Post is from 2014 about a reunion, wedding, adoptive parents weighing in on facebook. I just checked and that FB post is still up on the Today Show page if you want to get the fuller understanding of the angst in the adoptive parent community just click the link in the original post.
After you read the 2014 post above, scroll down and read the comments on the blog post, you won’t regret it.
Argh, words aren’t working today, hope the above makes sense.
Do you remember word games people would use to pass the time on long drives? Word games about if you could talk to a famous person from the past, who would you want to meet and why?
Read the rest of this entry »Read an interview with a first mother, wasn’t anything special, boy meets girl, girl gets pregnant, adoption happened and everything worked out. She ends with the fact that she was just a vessel.
Read the rest of this entry »Back before I got sick you’d have thought I was an adoption success story. I’m not alone in being seen as having a positive adoption story, many adoptees now sharing online were also seen as adoption success stories until they started looking deeper into the effects, and they may still be seen that way to people around them. Some adoptees will always be seen that way and it may be their truth.
Last year and the start of this year has been a journey for me. A time when big emotions from yesteryears rose to the surface time and time again. A time filled to overflowing with so much loss for so many. It’s also a time of so much ugliness and I hope it is never repeated, and that we come out the other side more aware, more kind, and definitely far less racist with a goal to keep being better to each other.
Read the rest of this entry »I want to see a concerted shift in how the adoption community talks about adoptee stories, specifically, the labelling adoptee stories as positive or negative. Stay with me a minute while I explain. Read the rest of this entry »
Long-time adoption agencies and lawyers have been dealing with adoption for decades, nothing new there, except they now compete, co-exist with an ever expanding list of *new and improved* so-called adoption service providers who call themselves consultants, whose goal is to get you (a hopeful adoptive parent) a baby, and fast. Read the rest of this entry »
This thread on FB is well worth your time: Yes I’m Adopted. Don’t Make It Weird.
If you don’t know who they are, they are two adoptees who cater their message to adoptive parents. I’ve only watched a couple of their video’s and they just aren’t my cup of tea, I find them flippant, dismissive, surface level and skirt any deeper feelings, and that doesn’t go well with me, it may be your cup of tea. Whatever. The above thread linked is because they used the old trope adoptive parents use when they don’t like what an adoptee says by calling the adoptee bitter:
As an adoptee you can choose to be bitter or better. Both are justified, one is just better for you.
Nope, you don’t get to call adoptees bitter, you just don’t.
Grab a coffee and dive into a really good pushback and to their credit, they took it. The pushback is not only because they called adoptees bitter, but because they lumped every adoptee into an either/or narrative that remains static. The message also assumes any adoption related feelings are once and done, instead of the reality that adoptees will process being adopted throughout their lives when their lived experiences trigger them.
We aren’t puppets, we are human.
I’ve been pondering on adoption today and how it has become something I don’t recognise anymore. Adoptions from my era (BSE) had a host of problems, but how they’ve fixed them, largely, only seem to benefit the other players in adoption, not the child. Read the rest of this entry »
I struggle to contain my anger when an adopted child’s entire world is taken away from them, I can’t explain in any cohesive way how devastating just the thought of it happening is, nor can I contain my outrage for the industry that placed them in that home.
On Harlow’s Monkey is this article that she was asked to contribute too, about the current story that is reverberating through the adoption community.
Adoption is complicated—and the Myka Stauffer controversy proves it
Personally, I want the National Council for Adoption to weigh in, to task themselves with the challenge of changing the harmful narratives of adoption is beautiful, adoption is love, all those sappy sentiments the adoption community and public recite by rote; and return to the basic premise that finding the right home for a child who needs one is the most important aspect in adoption.
I’m still to upset to even begin to expound on the story, how it highlights the problems with how adoption is viewed both inside the adoption community and in the public’s eye.
If you comment, you can be angry, but please remember to remain civil.
A post from a while ago that links to many posts on the problem of oversharing which this story shows the view when it is taken to the extreme.
“It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is “nkali”. It’s a noun loosely translates to “to be greater than another”. Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principal of nkali: how they are told, who tells them, when they are told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power.”
Chimanda Ngozi Adichie – “The Danger of the Single Story”
If yes, this post is for you. If you see yourself reflected below, do better, be better, because that’s not the moral standards an adoptive parent needs to have. Read the rest of this entry »
The adopted ones blog 