"The War On National Adoption Awareness Month" otherwise known as #flipthescript

“You’ll get over it…” It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To lose someone you love is to alter your life for ever. You don’t get over it because ‘it” is the person you loved. The pain stops, there are new people, but the gap never closes. How could it? The particularness of someone who mattered enough to grieve over is not made anodyne by death. This hole in my heart is in the shape of you and no-one else can fit it. Why would I want them to?” ~Jeanette Winterson "Written on the Body"

If I told you I lost my mother at birth the usual reaction is one of sympathy.  If I told you I was adopted the usual reaction is "WONDERFUL".  It is the same thing.  ~Adoptees

You took away my family.

You took away my home.

You erased away my history now most of it is gone.

What gives to you the right to do this injustice unto me?

How can you be so blinded?

How is it you can’t see?

You’re stealing from the innocent are you so unaware?

You’re playing God with all our lives did you think we wouldn’t care?

Who gave to you the authority to decide how we should live?

Who granted you this power?

It was not theirs to give.

You treat us as possessions, we are not yours to own.

How did you get the notion you can tell me where is home?

Do not dictate to me about how I should live my life.

Or who I can call mother, then take away my rights.

The answers to life’s questions you say I need not know.

You’re asking the impossible the questions only grow.

What it is I am asking for is for you to understand.

Until I have the answers I can not know who it is I am!

The angry adoptees are at it again!  Ruining the feel good wonderful promotion of adoption during National Adoption month!  I woke up this morning to a blog about “The War on National Adoption Awareness Month” from an adoptive parent with all kinds of adoptive parent responses as usual commenting on adoptees speaking so ugly about adoption through the #flipthescript campaign.  Ummm yeah, and here is more of why we are. 

I wrote the above poem about fifteen years ago and although geared toward the system of adoption and the archaic policies, laws, and adoption procedures, it can apply to those who continually dismiss adoptees and focus on what adoptive parents have to say instead.  I do get how people don’t get it, the whole ultimate reality of adoption.  The underbelly, the dark side, the reality adoptees speak of is hard to hear.  I know most people are missing the point in what adoptees are saying.  The point IS that adoption is based on loss and that loss for adoptees is usually undermined, ignored, and dismissed.

If we were promoting a "War on divorce" we would be widely supported.  Both adoption and divorce are the severing of families permanently (and many times rebuilding through step families as in adoptive families) but of course adoption is celebrated because the focus is always on the win-win for the adoptive family and never about the demise of an original family.  If you first acknowledge and recognize the magnitude of loss adoptees suffer THEN you can help them rebuild their lives into something more positive."  Yet again, people are not hearing the voices of experience, those of adoptees.

And then there was THIS part of the blog that TRULY makes it evident that adoptive parents and others aren’t listening or really hearing what adoptees are saying.

“I’ve heard an adoptee who was adopted from another country say her family was waiting for her back in “her country.” Where was her family when she was in the orphanage?”

Again, adoption permanently attempting to sever the ties of an adoptee’s biological family without recourse and discounting the fact that they will ALWAYS have another family be they absent, or across the world, dead, whatever the case or scenario might be they exist!  Even IN an orphanage adoptees still have a family “back there”.  Generations of them in fact!  Descendants and into the future, adoptees do not deserve to be expected to not want to know about, hear about, or reconnect with their families of origin.

The pain and loss divorced children, orphaned children, or abandoned/neglected children experience is widely recognized and often children are counseled to help them over come these traumas.  Adoptees experiences via adoption are mostly discounted and trivialized.  We as adoptees are criticized, ridiculed, called perpetual victims for voicing our emotions, feelings, and pain adoption has caused us. The hypocrisy that exists in adoption is blatant to adoptees and the rest of the world writes us off and white washes all of it and repaints it as a lack of gratitude.

I always have wondered about the two weeks before I was adopted, where I was, who I was with, what kind of care I received.  In 2000 at an AAC conference I heard a older nurse speak about how adopted children were taken at birth and isolated in the hospital from the other babies.  Hospital staff could not get them to stop crying and it was regular procedure to give them drugs to tranquilize them.  I tear up to this day thinking about how horrific that whole scenario is.  Now of course open adoption is promoted and children are placed immediately and yet again that original loss is dismissed.

I never deal in absolutes because life is not black and white nor is adoption totally good or totally bad.  There are always going to be children in need of good homes, however adoption should always be a last resort but more than often it is not.  Even adoption from foster care systems often siblings are separated, names are legally changed, and original family members are lost to one another forever.  Our system of adoption in this country resorts to adoption first instead of family preservation and support. 

One of the greatest experiences for me ever was an AAC conference in 2000 with hundreds of adoptees in attendance. After five days I didn't want to leave it felt like "home" amongst so many that completely and immediately understood me, how I felt, without a word or explanation.  I knew then it was never “my issues” with adoption, is IS the issue of adoption itself.

Until the time the voices of those who truly experience adoption firsthand is heard first and not last, adoptees will continue to suffer from the long term ramifications of the judgment that haunts them in the “real” world of the nonadopted.

“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.” ~Edgar Allan Poe 

The ghosts of adoption

Silhouettes

A silhouette without a face these ghosts I chase from place to place.
Shadows playing hide and seek elude my call evade my reach.
They come and go within my dreams looming near but never seen.
Just when I think they've gone away I realize they are back to stay.
Haunted by who I might be, in the mirror this face I see.
It is mine but comes from where?
I find no peace, only blank stares.
Few clues to riddles lost in time.
Can't capture what I can not find.
Pursuing what I can't deny, the phantoms of days long gone by.

I've been busy.  It's been a good productive busy but still hectic.  I have not had the time to write as I would like to.  I've jotted down some notes over the last few months that I wanted to expand upon because no matter how far you attempt to get from adoption it is always there and usually in your face.  It's quite invisible to nonadopted persons but as blatant to adoptees as the noses on our faces.  All it takes is a quick change in perspective to see it.

As adoptees we all know and realize you can never get away from adoption.  And, most of us don't want to since we have spent so much of our lives unable to express how we feel or how it has shaped and molded who we really are.  We need to feel it, see it, dive down deeply into it to discover what it is we need to do about it.  But there is a point a vacation would be nice.  And many of us take breaks from activism, reform, education, search and support along the way.  However, the world usually doesn't give you long before there it is, in your face, reminding you that being an adoptee is who you are and will always be.

I was in Walmart a couple of months back, yes Walmart it's the only store within walking distance I can get to, and doing my usual grocery shopping.  I turned the corner and there she was.  A woman about 4' 11" tall weighing around 100 lbs.  How can I size a person up that quickly?  And secondly, I'm sure nonadopted people wonder why would I?  Because I am adopted.  And, because the only identifying information I have about my mother that she gave me in her non-id letter through the adoption court is nearly exactly that.  And, because I have been searching for her my whole life.

I also know her hair and eye color as well.  Not many women are that petite and every single time I come across them I engage them in conversation if I can and scan their faces closely for resemblances.  Little are these women aware that I am almost oblivious to our conversations because there is a whole internal dialogue going on inside me that if anyone knew they'd probably turn and run and or immediately notify security.

The hair color of this woman matched too.  Unfortunately, she was turned from away from me and I could not see her face directly.  I pretended to look at items on the shelves on either side of her and moved as unstalkerish (yes adoptees get to make up words we need our own language) as possible to get her to turn towards me.  She was probably around my age and as my brain absorbed this information my first thought was "possibly a sister?"  I know I have at least two siblings from my mother's side.

Unfortunately, nerves got the best of me and I walked on pushed my cart down the aisle and went about my day swallowing the lump in my throat and breathing slowly to stop my heart from pounding so heavily in my chest.  If anyone asked I'd just attribute the shaking to too much coffee.  I should have approached her probably but who REALLY knows how unnerving it can be to be confronted by a perfect stranger in a Walmart no less.  But, this is the life of an adoptee in search forever traveling down the path of "who am I?"

Adoption is ubiquitous to adoptees.  We are constantly told to get over it, don't think about it, or it doesn't matter.  Adoption is the fabric our hearts and bodies are stitched and sewn from.

Recently I've began to delve into my favorite fiction authors.  Even when I escape into fantasy there it is chapter two, main character, and a girl no less.  Orphaned at birth, adopted and abused, sent to an orphanage, and taken in by a family member who became her guardian.  Almost too close to home and definitely enough to bring me back into reality.

Soap operas, forget it, not one around I don't think that doesn't have an adoption story line.  Horror shows, always look to the antagonist to more than likely be an adoptee given up at birth returning to exact revenge on the parents that abandoned them.  Pinterest, social media sites, and online news even adoption in some way, shape, or form is within view.

One day I'll be a ghost to my children and those who have loved me.  But, I will have be a "real" ghost in the capacity that I will have a face, and a voice, and eternal memories that will carry on when I am gone.  Adoptees need to have that as well, or at least the chance at tangible proof of the ancestors and heritage they will always be a part of, and that will always be a part of them.

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.” ~Salman Rushdie

More Adoption Myth Busting

I've been reading and commenting on an article about the New Jersey bill that will allow adoptees the right to their original birth certificate.  A bill that was passed by the house and the senate but vetoed by Governor Christie last year.  It is more than frustrating to attempt to educate people who refuse to listen or even consider the adoptee voice and experience.  Especially when adoptees ourselves advocate for equal rights, to the same legislators, and it continually falls on deaf ears and closed minds.

Some comments I've encountered recently regarding Adoptee rights:

"Be happy with what you have."  Ok, then let's have the government kidnap your family, ALL of them, and hide them from you in some remote inaccessible area and if you beg and plead long and hard enough and pay enough money they might, just MIGHT, let you know where they are.  Of course, they might not too that is their right.  You have none.  Oh btw, be happy about it.

"No one needs identification these days you can vote without an ID."  Don't confuse identification with identity.  Adoptees deserve their original identities they were born with that is printed on their original birth certificate.  What they do with that is their right just as it is for every other citizen.  Period.

"What if these biological parents are "bad" it should be up to the adopted parents themselves to tell the adoptee if they feel it is right for them to know."  And, what if they are not?  What if they are wonderful?  What if they want contact?  What if they don't?  What if they are deceased?  What if there is a whole biological family to welcome them?  This is what most people get confused, the difference between rights and relationships.  What if's don't matter in relation to OBC access, rights do. 

"These women are going to have abortions instead of adopting if they can be found."  Can we please get OFF the correlations between adoption and abortion FINALLY???  There is not a fact nor a statistic anyone has (or ever has had) that open records will 'cause more women to have abortions.  In fact, the opposite is actual true just look at states like Alaska and Kansas who have never closed adoption records.  Or, to Oregon who opened theirs over a decade ago.  Adoptees are receiving their original birth certificates in other states as well that have opened and no traumatic events are occurring and no tragedies are mounting because of it.  Can we be done with this lame argument now?

I understand adoption is difficult to comprehend for those who have not experienced it themselves.  And, it is not the same as having a relative who is adopted or knowing someone that is adopted.  What adoptees do NOT understand is the frequent dismissal of our requests to be heard and understood.  As if we were whiney little children who really don't know what they want or are need of and instead are and sent off for a nap, a time-out, or are simply ignored.

I really can not wrap my brain around how people fight against us in this really simple basic request for our original birth certificates.  And, how adoptees still are continually denied the same basic human rights as other citizens.  And worse, chastised for asking!


DENIED - By The Government

I plead though they ignore my cries.
The record's sealed is their reply.
Time and time again I ask.
I'm told to put it in the past.
I can't get them to try and see.
They have what belongs to me.
I beg for truth but no one hears.
It only falls upon deaf ears.
I get no matter how I try.
The same stone cold response DENIED.

Adoptees - Healing and Empowerment

In the Quiet of my soul

In the quiet of my soul there dwells, a story that is left to tell.
A life that lives beneath, so still awaiting its release.
Hiding there for many years beneath the layers of my fears.
Afraid to recognize the pain not knowing where to lay the blame.
Tucked away, I feign a smile.
But the pressure grows and all the while.
I dream one day, we'll make them see this burdensome road, this strange journey.
For if our voices join together ceasing not, nor quitting ever.
I believe united we'll reclaim the loss of histories and names.
And, that's enough until the time we'll change their hearts, transform all minds.
So cease not in this quest for truth nor give up on your search for proof.
What we're told that matters not can't be ignored, nor be forgot.
I pray for days and nights sometimes and probably 'til the end of time.
That relief is somewhere close in sight so I can lay to rest this fight.
Returning to truth and honesty at last our spirits will be set free.
And reaching out we'll heal all those lost and lonely wounded souls.

I've been told I'm consumed and obsessed with adoption.  That, I am an angry adoptee.  That I need to get over adoption as everyone has issues them from life experiences and to just leave it all in the past.  The problem is that being adopted can not all be in the past.  It it is very much a part of adoptees in the present and future too.  Just like you can't be unborn, you can't be unadopted.  Our pasts as children, the people who influenced our lives growing up, the genes and biological we come from, are very much a part of our now.

People every day talk about the circumstances and situations that have shaped and are molding their lives.  Just scroll through Facebook (as we almost all do ;) ) hundreds are discussing and sharing about loved ones who are gone, posting pics from childhood, High School, college, weddings, it runs the gamut from A-Z.  If we could just put everything in the past then there would be no wonderful memories and reunions!  But, unfortunately with the good parts of our past come the difficult ones too.

 Recently, I read someone who is not adopted comment on how much someone thinks about adoption and the hurt and pain that it brings up.  And how it's easy not to think about something you "just don't think about it".  And then this person goes on to list every wrong someone has done them over the last twenty plus years.  Ummmm, a little (understatement) contradictory?

For many adoptees, we've had decades of bottled up, unidentified, and confusing, bewilderment we have felt without anywhere safe to express it.  Misunderstood and perplexed because the knowledge of where we came from, the very foundation or our lives is gone, and we are told to be happy and bury the underlying despair and sadness we feel and have felt.  For us it's like opening an unread book and beginning on chapter four, and the previous chapters we are not allowed to have.  It will never be a complete story, and that's what adoptees deal with, incomplete lives.

For adoptees there seems to be different rules when it comes to reactions and emotions about being adopted that we are required to adhere to.  The term "victim mentality" gets thrown about a lot.  Many of us talk about it because there have been no guide books or mentors, no one who understood us and could help us, and instead it became even more confusing when our questions and emotions were dismissed and labeled wrong.  And many, many of us, speak continually and publicly in tireless efforts to change the system of adoption and educate the world as to what these changes can, should, and need to be. 

There is a difference in being angry about something, and being an angry person.  There is a difference in speaking about something to vent, be understood, and supported, and allowing yourself to become a victim because of it.  There is a HUGE difference in writing, speaking, sharing, and encouraging others to do the same about adoption, because there is power in numbers, and there is empowerment for individuals.

“It's not forgetting that heals. It's remembering.” ~ Amy Greene, Bloodroot

The Emotional Impact Being Adopted Has Meant In My Life

Reflections

I see this person staring back at me and wonder who it is I see?

Are those her eyes?  Is her face the same?

Do I look like him?  What were their names?

Mirrors like pictures tell thousands of tales but the stories told have always failed.

In lending me the slightest clues to endless questions and intangible truths.

For I feel just like an empty shell that has no history or past to tell.

A single light shines all alone in the dark so far from "home".

Burning bright to light the way into the dawn of another day.

To illuminate where I must go and guide my steps through this unknown.

Discovering trails back to where, I'll find that face that's in the mirror.

Some of this may repeat or over lap what other adoptees have written or expressed about being adopted.  That is the great thing about communicating with other adoptees, you finally know your truths are similar to others.  There is a lot of comfort in that especially after being so alone in the world with all the issues of being adopted that are never spoken of, and usually dismissed as unimportant instead.  I enjoy hearing from other adoptees who inspire me with their voices of truth and encourage me to voice mine.

I do tend to speak for other adoptees too, and I feel after 15 years in adoption search, support, education, activism and reform, I can.   I have gleaned a lot of experiences from the voices of thousands of other adoptees.  Today though, I am going to speak of my personal experience about what it means, and how it has felt and still feels, to me being adopted.

Many adoptees will tell you that they have never felt the way I do, and are happy and grateful for being adopted.  They consider their adoptive family their real and true family.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that in any way.  What I can tell you is that there are a good amount of adoptees, who feel as I do.

It's growing up living a secret double life that no one really knows about, including you.   It's belonging, or many times not belonging, to two separate worlds.  And always, always, trying to reconcile each with the other.

Being adopted means watching from the outside.  Constantly analyzing other families and comparing them to your own.  It's never fitting in anywhere, even inside your own skin.  Because your own skin is all you have to belong to genetically.

Pondering your navel in ways nonadopted people would never think about, and where that connection that once was is now.  Birthdays that are spent wondering if your mother is remembering you, and if she is in what way, good, bad, or indifferent?  Being adopted means being puzzled with the reasons parents could give you away, and walk away, and leave with so many unanswered questions.

Mirrors are tough, because they tell so many stories about you, yet none you really know to be true. Fantasy becomes a huge factor in your every day life.  You are often caught as a child staring off into space, or called on by a teacher for not paying attention.  It's not that you mean to be like this, it's that you don't know how NOT to be like this.

Being adopted means a lot of pretending.   Pretending everything is o.k.  Pretending you are someone you are not, because you have no idea who you really are.  You are always examining others to see how they do it and seem so comfortable with themselves.  You become chameleon like to blend in, and to appease others as you have no true sense of self and you fear further rejection.

 Adopted reality can hit you really hard, like a fast ball to your heart, an unexpected sock in your gut, when you hear your adopted mother snicker and proclaim, “No wonder your mother gave you away”.  And then, a large part of you believes it to be true.   And you always will in some capacity believe this, and hear that voice in the back of your mind.

It can also pull the rug out from under your feet in a matter of seconds, this being adopted, when you hear a social worker say "I'm sorry your biological mother is asking no more mail be sent."  Or, "Your biological father will not claim you are his daughter, put anything in writing, and says he understands your need for information but everyone there is healthy."  No nonadopted person can quite fathom what it means that the people who you were born from want nothing to do with you, ever.   And instead want to brush you, the dirty secret of their lives, off and away under the rug somewhere hopefully you'll never crawl back out from under.

Coping with losses and rejection so deeply unfathomable that sometimes the overwhelming facts and reality of what you face is so unbelievable you can't wrap your mind around any of it.  It all seems like a bad B movie, or an even more outrageous soap opera plot, or a nightmare you'll wake up from eventually.  But it's not.  There is no escape and you live it each and every day of your life.

Some days are easier than others.  Sometimes you can almost nearly forget, at least for awhile.  Of course, it's always there and you realize no amount of denial, food, drugs, alcohol, or other relationships are going to erase the perpetual questions, mend holes in the fabric of your existence, or fill the massive loss adoption has brought to your life.

I hope this gives those who can not understand adoptees some insight into the pain and trauma adoptees can and do endure most all of their lives.  Especially, those who want and need us to be grateful, and thankful, and happy that we were adopted.  I will never be happy to have been adopted, or relinquished, or "left" by two families.  I can only go on to attempt to educate the world and reform adoption, and hopefully help heal and support other adoptees struggling with their personal battles, issues, and truths in their own lives.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path; and that will make all the difference.” ~Steve Jobs