Acceptance

My adoptee mom shared with me before she died that she had to stop working on the family tree at Ancestry that she had been creating from the lineage of the adoptive parents (my dad was also an adoptee). She said “It just wasn’t real to me. I am adopted.” Then she added, “Glad I was.” because she had reached a place of acceptance that she would never know her origins and whether having been adopted was actually a “good” thing or not.

Acceptance is a phase of grieving. My mom grieved that her original mother had died before her search began. Arriving at acceptance can feel lighter, more balanced and has the ability to realize what all of our experiences have brought to us.

Adoptees will likely struggle with what it means to belong to two families. Coming to terms with that, could also make comfortable – duality, complexity and ambiguity. An adoptee may be able to see both/and rather than either/or.

What will always be true is that an adoptee can never be not adopted. That’s a given.

Adoption can add an element of compassion. There is no getting around the reality that the adoptee was given up. Taken in by strangers. There are consequences to both.

Healing can happen when an adoptee can accept that what happened, happened. This was their fate. They were surrendered by one mother and raised by a different one. An adoptee can’t avoid the pain that is part of that experience.

Platitudes such as “everything happens for a reason” or “it’s all part of God’s plan” are not helpful. Nor are attitudes that an adult adoptee should simply “move on” or “get over it” or “stop dwelling in the past”. These are not helpful either. The past is an adoptee’s history, their identity, their connection to a concept of family.

Babies adopted shortly after birth experience a trauma so early in life that there is no “before” the trauma to return to. Consider that. Add to it the pain adoptees experience by being mostly invalidated by society.

So better words don’t include a non-adoptee’s judgement of what would have been better or worse. A simple acknowledgement of fact is enough. Adoption can’t be undone.

Even so, an adoptee can know that they are also a survivor with those kinds of strengths and gifts. The adoption system is deeply flawed. Seeking to reform it is a worthy outcome for having gone through the experience.

One Retail DNA Test Away From Truth

If a child has been adopted or conceived via sperm or egg donor, that information is significantly about who that child is at a biological level and they deserve to know the truth. That truth can be introduced in age appropriate bits.

Withholding that information would be a lie and it is simply wrong.

Before anyone embarks on adopting a child or decides to utilize advanced reproductive assistance in order to become a family, it is important to become comfortable with what you are doing – BEFORE you do it. If necessary, seek counseling regarding your infertility issues. Denial will come back to haunt you.

There’s no reason for shame, no matter what medical assistance you needed, which includes IVF. Adoption, however, has its own unique circumstances. Every prospective adoptive parent needs to learn as much as possible about its impacts on every member of that triad before becoming embroiled.

The Blessings Of DNA

This morning I was reading, repeatedly, the sad stories of mothers who gave birth and were denied an opportunity to hold their newborn babies because they had made a decision to surrender their child for adoption. I suppose some psychologist at some time decided this was a wise course of action – though totally misguided in reality.

Then, I read a story about a woman who surrendered a daughter 17 years ago and now she has shown up as a match at Ancestry because this young woman had her DNA checked. My adoptee mom tried this too without any real results but she was so ahead of her time.

The availability of inexpensive DNA testing has been a large measure of my own success in discovering ALL 4 of my original grandparents (both of my parents were adoptees). It has played an interesting role in my own life as well. I have two children conceived with the help of a donor egg as I had passed reproductive age when my husband wanted to have children (we married with him being happy I’d been there, done that, no pressure on him).

Because of my own unique heritage, I have now given to each of my sons DNA test kits for 23 and Me. I also gave my husband one. It is a bittersweet decision because our donor has also had her DNA tested. Though my children grew in my womb and nursed at my breast and have known only my own self as their mother for decades, at 23 and Me it now shows that another woman is their mother. We are a brave new world of people but there is nothing un-natural or unusual about my children.

My donor said to me, “Who would have thought this could happen 20 years ago?” and that is the truth. Families touched by “adoption” of some sort are legion now and the tools to reconnect all the threads of our existence are within easy reach of every one of us.

I prefer reality to fantasy and live with the truths.

You Only Have One Mother

. . . unless you were adopted or raised by a secondary “mother”.

An adoptee has two mothers – the one who gestated and gave birth to us and the adoptive mother who raised us. For adoptees in reunion, there was the initial relationship that may have been almost immediately terminated post-birth. Then that child shows up decades later ? This is one facet of the adoptive experience.

Some adoptees are closer to their adoptive mother and feel a kind of strain in their attempted relationship with their original mother. There is a lifetime of working on getting along and growing a lasting relationship with the adoptive mother.

For many original mothers, their “relationship” to the child they lost to adoption is rooted in heartbreak and loss. For both the adoptee and the woman who gave birth to us, there may have been a lifetime of loving someone from afar, someone we don’t really “know” in the usual sense – it can be hard to bring those lifelong fantasies down to Earth.

The in touch, in person reality will never match that fantasy we have harbored. It can take years before the original mother and her child – once separated – can feel a closer relationship.

For an adoptee, their two mothers will never be quite alike, they are simply different, that is the reality and they occupy different spaces in the life of any adoptee.

However, love is love and that is always true, even when one has two mothers.

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.

Making Lemonade

So the worst has already happened and circumstances, situations, etc have separated a mother and her child. Now what ?

Family reunification recognizes a shared genetic connection and shared family history.

Though I spent over 60 years in total ignorance of my family’s true origins and heritage, learning about it now has made all of the difference in my sense of wholeness.

It may be that some children will be better supported by “substitute” parents than their original parents are able to accomplish. I will not deny that. But for, I would not even exist. That is a fact I can’t get around and so even though I’ve become very informed about the effects and impacts of adoption on any adoptee, I still know that it is the reality within my family and the outcomes have thankfully been good for each of those children who ended up with adoptive parents.

I now have aunts and cousins who share that genetic connection with me. While I can’t ever know the family history first hand, these have been able to share with me details of family characteristics over time. It is better than having nothing.

An Inconvenient Truth

Adoption is not the gray area it is often portrayed by the industry as. It is more black and white, with that overlap of gray.

As difficult as it may be to fully realize, in order to adopt, on some level you are okay with taking someone else’s child from them. You may not even be willing to consider the pain it causes the original mother and/or father.

This the inconvenient truth at the heart of becoming an adoptive parent. You may want to “believe” you are some kind of heroic savior but you really are simply wanting something (a child) that for whatever reason you don’t believe you can have any other way.

Some people can do this and function adequately to parent that child. Many adoptees, even though they have LIVED that condition, can’t reconcile the thought that this was okay with their adoptive parents.

This is not to judge or dismiss the reality that some children may actually fare better than they would have with their original parents. I can see this in my own family dynamics. Because I have the kind of faith that believes given a long enough view throughout time, it all works out – both at the physical level and in the soul karmic level.

There are always excuses on the part of adoptive parents. What if this ? What if that ? But I did this or I did that. If I had not, then what MIGHT have happened to that child ?

I respect ALL of the adoptive parents that are a part of my family’s life story. The adoption reform movement wishes only that adoptive parents recognize that their decision to adopt a child was driven by a desire to fulfill their own “selfish” motives. To be honest about that. They can admit simply that they wanted kids and couldn’t have them using their own reproductive capabilities. It was always about what they personally wanted for themselves.

It’s not the only thing that would make adoption concepts more honest but it is a beginning on the adoptive parent side of a complicated equation.

If Not For You

How humbling and profound it has been to learn about my family’s true origins. If not for . . . so many things, I would simply not exist.

Had my Danish paternal grandfather not been allowed to immigrate, I would not exist. One could say he is an example of chain migration because his uncle came first and then his sister.

Had a superflood not complicated the possibility of my maternal grandparents reuniting, my mom would not have gone where she had to go to meet my dad. I would simply not exist.

There is a comfort in understanding that what may appear unfortunate on the surface of things eventually serves a good purpose. There is a sense of peace and rightness about the world that allows one to take a long perspective on everything that happens.

Understanding

I believe one of the most surprising aspects, of finally knowing my family’s origins (both of my parents were adopted), is fully realizing the suffering and/or sacrifices my grandparents experienced that enable my own existence. That may seem like a self-evident conclusion but it actually was not.

Not only did I finally feel whole but I was compelled to understand the realities of adoption for ALL sides of the equation. While I may never personally know how it feels to be adopted, I have 4 adoptees to inform my perspectives for not only were my parents adopted but each of my sisters surrendered a child to adoption.

So I have two birth mothers who are very close to me as siblings and a niece and nephew who have reunited with our family, so I’ve seen that aspect as well. I also had two pairs of adoptive parents (the grandparents I knew as such my entire childhood into early adulthood) to inform me.

Due to an adoptee group I have joined at Facebook, due to TONS of reading from all sides of the adoption triad, I am much more fully informed than I was my entire life and that has been the side effect of learning my origins.

Origin information is very important to any person who has been impacted by adoption and that is something that those not impacted seem to struggle to fully understand. If you’ve always known where you came from, even if you were not all that interested, you can be forgiven for not knowing how truly important that is.

Considering Adoption ?

Too often adoption facilitators are more concerned with socioeconomic factors than psychological, emotional or intellectual considerations. There are better indicators for adopting a child than providing a nursery or having enough money in the bank for a college education.

What there is a need for is emotional stability, honesty, and the willingness to become truly informed about what this process means for the adopting parents and the child they adopt.

Prospective adoptive parents can help by making certain the child they are considering REALLY needs to be adopted.

~ The Primal Wound

When asking how to best raise an adopted child, the experts in the 1980s said there were no unique needs and that being adopted (though I should be told as soon as possible) would mean nothing to me.

There is no post-adoption support.

You will not know why I feel so drawn to the ocean if my original family is from Tennessee.

I will tell you that you are not my “real mom” a handful of times out of frustration and not feeling understood.

I will make you prove over and over again that you love me.

I will spend too much time with people who don’t care about me because I will not be able to stand rejecting anyone.

When I become a mother, the adoptee in me will awaken. You will be bewildered when I start talking about being adopted, missing my first mother and my interest in my roots.

When I embark on reunion, you will support me, but feel as though I am rejecting you. I will have to tell you over and over again that I am not leaving you, but regaining part of me that was left behind.

~ Letter to my Prospective Adoptive Parents in The Declassified Adoptee

Much that I have read resonates with what I have seen in my own family. Both my parents were adopted and each of my sisters gave up a child to adoption. Inform yourself. Don’t create a false identity for the child you adopt. Be prepared for perhaps the hardest choice to parent a child. Apply love liberally.