A Need To Educate

The general consensus in society is that adoption is a good thing. I used to think that way too. Both of my parents were adoptees. Both of my sisters gave up children to adoption. Adoption was the most natural thing in Life to me.

Then, I learned the stories of my original grandparents and how sad and tragic the loss of their babies were for each of my grandmothers. I joined a large but private Facebook group that has been educating me about how it feels to be adopted and how it feels to lose one’s child to adoption. I have also read a lot of books about the subject from all perspectives EXCEPT why it is so wonderful for anyone to adopt a baby that was conceived and birthed by someone else.

The reason I don’t go “there” is that I no longer can claim that adoption is natural nor can I say to anyone that it is a good thing. Having my eyes opened up to many experiences of other people who have been adversely impacted by the practice of adoption and the methods employed by a profit motivated enterprise, I feel a duty and responsibility to shout my newest understandings out into the world.

Maybe I can save some other desperate young mother and her child from the all too common impacts that others have suffered due to a society that promotes the separation of mothers from their children one way or another.

If you who are reading this adopted with the best of intentions, I do understand your heart was in the right place and whatever damage has been done, it is done. Get counseling for yourself and your adopted child. If you are a mother permanently sad and depressed by what you did, I know you were doing the best you knew how to do at the time. Get yourself counseling and always be willing to meet your child face to face and find out the honest truth, so that each of you can heal.

If I help even one other person by sharing what I have learned, it will have been worth the effort . . .

Adoption and Overpopulation

While overpopulation is a valid concern, the two issues should never be interconnected. A prospective adoptive parent who believes adopting a child, rather than procreating, is solving the problem of overpopulation, has objectified the child.

A child is not an object.

The issue of AI is important to me. So consider this. What are the ethical concerns associated with our use of automated intelligence ? What if that AI has been taught to feel emotion ? It is non-organic. Yet, it has feelings. It is an object. Do we have an ethical responsibility to it ?

When an adoptee is treated as an object to solve a problem, it is the same consideration. And adoptees are so often denied their basic human rights.

Adopting a child to satisfy a personal mission unrelated to the welfare of the child is simply the wrong reason to do so.

Actually, adoption needs to end. Guardianship that supports the welfare of the child without stealing their identity from them is a better choice – and not for reasons of solving overpopulation. Every child deserves consideration and respect for their innate humanity.

Forbidden Words

One can be human and do really bad/evil things. This is a sad truth of reality and society. There is a sickness in men, sadly. It is as old as humankind and it takes what it wants whether the object of its passion is willing or not. We give that behavior names, rape, incest.

It becomes complicated when that bad behavior results in the conception of a child. In abortion language there is often an exception for this situation that allows a women to take away the physical memory embodied as a fetus and go on with her life. Of course, she will never forget regardless.

Some of these “results” end up being adopted. Some adoptees have such an unfortunate experience that they wish they had been aborted but not all adoptees feel that way. In fact, there is no one size fits all when it comes to adoption experiences.

Perpetrators are real people with real problems who do something that healthy people cannot justify. They may have stressors in their life. These may cause them to act out in inappropriate and inexcusable ways. Pretending that men who commit rape are born broken and inhuman takes away the responsibility they should still bear for their actions.

Anyone conceived in rape or incest must embrace their own inherent self-worth and insist upon their human rights. Know this – what any ancestor did whenever they did that whether it is directly related to a subsequent person or not – this is not who we are individually.

At one time, such an event would have labeled the result a bad seed with flawed genes. While it is true, we inherit much from our genetic foundation, we also have the free will to make of our own selves what we will.

The #MeToo movement is an effort to bring sexual violence out into the light of awareness so that we can begin to understand how such things happen and why such behavior is wrong and how all of us can do better.

This is not a blog for or against abortion. It is a plea to give all people, including adoptees regardless of their origin story, human rights – dignity, heritage, truth.

Blame

I recently read an essay about “blame” in adoption. Many adoptees struggle with the realities of their childhood. It is not only the adoptee or their original parents who suffer but the people who adopt these children sometimes suffer as well.

Adoptive parents may feel they should be able to take the grief of adoption away for their adopted child or may even wrongly believe they could have somehow prevented it in the first place.

When I met my nephew’s adoptive mother (who is a loving, caring and supportive person in his life), she expressed that she had had such feelings as well. Learning about my youngest sister’s reality, helped lessen her feelings of guilt.

I am able to see how in the case of all of the adoptions in my own family, thankfully, the outcomes have been good. We’ve been extraordinarily lucky that all of the people involved have been good people.

Goodness does not alleviate the suffering. It does not worsen the suffering and that is a kind of blessing under the various circumstances.

A Mother’s Love

This is my paternal grandmother later in life looking happy and sweet and loving as a person can be. Yesterday, it hit me quite deeply how much she actually cared.

My elbows were supported at the table where I sat working on my writing. I closed my eyes and put my hands together as if in prayer. My fingertips touching my nose, my thumbs touching my lips. With my face turned upward, I poured my feelings out to her. Thinking that somehow she would receive my feelings wherever it is that one goes when they leave their physical body.

“I love you, Dolores, for what you did for me. You may have hoped it would help your son someday but I am as close to that hope as it was possible to come. I am so deeply grateful that you cared about recording it in photos, with names. Without that effort on your part, I would not be whole today.”

To me, what she did was nothing short of a miracle and I recognized the importance of that act by a mother who lost her child for the rest of her life.

Thanks to how she named my dad, to a photo of her holding him in her lap on the front porch of a Salvation Army home in El Paso Texas, and the proximity with which she placed the head shot of my dad’s original father to that photo, along with the man’s name and the word “boyfriend”, I was able to do something I had thought impossible.

I am able to identify the man who impregnated my grandmother. He was married. He may have never known about my dad but she knew who the culprit was and recorded it for some future unveiling that she could never have imagined.

Ancestry had identified a cousin for me 8 months before I knew who this man was. That cousin did not respond to my inquiry for that long and when he did, based upon the “other” surnames I knew at the time I contacted him, he could not imagine how we might be related, though he accepted we must be. When I gave him the “new” name, he came back immediately – your grandfather was my grandmother’s brother. A perfect confirmation of the truth.

Why Older Men ?

And why were they both attracted to such older men ?

I think, because, they were motherless. As young twenty-somethings, they found men their age immature, too unaware of how serious life could be. Too full of optimism about the future, too unaware of how life can come crashing down upon one’s self.

But the older men, they knew. Yet, they dismissed these young women and their concerns as insignificant simply because they were so young.

Maybe it is that in having lost their mothers, the father became more important in their own life, even if he wasn’t able to be as nurturing as their mother would have been.

Somehow, I just don’t feel that the fact that they chose older men, who would end up fathering their child but not take responsibility for it, is insignificant.

Uprooted

As I tried to think of a title for today’s blog, the word “uprooted” came to my mind. In searching for images via google, I was amazed at both how powerful and universal the concept behind that word is.

What was on my mind is what happens to a young woman when her mother dies. She is only 11 years old. She has 4 younger siblings. My grandmother’s father, a sharecropper most likely working for his wealthy cousin who accumulated a lot of land, never remarried.

What does a mother do in a family? I got a taste of what it means to step in and become the substitute “mom” when my mother died and I was already over 60 years old. I wasn’t a child anymore.

In my birth family with no brothers, only sisters, my mom was the hub around which all the rest of us rotated. In my husband’s family with no sisters, only brothers, the mom was the strength of that family unit too.

Some of us as moms are the supply officer of the family. We make sure that everyone has what they need in the most basic ways – food to eat, clothes to wear, a comfortable home in which to spend our private lives together.

I know how intense it was for me to become “mom”, though only for a few months. I can’t imagine, given the lack of modern conveniences we have now, what it would have been like to take over the household duties at such a tender age, with no one to teach how it should be done. With a little brother only about a year old.

Somehow, my self-reliant grandmother must have simply pitched in to do what had to be done. That is pretty much how I did it too. I missed that my mom couldn’t explain to me how she was paying the bills. I ended up paying some twice. I got up to speed pretty quickly, I guess my grandmother did too.