January 3 is my Special Day. It is the anniversary of the day I was adopted. The day my parents bundled me up and brought me home to live in our red brick ranch house on West Chicago St. in a sprawling suburb just outside Detroit. As I grew up, I would hear the tale of this auspicious day time and time again. Sometimes even now, in my thirties, my parents like to retell it. Their eyes still shine with something expectant, something new.
We drove through the snow that morning to pick you up at the adoption agency. We were so excited. We’d been waiting so long for you; had prayed so hard. We held you in our arms. Your new brother made silly faces at you and you smiled and laughed at him. We took you home with us and our family was finally complete.
Although the Michigan court proceedings that legalized my adoption wouldn’t happen for another year and a half, my parents decided the January day they brought me home would be the symbolic day we celebrated our family making itself again each year.
I was told versions of the tale of my homecoming so many times over the years, it became somewhat like a myth. Perhaps the same way one’s birth story might feel mythical. And since this was the closest to a birth story anyone had to give me, it became part of the fabric of our family culture, like the storybook romance of my parents’ courtship that began with a canceled blind date in south St. Louis in 1963 and unfolded into their long prayed-for children arriving safely in their arms.
My brother had his own Special Day, having been adopted three years before me from a different family of origin. Our Special Day celebrations always included the retelling of the sweet tale of our arrivals, a small gift, and a special meal or dessert in our honor. I remember lovingly wrapped presents of longed-for books and shiny lip glosses, new CDs and all-you-can-eat dinners at the local Olive Garden. I liked feeling as though I had something akin to a second birthday. It made me feel different in a good way—like I got more than other kids to make up for the feeling that I somehow had less, or was missing something everyone else just naturally had.
At the same time, I felt acutely aware of how happy my mom and dad were on my Special Day, and how sometimes my feelings didn’t quite match up. Sometimes I would feel disconnected from the party, as if some other ghost girl were being celebrated as I watched. A girl who had one family that loved her, one family she belonged to, one name, one home, one story that began on that cozy January day and stretched on into happiness forever after. I would watch this girl celebrate with her family, watch them celebrate together, and I would feel hollow, empty in comparison. Eventually, as I grew into my teen years and my identity began shaping itself in part around this absence, I would come to an understanding that for my parents, my Special Day holds within its memory unbridled joy and relief—finally. But that for me, it holds something far more complicated.
*
Most mornings I sift through news stories from around the globe in search of content for an adoption news website I curate. As a result, I can safely tell you the majority of adoption-related news that doesn’t have to do with a celebrity adoption rarely makes it past small, local, or adoption-specific media platforms, or into the average person’s newsfeed on a regular basis. Yet this summer, when a five-year-old girl named Danielle had her adoption finalized in a Michigan courtroom, nine Disney princesses showed up to celebrate her, and a video of the joyous occasion went viral. Media outlets the likes of BuzzFeed, NBC, Refinery29, and Today.com ran the piece with headlines such as, “This Little Girl’s Adoption Hearing is a Real-Life Fairy Tale,” “Girl, 5, Gets Happily Ever After When Disney Princesses Surprise Her at Adoption Court Hearing,” and “Fairy-tale Ending as Disney Princesses Show Up for Adoption Hearing.”
I hesitated to watch the video. The all-too-familiar storyline linking adoption and fairy tales registered in my body as a flash of anxiety and exhaustion: Here we go again, I thought. But I clicked on it anyway and watched as a representative from the foster agency told us of Danielle’s obsession with Cinderella and everything Disney princess. My heart melted a little as I learned about the foster care workers who had arranged the elaborate surprise in an effort to make Danielle’s adoption day special. At the front of the courtroom next to Danielle sat her elated foster family of two years, for whom everything had lead up to this day in which they officially adopted Danielle, and another foster child, one-year-old Neveah, into their family. The anticipation in the room was electric as the judge offered Danielle the job of banging the gavel, symbolically sealing her own adoption, and the entire courtroom called out in unison, “It is so ordered!”
As the gavel crashed into its sounding block and a smiling, sweet-faced Danielle wobbled almost imperceptibly with the weight and force of it, I realized I’d been crying. The overwhelming sense of joy in the video, the love, the celebration of a family making itself, was beautiful. And, at the same time, I felt a familiar dull ache that often arrives as I watch adoptees at the center of someone else’s narrative.
I think what Danielle’s foster care workers and family did to make her day extra special was an incredibly loving gesture. And even though I can’t help but wonder what Danielle’s story is, what else she might have been feeling that day, or how she will come to think of that day in the future, what’s really troubling to me is why this video went viral when most adoption news goes quietly or not at all. What’s troubling to me is the particular brand of magic that Danielle’s story conjures for the rest of us.
There is no denying this video tugs at the heartstrings, but I believe it went viral for a very specific reason. With its fairy tale imagery and language, this video, and other sentimental representations of adoption, offer us the opportunity to further cement a narrative that we, in American society, have constructed over the last century and seem to need to believe in our individual and collective conscience: Adoption is a happy ending. Adoption is a win-win. Adoption is happily ever after. Unfortunately, this heartwarming narrative is a dangerous tale to tell and has far-reaching consequences.
The singular, unavoidable truth about adoption is that it requires the undoing of one family so that another one can come into being. And because of this, it is a practice, an institution, and a mode of family-making that is born of and begets trauma, loss, and grief. The fairy tale narrative of adoption denies adoptees the acknowledgement and support necessary to process their experiences across a lifetime. It delegitimizes the trauma of adoption loss and directly and indirectly influences the overwhelming statistics that show us adoptees are far more likely than the general population to struggle with trauma-related mental illness, suicide, and addiction.
By ignoring the complex reality of adoption, we are also corroborating a sentimental narrative that drives a billion-dollar, for-profit adoption industry whose sole purpose has been successfully shifted in modern American history from finding homes for children who legitimately need them, to supplying hopeful prospective parents with kids to call their own. The fairy tale narrative of adoption uncomplicates these truths and it lets us off the hook. It makes us feel good about each other and ourselves without having to face difficult complexities and integrate them into our understanding of not only what it means to be adopted, but also what it means to be human.
Inside the fairy tale, we don’t have to think about the darkness, the underbelly, or the unspeakable grief lying just below the surface of a child who has been severed from their home and family of origin. We don’t have to think about the countless pregnant people in the United States and across the globe who have been tricked, bribed, forced, and coerced into relinquishing their children or whose children are kidnapped and sold to agencies or intermediaries who stand to profit from their adoptions. Inside the fairy tale, we don’t have to think about all the first mothers and first families who would choose to keep their children or whose children might not have been unnecessarily or unjustly taken from them if they had access to the right kinds of support. The kinds of support that could be provided countless times over, both in the US and abroad, with the money currently invested in keeping the for-profit adoption industry and the child welfare industry in business.
So why do we love the adoption fairy tale so much? Most of us agree that modern day fairy tales have set us up for failure when it comes to beauty standards and romantic relationship expectations, but what about family-making?
*
I have the date of my Special Day tattooed on my left forearm along with the initials of the three first names I have been given—my birth name from my mother, a variation on her own mother’s name; my foster name from the people who cared for me in the interim; and my adoptive name from my parents, after the first American saint. Because people change children’s names, for a better fit, for a different life.
In my experience, most people that don’t know me well assume I inked my Special Day on my arm as a tribute to my adoption. A tribute to my forever family. To my happily ever after. Oh, how wonderful!, they exclaim smiling wide, knowing smiles. Except this is not at all why I wear the date on my arm. I wear it as a tribute to and an insistence on complexity. The complexity of a day that marks a beginning and an end, all at once. The beginning of my life with my adoptive family and the end of any possibility of returning to my family of origin. A family whose absence I felt as though my small body housed a haunting.
As a child, I never let on that I didn’t feel as excited as my parents did to celebrate my Special Day. This is a complicated hallmark of an adopted childhood. Adoptees often take on the emotional labor of holding our difficult feelings in places where no one can see them because we want to protect those around us from feeling hurt. There also often exists a very real and primal fear of further rejection. We understand we are loved and we understand love is tenuous, so we hide our feelings away because what if we didn’t? How will you feel? Will you be mad at me? Will you be hurt? Will you love me less? Will you send me back? I don’t want you to feel sad or think that I don’t love you, so I hold this hard truth. I hold it for you. I celebrate this day, in this way, for you.
In pictures of the day my parents brought me home from the adoption agency, I look like a baby. Utterly remarkable and yet not at all. In some pictures I look solemn, expressionless. In some I look happy, rosy-cheeked and smiling. There is no and every inference to be drawn as I sift through them, turn them over to see my mom’s handwriting, hold them up to the light. I can insert my adult feelings about this day into these pictures or not. I can choose how to narrate this story. I can tell a true story about a loving family that came to be. How long my parents had waited, had prayed. How they held me, finally. How I laughed at my brother because he made silly faces at me. How we went home together, forever. A family.
Twenty years later, although my parents (and consequently I) were told differently through agency records, I would find out that my eighteen-year-old mother had not wanted to give me up for adoption, but, like most original mothers, did not have the means to support me on her own and lived in a country unwilling to invest in helping single people, poor and working class people, people of color, queer people, immigrants, and young people keep their families sustainably intact. Though they were in love, my mother was not married to my seventeen-year-old father, and her family was Catholic. The answer was clear.
I was told her father made the decision that I would go away. A decision the family held against him for years afterward. A decision I believe I could see behind his eyes when he would try to look at me across a room or expanse of yard two decades later, after I found them.
I kept your newborn picture in my wallet for ten years or more, my mother’s younger sister tells me in a hotel bar. We always thought of you as The One That Got Away.
There is no record of the first five days of my life. I do not know if I was taken from my mother immediately or if we spent those last days together in the hospital. She was never able to speak of it during the time I knew her as an adult, before our reunion unraveled. Her sisters indicated to me they believed she no longer had access to these memories. That they had been too painful and she’d found somewhere to put them. I imagine a shoebox buried in the backyard of her parents’ home, the banks of the Detroit River eventually eroding, giving way, washing the memory of our time together into the tributaries and lakes that were the landscape of my childhood carrying on mere miles away.
The adoption agency placed me in a foster home on the fifth day, but my mother, not wanting to let me go, would come visit me. She asked her parents to take her there and they obliged. Once, she came alone. For two months, I lived in a stranger’s home without the person I’d come to know as intimately as one can. Except that sometimes she would come back for me. And then she would leave. And then she would come back. And then she would leave. As my body began to learn: this is what love is. Right up until that snowy January morning when I was taken to the adoption agency to meet my new parents and my new brother who made silly faces at me and I smiled. I laughed.
*
The late adoption scholar and activist, Reverend Keith C. Griffith, once said, “Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful.” I come across this quote time and time again, more than any other, in the online adoptee and first mother communities. It is so often quoted I think, because it succinctly points to the glaring misconception, misrepresentation, and misalignment that exist between society’s narrative of adoption and our actual lived experiences as adopted people and first families. There is such a gulf, such a divide, and one that is valiantly defended by society’s deep need to believe a singular, uncomplicated truth about adoption, that those of us who have experienced the interior of an adopted life often feel completely erased and utterly silenced.
Society’s narrative of adoption tells adoptees, in no uncertain terms, if we were given to a loving home, we shouldn’t feel this pain, this chasm, this rip, this tear. We were saved, after all. We’re so much better off. We’re the lucky ones. Our parents must be such wonderful people. We must feel so grateful. How lucky. How special. We were meant to be together. Everything worked out just the way it was supposed to in the end.
It is here—in everyday encounters, in saccharine and reductive media representations, and even in our adoptive families—where adoptees are expected to embody the fairy tale narrative of adoption. A hopeful, well-intentioned narrative, but one that is historically steeped in white saviorhood and colonialism. One in which people with more financial resources, social capital, and most often racial privilege, feel entitled to the children of those with less privilege, opportunity, and support. And we have accepted this not only as an unquestionable good, but also as the best possible outcome.
But what exactly is being measured when weighing this out? Are we certain a child will be “better off” living with the irreparable wound of parental separation and more financial resources than with a low-income or working class parent in their family of origin? Certainly socioeconomic status is often a clear indicator of one’s opportunities in life, but what’s the trade off? I have often wondered what our lives would have looked like had my mother and father made the decision to strike out on their own and raise me. And I wonder too how much of our future might have been determined by the biases that are alive in these very same assumptions. Am I better off? Am I lucky? The truth is, we will never know. And this, too, is a loss.
*
I found my original family in my early twenties and for the last fifteen years, I have experienced wild anxiety, deep joy, profound grief, complex gratitude, rage, fear, alienation, belonging, contentment. I have made primal noises and shapes alone on the floor of a studio apartment when my mother stopped answering my letters after two and a half years of knowing her. I have gotten to watch new siblings grow into stunningly kind, caring, creative, bold, and generous young adults. And I recently reconnected again with my original father for the first time in nearly ten years. Perhaps it will be different this time. Perhaps it will stick. I hope so.
Three years ago I met my original grandmother and three aunts on my father’s side for the first time. I stood barefoot on a cold, tiled kitchen floor during a sweltering Southeastern Michigan heat wave, surrounded by four brazen women who looked and laughed and cursed just like me. I stood there in that kitchen as my grandmother tearfully handed me a jewelry box containing a pair of delicate earrings, tiny gold hoops with sparkling lavender gems—a family heirloom. I stood there as they apologized for not knowing about me. Apologized that I’d been a secret. Apologized for whom?
We didn’t know, they said to me. If we’d known, we would have kept you. We would have raised you ourselves.
In that moment, I felt wanted, I felt important, I felt loved beyond measure, and at the exact same time, another ghost girl was born. A girl who was raised by four strong, independent, take-no-shit, hilarious, hardworking women in a working-class town. She had one family and one name and one home and she knew where she belonged. I watched the ghost girl’s whole life unfold in that moment. I fell in love with her. And then I began the task of grieving her. I’m still grieving her. I’m not sure how to let her go.
*
Adoption loss is an ambiguous loss. While it changes shape over time, it is often life-long. It is without end. I have lost my entire family and yet, there are no bodies to bury, no socially acceptable ritual or process meant for me to understand this loss and how to live with it. My mother went on living, became someone else’s mother, while I lived my young life with only the presence of her absence and the fracturing unknown. Maybe she’s alive; maybe she’s dead. Maybe she loves me; maybe she has forgotten me. Maybe anything.
Even after reunion, if it is possible or desired, there are new losses, new lives, and new selves to grieve. Loss of this magnitude and with this kind of ambiguity most often does not simply resolve itself. Adoptees must learn how to live with it over time, yet we must do so in the face of society insisting we exude joy, gratitude, and luck. An insistence that often means the kind of support we need to manage our grief is either nonexistent or unavailable to us. Imagine for a moment, if we treated other losses this way. Imagine losing a loved one—tragically, unexpectedly—and then being expected to behave as though it was the best thing that ever happened to you.
We need a new adoption narrative. We need to ask ourselves why we have historically needed to perpetuate the sentimental fairy tale narrative of adoption that only serves to hurt those at the center of it and to support an industry in dire need of reconstruction. We need a narrative that can celebrate love and family-making, but which does not insist that adoption is always the best option. That in fact, it is often unnecessary and the most generous, altruistic thing we can possibly do is to help prevent another child and first family from having to live with a lifetime of loss and grief. We need a narrative that centers the voices of adopted people and can hold the complexity of our multiple and fractured truths. That can hold all of it. Because I think this is the reality of being adopted—holding these seemingly contradictory, disparate, complicated truths, in the same body, always. Holding deep grief and profound joy in the same breath. Holding love for one mother that does not negate the love for another mother. Belonging partly to one family or country or culture, partly to another, but maybe never feeling as though we belong to either. Feeling both wanted and unwanted, both chosen and abandoned. Wanting to belong here and wanting to go back there.
What if we, as a society, chose to hold all these truths at the same time, at the same pitch, without the need to push one out in favor of the other? How might our questions or actions or beliefs about adoption change? How might our ideas about loss change? About healing? About family?
*
Though we live on opposite sides of the country now, sometimes my parents and I are in the same place on January 3 and we celebrate my Special Day together. We still eat, we talk, we laugh, we remember. And at some point, later that day or the next, I mark it in my own way, privately, for me. I meditate, I cry, I go to nature—the ocean especially. The ocean rebalances me, stirs a kind of biological rhythm in my body, a point of origin. And the ocean is always bigger and stronger than whatever you bring to its shore. There is comfort in the humbling, in one’s own smallness.
This past January, after thirty-six Januaries, I finally told my parents that my Special Day means something very different for me than it does for them. Fear and shame and guilt licked at my heart as I opened my mouth to say the words. I still wanted to protect them. I wanted to protect them from me. But because the impulse to protect others from their own feelings about my adoption ignites resentment in me, a desire to be the one protected instead, I was cold and forceful in my telling. It’s the day I lost my family. Why would I want to celebrate that? This wasn’t the plan. I didn’t mean to, but this is what happened. I wasn’t prepared for the force with which a truth, held inside a body for thirty-six years, would emerge. I can still see the sadness in their eyes as they listened carefully and nodded, Yes, ok, we hear you.
I left their house later that day, the day before my Special Day, without saying much. I went to a friend’s place a few hours away, in a town I used to call home and didn’t return for a week. I felt guilty about how I handled it and I wasn’t ready yet to try again. The truth is, my parents and I haven’t always had an easy relationship. My unresolved childhood grief made for an angry, rebellious adolescence that left my parents at the end of their rope. When I came out of the closet at eighteen, it proved irreconcilable with their devout Catholicism and there were years of deep distance before we were able to find common ground again. When I found my original family, my parents acted threatened and scared and were unable to figure out a way to support me around it for many years. This is not a laundry list of anyone’s failings. This is complexity. This is a family.
*
Watching Danielle’s adoption hearing reminded me of how much I adore adoptees. How fierce, independent, resourceful, hard-loving, loyal, brilliant, and creative we are. Not in spite of, but alongside this grief we carry. How the first time I was ever in a room full of adoptees, I felt an atmospheric shift. I mean this in the planetary sense. I was never the same again. I had been given permission to be myself for the first time without having to navigate someone else’s need for my story to reflect a fairy tale ending.
This was when I began to dream in earnest about what it would be like for adoptees to exist in a world that understands the paradoxical experiences that we live. A world that does not insist on reducing us to cheerful assumptions and sentimental media representations. A world that accepts adoption not as an unquestionable, benevolent good, not as a fairy tale ending, but as an event that forever changes and complicates the lives of everyone involved. That when the gavel crashes into the sounding block, literally or symbolically, it is both a fracturing and a coming together, a severing and a multiplication, a derailment and a hope for the uncertain path ahead.
***
Image credits: feature image, image 2. All photographs provided courtesy of author.
58 responses
I didn’t read the byline until the end, but I knew this was your story as I read. It’s beautifully and necessarily told, and I hope it reaches those who need to read it, which is to say, all of us. Thank you for sharing your story, and for the work you do.
Thank you, Liz. Thank you.
you write very well and it has been amazing getting to know you
love
auntie B
Thank you for this. I was just talking this morning with a friend about our relationships with our kids’ birthparents. We both have young sons from open adoptions, and both have close (and complicated) relationships with the birth families. We were working to unpack how we simultaneously bear witness to the bp’s loss and grief, while celebrating the family the bp allowed us to have. It’s a messy complicated thing that non-adoptive parents don’t ever understand. I want to thank you for writing and sharing this, and also echo the cosmic shift you felt when being in a room full of adoptees. I had the same thing happen a few months ago when I ended up in a room full of like minded adoptive parents. This line of yours resonated 1000x: “I had been given permission to be myself for the first time without having to navigate someone else’s need for my story to reflect a fairy tale ending.” Most folks don’t like hearing about the realities of adoption, instead they want to me that I “saved a child” and spin yarns about how “lucky the child is” to have me. It’s not that simple, at all. Anyhow…thanks for this. It came on a day I needed to read it 🙂
Liz, thank you so much for writing this. This line knocked the wind out of me:
“Adoptees often take on the emotional labor of holding our difficult feelings in places where no one can see them because we want to protect those around us from feeling hurt. There also often exists a very real and primal fear of further rejection. We understand we are loved and we understand love is tenuous, so we hide our feelings away because what if we didn’t?”
My youngest sister is adopted, and she occasionally hints at pain and fears that she hasn’t previously been willing to discuss with me. I hope this article will start a dialogue when she’s ready someday; I want her to know that I recognize the grief she sometimes feels for a family she’s never met, even if I can’t comprehend it. My sister’s adoption was one of the best things that ever happened to my family, so it’s painful for me to acknowledge the complexity of the issue, but it’s also necessary. Thank you again for this thoughtful piece.
Hi Liz
I was an adoptee growing up in the 60s and am nearning completion of a memoir on my story of being “found” by my birth father at the age of 18. So many of the feelings and complexities in your article are in my memoir as well, so thanks for the validation. People dont understand the emotional pile of bricks adoption can bring, and articles like yours helps illuminate them so well. I grew up in the “closed” system, so for me, adoption was the big secret. Your article helped me understand that even in the open adoption system, where you grow up having you adoption celebrated, there are still enormous emotional challenges (that I was not fully aware of) given my own experience. Thanks for writing this incredibly well articulated and provacative piece that helped me uderstand my own challenges even deeper. Look forward to your memoir. Stephanie S.
As a fellow adoptee, in reunion for over 25 years, your words resonated deeply. Thank you for writing.
Wow .. your blog has nailed it! I couldn’t have said it better .. thank you from a fellow adoptee (intercountry). This is the truth of our lives and it’s wonderful to see fellow adoptees who can express it so succinctly without blame or judgement but just for what it is! Well done!
http://www.intercountryadopteevoices.com
Thank you for telling your story.
By far the best thing I’ve read concerning adoption. Thank you.
Thank you for expressing the complicated emotions of adoption and reunion, Liz. You’re a superb writer. As a first mom, you’ve help me understand my bio daughters complicated feelings. I feel understood and no longer alone since reading your story. It truly is an ambiguous, life-long loss.
Excellent descriptions of the life of adoptees. There are so many complicated feelings and issues to sort through which is an insane burden to ask of a newborn and child. Then on top of all that, be happy and grateful. And in my case, don’t ever talk about being adopted or your biological family because it shouldn’t matter, you’re with us now. SMH. Thanks for the brilliance, Liz.
Thank you for one of the best articles I have ever read describing the feelings and circumstances of adopted people. This will be a resource for many people for years to come.
I was filled with joy and pain as I read your story. It was beautifully written. I am a birth mother and I found my son 39 years ago. Everytime I see my grandchildren I am so grateful and thankful. The pain of loss, even after being reunited, never seems to completely go away.
I have read hundreds of books, blogs, posts and articles over the past 10 years as I have come out of my adoption fog. This sums it all up so eloquently. Not a condescending word. Not an accusatory tone. Just the truth. Well done and bravo!!
“Too soon oldt; too late shmart!” How I wish I had this knowledge available 55 years ago when we adopted our first child. I had read in Reader’s Digest a “Life in the United States” segment about a neighbor questioning his 8 year old neighbor about sporting a new bicycle. “It’s past Christmas, and you had a birthday two months ago — so, why do you have a new bike?” She replied, “Oh, I got it for my anniversary — ANYBODY can have birthdays, but only adopted kids have anniversaries.” My husband and I bought into the “specialness” and celebrated her (and later, our adopted son’s) “special day.” Truth be told, I think we may have, at times, gone overboard on their anniversaries, celebrating with special gifts and parties. We wanted them both to know how very special they were, and how much we loved them. We adopted our daughter from a different country which required the mother to keep her baby for a full month before surrendering her, at which time she was placed into foster care until she was 4 months old when they examined her reactions and responses and checked her for possible medical problems. When our daughter, as a teenager, discovered that her mother had given her up after a month, she was haunted by the thought of what she could have possibly done to make her “real” mother hate her so much as to give her away. She was a bright, engaging and gifted child, with an undercurrent we could not quite identify, even through psychiatric counseling. She told me years later that her rebellious behavior was her attempt to see if we would give up on her, too. I see now through your article the inward struggles she might have been experiencing about being different, special — as well as her struggles about who she was, and coming out to us when she was 20. She lived a troubled life, and at age 51 she gave up the struggle and committed suicide. I still hang on to the Mother’s Day card on which she wrote, “Thank your for never giving up on me. If you and Dad have taught me anything, you have taught me how to love.”
Im 61 and adopted as an infant. No fairytale ending here. Rollercoaster- yes. Reading this article left me raw. The thing that made me burst out crying was : The late adoption scholar and activist, Reverend Keith C. Griffith, once said, “Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful.†” Society’s narrative of adoption tells adoptees, in no uncertain terms, if we were given to a loving home, we shouldn’t feel this pain, this chasm, this rip, this tear. We were saved, after all. We’re so much better off. We’re the lucky ones. Our parents must be such wonderful people. We must feel so grateful. How lucky. How special. We were meant to be together. Everything worked out just the way it was supposed to in the end.” I was raised to be grateful for my family. I was and I AM—But I always felt i OWED my adoptive family my gratitude. And nothing I could do would be enough. Who I am is not enough to pay back the debt. Not even if I were perfect would it be enough. Being adopted is very hard.
I am a natural mother from the Baby Scoop Era, trying to reconnect with my 52 year old son. Your article is absolutely brilliant, educated me about the feelings of adoptees I had never even considered. Thank you.
This is a great piece -resonates loudly with me on so many levels. It made me want to send you something I wrote a few years back. When I dug it out, I realized I’ve inched forward just a tiny bit. (One step foward, two steps back?) Thank you so much for this. https://jayesbrain.wordpress.com/2013/04/29/my-birth-mother-was-a-princess-and-other-adoption-fantasies/
No, adoption is not a win-win situation. There is a buried primal wound around which the adopted child, the birth family and the adoptive family dance.
As an adoptive mother, this primal pain was apparent to me the first night we brought our 6 week old son home. He cried, and nothing I could do would soothe him. I cried too. For the 3rd time in 6 weeks he was being introduced to an alien environment in which he must survive.
In time, we all adjusted and bonded deeply. There was nothing in life that I wanted more than to be a mother. The years of childlessness that my husband and I had were trying. We wanted more than anything to be parents and have a family. My husband whistled as he put together baby beds and swings. He took cigars to work to share his joy with his co-workers.
I was overwhelmed, but in love.
For years we delighted in having this child, this family. I knew that our son was sensitive to being adopted. We told him as soon as he could understand, but he insisted that we not tell anyone else. I could see that he struggled with belonging, with feeling accepted. In hindsight I wonder if we had adopted more children his dilemma might have been easier for him.
As he grew older I noticed that he harbored a certain unexplainable hostility toward me. Then he married a woman and communication with us ended. We lost our son.
The pain and confusion into which this has thrown us is no less than that of birth parents who lose their children. We struggle with how to cope. I’ve joined Al Anon and am learning that life (and children) do not always turn out the way you expect and you have to just move on.
My question to adoptees is: is your hostility toward us warranted? Were we supposed to just leave you in the orphanage? No, I don’t expect you to be “gratefulâ€, but acknowledgement of us as decent human beings would help.
The loss that we experience is real. It is as if the primal abandonment wound of the adoptee is transferred to us, the now abandoned adoptive parents.
Perhaps the better approach would be for all of us to acknowledge the pain of adoption for all parties involved, including the adoptive parents. Forgive each other and carry on. This isn’t a fairly tale, this is life. We can bear the pain without blaming or alienating each other.
You open each door labeled “truth” and taking your reader in your arms, carry them over the threshold. Well done.
Thank you Liz for speaking for me so clearly. I am still struggling at age 63. 30 years of personal work and a spiritual practice are what kept me alive. More than anything I long for a life filled with people who are indelibly connected to me. ‘Would that feel like belonging? or is my ability to feel safe and part of a family what’s broken? So often, especially at holiday times I feel untethered in the vastness of people who seem to exist in groups and clusters, not knowing the entry code they all seem to possess.
One thing I have to add to your beautifully written piece is this: the oppression of being denied the civil right of knowing my story of origin, of being prevented by the government from seeing my original birth certificate (thankfully Illinois changed the law on that!) in favor of the ‘privacy’ of the adoptive parents. And what made that even more painful is that every single person who knew me, whether they felt compassion for my plight or not, was ok with that law, felt no need to protest that, to write a letter, sign a petition, nada. Another abandonment for 58 years.
Thank you again for writing this and helping to educate the world about our reality.
Just fuckin’ brilliant.
I wish everyone in the country could read this and grasp your hard truths.
As an adoptee, this is the best insight into our experience I have ever read. Thank you. I want to share this far and wide, post it on facebook, tell everyone about it. Yet, fear of seeming “ungrateful” and hurting my family’s feelings prevents me from doing so. 🙁
Thank you ! Absolutely amazing! You touched on it all ! I don’t even know how to express how deeply moved I was reading this . You just made this 46 yr old Adoptee feel so understood ! I can’t believe how perfect this was written . I want to read it again & again .
I always thought I would like to adopt a child out of foster care; after reading this article I no longer want to.
Thank you, thank you. I am a first mother who lost my daughter to adoption. This line of yours speaks so clearly, “Imagine for a moment, if we treated other losses this way. Imagine losing a loved one—tragically, unexpectedly—and then being expected to behave as though it was the best thing that ever happened to you.”
Both myself and my daughter (we have been reunited for 25 years) relate to this grief that society does not/will not recognize.
Thank you this was amazing ;-(
I’m truly an orphan now. My adoptive parents are both gone. I found my birth Mom a few years ago and she never wanted me. She said she “felt like the system failed her” when I found her. I wish I could pass this onto her and her kids but they all think I should be grateful that I was adopted. I’m still working on that.
A beautiful, heartfelt piece that pulls no punches. It should be posted on every pro-adoption site and publication around the world. Thank you.
You are so correct as to the perception vs reality of adoptions.
Child Welfare is the biggest scandal in our nation today. The feds pay states every time a child is placed in foster care, and if the child is adopted away from family, the state gets a nice bonus. In fact, states have adoption QUOTAS! What is the incentive for family preservation? ZILCH!
All you hear are children are adopted into a ‘loving home’. This thinking is a tragic, both for the adoptive parents and the child. The parents are strung along with the ‘happily ever after’ and the children are given the guilt trip, they should be grateful. No wonder the suicide rate is so high!
You should contact government officials with your story. There is a ‘family first act’ that seeks to reform the federal funding that requires foster care, but at this time, it has been tabled by the senate. There are too many in government that promote the fairy tale, including Hillary Clinton.
Perhaps redemption is a valuable framework for the adoption experience. The circumstances leading a person to place their child for adoption are often very difficult. The circumstances leading to dependency intervention are most often terrible. The complex factors that lead a single father in a developing country to hand his chronically ill one-year old son to a traveling aid worker are just about impossible for we in the U.S. to grasp. The systems that try to address these circumstances are limited and very often broken. Well intentioned people recognize these truths; however, the reality of a broken system shouldn’t stop us from attempting to redeem what we can. I’m saddened by the comment above from the reader that they will no longer consider foster adoption. If I’m walking along the beach and see a child drowning, I’m going to jump in to pull them out, not because I have a savior complex, but because they need saving. The reason they are in the ocean is irrelevant at that moment. Down the road, it may be wrong to demand that the child pulled from the water after experiencing the terror of near-drowning will remember the day as a happy one, but it’s also wrong to villainize the rescuer for trying.
I am not an adoptee… however I am going through and excruciating experience with “Child Protective Services.” I’ve seen the flowery savior-complex speech among those who adopt children and it is interesting to see it portrayed from your particular point of view. I feel in a poignant way for all those parents who have lost children they treasured, lost a part of their own soul, to a demanding, angry and corrupt agency that operates well outside not just the law, but common sense. They claim to be the only arbiters of what is in any and every child’s “best interest,” yet you have portrayed the the actual impact of those actions, and how its not all a fairy tale ending with charm, grace and poignant accuracy.
I keenly feel the pain in this article but I have problems with it too. There is so much bitterness and not one single word of love for her adoptive parents. I am not adopted but I am very grateful to my mother for everything she has ever done for me…. shouldn’t our first feeling be gratitude to our parents whether birth or adoptive? Obviously it is important to prevent unnecessary adoptions but Liz appears almost to blame her adoptive parents for the fact that her birth mother didn’t have the support she needed. I feel very sorry for her adoptive parents….they did their best to love her. She is hurt with their efforts to make her feel special. I look around the world at the neglect and abuse that children suffer and would count Liz among the lucky ones.
We are in the process of adopting the kiddo that we have been in the life of since she was 3 wks old. We have known her first mom since first mom was 15 yrs old. Way before our wee one even existed. First mom and our wee one moved into our home when wee one was 3 wks old and they had no place to go. We opened our home and lives to them both. First mom comes from a family with many many issues and layers of disfunction. After first mom and wee one lived with us for 7 mos, first mom was making positive changes in her life. We were so proud of her. Then first mom’S sister got out of prison and pulled first mom right back into drugs, alcohol and gang life. We were so sad and when we learned of the dangerous situations wee one was being put in because first mom took her into them, we called CPS. We did this with complete support from first mom’s parents. As a result first mom took wee one and moved out of our house. Within two weeks first mom was arrested and wee one was put on foster care. We had to get licensed to become wee ones foster parents, so in the time it took us to get our license we took first mom to all of her visits with the wee one while she was living in another foster home. When wee one moved to our home we still supported first mom with visits and more. We continued to support first mom and wee one after wee one left foster care and went back to first mom. But first mom was pregnant already when wee one went back. So just 3 months after wee one went back, her half sis was born. First mom gave that baby up at birth through private adoption. Within 6 months first mom was using drugs and alcohol again and at 7 mos and a day after wee ones 2nd bday first mom gave wee one back to us. A little over a year later wee one became our legal ward. We did this to keep her out of foster care. We had hoped first mom would get back on her feet and take wee one back. Now it’s over 4.5 yrs later. First mom has since made more unwise choices, but also some wise ones. We were there the day she married her now husband. We were also there the day the wee ones next sibling was born (on my birthday coincidentally). We see them all regularly. When first mom first married they talked about taking wee one back, but since have admitted they don’t know how to handle her disabilities due to first mom’S use of drugs and alcohol and during wee ones pregnancy. Wee one has issues when we spend time with her first mom and her half sibling. She doesn’t completely understand things. But we try to do our best. We are finally moving forward for adoption because it will help our wee one qualify for more assistance to aid her in the much needed treatments and therapies she needs to aid her because of her disabilities. We struggle with her needs sometimes, because they are challenging. We understand the complexities of the trauma and attachment issues our wee one has. But we are committed to making sure our wee one always knows who her first mom is. In fact she calls her “Mommy ____” and I’m called MOmma or just Mommy. She made this choice all on her own and wee ones first mom understand this. I just hope and pray we can always maintain this special family we have created. I’m praying more adoptive families, foster families and first families can build families like our complex multicultural, and multi race family has!! I personally am half Japanese, my hubby is definitely what he has labeled himself as “the pasty white guy” in our family, our bio kids look like me and our wee one is half white and half African American. But we love it!!!
Please keep writing about these issues!! I have way too many adoptive friends that don’t get why we work so hard to maintain a relationship with our wee ones first mom.
As a father of loss, I look to comments and clues as how to conduct myself for my daughter’s sake. I have my very strong feelings about the insensitivity for the rest of this world that wrought misguided notions and are content with separating mothers from their children.
I find adoption to be extremely self centered and not about the children, especially for those that adopt for filling a personal need they make a child sacrifice their own family for.
Rescuing a child that needs rescuing should not preclude there is only the child. The rescuer should not then feel free to take a child home and be content to keep a child……assuming a signature in place, a lost child in the ocean has no one wanting. A search is in then in order, for rescuing should not be the end. Adoption being a business, an impersonal affair dishonors a child, & family every where.
Even in an open adoption there is still a void where separation for mother and child exist. I would hope that a child would be safe from the power struggle two families impose on a child. I see that adoptive parents want their position recognized as if born to them as well. Their attachment being recognized as the same. A mother and child are of a special bond in womb and nature. That relationship is what needs to be encouraged, nurtured and celebrated first place. An adoptive parent might be the saving grace for a child, but that can then become the strings for which weight is attached. I wish no child would suffer the weight of adoption and all the ramifications that ensue no one can fix.
I am so sorry that you did not have access to a more enlightened form of education about your adoption. It was explained to us many times that there were many different emotions that an adopted child could feel. We understood the myth of “The Chosen Child.” both of our children were given room permission and encouragement to think to grieve and to explore. They both had very different reactions and experiences. Both went through therapy at different times of their lives both dealt with their issues and continue to. They are in their 30s now and will probably continue to think and grow.
The agencies and the people that we worked with educated And prepared us for this I wish you had had a similar experience.
As an adoptee, this perfectly summarized my frustrations surrounding adoption. Thank you so much for articulating what I’ve been struggling to say for years.
Thank you for this piece, which so beautifully articulates the complexities of adoption. I grew up as one of the biological kids in a family with both adopted and biological children. As a long-time observer, I find what what you describe so familiar. It’s hard for me to find people to talk to honestly about adoption, let alone for my adopted siblings. So, again, thank you.
I was adopted via a pre-birth arrangement, and grew up with the happy story of my birthparents “choosing us to be your Mommy and Daddy”, and photos of all four of them together, arms around shoulders, smiling, my birth mother big as a house. I’ve been edged out of discussions with other adoptees before, with the reasoning that I don’t *have* an adoption story because I didn’t have any time to know my birthparents. I didn’t go through foster, I wasn’t aware enough for my parents to ever be strangers to me. I supposedly have no conflicts, no loss. I’m 35, and for the first time in decades this piece is pulling on feelings I never really knew how to name.
I’d like to adopt, to help a child who needs a home… Is there no way to do it? I don’t want to rip a family apart…
You nailed it. What a fantastically written article that truly captures the paradoxical life that many adopted people cannot explain or even understand themselves. Loss is the consistently forgotten (ignored?) first brick in any adoption story. If that brick is denied to the adoptee where does their truth even begin?
Having a daughter through adoption, your blog makes me want to be the best I can for her, including recognizing and validating her feelings regardless if how they make me feel. Thank you for your honest words.
I am an adoptee born in 1971 and I I gave birth to one son, and I adopted 3,very soon to be four children through foster care.
If I know one thing that’s for sure each one of us adoptees have our own stories….
We have unique situations that led to adoption.
We have unique feelings about adoption and the circumstances that brought us to it.
Some of us don’t know anything other than what our adoptive families tell us , some of us know most or all of the story.
Regardless of the facts,one thing you say is true , it is a loss, a gain, An end and a beginning.
As an adoptive infant girl I was only told only the positives as you were almost word for word. As 40 something adult,giving birth to my only biological child I cannot imagine in a million years under any circumstances being capable of willingly giving him away at any age. As an adoptive parent of 3 soon to be four infants, I again have seen it from a different side.
I see the pain, grief, loss and pray that I can provide the support and understanding and resources they all need to live life and work through feelings in the healthiest way possible.
I pray that I can provide each child the support and understanding each child needs to process their feelings individually. Unlike my adoptive parents, I know each of their birth families. For each and every case I have heartfelt compassion for each first Mom and their individual reasons for their babies coming into state care.
I have attempted to keep communication open. For some, they simply can’t or won’t, for others, I have had lunchdates, updates, picture exchanges in various levels of contact.
I know these things can be fluid and can and will change over time.
My one true hope is that all 4 of my adoptive children know above all they were and are loved greatly by both First Moms and their families and their new adoptive families. That we love them, think about them all the time and want only good things for them. I am blessed to be able to share wonderful qualities about each First Mom and some members of their families. I understand why each mom could not or was not allowed to keep their child. I will be available for each of them to help make sense of how we became a family and how their first family was not able to stay together.
I personally am grateful to be adopted, regardless of the loss and other possible life that could have been. It will be up to each one of my children to make their own conclusions about their personal situations.
Regardless , I am grateful for each of them and my love for them is and always be unconditional.
As an adoptive parent myself, I can say that We also feel a sense of loss; not being able to have a birth child. There is loss on both ends. One has lost their birth family and the other feels a loss of not being able to conceive a birth child. No one owes any special thank to the other party. An adoptive parents make sacrifices just like a birth mother would to raise their children but sometimes feel that its not enough and that we need to go above and beyond so the child would accept us as “real” parents. It is important to acknowledge that.
This was a beautifully written and eye opening article. Thank you for sharing.
As a woman who is looking to adopt in a few years, I’d like to ask a question (and will take any adoptee’s opinion). Overall, would the best course of action be to encourage the child to talk about these feelings? How could this be encouraged (if they are not expressing) without pointing out that they “lost their birth family”? This may sound completely ignorant. I mean no disrespect, but rather want to learn from those who have experienced this.
This article ‘randomly’ popped up on my Facebook feed at the perfect time. I struggle to feel like I ‘have to’ spend time with and reassure my adoptive parents constantly even though I do not like them as people (parenting issues aside we have nothing in common and conversations with them are gossip about others which I’m not into). Yesterday I had a relationship changing conversation with them as my mom told me I ‘only hang out with them when I want something’ and in reality I only hang out with them to care for their feelings. It hurt beyond explanation and I am still greatly struggling but I know this is now the opening to let go of the ‘need’ to protect them.
So many of these comments above resonate with me. Knowing I’m not alone in the struggle to let go of ‘adoption guilt’ is extremely helpful and necessary, especially now, as a made decisions to protect myself going forward.
Thank you for the article. Thank you for support. And thank you for this outlet to release my common struggle.
Others have said it but I have to agree that you have done beautifully and summed up perfectly what my own adoption experience entails. I was adopted at birth in 1967 and our experiences mirror each other greatly. All I can say is thank you.
As a person who wants to know everything about adoption (in my country it’s very uncommon) I wonder how adoptees from open adoption era feel. What would THEY say? Maybe they are actually grateful that they have two families?
I myself I have been adopted and wrote down my experiences into a bookform. To grow up in the 70’s in a village in Belgium where people had never seen a black person is still one of the most traumatic experiences I ever went through. Basically I was a circus animal and was scare of the impact I produced on people as if I had to feel guilty of that.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015UHFJ2G/ref=r_soa_w_d
This is so beautifully written, poignant and clear. I’m a birthmom.
I am truly torn about this piece. While well written and presented, I find it still somewhat simplistic. I understand this perspective exists, I do not think it gives enough consideration to the perspective of the adoptive parents nor does it take into consideration how our society as a whole deals with the concept of adoption. First, any musing done by the adoptee about “how it might have been if I hadn’t been given up” is as much of a romanticized fantasy as the princesses who showed up in the courtroom. It is an alternate reality. Chances are the “4 strong women in the kitchen” were pure bravado – and would not have actually stepped up to take in their sisters’illegitimate child, (“the one that got away”) against the wishes of their father, at that particular time their lives. It’s all conjecture, hind-sight is 20/20. I wonder how many prospective adoptive parents this article will make revaluate whether or not they choose to open their hearts, homes and finances to a child in need of a place to go? A child who will look them in the eye some 20 years later and tell them they weren’t enough. I wonder how many pregnant women it will motivate to choose abortion over adoption in order to avoid creating a child who will never be happy in the world, or being a mother laden with guilt for having chosen not to keep their baby? I wonder how many children of drug addicted, poverty stricken, mentally ill mothers believe they would have actually been better served by being raised by those people of origin, rather than adopted into a family where they were loved and had a chance of succeeding in life? I wonder about the dynamic of children of surrogate mothers, and the surrogates themselves? I also think there’s a lot to be said for leading our society and culture back into the “It takes a village” mentality of child raising – so that so much emotional value is not placed upon the birth parents. I find the self absorption of the author to be off-putting and stereotypical of a generation that will continue to alienate itself from the world by virtue of the massive amount of need it has for attention, and acknowledgement of its pain, and specialness.
The comment below that suggests that the author needs to give more “consideration to the perspective of the APs” is precisely the dominant narrative that was addressed in the piece. Bravo to the author. This article is spot-on.
Thank you to Liz, and all who have commented here before me. I am grateful for each of your perspectives. Liz, I especially treasure your insights and have seen so many of these same feelings, fears, doubts and struggles present in our daughter over the years.
My husband and I have 5 biological children and are Legal Custodians of one more for the past 7.5 years. Though we began to parent her when she had just turned 7, and we have not done a legal adoption process as of yet, she is our daughter and I her most recent mother. Her first mother died of cancer at a young age of 37, when our daughter was 2.5 years old, and her first father stopped parenting her when she was 6.5, though she and her 15 year old brother were not removed from the home for 7 more montbs. He was with us just one year and then lived his senior year with their older sister (who was now 20) and her new 18 year old husband, before going off to college.
The older sister is the person who sought us out to take her siblings when their family life deteriorated. We had been family friends for 9 years. She was not comfortable with any of their relatives and by the time the relatives were informed the kids were well settled in with our family (their friends) and the court, thinking it would be temporary, saw no need to uproot them. Eighteen months later it was clear they could not return to tneir father and since our daughter had been with us so long and was doing so well the court (and the relatives, reluctantly) granted us full custody.
The older sister did not want us to adopt when first dad lost parental rights because she felt guilty about not raising her younger sister herself. But, though they enjoyed her regular weekend visits, her young husband felt they were not ready or equipped to parent her and they finally asked us to adopt.
Due to the increasingly difficult relationship with her (now transient) first dad, we opted to wait. Sadly, he has now passed away, 2 years ago this month, and tragically so has the older sister and her husband (3 days before first dad). Adopting then just seemed so insensitive so we have simply been allowing everyone time to begin processing all of the losses.
Now, two years latet, I feel like we need to adopt for her to have legal rights as our child, though it isn’t necessary in order to make her our child…, that happened in our hearts and lives after 18 months when we accepted permanent custody. We have been grapplung with the changing of her last name but finally may have concluded to give her both. I’m still not sure that is final. We don’t want to negate her identity, or change it, just make sure she and everyone else knows she has rights to us, her newest family members. So she can share any inheritance as well as medical benefits from 18-25 years old.
Our now 14 year old daughter once asked me why God didn’t have her born into our family if He wanted us to be her parents. I said that she could only be made from her first mom & dad, a special combination. He knew they would not be able to raise her for her entire childhood and He set us in place to share in her life & development. We are are (usually) honored and very thankful He picked us and in spite of our many mistakes we hope to do the job justice. We are all first-timers in this together.
Thank you to Liz, and all who have commented here before me. I am grateful for each of your perspectives. Liz, I especially treasure your insights and have seen so many of these same feelings, fears, doubts and struggles present in our daughter over the years.
My husband and I have 5 biological children and are Legal Custodians of one more for the past 7.5 years. Though we began to parent her when she had just turned 7, and we have not done a legal adoption process as of yet, she is our daughter and I her most recent mother. Her first mother died of cancer at a young age of 37, when our daughter was 2.5 years old, and her first father stopped parenting her when she was 6.5, though she and her 15 year old brother were not removed from the home for 7 more montbs. He was with us just one year and then lived his senior year with their older sister (who was now 20) and her new 18 year old husband, before going off to college.
The older sister is the person who sought us out to take her siblings when their family life deteriorated. We had been family friends for 9 years. She was not comfortable with any of their relatives and by the time the relatives were informed the kids were well settled in with our family (their friends) and the court, thinking it would be temporary, saw no need to uproot them. Eighteen months later it was clear they could not return to tneir father and since our daughter had been with us so long and was doing so well the court (and the relatives, reluctantly) granted us full custody.
The older sister did not want us to adopt when first dad lost parental rights because she felt guilty about not raising her younger sister herself. But, though they enjoyed her regular weekend visits, her young husband felt they were not ready or equipped to parent her and they finally asked us to adopt.
Due to the increasingly difficult relationship with her (now transient) first dad, we opted to wait. Sadly, he has now passed away, 2 years ago this month, and tragically so has the older sister and her husband (3 days before first dad). Adopting then just seemed so insensitive so we have simply been allowing everyone time to begin processing all of the losses.
Now, two years later, I feel like we need to adopt for her to have legal rights as our child, though it isn’t necessary in order to make her our child…, that happened in our hearts and lives after 18 months when we accepted permanent custody. We have been grappling with the changing of her last name but finally may have concluded to give her both. I’m still not sure that is final. We don’t want to negate her identity, or change it, just make sure she and everyone else knows she has rights to us, her newest family members. So she can share any inheritance as well as medical benefits from 18-25 years old.
Our now 14 year old daughter once asked me why God didn’t have her born into our family if He wanted us to be her parents. I said that she could only be made from her first mom & dad, a special combination. He knew they would not be able to raise her for her entire childhood and He set us in place to share in her life & development. We are are (usually) honored and very thankful He picked us and in spite of our many mistakes we hope to do the job justice. We are all first-timers in this together.
Leigh, to be honest, I find your comment pretty off-putting and stereotypical. Almost the whole discourse on adoption is catering to the feelings and interests of adoptive parents, the customers of the adoption industry.
And some of these adoptive parents, (not all, of course!!), when confronted with viewpoints different than your own, sulk and feel offended, continuing to alienating themselves from all sorts of reasonable people with their massive amount of need they have for attention, and acknowledgement of their entitlement, and specialness.
There’s an easy antidote to such ignorance: When you want to learn how it feels to be African American, you ask African Americans, not white people. When you want to learn how it feels to LGBTQ, you ask LGBTQ people, not straight ones. And when you want to know how it feels to be adopted, you ask adoptees, not adoptive parents. Plain and simple. This is how grown ups find out how the world works beyond their filter bubbles.
Recommended reading: “Five reasons why you need to stop talking about adoption: Adoption is an emotive topic and there are a range of views in this space. However, I question how people’s perceptions of adoption are being shaped. Consistently, it is the views and opinions of non-adoptees, who commonly occupy privileged positions of power, that are canvassed rather than the adoptee. On that note, here are my 5 reasons why you need to stop talking about adoption and listen to the voice of adoptees.”
Educate yourself here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/5-reasons-why-you-need-to-stop-talking-about-adoption_us_573b9c00e4b0084474945366
Further, you employ the typical, boring, worn out stereotypes of “adoption vs. abortion” – like there would be no other option, like guardianship that actually respects the original identity of the child or creating a social net that allows low-income mothers to keep their families. One could argue that your comment displays a certain class prejudice.
You’re not alone in this, of course. We’re in this together. All of us have their own prejudices to fight against, and all of us are propagandized in one way or another:
“Here’s the reality. There aren’t a whole bunch of abandoned infants in tremendous need of cuddles or homes. There ARE a whole bunch of people wanting to adopt newborn infants and the demand far exceeds the supply. The reality is that these babies DO have loving mothers, or at least the majority do. The reality is that many of these relinquishments would probably not take place if the mother had just the tiniest bit of support, sometimes not even financial. Some diapers, formula, clothing and transportation.
Why are agencies making hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries, alone (donated money at that!), to facilitate separation of mother and child, while they could be using those resources to keep families together? Because adoption, in America, has become this great propaganda machine.”
http://musingsofabirthmom.com/2016/02/19/cuddle-nurture-newborns-awaiting-adoption-the-adoption-propaganda-machine/
And as I said, this is not about adoptees vs. adoptive parents. This is about reasonable/decent people vs. those who are not.
Take care.
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