When The Name Is The Abuser’s

When the name we carry is also that of an abuser – today’s story (not mine).

I know changing names during adoption is typically a no, however I’m curious about opinions in this circumstance. I’m adopting my niece and nephews. The oldest’s (age 4) middle name is after his natural dad, and a man his dad claims as his dad. (In reality, it’s just an older man they befriended.) Both of those men being the main 2 abusers. In every kind of way. My middle name is technically after my grandpa, who abused me, and I’ve always wanted it changed, which is where this is coming from. I want to make certain that I’m not just projecting my own feelings, which I admit is possible. This case has been extremely triggering, given my past. Do you think in this circumstance that changing his middle name would be beneficial ?

One adoptee responded – My gut reaction is that this about you and your dislike for your own middle name (I’d encourage you to change it, btw). Have you asked the child ? My first thought is that you should keep the name the same for right now, while this transition is being made and because it’s his middle name, it doesn’t have the impact of a first name. Hold space for those two kids and see what comes up.

From another adoptee – His middle name is his choice. Period. Get the child in therapy and let him discuss his trauma and triggers. If his middle name ends up being a trigger for him, then have an open conversation about it. Leave your trauma at the door, when it comes to having an open conversation about his trauma. If changing your name will help you feel more comfortable, you should 100% do that !

From an adoptee (who changed their name as an adult) – you’re projecting. You should change your name for you, and you should wait to let kiddo change his name (or not) for him. I like the name I share with an abuser. It’s my name. When I changed my name as an adult, I kept the portion I shared with the abuser. My whole childhood adults pressured/“offered” to change my last name because of who I shared it with and I’m thankful I always felt brave enough to say no.

This person adds – Not wanting to share the name of an abuser is 100% valid, but it’s not the universal viewpoint. It’s totally possible in time that nephew may want to change his name, and it’s also possible that he won’t but you don’t know now. Also having changed my name has caused me significantly more extra work than I thought it would. I have to bring the court doc when I travel internationally, I have to list my old name as a “previous alias” when I apply for rentals, and I’ve struggled to get old documents because my ID doesn’t match their version. This is a much smaller reason than not fucking with someone’s identity, but I don’t think anyone should get to choose this for someone else who didn’t consent.

This one who is a foster/adoptive parent, and also shares that she was rescued from hopeful adoptive parents when she was pregnant at 17, says – I am allowed to share that both my sons (as they have requested to be called) have changed their names but differently and for different reasons. We made sure they discussed it with their therapist and reassured them that what they choose has no baring on the love and care we will give them (including whether or not they want to someday contact their biological family. Or how they want their Fostering/Guardianship/Adoption handled). Our only rule is, while they are allowed to express themselves and what they want to do, they absolutely may NOT attack their sibling for choosing a different path. Each journey is traumatic and will be handled by different people differently. We also reassured them they can always change their minds without judgement (But I won’t pay for another name change till after 18). Unfortunately, your nephew is not old enough to make these decisions for himself. And there lies the difficulty. In almost all cases, I do NOT suggest changing their name and do suggest waiting till they are older to decide for themselves. I will admit that I make exception for Sexual Abuse or Attempted Murder victims. I am a sexual abuse victim myself and my Dead Name is as it is called…Dead to me.

Never Ending Grief

Today’s story from an adoptee – Today I was told my biological half brother, who has been the most communicative of my first family, has terminal lung cancer. I’ve never met him, our younger brother or either of my sisters, in person. I do not have a good relationship with first mom and first father is deceased. I had knowledge this might be a possibility and thought I was okay. But I am grief stricken. I can not stop crying and left work today. My heart is broken for a brother I never got to have and now one that will never be. Suggestions for dealing with this grief are welcome. I probably should add I lost both my adoptive parents and brother already and a son to suicide 4.5 Yrs ago. This grief feels too much and never ending.

One respondent suggested – I’m sorry for his diagnosis. I’ve found writing a grief letter to be helpful to process thoughts and feelings. Let the feelings of grief come up within your body as you write.

Another suggested – I’m so very sorry for all of your losses- the pain must be massive. My heart aches for you. Please hang in there- the world needs your light. I would encourage you to reach out to your brother and prioritize meeting him as quickly as possible. Have the relationship you’re grieving. In the meantime, I would start keeping a journal (or a note on your phone) of all the things you think of to discuss with your brother. Maybe even write him a letter (that you don’t have to send) expressing the feelings you’re experiencing right now.

Another adoptee wrote – A grief counselor and therapist really helped me deal with the loss in my life. I don’t know if this is helpful but my therapist told me I have to grieve the life I will never have. For me, I will never have a family and once I can grieve and accept that fact, it will be easier to move forward and be clear on what I really want and need for my future. I know the circumstances are different in your case.

Another notes – I too have had so very many losses myself. It is a hard walk to travel through. I reach out when I’m feeling needy or I have feelings that are overwhelming before I am in what I call a crisis. For me it took time to learn how to do this (reaching out) and my triggers, what they are and which times I know I’m going to struggle the most – such as holidays, birthdays. I learned that it’s always up and down, and sometimes it can be easier by working on myself and embracing my journey.

Another adoptee wrote – Disenfranchised grief is real grief too. She also wrote – Virtual hug to you (cause physical hugs I can’t stand).

Living In Delusional LaLa Land

Delusions are beliefs that are held by many people based on inadequate information. Often, such people are resistant to rational arguments or evidence to the contrary. In other words, there are beliefs about adoption and adoptees that are based on incorrect information about the actual experience or even worst still, a bias based upon a profit motivated agenda. Adult adoptees are speaking loud and clear today about what their own experiences have been. From the all things adoption group that I am a part of, an adoptee (who is also a former foster care youth, former foster parent and a mother) expresses herself quite bluntly, but honestly –

So many assumptions, stereotypes about adoptees, and whataboutisms. I just wanna say that most of us have jobs, lives, relationships, children (or grandchildren!) of our own and plenty of other life obligations. Yet we are there to share with you our honest experiences.

Talking about your own adoption and adoption in general, when you’re a grown adult who has spent years and years in therapy, healing and growing, is A LOT of emotional labor for many adoptees. So, the adoptee posting this, doesn’t care about nor does she want to hear opinions from adoptive parents. So, please don’t comment with some self righteous, “I am not like THOSE people” story.

In a space that is supposed to prioritize adoptee voices, adoptive or hopeful adoptive parents seem to want adoptees to hold their hand and coddle them, by sharing the adoptee’s own trauma. That group space is literally called “facing realities” for a reason. So many adoptive or hopeful adoptive parents are just living in a delusional lala land. That simply isn’t the reality for many of the adoptees who are there. If you find yourself is such a space – please be considerate of the reasons that adoptees are there.

What are those reasons ? Most of the adoptees that are there, are there, because they care about your children. Deeply. They don’t want more children sitting at a window wondering if their mom is going to come get them. They don’t want more children being told their feelings are wrong or that they should be grateful. They don’t want children to grow up and be treated like they are bad, when they finally start to come to terms with their feelings.

Adoptees are not in that kind of space to be there for adoptive parents. I say that respectfully. They are there for the kids. If you truly care about your children and want to learn, then pay attention and learn, when you encounter a space like that.

To any of the other adoptees and former foster youth that are there – please do prioritize yourself over any obviously self-centered people. Yes, it IS triggering to see the selfishness. YOU really do matter more. If you need to, take a day off. Start your preferred self-care ritual. Do not let selfish people drag you out of the happy place you’ve built for yourself. I see you. I’m proud of you. Your voice and feelings matter.

Grieving Many Times Over

Today, I share a piece by LINK>David B Bohl, who is an author, speaker and addiction & relinquishment consultant. It is titled On Grieving Many Times, And Many Times Over. I was attracted to this because yesterday was my deceased, adoptee mother’s birthday. I don’t suppose we ever get over the grief. I don’t think she ever got over the grief of never being able to communicate with her birth mother, who Tennessee told her in the early 1990s was already dead.

David writes his adoptive mother’s death was the fifth death of a parent he’d had to go through. He explains that he – hadn’t learned of the first two until much later after they’d occurred. The first one to go was my birth father, who died 32 years before I learned about it, the second one my birth mother whose death I did not learn of until 8 years after it happened (very similar to my own mom). Then there was my adoptive father 12 years ago, and now, Joan Audrey Bohl who died twice —first when the dementia robbed her of her mind and memory, subsequently rendering me a stranger when she would fail at times to remember who I was and why I was visiting. There she was another mom who had no idea I was her son. In those moments, in a most sinister coincidence, she was like my biological parents who relinquished me and existed in this world without any specific knowledge of me.

He wants us to understand “What all of this means to someone like me—a relinquishee and adoptee who now has two sets of deceased parents–is that I must face twice(?), five times(?) a yet-to-be determined amount(?) of grief and confusion. Add to that losing my adoptive mom to dementia, and there is plenty to process, a great deal of loss, and certainly much to grieve. I am, of course, not blaming any of my parents for dying or getting sick, and I’ve made peace with my biological parents for giving me up a 62 years ago. But it would be disingenuous to say that I am no longer affected by these losses and that my mother’s recent death doesn’t trigger some new layer of grief where all of those people who contributed to my existence must be acknowledged in how they shaped my life. And so, I think about mothers. The mother I knew and the mother I’ve never met. And then the mother I knew who no longer knew me. I think of fathers, the one who had never even met me, and the one who raised me and provided me with a life filled with opportunities. And I of course, as a father, I think about my children.”

When I try to talk about my own family, my youngest son says to me – you have a very complicated family. It is true. And it is true for adoptees as well. As I have learned who my original grandparents were and have made contact with that novel new experience of genetic relatives that never knew each other existed – it has actually given me a new sense of wholeness – while at the same time totally messing me up with the adoptive relatives and the feelings I have (and still have) and each of them. Very complicated indeed.

There is much more in his very worthwhile article – see the LINK.

We All Want To Feel Safe…

Safe by Kristin Brantley Poe<LINK

I was inspired by this adoption related painting to consider the concept of Safe. I found a related kind of article at LINK>Fostering Perspectives, an effort by the North Carolina Div of Social Services and their Family and Children’s Resource Program.

Safe can be defined as free from harm or hurt. So, feeling safe means you do not anticipate either harm or hurt, emotionally or physically. One emotion we often feel without consciously knowing it is the feeling of safety.

It’s likely you’re able to recall at least one time in your life when you didn’t feel safe. Do you remember what emotions you were experiencing when this happened? Several emotions often compete for attention during traumatic events like this. The author of the article writes – When I was feeling unsafe, I was scared and anxious, and my body just froze in place. My heart pounded and my mind was racing to figure out what was going to happen next. Because I was not in control of my body’s reaction, panic was closing in.

Your interest in adoption related topics including foster care and family preservation is probably why you read this blog. It is highly probable that you may have heard the expression “safety, permanence, and well-being” before. We use these terms to compartmentalize the vision we have for child’s welfare. Caring people want children to have a permanent family who will be there for them for the rest of their lives.

The concept of safety is always evolving. Historically, we may have thought of safety as simply being free from physical abuse, free from sexual abuse, free from emotional abuse, and free from neglect. This type of safety is a critical first step on the road to well-being. We can broaden our definition of safety to include the concept of feeling safe; a concept that is called psychological safety.

What research tells us is that permanency and general well-being alone are not enough. It matters if a child does not feel safe. To have the kind of a good quality childhood that allows the child to develop, grow and be well in all aspects, the child needs to have a feeling of psychological safety as well.

At every age in a child’s development there are things that help a child to feel safe. When they are very young it might be a pacifier, a special blanket, sucking their thumb, a stuffed toy, a loving caregiver, a kind word, a smile, a hug, or the act of either rocking back and forth or being rocked. As children grow older, a feeling of safety might take the form of a friendly voice on the telephone, a comfy pillow, a special meal, friends, clubs, a special location, spiritual beliefs, or books.

Unfortunately, some seek safety through unhealthy behaviors – over-eating food, getting drunk on alcohol and/or high on drugs.

One important thing to remember is that children who have experienced trauma may get a sense of safety from things we hardly ever think of being related to the concept – food being readily available to the child at all times might just help them feel safe from hunger. The comfortable temperature in a room might help them feel safe if they have experienced homelessness or inadequate shelter.

It can be surprising to learn that things we may believe should create the feeling of safety such as a comforting hug or a hot bath could actually cause a child who has been abused to feel terribly unsafe. Sights, sounds, smells, people, places, things, words, colors and even a child’s own feelings can become linked to trauma. Afterward, exposure to anything associated with the trauma can bring up intense and terrifying feelings. Often, these associations to a trauma will be completely unconscious.

This is why it can be challenging for non-related (genetically and biologically) caregivers to actually help. It could help to become a really good detective. Such an effort might help a child identify things that make them feel safe. It could also help eliminate or minimize the things that cause the child to feel unsafe.

All caring people should understand that just because a government agency has certified a foster/adoptive/kinship parent as “safe” (often meaning such obvious factors as having the right locks on doors, or that there are no criminals living in the home, and that family pets are up-to-date on their rabies shots) does not mean that a child moving into this home will feel safe. In fact, what government agencies define as a “safe home” has very little to do with a child placed there feeling safe.

“If your (adoptive) parents or foster parents go on and on about what happened a long time ago, that’s kind of putting you down and not really making you happy.”
~ Angel, age 13

Why ?

*** TRIGGER WARNING

I know these things happen but still my brain cannot wrap itself around the idea that an adopted girl as young as 3 has been sexually molested – her behaviors graphically illustrate that it is the reality. My heart hurts just trying to think about it.

One recommendation is related to Sex Ed Rescue – finding a better way to talk to your child about sex. Cath Hakanson is the person behind Sex Ed Rescue. She is an Australian and a qualified sexual health nurse, author and speaker. She believes that kids need help to thrive in this sexualized world. Sex Ed Rescue can help parents with … giving age-appropriate answers to tricky questions about sex, starting conversations that feel natural and guided by your personal values as well as becoming an ask-able parent.

There was a warning about virtual therapy places (specifically mentioned Better Help). They don’t all vet their “therapists”. There are horror stories out there of people being paired with people who outright say they aren’t licensed. I’ve seen people say they were matched with open white supremacists, counselors who were just telling them to leave their spouses over trivial arguments, and even therapists who were doing sessions while buying groceries – meaning that anybody in the store could hear your personal issues–a major HIPAA violation. The person went on to say – if you can find a legitimate virtual therapist it’s fine, but it would probably be difficult to find one willing to work with sexual assault victims virtually. She shares that when she was in foster care, she had to see a therapist and one of the topics that came up was child sexual abuse. One of the ways they questioned her was through games to make it more appropriate to what a child could understand. If a kid is old enough to just talk things out, virtual therapy would be great, but it would be increasingly difficult to be effective the younger the child is.

Tiffany Hamilton aka Never Alone Support was recommended. She is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of my step-father. She says that her goal is to provide this type of support to any victim who is seeking it. She says, “I want to help them where they are with whatever they need. This is my passion and my hope is that I can make a positive difference in the lives of sexual abuse victims and help to save them from a life of addiction, self-harm, and suicide. She has a podcast on Apple.

Most important – from an adoptive parent of children who have been sexually abused – I know that for a single parent, keeping her world and physical contacts limited is not easy but in my experience it is absolutely necessary. 4 years in for us and we’ve had a lot of progress with consistent therapy and boundaries.

I would be extremely cautions of any child or adult you leave her alone with, until you have some significant progress in these behaviors and she understands that it is not okay for others to touch her private area other than diaper changes. And also that she cannot touch others. I would also limit how many people can change her diapers. Children that have been sexually abused and have sexual behaviors are more likely to be abused again, and it’s more likely that someone close and trusted would abuse her. If she goes to daycare/school they need to have a designated person to change her, not just who ever is available. She needs to have healthy boundaries with others and a limited number of people who can have contact with her genital area for her care and hygiene.

Do not shame her for masturbating, it’s not something she has control over, but you want her to be safe – so be sure to keep her in the clothing that prevents her from inserting anything. But touching herself is an appropriate response with a child who has been sexually assaulted. Gentle redirection without shame is what you need. So don’t say “you can’t touch,” say “oh look at this toy! It is okay to redirect her to an appropriate activity that occupies her hands – “Let’s wash your hands and play with playdoh!” Gentle redirection, if she tries to have anyone else touch her. “It’s not appropriate for so and so to touch you there.” This is why it’s important to limit who can change/bathe her. She needs to know that only those people who are safe can touch her when they bathe/change her.

This is an extremely urgent need. Contact her pediatrician, see if they can expedite referrals. Also, DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. Keeping logs may help you find patterns in her behavior that can identify possible triggers, and could also identify abusers. For instance if she spends time with a family member and is sexually acting out every time following a visit that is a red flag. Contact your local children’s advocacy center and see if they can do a forensic interview. A forensic interview could identify the abuser and knowing the nature of the abuse could be helpful.

Sour Grapes

From my all things adoption group – an adoptee after reaching maturity should not have to deal with this in her adoptive mother but I have seen such bad behavior before in one of my adoptee relative’s adoptive mother as well. So sad.

How do you help someone you love, who is on the fence and struggling, come out of the adoption fog ? Or do you even try ? The person I am talking about is going to be my daughter-in-law in less than a month. We have become close and she is great. She is only 20 years old. I’ll call her T.

T expressed to me that she was curious but scared to reach out to her birth mother. She eventually did so behind her adoptive mom’s back. Her adoptive dad has passed. She said her birth mother was very nice and she told T that she tried to make contact many times throughout the years but that the adoptive parents would block her and change their numbers. T told me she didn’t know who to believe because her adoptive mom said this was a lie. T asked me why would her adoptive mom lie and so, she tended to believe her adoptive mom over her birth mom. I gently asked her to think about who would be more motivated to lie about this.

Anyway when her adoptive mom found out that T was contacting her birth mom, she had a complete emotional breakdown and made T feel so bad. She even said maybe it was a big mistake even adopting her blah blah blah.

I met her adoptive mom last week at the bridal shower and she told me that she was totally fine with T meeting her birth mom but she would not let the birth mom emotionally abuse her with lies.

T has since blocked the birth mom on social media and says she is scared and creeped out. These situations have shoved her way back into the adoption fog. I’m so sad for her because I know that this is important for her mental health. She deals with a lot of anxiety and often struggles with her adoptive mom. T was adopted with 2 her biological sisters who also are struggling with anxiety and mental health.

What can I do with the most love to help her ? She has some leads on her biological dad but now says she is even more creeped out by him. Someone told her he may or may not have shot someone in the past. I wonder who she got that idea from?? Eye roll.

She is definitely afraid of getting in trouble with her adoptive mom (who is paying for the wedding). Her adoptive mom also helped her get a car, after T went back into the adoption fog in submission. Another Eye roll.

My own comment is simply – why do adoptive mothers behave this way once their adoptee is a grown person ? Clearly exerting financial leverage (I saw my mom’s adoptive mother do that with her). They had the child all to themselves all the child’s life. I saw this during a loved one’s (adoptee) wedding. Previously, I would never have thought that woman could be that way but . . . adoptive parents it seems also have their own triggers.

Often It Isn’t Intentional

Short again on time today. Seems to happen too often in this holiday season. Learned about a new “adoptee related” Facebook page today – The Healing Adoptee. Sharing some wise insight from there today.

There are lots of ways that humans experience loss. Most humans are allowed to grieve those losses. Those of us on the adoptee side of adoption have generally not been allowed to grieve the loss that we experienced in infancy and childhood.

Ungrieved loss causes trauma. When a person experiences trauma they develop coping mechanisms which generally are not healthy. One of these coping mechanisms is deflection. When we hear something that we don’t like the idea of (our self) having done (that) we will think, “No, I didn’t do that.” I know that I don’t like hearing that I hurt somebody else because it causes a loss to my sense of self respect, and how I want to present myself to the world at large.

When we use deflection immediately upon hearing that we caused somebody else pain it causes that person more pain, And then they lose respect for us. Me personally, I prefer to be respected by other people. Therefore when I was told recently, that I caused someone pain I took a few deep breaths and accepted that my words had been hurtful to that person, whether I intended those words to hurt or not. Having decided to use a coping skill of deep breathing instead of a coping mechanism, deflection, I saved my self-respect by not continuing to hurt the person that I had been having the conversation with.

I apologized for unintentionally using unhelpful coping mechanisms in my conversation with her. It would be nice to see the online adoptee circles benefit from taking a moment to stop when we feel as though someone else’s pain is triggering our grief, take some deep breath, recenter and move forward with the intention of being gentle with one another, by not maintaining the use of the deflection coping mechanisms.

Ending November

National Adoption Awareness Month can mean an adoptee feels heard. Or it can be an opportunity with the spotlight shining on adoption to discuss the trauma of being adopted. Some adoptees prefer to share what they feel are the positive things and people being adopted brought them. Every adoptee has a different story to tell but maybe the greatest relief is knowing there are others out there with the same experiences, that we are not alone. Less than 10 days left in this year’s adoption awareness month.

Mardi Link writes in the Traverse City Record Eagle on Nov 20 2022 – LINK> Happy National Adoption Month – “Being adopted isn’t just for babies, it doesn’t last for a single month and the brief burst of celebratory attention lavished on an institution designed to ‘save’ people like me feels jarring.”

She acknowledges – The press releases, celebrity baby adoption photo spreads and international infant rescue stories leave no space to narrate the lifelong complexity of a system which often provides adoptees with no agency over their own lives. For example, I’ve been on a 30-year mission to obtain every page of my medical, adoption, foster care and genealogical records. I’ve had some success at this mostly because I haven’t stopped asking after being told no.

Mardi notes – As a baby, I spent months in foster care before I was adopted. Somewhere, there are records and I want them. They’re mine. If National Adoption Month was really meant to raise awareness about the lifelong requirements of adoptees, the folks behind this celebration would have developed a mechanism for us to use to access our records.

She affirms – We’re also not going away. I’m still filing Freedom of Information Act requests on myself and I’m still writing polite letters. We have to be polite — we can’t ever appear angry or even conflicted about a system everyone else seems to celebrate.

This is the kind of reality that is an every day occurrence for adoptees – Last month, an Michigan Department of Health and Human Services adoption analyst responded to my latest inquiry with a copy of a typed telephone message delivered to the Children’s Aid Society in December of 1961. “Booth hospital telephoned to report Patricia delivered a baby girl at 8:15 a.m. Birth weight six pounds and seven ounces.” That baby was me. Until last month, I didn’t know what time I was born or what my birthweight was.

In my going nowhere efforts with the state of Virginia where my adoptee mom was born, that is the kind of information I would have liked to have received – the hospital’s name, the time my mom was mom, what she weighed. But alas, no. Not without a court order and that means an expensive legal representative and no guarantee of success. Sometimes, we just have to let some details be unresolved. Like why my grandfather abandoned my grandmother and baby mom. Like why my grandmother was sent away from her family in Tennessee to Virginia to give birth to my mom. When she left Tennessee and when she arrived in Virginia. Where she went to wait out her pregnancy until my mom was born. All I can do is make up stories.

Mardi ends her article with Happy National Adoption month. I question whether happy is the right word to attach to it – unless you are an adoptive parent who got what they wanted – someone else’s baby.

Why?

One of my newest and quickly a favorite, adoptee writers is Tony Corsentino. In this essay, LINK> Wtf Is Wrong with That? he shared the Tweet imaged above. He writes, “I took to Twitter in what might have looked like a fit of pique, though for once I wasn’t piqued.”

Every adopted person who searches for their biological parents could answer – why. His answer ? “I decided I needed to learn the identities of my biological parents because, after being diagnosed with cancer and, soon thereafter, becoming the father of two children, I realized that I was no longer content with telling doctors that I knew nothing about my medical history.” I remember those days myself and both of my adoptee parents could never tell medical professionals about their own medical history. This is one of those inconvenient truth about being adopted in a closed, sealed record type of adoption.

“All men by nature desire to know.” ~ Aristotle I certainly wanted to know, my mom certainly wanted to know, my dad claimed he didn’t. He cautioned my mom against opening a can of worms. I think he was afraid to know.

Tony notes that this knowledge is forbidden. Certainly, my mom tried and was forbidden to know by the state of Tennessee. Tony notes, “I decided, somewhat in the manner of Huckleberry Finn, that if I was courting damnation to do this thing, then so be it, let me be damned.” You have to love that spunk !!

I remember long ago learning not to ask questions but to let people tell me what they wanted me to know on their own initiative. Tony says, “Questions are not obnoxious or offensive in content, but as asked in particular contexts. Imagine being asked if you cheat on your partner, or why you don’t have children. If you and I are more or less strangers and I put those questions to you out of the blue, you would of course be right to protest that it is none of my bloody business.”

Tony suggests that “question intrudes on a zone of privacy that people should respect. There may be no knowing what pain lies underneath an adopted person’s relation to the decision to search, or not to. To ask the question could be a trigger. Compare this to ‘Why did you terminate your pregnancy?’ or, of course, ‘Why did you relinquish your child for adoption?’ Whole histories of hurt might have preceded, and culminated in, these decisions.”

He goes on to share his thoughts about justice and power –

He adds – “To the extent that severance causes such harms, and that discovering one’s genealogical identity can help (or even be essential) to assuage these harms, then we can give real content to the idea of needing to know our genealogical identities.” Then adds, “part of what I was suggesting in these tweets is that we must separate needing to know from deserving to know.” ie Normative ideas grounded in our overall picture of human dignity and freedom.

He concludes by saying “if people better understood how deeply adoptees like myself are committed to reclaiming our moral dignity, and how central to that dignity the question of knowing really is (and is it really that difficult to see?), then we would not need to practice so much forbearance.”

Tony did have more to say than I have shared. The link is at the beginning of this blog if you care to read it all.