In an effort to approach this by degrees, I’m still pointing to the adult adoptee writings that aren’t so hard to read. I had intended to gradually get to the rough stuff, but as I look through blogs and websites I think that maybe I don’t need to point to any of the really rough stuff. I think there is enough thoughtfully written material out there that we can probably discuss most of what I’d like to get across without reading the super duper harsh writing that is out there. I may change my mind as we go along, but for now I’m rather impressed with the material I’ve come across. Years and years ago most of what was available online was the writings of people who were hurting and were lashing out and writing things designed to make others hurt, too. You could learn from them, but you had to have pretty thick skin to do so. What I’m seeing now is a lot easier to read, and (I think) a lot easier to learn from.

Today I’m concentrating on articles at informedadoptions.com that were written by adult adoptees. Not all articles were written by the same person, so you’re getting viewpoints from different people.

Lost in the Shuffle
I find this a very honest and well written piece, and it points to one of the reasons I always bring GG into a conversation when people want to talk about her adoption. As TT gets older she’ll be brought in as well (GG was involved at TT’s age, but TT’s language skills just aren’t there yet). And I always remember that the words that I speak to strangers are intended for GG and TT’s ears and not so much the stranger’s ears. If a stranger says something about her being lucky I used to say something along the lines of, “No, I’m the lucky one” but recently I’ve changed that to something more like, “I think she’s the one who gets to decide whether she is lucky or not, not me.” What I always want to add to that is “and certainly not you”, but so far I’ve refrained. The whole luck thing just seems wrong to me, anyway. I mean, I was once in an accident where I was considered “lucky” because another inch or two in another direction and I’d have died. But at the time all I could think about when people told me how lucky I was, was that if I was truly lucky then the accident wouldn’t have happened at all. And I think the same thing here… if my girls were truly “lucky” then wouldn’t they have grown up with their birth families and not have had to be abandoned and then spend time in an orphanage? But, I’m getting off of the subject. Onto the next article.

Loss of Family is like Losing a Limb
This is yet another article that shows us why words like grateful and lucky can be so damaging. I believe the author is trying to explain why always putting a positive spin on adoption can be harmful. I’m reminded here of my favorite parenting book, Siblings Without Rivalry. A huge part of the advice in this book has to do with acknowledging what the child is saying. Acknowledging their pain (whether it be emotional or physical or whatever) helps make it go away. Simple words like, “When your sister said ____ it hurt your feelings” sometimes is all it takes, someone acknowledging that her feelings were hurt, and then she can move beyond it… instead of spending the next hour (or more) brooding over it because no one understands. I doubt it will be quite so easy with adoption issues, but I understand that if I try to put a positive spin on my daughter’s pain then that is the same thing as not acknowledging it, and that can be harmful. Something I picked up a long time ago is that it doesn’t matter if I think her feelings are valid or not. If she’s feeling them then they are real, and that makes them valid to her. If I try to invalidate them then that can only cause damage.

I also realize that I, personally, am liable to have trouble with this (the whole idea of helping to validate sad feelings) just because of the way I see the world. When something bad happens I generally give myself a set number of days to grieve or feel sorry for myself, and then I pick myself up and get on with the rest of my life. If it’s something really bad then I use the Scarlett O’Hara approach and keep myself so busy for several days that I have no time to think about it (again, time frame decided ahead of time), and then I deal with it and give myself a set number of days to feel angst or sadness or whatever and then I get on with things. I decided long ago that I get to decide whether I’m happy or not. I get to decide whether something has the power to make me sad or not. And if I decide it does, then it is only making me sad because I gave it the power to make me sad, I empowered whatever it is. I made that choice, which means I’m choosing to be sad. Nothing wrong with being sad sometimes, and when I choose to be sad I do a darn good job of it, and then I decide I’m done with it and I get on with things. The adoption wait challenged me on this quite a bit because it was an ongoing emotional rollercoaster and it was hard sometimes to take responsibility for my own sadness when it was so easy to blame it on outside sources. But mostly, it was the ongoing part that made it hard, so I often found myself in the position of “okay, I’m going to be sad tonight but that’s it, it doesn’t get to make me sad tomorrow”, or “I’ll cry on the way home, no time for it now”, or “well #&!@, I’ll buy ice cream on the way home and drown myself in mint-chocolate-chip, but when the quart is gone that’s it, no more feeling sorry for myself”, or “no, I’m not giving this the power to make me sad this time, enough is enough, we’re going out to eat tonight and we’re going to have fun, *%#@ it”. I knew that the Christmas I mostly ignored was my choice to be sad for that Christmas, and I gave myself permission to be sad until the tree came down a few days after Christmas. But, again, I’m getting off the subject. The point I’m trying to make is that if I hadn’t read the writings of adult adoptees I’d probably be royally screwing my kids up by just teaching that they get to decide if they are happy or sad, and that they have to empower something before it can make them sad. I’ve still got that lesson in there in subtle ways (if you want to give Serenity the power to hurt your feelings you can certainly do that, just as long as you realize it’s up to you whether or not you let her words hurt you), but I’m also careful to let them know that it’s okay to hurt and be sad about things, too. That if they feel bad about something then they shouldn’t deny those feelings just to keep from feeling bad, that they should talk to someone about them and figure out why they feel bad about them, or if they don’t want to talk then maybe journal about them to help them figure it out.. and then decide how much power to give to the feelings. And that how much power they give their feelings is up to them, not me or their dad or their teacher or their friends. We talk about these things in general terms, or sometimes in specific terms (how GG felt about a damaged (special) stuffed toy, or how she feels about doing bad in a game near the end so she feels it is her fault they lost, or how she feels about a friend who lied to her about something important) but I know that eventually it’s going to filter down into how she deals with her feelings about adoption and race as well. I’m trying to give them the tools to handle emotional stuff so that when they work on their adoption stuff they have tools to help them work through it all. And I’m trying to make sure they understand I’m there as a sounding board to help them come to their own decisions, but not to decide for them. Or, that’s the theory, anyway.

I Don’t Want My Adoptee to Hurt
I have a lot to say about this one. Not all adoptees feel a whole lot of pain around their adoption. Some take it in stride, others don’t. This author tries to make those who don’t feel pain be wrong to not feel pain. She seems to be saying that since they can’t feel pain they must not feel anything else, either. That doesn’t work for me, I’ve talked to too many adult adoptees who just never felt the need to delve into that part of their life. For them, the whole “loss of roots, loss of origins” stuff just never seemed a big deal to them. Why is that? Why is it a big deal for some and not others? I think that for some people the way they are raised goes a long ways towards their feelings about adoption. If they aren’t allowed to grieve as children then I think when they are finally adults and can do what they want then they finally do what they felt they weren’t allowed to do before. I still do that with potato chip dip – my parents only allowed the chip to go straight in and straight out so that just the tiniest bit of dip was on the chip, we weren’t allowed to scoop… and as an adult I scoop a lot of dip on a chip, I go completely overboard with it and I still get all kinds of enjoyment out of it. Way more enjoyment than is rational. Not to say that potato chip dip and adoption angst are in any way parallel, I’m just pointing out that as adults we often go overboard in doing what we weren’t allowed to do as children. Especially if we felt somehow injured by not being allowed to do it as children. That being said, for some adoptees I think they would feel this way no matter their upbringing… I think it’s just part of their personality. But, the point I really want to make is that no matter what an adoptee feels, whether there is angst or no angst, I think it is wrong to invalidate their feelings. It is just as wrong to invalidate the no-angst individuals as it is wrong to invalidate those who feel grief over their losses. Of course, the they-are-wrong-if-they-don’t-hurt message isn’t the only message in this piece, the other messages are important, and powerful. I pointed to this piece mostly because of the main message, the one that says something along the lines of “don’t invalidate my feelings just because they make you uncomfortable, the losses in my life create this hole in my heart and I need for you to acknowledge my pain.”

I Don’t Want Adoption to Define My Kids
I appreciate this author’s view on the subject. And I once again see someone who was hurt as a child by not being able to talk about how she felt about the whole adoption thing.

Am I Enough for My Kids?
This one is a new viewpoint for me. I’d never considered it in quite this manner. Definite food for thought, and a whole new way of looking at things. It kind of reminds me of a conversation I’ve had about why our family celebrates “family day”, the day our children joined our family. For a biological child, a birthday is a celebration about growing a year older, but also for the parents as a way to celebrate and remember when the child joined the family. Every year on my birthday I got to hear about the craziness that surrounded my birth (there were two catastrophes that happened while my mom was in the hospital, so this has always been quite the story). So, for a bio child, a birthday is also their family day. Bio families celebrate these two things all together, probably without even realizing that is what they are doing. But for our children these events happen on separate occasions (unless you happen to adopt them on one of their birthdays), which means they get celebrated separately. Back to the piece I pointed to, I can see a similarity here in that for most bio children the people who raise them also happen to be biological mother and father – though of course with divorce now we end up with stepparents, and with extremely rich people often a nanny (or series of nannies) handles the day to day parenting stuff, and in some segments of society a grandparent does the majority of the day to day parenting and takes on the role of mother or father. So it’s not just adopted kids that might have a different person in the roles of mom and dad than the people responsible for the egg and sperm that created them. Okay, I’m making this more complicated than I think it was originally intended… I think the original message was that we aren’t the bio parents and can never fill that particular void and we shouldn’t stress about it or try to fill the void. It’s just the way things are.

That’s it for links for today. InformedAdoptions.com has a page of links delegated to raising an internationally adopted child. The items I linked to today are on that page and there are a few other articles that I found to be of value, but they weren’t written by adult adoptees, and for now I’m trying to focus on things written by adult adoptees.

I didn’t really intend for there to be a single theme to the writings I pointed to, but today there was a theme – that of allowing our children to be sad if and when they feel sad about the things they’ve lost. Sure, we’d like to think that their gains can erase those losses, but for some of our kids that’s just not going to be the case. And our denial of their pain won’t make it go away, I believe that it can do just the opposite and make the pain that much more difficult for our children to deal with.

Writings of Adult Adoptee Series
1. The Writings of Adult Adoptees – Tai Dong Huai
2. Adult Adoptee Book Recommendations

This entry was posted on Monday, January 26th, 2009 at 9:48 am and is filed under Adult Adoptees. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.