they are doing a good thing and being a beneficial presence in the life of a blank slate baby. It is an uninformed perspective. Every adoption has some degree of trauma at its core. If the adoptee was an infant, newly born when the adoption occurred, that trauma is not even conscious nor can it be verbalized. It is buried deep in the core of that developing fetus during the time it was connected to the original mother. That bonding has only recently begun to be more fully understood but it is at the root of much that later is seen as challenging behavior.

One outcome I didn’t see coming as I uncovered the identities of my original grandparents (both of my own parents were adoptees) was that I would go on to learn about all of the inconvenient truths around the process of adoption as it was practiced at the time my own parents were adopted (both spent 6-8 months with their original mothers before the separation occurred – I can only imagine the upset when they were torn away from her).

I also learned about the time period called the Baby Scoop Era – which began with the end of World War II and continued into the 1970s. From 1945 to 1973, it is estimated that up to 4 million parents in the United States placed children for adoption, with 2 million during the 1960s alone. That is a staggering number of adoptees that have grown into mature adults. Each with some degree of wounding from the process.

Because adoption was experienced as a normal occurrence in my childhood family, both of my sisters would go on to give up their own children to adoption shortly after birth. A pattern of mother/child separations plagued my sisters and I. Beyond adoption, in one way or another, two more of our children were raised by someone other than ourselves.

I have learned so much but if you who are reading this are considering becoming an adoptive parent yourself, please read first The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier and inform yourself honestly about what you are contemplating. She is the mother of two daughters – one adopted and one she birthed. She has a degree in clinical psychology and has a good depth of experience from which to inform your decision.

Knowing One Is Adopted

I believe, from the time they were old enough to even understand the concept, both of my parents knew they were adopted. Therefore, as their children, we also grew up always knowing our parents had both been adopted, even though we had no idea of what that really meant. I thought my parents were orphans until rather late in life when I learned that my mom’s adoption had been part of the Georgia Tann scandal and that my mom believed she had actually been stolen from her original parents. It is a fact, she died still believing that.

Adoption is not something that should be a secret or something that anyone should be ashamed of. It is how an adoptee came to be in the family they grew up in. If you always know, then it just IS. It is better to know that no one ever kept something really important from your knowledge.

Growing up, adoption seemed very normal to me. It has always been a core circumstance of my family’s life. Therefore, both of my sisters also gave up children for adoption. They never thought it was harmful or wrong because to think that would have been to judge how we ended up with the parents that we were born to.

My family’s experiences are not unique, there are many many families that have been impacted by the process of adoption. It is important to me. I am grateful that my mom shared with me how she felt about her own adoption. I believe I am the only person she shared those feelings with.

The main reason most adoptees don’t talk about their struggles is generally the same. When they are young, they lack the ability to identify how they should or do feel about their origins. They are not able to articulate their feelings. As an adoptee gets older, if no one is talking about adoption, they get the sense that their feelings won’t be understood or validated.

Sad And Heartbreaking

I find myself in such an awkward position. I have come to see that adoption is not the happy, rosy picture the industry wishes to paint because it is so lucrative. Even so, but for adoption, I would not even exist. What a quandary.

So to get real – adoption is never about the child who becomes an adoptee. This is the reality. As difficult as it may be to accept and understand.

Certainly, I am anti unethical adoption. My mom’s adoption was unethical. My maternal grandmother was pressured and exploited in a difficult situation that to her unending sorrow resulted in losing the baby girl she fought so hard to keep. It wasn’t her fault. She was a victim of Georgia Tann who was a master at the art of separating mothers from their children.

Even though my existence is decidedly an effect of two adoptions (both of my parents were), that does not mean that I cannot see the problems with adoption – especially for the child who is forever wounded in a deep place and may not even know what the actual source of their emotional pain is.

So, it is not positive or beautiful to take another women’s child. Period. There has to be a better way and that is to provide for a family to remain intact.

And there is also the issue of the father. Yes, some are unconcerned about the child they helped to create. It may also be true that others that never get a chance. I believe my dad’s father never even knew he existed. Since he was married, my dad’s mother probably simply never told him and handled it herself. My dad was so much like his father that I believe they would have been great friends. It wasn’t her plan initially to give my dad away, though at 8 months, she let him go for adoption.

Everything about the act of adoption is sad and heartbreaking – for the adoptee certainly – but I also believe for the natural, original parents as well.