Privacy Issues

The sad truth is sexual abuse is way too common in society and it has always been so. That’s not to say we can’t all work to make things better and one of the ways we can make things better is to face the truth that it happens with an open heart and an understanding mind.

There are children removed from their natural parents when abuse is revealed. Some of these children end up adopted. Often if there are several siblings, they end up in a variety of homes.

Sometimes, enlightened adoptive parents become aware of how to reach these siblings who do not live in the home of the child they adopted.

A question sometimes arises, how to explain the cause of removal to the child they are parenting in an age-appropriate way. A complicating factor could be the perspectives and desires of other adoptive or foster care or extended family (as in where the natural parents have divorced and remarried another person) when they do not want to reveal what any person deserves to know.

I wish adults never foisted their sexual impulses on children. The reality is that it happens. The question is how to reduce the incidence by the revelations of truth. It may never be possible to end these horrendous acting outs on the part of some men but we can definitely make them less comfortable doing so.

The Lies That Bind

I finished reading this book yesterday evening. On Saturday, it absorbed my entire 4 hour writing session because I simply could not stop reading. That was the first time a book truly did that to me. It is a page turner, at least it was for me, because having been on my own journey to discover my family roots – I understood empathically the disappointments and the excitement of being on the hunt.

There are differences in our experiences. Laureen is an adoptee and she definitely offers a clear-eyed and honest expression of the issues that most adoptees face. It was easy for me to recognize the truth in these descriptions.

I am not an adoptee but what I have discovered is that as the child of two adoptees (and neither of my parents knew much at all about their origins or heritage when they died after 8 decades of life) I am almost as impacted by the issues adoptees face as the one who is adopted is. My situation has only been slightly better because I do know who my parents were but nothing beyond them until very recently.

There is a bittersweet aspect that I won’t give away but I do highly recommend the book – even if adoption has not impacted you. Why ? Because it is written so very clearly about why reform is needed in adoptionland – from the practice of placing children to the unsealing of adoption records in all 50 states. This is a situation with societal impacts which all people should care about.

When A Child Kills

Learning about these statistics fascinated me the way a car accident often fascinates us (in horror) as we pass by and are grateful we are safe.

Adoptees are 15 times more likely to commit parricide (kill one or both adoptive parents) than biologic children. Of the 500 estimated serial killers in U.S. history, 16 percent were adopted as children, while adoptees represent only 2 or 3 percent of the general population.

Dr. David Kirschner has been an expert witness in 20 homicide cases in which the accused was adopted, usually as an infant, or in early childhood. In every case of these adoptees who killed, he found a remarkably similar pattern, including a history of sealed original birth records, a childhood of secrets and lies (re: birth parents and genetic history), frustrated, blocked searches for birth parents, and untreated, festering adoption issues of loss, rejection, abandonment, identity, and dissociated (split-off) rage.

This sub-group of adopted killers who he has seen consistently had a strikingly similar fantasy of the birth mother: That she was an all-giving, all-loving, nurturing, wonderful, perfect being. He had expected to find conscious anger/rage directed at a malevolent, rejecting bad mother – but instead there was this paradox of an idyllic birth-mother-fantasy image. The anger and rage toward birth parents was there – but deeply repressed, often dissociated and cut off from consciousness, and ultimately acted-out with violence toward the adoptive parents or others. In these extreme cases, the split, false, secret self described by many adoption experts, had evolved into a more malignant, clinical Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple Personality Disorder).

Adoption has long been neglected by mental health experts, as well as the criminal justice system, in the search for causes of eruptions of extreme violence. Some adoptees believe that they have been conceived out of wedlock in the back seat of a car or by a prostitute. One adoptee who has written about her search for answers was conceived in an act of rape. Regardless of the sad circumstances that lead to a person’s birth and relinquishment – truth is always the best policy. In the absence of truth (due to sealed adoption records and changes in identity details) an adoptee and even their children are left to make up stories to fill the gaps in real information. I know that happened to me and within my own family.

Not every adoptee will suffer in the extreme this way but every adoptee deep inside has issues of abandonment and rejection. For this reason, I do believe we have to find a better way to care of children who need a stable home with loving, caring parental figures. No identity changes, no hidden familial truths. Honesty is the best policy going forward.

Not A Choice

Imagine. You are just born. Immediately, your tiny self is thrust into the chaos of foster care and/or adoption. You had no say in what was done to you.

Your newborn self wanted no one else in the world but the mother who carried you in her womb, who’s blood ran through your veins, who’s heartbeat was your lullaby as your neurons formed and connected. You wanted her. You cried for her. You experienced the rush of cortisol and adrenalin as your primal need was denied.

You did not sign up to be involved in adoption.

You did not volunteer to become an adoptee.

Those choices were made by others, and that was that. It is the common plight of all people, when they come into the world. Infants cannot dictate who cares for them – or the quality or lack of it that is administered. Infants cannot control where they are taken, what sort of environment they are raised in, or the people around them.

If you were adopted, when you are old enough, you can speak out about your feelings. You can speak about what you experienced, you can speak about the feelings you have had, the life you have known, and the pains you have felt. Tell your own truth honestly.

Find other adoptees, so that you know that you are not alone in having these feelings.

Do not be ashamed that once upon a time, you told other people that you were happy to have been adopted. You had nothing to compare it to.

Do not be ashamed, if you often cry in private. You carry a profound grief. Do not think it wrong to try and find your original family. If you are able to do that, the experience may (but that is never guaranteed, as people as very complex creatures) be healing. If nothing else, it will be the reality you were once denied. The truth of your origins.

You have my sincere compassion. I am not an adoptee but my family of birth is full of adoptees – for one reason or another. You truly are not alone.

Opioid Orphans

It is so sad that medications meant to relieve serious pain have become such a travesty that people who might benefit from them find it hard to receive a prescription. I understand the complication. I have been prescribed such medications and though I never became addicted, I could see the temptation and how the drug fixes itself upon the person.

I have experienced the awareness that my ex-husband overdosed and gratefully survived the experience. When he came home he told me his friend dumped him out at the emergency room. Not long after, that friend actually died of an overdose himself. His family lived next door to my in-laws and they quite obviously, and reasonably, distanced themselves from my ex at the time – though he was not at all responsible for his friend’s death. Parents have a hard time accepting such a hard truth at the time they lose their child.

Today, many grandparents will be forced to rescue their grandchildren after such an event. Fortunately, the death I described above was a person without children. Though perhaps a few years away from retirement, they find themselves full-time parents again. This is the collateral damage caused by the opioid crisis.

As the opioid epidemic has spread across the country, through all age, gender, race and economic categories, the number of children who have lost their parents to drugs—either to death by overdose, to jail, prison, homelessness or disability—has skyrocketed. Those children wind up in one of two places: either with relatives, or in an already overburdened foster care system. In 2015, the child welfare system saw a three-year national increase of more than 30,000 children entering foster care. That number is likely much higher now as the nation finally begins to face the truth and pharmaceutical companies are being held to account.

In West Virginia, the hardest hit state in the opioid crisis, the number of foster care children grew 24 percent from 2012-2016. The numbers escalate as the number of overdoses increase; they mirror the number of addicts in treatment programs, incarceration or living day-to-day on the streets. Babies are born addicted to opioids or other drugs. More often than not, addict parents, living or deceased, have made little or no provisions for the ongoing care of their children.

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

Owning The Truth

Regarding adoption, as one dives deeply into the practice, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that either you are OK taking someone else’s child – regardless of the pain it causes them – or you’re not OK with that.

At some level, it really is that simple. Some people can do that and function and some can’t fathom the thought.

Many adoptive parents make excuses. What if this ? Or what if that ? Or I did this ? Or I did that ?

Or even more honest and direct, if not me, what would happen to that child otherwise ?

But there are some adoptive parents who recognize and own their personal motives – I wanted kids and couldn’t have my own. It was about my need to experience motherhood.

It doesn’t make it a positive thing for the original mother or the adoptee but owning it is something. Many adoptive parents can’t bring themselves to accept that truth.

In case you misunderstand this – no one, absolutely no one, is advocating that children should ever remain in truly abusive situations. No one!

It’s Not Easy Being Adopted

“It’s not as easy as everyone thinks, growing up and never knowing the truth about yourself.” And it isn’t easy for the child of two adoptees because the feeling is the same – there is an emptiness, a void, a gap in the family history story and it hurts somehow in some deep place that is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t felt this.

Once the adoptee had her mother’s name, finding her turned out to be remarkably easy. Her mother’s first words to her daughter were: “I always thought you’d find me.” I believe this is what my maternal grandmother thought. However, for my mom and her mother, it never came to pass.

Some adoptive mothers will feel threatened by the relationship an adoptee begins to develop with their natural mother. The best outcome is for the child to be able to have a relationship with both mothers. Knowledge means no longer being troubled by unanswered questions. Feeling whole, having a past, a new peaceful tranquility with who one is.

Generally speaking, adoptees and birth mothers both have to suppress, in polite society, the feelings that are ripping them up inside. A natural mother who has relinquished her child is supposed to hide her grief and act like nothing is wrong – and especially TELL NO ONE.

The secrecy is suffocating. It is time for that to end.

Second Choice

It could be the worst thing about being adopted.

Everyone’s first choice is to pass their genes down to a biological child.

Even before I knew so deeply about all the complications of adoption, my husband and I considered adopting when he wanted to become a father (I had already become a mother at age 19). We rather quickly rejected the idea and never seriously pursued it. We chose a novel method that is not without its own complications now that DNA testing is so inexpensive and matching sites out the truth, at least privately between the affected individuals.

Adoption has often been the solution for a couple when their first choice died young and subsequent efforts to conceive have failed – known as secondary infertility. Whether the woman has previously had a successful pregnancy or never could, some of these couples decide to adopt when all else has failed for them.

Just last night in a Season 6 episode of The Simpsons about the conception of their youngest daughter, Maggie, Dr Hibbert says to Marge – a healthy baby can bring in $60,000. Yes, the comment did not passed but caught my attention.

Secrets

I think because my parents were both adoptees and I spent most of my life with no idea of my heritage or our family’s origins, I am particularly sensitive to the need to know. Most people take what they know about such things for granted. Adoptees are grateful when they are able to gain such information, since so very often they encounter only obstacles, sealed records, hidden identities and struggle with a lack of family medical history when they have unusual health challenges.

So I have gifted my husband and both of my sons with 23 and Me kits. I want them to have a clear and honest understanding of their own origins. For me personally, it isn’t the most comfortable situation but as my own family history indicates, it is important and I understand that.

Inexpensive DNA and the matching sites of 23 and Me as well as Ancestry do out family secrets now and even 20 years ago this was not an obvious risk to keeping secret children conceived in novel ways made possible by advances in reproductive science nor does it keep secret the relationships of adoptees to their true genetic relatives.

I think it is all for the good because genetics is now proving that DNA has more influence than previously believed. A book – Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are by Robert Plomin – makes a persuasive case for the primacy of genes over environment in shaping our individual personalities. The genetic influence is great even in areas we’d hitherto assumed were almost entirely environmental.

So, you may need to reconsider those “secrets” you thought possible to keep from your children because chances are, they will know the truth for themselves eventually and if they didn’t hear it from you, they will likely feel they were deceived.