Some won’t ever get it, they don’t want to…

By TAO

I’m sorry, this post has festered inside of me for a while – and I can’t believe it’s 2014, and still it is needed…so much for how different adoption is today than my day…this is a grumpy post and if you were looking for pleasantries, just skip right on by…

Have you ever been lambasted and skewered, because you have spoken about the loss an adoptee can feel, or the need deep inside to know the totality of who you are, not just who you became?  Or worse yet, speak your concerns on how adoption is practiced today?  Told that adoptees like yourself, with your hatred for adoption, adoptive parents and prospective parents, are just mean, and spiteful, to those with infertility who have adopted, or want to adopt?  That you believe adoptive parents will never be enough, because you want to know your family of birth, or because you feel loss?

I have…sigh…(said in a very passive aggressive way)…

Those people are hurting, perhaps even angry and can’t see past that, I get that, and anything that even hints at a downside to being adopted, gets their dander up, in a flash.  No conversation can be had, let alone an in-depth discussion on the how you can’t lump the relationship an adoptee has with their parents, with that of wanting to know where they came from.  Or the relationship with your parents, with the feelings of being adopted.  Those are completely separate conversations, and one has nothing to do with any other.  Paradoxical feelings can, and do exist within your soul, it’s called being human.  It would be like me telling them, that if they had a great relationship with their parents, they wouldn’t need to have children – that makes as much sense as wanting to lump an adoptee’s relationship with her parents, with wanting to know why you needed adoption, and meet (and perhaps) get to know your family of birth, or feeling the losses that exist in the very fabric of being adopted.

Being adopted means you lost your entire family…there is no escaping that brutal fact.  How, or when you process it, how many times you process it over again – at the end of the day, to be an adoptee, means you first lost your family.  No matter how much you resist it – all adoptees must process it, in their own way, and on their own time-line.  Just because you don’t want to recognise that it exists, it’s fact.

I tell myself that it’s okay if someone doesn’t believe me, but it makes me angry when they say they have read my blog, and then proceed to tell me that I don’t believe adoptive parents will ever be enough, that I hate adoption, adoptive parents and prospective parents.  Tell me, how many posts must I write that speak of my relationship with my parents?  How many, because it seems to me that I am always talking about them in some way, shape, or form, and always as parents you should strive to be like.  Even if I wrote about them in each post, it wouldn’t be enough for them, because I speak critically about parts of the system that are broken and not child centered, the industry, the process, what needs to be better, and I will always care more about the child to be adopted, than those doing the adopting.  So by writing about that, I am being critical of them for how they want to form their family (still don’t get that leap either).  So for those who are skimming my posts while forming rebuttals in their heads, and not comprehending what I have written, this blog is not for you, please move along.

Hope you all have a great week…