What Adoption Means To Me

A friend posted a link to a site where the question was asked "What does adoption meant to you?"

http://nationaladoptioncenter.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-does-adoption-mean-to-you.html

It was prefaced with the comment "I wanted to find out from the most important people in the adoption conversation – the parents, what adoption means to them."  I take offense to that!  Once again the most important people in adoption, adoptees who adoption is supposed to be in place to provide for, were left out of the equation.  Natural parents, par for the course, were not included either.

The first comments are from adoptive parents and the usual "Adoption is love" blah blah blah.  One left me wanting to puke "adoption was our dreamcatcher."  Well, as an adoptee glad to be of "service".    What a burden to place upon the head of a child to complete other people's dreams and lives.  Perhaps that is not what was meant but that has certainly been my experience, and the experience of others.  Do I believe that there are adoptive parents who adopt to support the dreams and lives of adoptees?  Absolutely.  Unfortunately, the reality of what adoption does to adoptees is most frequently either denied, dismissed, or harshly judged.

So let me state it loud and clear what adoption means to me.

Adoption to me means being taken from my first mother who wanted to keep me and given to a family who abused me verbally, mentally, and emotionally. Who later, had a biological child who was loved and adored. It means rejection and abandonment two fold.  It means becoming ill in my teens and suffering multiple genetic and hereditary health issues with no family medical history to give doctors and languishing for decades in ill health with hit or miss, mostly miss, tests and treatments, and losing a great majority of my life in and out of doctors and hospitals without answers, unable to work.  It means trying to obtain vital medical background for doctors with only an amended birth certificate in hand filled with falsifications and lies, and adoptive parents who did not care to try and help me.  It means years of court petitions to a judge through an adoption court to try and get as much updated family medical information upon doctors urgent requests and adoption laws and policies that treat me as a perpetual child unable to handle the truth about my own biological family.  Adoption for me means loss, and pain, and immense sadness.

These are not stories the adoption industry wants to acknowledge.  These are not emotions adoptive parents want to hear.  These are not experiences the general public understands as truths that exists in adoption.  But they are ours, and they beg to be heard and acknowledged.  Adoptees are speaking loudly, and clearly, that the system of adoption is in need of a major over haul.

Adoption is separating natural families to create new ones.  Adoption is based on loss and pain.  Adoption is the government stealing our identities, issuing us false ones, and profiting off of that!  THESE are the facts and truths that need to be listened to and heard in the month of National Adoption Awareness.