A Difference In Perspective

Within adoption reform communities, there is a deep commitment and ongoing effort to do adoptive relationships in a manner that is focused on the well-being of the adopted child, who through no choice of their own is not with the parents who conceived nor the mother who gave birth to them.

So, here’s the story of two conflicting perspectives on “doing it right”.

My husband and I live in West Africa with our 5 children. We recently adopted twin 4 year old girls in December. These children were being raised by their single Aunt who could not take care of them any longer since she was also raising 6 additional children (her own and also from other siblings), so she surrendered them to an orphanage because their mother had nothing to do with them since they were 1 year old. Unfortunately, this is a pretty common scenario here in West Africa.

We talk often about their “first mom,” allow the twins to miss her and express sadness, assure them they are loved and wanted. We keep in contact with their Aunt and have recently developed an online relationship with their mother. I send pictures and video to their family several times a week so they are able to know how the twins are doing. The twins have been able to talk with their aunt, cousins, and mother on two occasions. My husband and I had hoped to keep this relationship alive so the girls always had a connection to their African family.

Recently I received very harsh criticism from an adult Native American adoptee who was adopted into a privileged white family at birth. She has no connection with her biological family and claims she has never had any questions about them because “her parents did it right.” She insisted that the way we are referring to their mother as “first mom” and the ongoing connection we are attempting to foster will create an identity crisis and undermine my parental authority as their adoptive mother. We are a Christian missionary family (as is she) and she also told me that she believes our behavior and language will cause them to question God and fall away from their faith because of the uncertainty we’ll cause. In her opinion, we need to “squash” the connection with their mother and start referring to her as “the woman who gave birth to you” and to me as your “only mom.” She was also concerned that the girls have “romanticized” their memories of their mom, making her seem better than she was to them.

There is so much attention now being paid to issues of racial inequality and identity that I am not surprised that the first comment was somewhat harsh but here goes –

You are the definition of white saviorism. The very fact that you are missionaries in another country trying to recruit locals to your culture and belief system is white colonization. I find it disgusting and harmful. As to your adoption, it’s sad for all those involved, especially for the twins.

And the original woman’s response –

I teach at an American Christian school for North American children who have parents living abroad either as missionaries, humanitarian workers, or for business. We actually do not interact with locals in the manner you are assuming. But, let me educate you on what happens here in West Africa to children whose parents cannot take care of them…. the lucky ones are given to “schools” that use these children as slaves, abuse them, and force them to beg on the streets for money usually shoeless and hungry. Others are taken out to remote villages and left to starve or sold as human sacrifices or into human trafficking. The fact that you make such a bold statement without knowing anything about what happens here just shows your own ignorance and first world privilege.

The criticism was gently affirmed by another woman –

What was brought up is a valid point. I think your heart is in the right place, but you should always be mindful of how your actions have potentially negatively affected your adopted daughters’ natural family.

In adoption reform circles, financial and other resource support for natural families and keeping children within their birth culture (which means ending transracial adoption, which is not the same is a mixed race family birthing mixed race children, to be clear on this point) is the direction that reformers are seeking in an effort to end the need for removing children from the biological and genetic families.

And finally, an adoptee shares –

As an adoptee ALL I wanted my entire childhood was to know who and where I came from. Since I had no answers I would make up stories about how my first mom was a famous actress etc etc. I found out later in life that many adoptees made up elaborate stories about their bio families. It was literally torturous to not know. I feel now that SO much was straight out stolen from me as a child. And for what purpose???

Since I had no answers about my own parents’ origins, I “made up” stories. My mom was half African-American – she was not. My dad was half Mexican – he was not. I would have preferred the reality and an opportunity to know those persons who I was genetically related to. My parent died without ever having that opportunity. Since I have recovered the knowledge of my genetic origins, I am thankful also to now know people I am actually related to by blood. It has healed to wholeness something that was previously broken within me – without denying the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins I knew as a child due solely to the adoptions of my parents.

After Terror, Come Babies

I’m not certain what this image conveys about what we teach our children. Like many people on this date, my thoughts return to 19 years ago and a photo we took of our 6-1/2 month old oldest son sitting next to a TV with the image of the Twin Towers burning real time. One of those iconic things one does in an attempt to capture a moment in history, which we instinctively knew it was.

So my thoughts turned this morning to the orphans of that event. These children are what comes after 9/11. Gabriel was born six days after the death of his father. They are the joy, the salve, the ointment. They’re the love.

“I could only imagine how much courage someone could have to go into a situation like that,” says Lauren, who was born less than three months after 9/11. Her father died after running into the South Tower to save others.

Ronald lost his dad at the Pentagon while his mother, Jacqueline, was five months pregnant with him. (She was working on the other side of the building during the attack.) A high school basketball player, today Ronald Jr. wears the number 33 on his jersey, the age his father was when he died. “I feel like my dad is watching me,” he says. “Every move I make, he’s here.”

Robyn was born seven weeks after her father died. She says the loss has given her a different perspective from her peers. “I’ve always been aware of the world. The world should be a place where it’s okay to be who you are, and to love whom you love and believe what you believe. Underneath, what we’re made up of is the same.”

Allison’s father was on Flight 11, traveling to be home for his daughter’s imminent birth – has learned that her sadness is also coupled with happiness. “There’s always an empty spot.”

Sadly, death is a part of life, no matter how that death happens. At this time, there is a lot of death all over the planet and the terror of never being certain if one will be infected with this virus and lose their own life to it.

Reclaiming The Adoption Story

Ashley Billings

I’ve been running behind on everything all week and today is no exception. Running out of time to do a blog today, I thought I would share Ashley’s own blog with you as she is an adoptee with her own story to share. I met her through this blog and I follow her own blog too.

In her “About” section, she writes that she is 17 years old and was adopted at five days old. She describes her adoptive family as the most amazing in the world. However, she also admits that being adopted has definitely brought up many issues and feelings. She says that she has found adoption is often told from parent’s and family’s perspective. Way too often, people don’t consider what the adoptee is feeling and going through. Most resources are geared towards parents and families.

She wants her readers to know – EVERYONE’S feelings are valid.

She wants other adoptees that find her to know that they are not taking this journey alone. She acknowledges that everyone’s story is unique. Her purpose in writing the blog is to reclaim the adoption story by voicing her own journey through adoption.

Her latest entry is titled My Perfect Life. She writes that while everything on the surface of her life appeared very good, it was weird to her how she was still so sad all the time. For her, discovering God through a friend has helped her continue forward with her life.

In another blog – I’m A Foster Aunt – she describes how she has struggled with a fear of being unwanted. Because she was given up for adoption, she always felt like, “Well, if my own mom didn’t want me before she knew me, why would anyone else?” Many adoptees have abandonment and rejection issues.

In What Is My Tattoo – she describes it as right under her ankle and is It is a heart and a triangle overlaid one another. To her represents the love between the child, birth family, and adoptive family during the adoption process. She says it is a constant reminder to her that no matter what she believe at any moment, love went into her adoption. She says “I know my adoptive family loves me, but often I question if my birth family does.”

Adoption is complicated and every triad is different. I can’t answer her question about her birth family but I sincerely hope that someday she knows the answer herself.

Losing My Grandparents

My Granny, My Dad and My Granddaddy

Both of my parents were adopted. So the grandparents I grew up with in my childhood were never actually related to me. They were influential though. The two people shown above often cared for me and my sisters over weekends. I think mostly to get us into their church, the Church of Christ, as contrasted with the church our mom was raising us in, the Episcopal church. My dad didn’t go to church at the time. He worked shift work in a refinery, often double shifts, and so was mostly asleep when he wasn’t at work, except for meals. Maybe he would watch a little TV or read a news magazine or the local paper.

My mom conceived me while she was still in high school and my dad had just started at the university out of town. I think these two people shown above made certain my dad quit his dreams of a higher education and married my mom and went to work to support his young family. Not that he didn’t want to marry my mom. They were married over 50 years until death did them part and they died only 4 months apart. My dad’s adoptive parents insisted I have a biblical name to save my damaged soul because of my illegitimate conception.

All of my grandparents had already died – and in fact my parents had already died as well – when I went in search of my original grandparents. Though I doubted I would ever know who my dad’s father was because his mother was unwed and he was given her maiden name at birth. I do now know who ALL 4 of my original grandparents were, their names and their ancestry. I didn’t expect, that in learning who my original grandparents were, I would in effect “lose” my grandparents (those people who adopted my own parents as infants).

But I did.

Though I know I have a “history” with these people who adopted and raised my parents, they no longer feel like my grandparents. And my true biological and genetic grandparents have taken their place in my heart and imagination, even though I have scant knowledge (but some) of these people whose genes are in me and helped create who I am at the level of physicality. I have connected with some cousins who share the same original grandparents and what I know of my original grandparents is thanks to anything they have shared with me about these people.

I don’t love the people who raised my parents any the less but they are so far back in my own past now. Though I had occasional interactions with them up until their deaths, as living people they are receding for me. They are fading . . .

My original grandparents didn’t lose my parents due to anything worse than poverty and a lack of family support. That doesn’t say much for my parents own original grandparents, who did not seem to care about my parents very much. I’ve only heard that my mom mattered to her dad, which was a happy surprise for me and quickly warmed my heart towards that man. My dad’s father probably never even knew he existed. His mom was self-reliant and he was a married man, so she just handled it alone.

It is strange. I was robbed of my original grandparents by the Great Depression, Georgia Tann and the Salvation Army. Both of my grandmothers eventually re-married. If they could have been sustained somehow, I know they would have raised their children because every indication is that they loved their babies and mourned their loss until they died.

Nothing makes up for these losses really but at least, I do know where I came from – which is more than my parents knew. They died completely ignorant of who their own original parents were. And that is very sad.

The Saddest Moment

One of the saddest things was a video of a brand new baby being presented to a woman, everyone in tears of happiness, excitedly saying, “the mother just signed away all rights!” I mean this is a video of the saddest moment of that baby’s life, and they truly don’t seem to have any awareness of that.

There sometimes seems to be a real disconnect. Adoptive parents in their ecstatic joy totally clueless about what is being done to the mother who just gave birth and what will be a lifelong sorrow not only for her but for that child as well.

It has become well-known that a fetus bonds with the woman carrying it in her womb during the 9 months of gestation. When it leaves the womb, this baby still knows its mother. A newborn infant is not a blank slate with no awareness or memories. That is what people thought for a long time and the well-meaning lie that was fed to prospective adoptive parents.

Georgia Tann who was involved in my own mother’s adoption in 1937 believed this and told her clients this was the reality but we now know that the baby knows differently. In desperation as she tried to work through the difficulties of obtaining financial resources as an abandoned mother (she was married, but her husband had left her, and her father refused to help her and my mom), my grandmother turned to the Porter-Leath Orphanage for TEMPORARY care of my mom. In doing this, she was being a responsible mother.

In doing this, she fell into a trap whereby she lost custody of my mother. After being pressured, exploited and coerced to give up her very valuable little white blond baby girl to the Tennessee Children’s Home, my grandmother was allowed one last visit with my mom who had not seen her own mother for some days/weeks.

The joy expressed in my little mother’s body at seeing her mother is something real to behold as she was only about 8 months old at that time. Throughout her life, my mom never stopped longing for the woman who gave birth to her. When she tried to make contact, she was told her mother had died some years before. My mom was devastated and heart-broken.

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).

Eye Of The Beholder

We need to talk to each other more. We each have a perspective but it is not the whole picture. We need to be able to hear the sadness, grief and anger. We need to be able to hear the needs and good intentions. We need to be able to hear the frustration of a young parent not receiving enough support to do what it is they were assigned to do when they conceived a child.

Perspective is everything but it need not be fixed in a rigid position. We can expand upon what we are able to understand by seeking to hear from those others with a different view on a situation.

Money tends to rule too much of what is considered the right perspective in this country. For too long, the rules have sided quite strongly with the perspective of those people with the money who desire for their position in the adoption triad to be inviolate. We’ve allowed the legal system to put up walls to deny 2/3s of the triad any kind of rights in the circumstances.

Maybe I don’t have all of the answers to how we go about providing for the welfare of children in our society but I do believe that denying people their right to know where they came from or what became of a child they gave birth to and then lost – often for no better reason than poverty – can’t be the best answer.

Adoptees are speaking out. Original parents who gave birth and then lost a child who is yet alive and living elsewhere are speaking out. And the motivations and needs for security by people who are investing their time and resources to provide a stable and secure home for a child should be heard as well – but not to the degree that we deny the needs of other two limbs of this triad of persons.

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.

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.