Lying About The Family Relationship

It is hard to believe but it happens. Siblings will be raised in proximity to one another without knowing they are siblings.

In one such story, an adoptive parent had her child spending time with that child’s biological siblings who had been adopted by another family member but these children are not informed that they are siblings.

In another story, though not related to an adoption – a woman grew up playing with her sister as a child but not knowing that she was related to her. That reality was kept from her.

She goes on to share – “the anger and resentment I have toward my dad and her mom for trying to keep us apart for literally no reason than their own selfishness. I had to sneak and lie and use the pay phone at school to call her and pretend to be a friend of a friend to be able to talk to her to start building our relationship. I was 14 and she was 11. We are each other’s only sisters.”

These LIES bring anger and trauma when the truth finally comes out and in these modern times, it is easier than ever for that eventuality to occur. It really is hard imagine what these children will feel one day, knowing their parents had them play together as cousins, when they were really siblings.

Some adoptive parents take the perspective that they are the legitimate parent now, and the other kinship parents involved are the other kids parents now. They will each parent them the way they want. My parents were both adopted and I know that my dad’s way of coping with all of his unknowns was to sever any attachment to the original parents. As far as he was concerned, once adopted, you no longer belong to the original family. I have never agreed with his opinion about that but maybe it simply made things easier for him as two of his grandchildren (one with each of my two sisters) were surrendered to adoption. Hard to believe but true.

Those of us who understand with better clarity must keep planting seeds of awareness …. and keep trying …. and continue educating.

Income Inequality and the Pandemic

There are hopeful adoptive parents who are so self-absorbed that they view the economic hardships brought on by the shutdown of the country to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus as a silver lining potential blessing.

They are hoping that financially distressed single pregnant women may be more likely to chose to surrender their babies to adoption under the current circumstances. This is a sad truth of our often selfish times that such people would be thinking this way but apparently this is the truth.

Instead of feeling compassion for women in those situations, they are hoping and praying it leads to something they want. This is always the case with domestic infant adoption which is generally 100% selfish.

It’s not about finding a baby a home. These babies have families. 9 out of every 10 placements occur because of financial pressures. Hopeful/adoptive parents often like to believe every birth mom just didn’t want her kid. That’s rarely the case. It’s almost always as simple as a lack of money.

The truth is that these babies are highly in demand and sought after. That’s why it costs so much to adopt domestically, supply vs demand. It’s exactly why it often takes years for someone to adopt. There’s a shortage of these babies vs waiting hopeful adoptive parents.

During a global pandemic, hopeful adoptive parents are still begging for money via GoFundMe, YouCaring, and hitting their friends up to buy ridiculously overpriced t-shirts.

Domestic infant adoption is almost always a baby going from a poor family to a middle/upper class one. The foundation of adoption centers around privilege, and the lack of it. The haves vs the have nots.

These are facts. Hopeful adoptive parents and their WANTS drive the billion dollar a year adoption industry. It drives the manipulative and coercive tactics used in adoption. All for $$$. It’s all about money.

Parenting And Maturity

I’ve been known to say that I think Nature got it wrong to make us so fertile in youth and have that period of reproduction end so early in life. True, the body ages and there are impacts to that.

Yet, I find that men who are ready to become parents do a better job. Even when we are ready, as I was at 18, we may not really be mature enough to understand the difficulties of life well enough to avoid unfortunate outcomes.

When I became a mother at 19, I could lay down on the floor and color with crayons in a coloring book with my daughter. I also did foolish things like partying with her in tow and we are both fortunate she survived my immaturity.

When my husband and I had sons late in life (he was 48 and 52, I was 47 and 50), we definitely had the maturity to put our children’s interest ahead of selfish preferences on our part. I have seen that my husband has been an excellent father and will drop whatever instantly when one of his sons asks for his attention.

Me, not so much. I’ll also admit I have had less patience with what seems utterly un-necessary than I did when I was so young. I have more wisdom too – for which I am grateful. I do think the hardest thing for me as an older parent has been learning to let go of that instant urge that mothers develop in answering their infants cries and let my sons “wait” a little bit as they get older for gratification of their demands.

Health considerations certainly were not given enough weight when we decided to have children late in life. It was a shock to realize I will be 70 when my youngest son turns 20. And my body is changing in the ways that aging brings, though I do my best to maintain the best health I am capable of.

For my second husband, he waited until we had been married 10 years to decide he wanted to have children. By then, we needed a lot of help and thankfully medical advances gave us enough to succeed. My husband needed to feel financially secure before he could commit to parenting. It was in 2001 and 2004 that our sons were born and our business was thriving then. Along came 2008 and the financial collapse and we’ve yet to recover. We have tightened our belts as much as we can as we have had to. We do worry about our future ability to adequately support this still young family (our sons as 15-1/2 and 19).

I suppose we have good management skills and we do about as well as most people in the parenting skills department.

It Is NOT God’s Plan

Many Christian couples who struggle with infertility begin to believe somehow that this signals God’s desire that they adopt someone else’s newborn baby. This baby is not a blank slate. Newborn or infant adoption is not mostly trauma-free simply because this human being is pre-verbal.

I don’t believe for a minute that God is deliberately punishing you by causing you to become pregnant under difficult circumstances only to hand your baby over to complete strangers and then more or less throw you away (forget you ever existed or mattered).

What is actually selfish ? Saying that giving a child up for adoption is the most selfless thing someone can do is flawed logic. Does that mean biological mothers who keep their infants are selfish for keeping them ? It is selfish not to give your precious baby to the more privileged minority of people who have much better financial resources to parent with ? If that logic were true, then all biological parents would give their children to someone else to parent, since it is selfless towards the child to keep them when someone else has greater resources.

Using God to take away someone else’s baby is exploiting a vulnerable person and trying to use any belief in God they might have to coerce them to YOUR will. This is not God’s will, this is you trying to use God for your own purposes.

I will never be able to get behind the idea that God got the wombs mixed up when he gave a baby to their mother. God didn’t give a little baby to one mother for her and her baby to go through the rest of their lives with trauma simply to “heal the infertile wounds” of another couple.

It just doesn’t work that way but Christian couples are very prone to use their religion to justify taking a baby away from a vulnerable mother.