Adopters and Hopeful Adopters. What Should They Know? - Guest Post

I love this adoptee community! 

I have been lucky enough to get to know, and regularly communicate with, so many of the unkept from all walks of life around the world. One of my favourite people lives in Canada, and we talk often about what's on our minds. Sometimes we make sense of it, but often we just rant, because we know that it's landing in a space of understanding. Our conversations always leave us both with things to consider, and I often tell her that I have a lot of time for the contents of her mind. 

I invited her to write some of it down for the blog, and I'm excited to say that she has done just that! 

I'll be releasing this in two parts, so here is part one... 

Over to you, Catherine Elle Mari …

I was asked not too long ago, what do I think Adopters, and hopeful adopters should know … This is a difficult, complicated subject to approach.

It involves people’s hopes and dreams. It deals with wants versus needs, with griefs real and often unacknowledged. It’s a delicate class 1.1 explosive, sensitive and liable to detonate under fairly mild conditions. It seems too much.

 I feel like it would be easier to assign reading and listening projects that are already available. My list would include: The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier, Journey into the Adopted Self by Betty Jean Lifton, various podcasts, especially those that host conversations with mental health experts who are also adopted individuals, Paul Sunderland’s talk on Adoption and Addiction, and any of the writings of adoptee advocate Barbara Sumner. I could go on. 

I’d like to simply suggest these resources, walk away, and hope for the best. The problem is that what those adopters and hopeful adopters would learn would not give them the happy love-conquers-all narrative that they so desperately want. And so I doubt that any would dive into that learning vortex. Call me cynical. That’s fine. I’m a member of Gen X after all. I feel like the only way for me to share all of my observations, feelings, and thoughts with adopting parents and hopeful adopters would be to copy the format of the song by Alanis Morisette, These are the Thoughts (that go through my head on a Sunday afternoon, lalalalalala…). But I fear that would just be a list that could be easily dismissed with statements I’ve heard so often before. “You sound so angry. Get some therapy and get over it. I know an adoptee, and they’re fine. You should just be grateful that at least someone wanted you. Why do you care where you come from? They didn’t want you. Should we just leave kids to die in orphanages? Maybe you should have just been aborted.” 

The litany of things said to adopted people who are willing to share their experiences is long and, more often than not, exceedingly unkind. They are also lazy, tone deaf, and frankly boring. Am I angry? Sure. At a system that shames and manipulates for the benefit of those with money and who are seen as worthy. Do I need therapy? Yes. And I am in therapy. Thank you for noticing that adopted people need therapy. That statement explains itself in a way the speakers never intended. You know an adoptee who is fine. What makes you think they would tell you how they really feel? So how do you know they’re fine? Also, people (at least interesting people) aren’t static automatons. They grow, learn, and sometimes they change their minds about things they once believed. Adopted people are allowed to change their minds, too. 

Being grateful for trauma is strange. Are others expected to be grateful for the loss of loved ones? As for being unwanted. Well, that’s a whole thing. But first, often we, as adopted people, were wanted by our mothers and members of our biological families. But they lacked support in various forms in order to keep us. So at least someone wanted us? Such a comfort that statement is. Talk about backhanded compliments. As for leaving children to moulder in orphanages. There are a myriad of options between garbage heaps and cutting a child’s ties with their biological parents, cultures, languages, genetic mirrors, ancestral histories, and medical knowledge in order for someone else to “build their family”. And lastly, we adopted people who speak our minds should have been aborted? For the naysayers' comfort, I suppose. We wouldn't be here to poke holes in their ideas then. 

I am aware that this is starting out on a fairly stern note. That’s okay. I’m tired. I’m tired of speaking in a way to keep adopters happy and comfortable. I am a 55-year-old woman, I have raised three children, I am not interested in being infantilized, and pressured into soft-selling what I think. I won’t have it. And as my sister-in-law is wont to say, “You can do hard things.” So this may be hard. But hard isn’t bad, and in reality, it is often necessary. 

This then is the first thing I want adopters and hopeful adopters (as well as the extended family and friends of the adopters) to know. Be careful about how you speak to adopted people. Anecdotally, many of us are diagnosed with complex ptsd because of the trauma of relinquishment. We struggle more with addiction, relationships, thoughts, and attempts at suicide than biological kept people. The rending of a baby or young child from their mother is unnatural and highly traumatic. It isn’t god’s will. The universe didn’t intend for that separation. And if it has to happen for a child to actually be safe, the rending is still a thing. A baby or small child does not know that it is now in a safer place. They just know my mom is gone. 

Be aware that love does not conquer all. Patience, therapy, honesty, and making the child the focus are the absolute point. The sentimental desire to parent needs to be disposed of. Raising children who need care, not assuaging the feelings of adopters, is the point. If adopted people need therapy, so do adopters and hopeful adopters because while the desire to parent is a natural biological drive, we are higher animals and so need to work through the grief that comes with the possibility of not having that desire play out, rather than deciding to take someone else’s child, change its identity, then raise it as their own. The child should never, I repeat never, be made to feel responsible for their adopters' well-being at the expense of that child being able to “be” and express their whole selves. I’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables again. 

What can I say? I’m Canadian, and I love Anne. But as a 55-year-old old I don’t just read the sweetness in the story anymore. I see Anne’s trauma in her fear of rejection, attachment issues, flashes of temper, ghost kingdom building, dissociating, and people pleasing. Another thing I have been struck by during this reading is how the character of Marilla is just called Marilla. 

Anne asks if she can call her Aunt. Marilla says no, because it’s not true. Yet the story describes how close and loving their relationship becomes because of the time and effort Marilla and her brother Matthew put into “bring Anne up”, a young girl (an actual orphan with no extended family) who needed care. In the second book, Anne of Avonlea, Marilla takes in six-year-old twins who are left without family. Again, Marilla is just Marilla. And Anne, who was a teenager by that time, is just Anne. The twins need “bringing up”, and so Marilla and Anne take it on. 

There is love. It is a family. But it’s a family without the need to manufacture relationships in a way that erases that the twins came from somewhere else. The twins never have to pretend that they have no “before”, as Anne was never pressured to ignore her “before”. There is no changing of names, no “adopting” another family's history as their own. They are who they are, from where they are from, being raised with compassion to grow into their best selves by loving people who saw a need, and humbly met it. 

My last thought comes as a series of questions. 

Would adopters, or hopeful adopters, bring up a child or children if they couldn't rename them, keep their histories from them, expect to be called mom or dad, have them take on their family history as if they didn’t originate from someone and somewhere else? 

Would they parent if they couldn’t be on a new, manufactured birth certificate for the child, making it look as if they gave birth to that child?

Would they parent if that child wasn’t severed from their biological family tree, and grafted onto their adopters' tree? 

For those transracial and international adopted people, would their adopters learn the child’s language of origin, eat the foods, move to that country, or at least the expat/immigrant neighborhood that would match that child’s heritage? 

I mean, why not? It’s apparently caring for the child that is of importance. Right? 

The fact is that cutting a person off from whole aspects of who they are for the comfort of others is damaging in the extreme. But as adoptees, that happens to us with boring regularity, and we’re supposed to be fine with it. 

Meanwhile, the “kept” people are constantly on ancestry researching shit they often already know. Make that make sense. To get personal. If I, as an adoptee, just called my female adopter by her first name or perhaps an affectionate moniker as children often come up with, would she still have parented me? If I saw her as my Marilla instead of my mom, would she have brought me up? 

If my adopters had been expected to talk with me about as much as they knew about my family of origin; noting how my eyes were brown just like the papers said my mothers eyes were, or my love and natural aptitude for skiing was just like my fathers, or my love of art was like my maternal grandmothers, or that my philosophical bent was like my grandfathers; would they have raised me? If they had to keep me connected to my biological heritage, would they have still committed to bringing me up? Or did some version of proprietary ownership that cancelled my nature for their nurture need to be a part of my adoption? 

The sensitive nature of most adopting and hopeful adopting parents is interesting to me. Society in general expects immature children to deal with and accept notions that are impossible for grown adults to deal with. For instance, the adopted child must accept that this is my family now. But an adopter never has to accept that this child came from somewhere else. Some do, of course. Yet the whole of society will rally behind the adopter's feelings of rejection if an adopted person critiques the institution. It’s never the other way around. And so, would you bring up a child, raise a child, parent a child, without having the desire to be called mom or dad fulfilled? Could you love a child who you had to admit comes from somewhere else, and that you must nurture the nature they came to you with? 

If a child is in actual need of external care, and you were granted the privilege, would you face the fact that you are bringing up someone else’s child?  

Image © Catherine Elle Mari