What adoption shouldn’t be.

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.

 

We need to change how adoption is viewed.

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”

 

Are you a HAP hoping to adopt?

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.

 

PAL Suggestion

I have a suggestion for an addition to Positive Adoptive Language (PAL). Yes, me, the one who dislikes most of the required language, but maybe this request will spur an update and be inclusive of all parties to adoption (excluding adoption service providers), who knows, but it needs a good overhaul and what better time to start the conversation than now.

 

Making Choices

We make choices every day, but the values that drives those choices is what is important. I shopped at the same grocery chain for decades, even after their ownership changed, I resisted trying their competitor for more than a year. During that year I noticed older employees disappearing, new employees so young I wondered if they’d ever shopped for groceries before. Name brands disappearing, replaced with no-name products I’d never heard of before, or knew what company produced.

 

Influx

Talk is going round the online adoption world about an expected influx of expectant mothers to adoption. I’m not in the know so I can’t say if that is correct, yet it wouldn’t be surprising if it was true, with all the lost jobs, the panic over not being able to pay your rent or groceries for starters, let alone no idea how long this will last, how long before normal returns.

 

From 2014: Every single day…

My mother was asked by someone fairly close to her, if she still thought about me after all this time.  The title was the immediate answer.  Stop and think about what that means to a mother.  To me, it means that not only did she think about me, she would have wondered if I was okay, healthy, happy, sad, even if I was alive. I can only begin to imagine the level of pain she lived with, because without knowledge, I doubt that she would think only good thoughts, not have any worries about the life I was living, rather, they would include if I was living, what my new family was like, was I loved, was I okay. I compare her words with the length of time I thought of my son every single day – before I had days, and then, weeks go by without thinking about my son after he passed. That transition happened long before the first decade had passed and having lived through that, I can’t imagine the pain that stretched decades, day in, day out, no relief, no forgetting. It’s incomprehensible, and makes tears roll down my face just thinking about it.

 

Sharing Your Child’s Story

Reading this post on Adoptive Families Facebook page is the reason I’m talking about this again. Maybe I’ll be able to change some hearts and minds and, maybe no one has explained well enough so it makes sense. What likeminded people in adoption are trying to do is to get you to take the time to see and set a line on what’s okay to share and what’s private (not secret, just private) of your families adoption story, especially your child’s story.

 

Note to Adoptive Parents

This post is wandering into a place that makes me uncomfortable and maybe it will be for naught as those who need to hear it, will likely not hear or understand the reason why I’m going there. Do understand #NotAll applies without me needing to say it each time.

It’s a fact that infertility plays an oversize reason why people turn to adoption, and specifically, to domestic infant adoption (DIA). It’s also a fact that many of those have suffered through multiple losses first, and for that, I’m sorry.

 

Was adopted or Is adopted – which is right?

Since I came on-line I’ve read countless comments by adoptive parents who don’t want their child defined by adoption and being adopted (oh the horrors). Positive Adoption Language supports that being defined by being adopted is a very bad thing with Is Adopted being bad and Was Adopted being good or positive, it was just an event after all.

 

From 2014: Good grief, this gets so tiring…

[2014] Earlier this week the Today Show included a segment on a daughter meeting her mother for the first time.  A daughter that resorted to using Facebook to try to find her by putting her personal information out on the internet (risky), but it paid off, and a reunion happened.  So what happens in the comments on the Today Facebook page after the segment aired?  (Be warned that I am using adoptive parents repeatedly throughout because that is what was used.)

 

Adoption Awareness Month – Family History

As adoptees we have two different families; the family that adopted us, the family that we were born into. Both families shape who we are, what our family histories tell us also comes into play for many of us.