Second Chance

One of the saddest situations in adoptionland is a child that was adopted and the adoptive family seeks to be rid of that child and it does happen.

In one case, an adopted child had been through four failed adoptions. This child had been renamed each time and didn’t even know their real name.

Or a child adopted internationally when they were 2 years old now up for re-adoption at the age of 8-1/2. The advertisement for this child is full of glowing attributes – why then is the need to be rid of the child ? It is beyond sad that people adopt without understanding the trauma and wounds that come from separating the child from their original family.

Between 1 and 5 percent of U.S. adoptions get legally dissolved each year. Some children are put up for “second-chance adoptions.” Second-chance adoptions are children who were already adopted and whose adoptive family no longer wishes to parent them.

Accurate statistics are not available for how commonplace second adoptions are, due to a wide variety of factors that include the closed nature of some adoptions, changed names on Social Security cards and birth certificates, and other paperwork issues.

Legally speaking, adopted children are recognized as no different from biological children. And for this reason, parents who opt to put a child up for re-adoption are doing nothing more legally complicated than any parent who puts a child up for adoption in the first place.

Children who end up in need of adoption a second time have lives that are deeply disrupted and end up with lifelong doubts about their worth. Most adoptees, even when their first adoption does not end up dissolved, suffer from similar issues.

Adoption is a complicated situation that is fraught with problems. That is why many adoptees are now speaking out against the process and looking for better alternatives for cases where a child’s welfare requires a more stable situation.

Abortion As An Ethical Decision

#1 – never pair the two issues. Adoption as a counter to abortion. Pro-Life should be positive in the support of keeping babies with their mothers.

Honestly, many adult adoptees will say “if I had a say in my birth mom doing it over again – hell yes, I wish she’d never had me.” That may be hard to understand, if you were not adopted but this is the truth.

An abortion makes life going forward easier. If someone doesn’t want to be a parent, then putting themselves through a pregnancy and birth makes no sense. If someone does want a baby, then they’d regret adoption forever, if they chose that as an alternative when what they really lack to enable them to keep their child is the emotional or financial ability to parent that child. This is also the truth.

An adoptee is forever the child whose mother gave her to strangers and all the emotional wounds that come with that.

If society were willing to make it more feasible for underprivileged mothers to keep their own babies by providing financial and other supports – then the truth also is that adoption and abortion rates would both likely drop.

There are options other than adoption for infertile couples to conceive children. It is known as Assisted Reproduction and that entails a variety of potential treatments that may prove successful and be a better choice than creating huge psychological problems for adoptees and their original mothers, who are separated at birth, and under the best future possibilities, will still have a painful road to reunion.

Transracial Adoptions

This is not a topic I’ve discussed here before because I really don’t have any experience with it but Angela Tucker, an adoptee (raised by the white parents you see in the image above) has been speaking out about her experience of growing up among people who did not look like her.

Angela was able to achieve what many adoptees hope for – a reunion with her original parents. She found her father on Facebook in 2010. He is known as “Sandy the Flower Man” in Chattanooga TN. His actual name is Oterious Bell. What Angela noticed first was his smile – which matched hers.

Born in Chattanooga TN, Angela was adopted as a 1-year-old by David and Teresa Burt in Bellingham WA. Eventually, this Caucasian couple would adopt seven of their eight children, drawing together a family of diverse ethnicity.

“I’m an African American who ‘fits in’ within Caucasian areas, better than in predominantly African American areas,” says Angela. “That is confusing and interesting at the same time.”

She wanted to understand her ethnic background, her personality and character traits. Where did her athletic skill come from ? Who did she look like — her original mom or original dad ? At the age of 12, she began expressing interest in finding her original parents. But her adoptive parents flinched at the thought they might be replaced.

“On my part,” says Angela, “there was a need to explain what my motives were — not to replace anyone, but simply to figure out who I am. What are my roots ? How did I get from Tennessee to Washington — and why?” This question mirrors my own mother’s question – how did I get from Virginia to Tennessee ?

I love that her original mother’s name matches my own – Deborah. When Angela first found Deborah, she denied any familial connection. That rejection was a devastating blow for Angela. Deborah’s resistance did slowly give way to acceptance and embrace. Eventually, Deborah spoke for the first time ever about the pain she experienced regarding Angela’s birth.

“It is wonderful to ‘not see color,’ and to want to adopt any race,” Angela says. “But there is a difference in parenting a child from another race. … If you aren’t Caucasian, then you do see color. You have to. You can feel it. It instilled in me an attitude of humility and a genuine openness towards accepting and understanding complex situations.”

Angela’s quest to find her birth family shows that reconciliation is possible, even when the deepest of hurts becomes an obstacle. Her husband, Bryan Tucker, has made a documentary about her journey titled Closure. You can watch a trailer at – https://youtu.be/g__N9YW78XU.

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.

You Have To Get Over It And Connect

If you gave up a child to adoption, regardless of the reasons and whether it was totally your own choice or someone pressured you to do so, you have to get over the trauma and connect if the opportunity for a reunion comes your way.

Today, I was reading about the unbelievable pain that a young woman is experiencing. She is an adoptee and her original mother lives in the same city and refuses to have any contact with her. She lives in total fear of an unintended encounter and how painful it would be to be snubbed in person.

One such mother shared – about how she thought about the daughter she gave up all the time. I don’t doubt it. A piece of a mother’s heart is torn out with any surrender. Deep down she always did hope her daughter would get in touch with her once she was grown. The day came. She got a Facebook message from her daughter. Next, the Face Time started to ring and she just froze. Unbelievably, she couldn’t answer the phone.

Fortunately, her daughter was persistent. She called 5 times in a row before this mom had the guts to pick up. She acknowledges how selfish and f’ed up that was. She admits that the anxiety of talking to or eventually seeing her was just so overwhelming. She understands now in hindsight that the reaction comes from a place of fear and self protection.

The story does have a happy ending and an encouragement for other women who might be in the same situation. Once they got past that initial step, now they talk every day. And even though they live 100s of miles apart, they find a way to meet face to face on a regular basis.

Don’t let fear keep you apart. The only way to heal is to reconnect.

When You Don’t Control The Narrative

When adoptees are little, it is natural to fixate on matters such as birth and death, and to even try to appeal to and please the adoptive parents by talking about the adoption in a fairytale way (as a safety mechanism for survival; trying to be always in good graces, and assure one’s self that everything is fine, because your identity and sense of security are fragile). Adoptees suffer complicated emotions like grief, loss, and triggers in isolation.

Some adoptees believe their feelings are always wrong. They are expected to think about everyone’s feelings but their own. No wonder so many adoptees are people pleasers (which enforces the ‘good complaint adoptee’ persona as a necessary expression and explains why so many adoptees are afraid of speaking out – fearing rejection by the larger society). It can leave them with a lot of issues related to control because they feel like their life story isn’t their own. Everyone else is defining it for them. Personally, I tend to rebel at being forced to do anything that isn’t my own idea to begin with.

Imagine the adoptee then. Effectively kidnapped at a very young age, many on their first day on Earth. It’s no wonder some infants who have been separated from their mother and placed with complete strangers scream for quite a long time. There is evidence in my mom’s adoption file that she required sedating medication to calm down. So sad.

If they are nothing else, adoptees are survivors – IF they make it to adulthood, even a little bit intact – though many exhibit behaviors that are self-harming. Many become victims of an effect similar to Stockholm Syndrome. This is a condition which causes hostages to display a psychological cooperation with their captors during captivity. Sadly, adoptive parents are a variety of captors. Adoptees must exhibit a fierce loyalty to their adoptive parents because their very survival is at stake.

Worth a few minutes to watch – Blake Gibbins, an adoptee, telling it like it is. “Kidnappers with pretty stories.” https://youtu.be/kvBHlrLuats

Trying To Do Better

Though fraught with its own challenges, Open Adoption is an attempt to do the process better by considering the needs of the adoptee and their original parents with equal compassion to the needs of the adopting couple.

Generally speaking, there will be a higher level of personal interaction among the parties. This interaction may take the form of letters, e-mails, photos, telephone calls and visits.

Some of the pitfalls that may occur include an abuse of the trust that the original parents have placed on the assurances of the adopting couple. Interactions may lead to a variety of disappointments. When the adopting couple has invested in the unborn child, financially and emotionally, the original parents may feel obligated to go through with relinquishing the baby. If the adopting couple changes their mind shortly before or after the birth, it may place the child in a state of limbo and cause a referral to foster care.

In agreeing to an open adoption, the adopting couple may find the original family has greater expectations than they anticipated in agreeing to the situation. Within the extended birth family may be individuals who are not conventionally stable which may even be part of the reason the child was surrendered.

Some of the original justifications of closed adoptions have included fears that having duplicate mothers, fathers, grandparents and other extended family would make it more difficult for the child to assimilate into the new family unit. If contact between the original and adopting families ceases for whatever reason, the adoptee could be left feeling even more rejected than is commonly the experience for adopted children. There can be social complications for the child among their peers.

Identity and family history are the most important reason for open adoptions. Denying the child access to that information violates basic human rights. Adoption will never be the perfect circumstance for any child but trying to do it better does matter.

The Strange Case of the Ukrainian Adoptee

Not the child in this story.

She had traveled from Ukraine to the rolling hills and cornfields of Indiana, only to wind up on her own in a strange city. When police checked in with the girl in September 2014, it had been more than a year since she had seen or heard from her adoptive parents, who had changed her age from 11 to 22 on official documents and rented her an apartment before moving to Canada and leaving her behind.

This is strange enough but the story gets stranger from there.

The couple who abandoned the girl disagree about whether she actually was a child — or an adult pretending to be one. The mother, now divorced from her husband, claims that the adoption was a “scam” and that the girl was a diagnosed psychopath and sociopath, who had been an adult the entire time they knew her.

Her ex-husband tells a different story. As far as he was concerned, police said, the girl was a minor when they switched her age and left her behind in Lafayette Indiana. He also told detectives that his wife had counseled the girl to tell people that she was 22 if questioned, and to explain that she just looked young.

The family had adopted the disabled girl from Ukraine in 2010 and she came to live with them and their three sons in their cozy suburban home north of Indianapolis. The girl would later tell detectives that a different adoptive family had initially brought her to the United States in 2008. Though no details are provided in the police affidavit, there were apparently complications, because the couple in this story adopted her two years later.

The girl’s actual age was difficult to establish from the beginning. In an Indiana probate court, they adoptive parents legally changed their daughter’s age from 11 to 22 and provided a letter that purportedly came from a doctor who said that the date on the girl’s birth certificate was “clearly inaccurate,” since she had both the teeth and the secondary sex characteristics of a grown adult.

The girl had been committed to a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with sociopathic personality disorder in 2012, and, around that time, started to admit that she was over 18. Determining her true age was difficult, the letter states, because records provided by Ukrainian officials were “grossly incomplete” and her condition, spondyloepiphyseal dysplasia congenita (dwarfism), meant that the typical assessments weren’t helpful.

When her adoptive parents rented her an apartment in downtown Lafayette Indiana, she knew no one else there. What happened next is unclear. It is said that the girl’s neighbors “took her under their wing.” In May 2014, less than a year after her adoptive parents left her alone in the apartment, she was evicted for not paying her rent.

In September 2014, the Tippecanoe County Sheriff’s Office tracked down the adoptive daughter, who would have been 12 or 13 at the time. Legally, she was considered to be well into her mid-twenties. Another five years passed before her adoptive parents were finally charged with neglect.

When another couple petitioned to become her guardians in 2016, the adoptive parents filed an objection. Two years later, the new couple changed their mind about the adoption, for reasons that weren’t specified. The adoptive parent’s petition was subsequently dismissed.

Stay tuned. Authorities have hinted that there could be even more strange details to come. “This is going to end up on a TV show,” an anonymous law enforcement official remarked.

There Can Be No Denying

Becoming adopted will never be a natural circumstance. There is a loss of security and certainty in having been adopted that cannot be prevented. For whatever reason, an adoptee has been torn away from those who gave themselves to that life.

There cannot be other than a sense of abandonment and rejection. And not knowing the reasons and causes only makes it worse. That is why closed adoptions are not good and yet, there are fears attached to open adoptions as well. A fear of intrusion and difficult people making difficult demands and confusion as to who holds the authority over one’s life.

Life is a hard school. There’s no denying that. Adoptees have to contend with some harsh realities, no matter how much those people who do care about them try to minimize the effects.

Some will crumble under the reality and some will find within their own self a strength that requires no one else. Some will find the way to make the most of a bad situation and some will fight and struggle against what is all the days of their life.

While every person born faces challenges, those faced by adoptees are an added layer of complication that only they can meet and must meet in their own personal efforts to somehow rise above.

Did The Child Need Another Home ?

It’s the end of the month of August. I didn’t know there was such a thing as “Child Support Awareness” but it is probably the most crucial issue in whether a child is raised by the couple who conceived them or adopted by people who have no genetic relationship to them.

Adoption has primarily served couples afflicted by infertility who have the financial ability to “buy” a child to fill their need. One can argue the semantics but that is what it comes down to.

What are the other situations in life where we cannot have something, so we feel entitled to take something belonging to someone else ? In the case of adoption, that something is a human infant.

If it were a car in a parking lot, it would absolutely be considered stealing to feel an entitlement to take it because one couldn’t obtain one any other way.

People who adopt want to feel good about adopting someone else’s baby. They justify this by saying things like “the child needed a home ANYWAY… they were giving the child away regardless …. someone else would have adopted if not me….”.

What if, instead of selling the baby of a struggling parent to wealthier people, society decided to support the parents in keeping and raising the child ? Many of the emotional and traumatic impacts of adoption would cease to exist. Adoption is a process in serious need of reforms.