Adoption Survivor

I was building my @adoptee1970 twitter following list. I was excited to see that there is a decent sized cyber-community of folks thinking and talking about being adopted. My adoption is something that I don't think or didn't think I thought about. I would say I was peripherally interested in my adoption. Today I realized that is a lie. It is the kind of lie you tell yourself to keep from getting hurt. I am not obsessed with my adoption. I am obsessed with living my best life and this is something that has been weighing me. This is the foundational reality to my existence as a person. It is something I locked away in a secret room just past my consciousness. I do not visit there often.

I have always known I am adopted. I have not lived my whole life to find my genetic mother. I have actually felt like she was dead since I was in my mid-twenties. I still do not know. Most important to this post, I have not blamed my childhood trauma on being adopted. I have a full and contextually successful life. I am intentional, now, about my engagements with other. I do not bash adoption or genetic parents. There is a piece of me that understands something broke when I was adopted. I have never tried to find out what that might be.

Adoptees are multiplicitous as any identity or affinity group is. Some suffer deeply from the disruption and separation from their genetic family. Others, like me, have no strong attachment to people they have never met. This is not to say that I never think about being adopted. It was not until I saw the #adoptionsurvivor, however, that I realized that despite my ability to push through this aspect of my life, I really have survived something huge. Adoption, genealogical disruption, adoption imagination, adoptive families, adoptive communities and adoption reunion are all trauma inducing spaces. relationships and events. The thing about adoption is that it is literally permanent. Even if there is an adoption reunion, you are still adopted. It never goes away. I believe that there is no single traumatic incident for adoptees. There is an ever present threat to your intimate relationships and sense of self, and no matter how well you manage that threat, it is always there. I am sure that it is not an unfamiliar narrative, the "someone is going to take me away" articulation of adoptee fear. This, this is trauma. We understand it when we see children taken from their parents at the southern border. We get the absolute horror of that. The inhumanity of that. How is adoption any different?

I have given this so much thought lately that I can articulate now that much of my avoidance, not wanting to find genetic relatives, was an attempt to not add to the daily trauma of being adopted. Especially as a transracial adoptee, I was already excluded and rejected in peer groups that were organized around binary race, gender and familial status. I am not certain I have ever thought about adoption as an identity in the ways that it is showing up in the interwebs. I didn't think about my familial status, that this is in fact a continuum of experiences and belonging. I had stopped using and assuming "family" in my interactions with students. I did and do understand that not everyone has what we would describe as a normative family structure. I had never applied that reality to myself.

I have a lot of forgiveness to do - for myself, my genetic parents and my adoptive parents. I have tried my entire adult life to not blame everything in my life on being adopted. I drew the short straw on adoptive parents but had it way better than other adoptees and foster children. I am not, overall, damaged any more than folks who were raised in their genetic families. I spend no time, even now that I am in reunion, thinking about whether my life would have been better or not. My life is the work I do around education, human development, mindful living and intentional choices. This is what guides my life, I think.

And at the same time I know that my relationship with my adoptive mother was so very damaging. I have permanent scars on my body, heart and brain from surviving childhood. I was so disassociated by the time I graduated from high school that I had no plans past the day I was supposed to turn 18. When asked what I wanted to do when I grew up, I would tell people that I wasn't going to make it to 18 so it didn't matter. I was not suicidal, I just could not imagine life past 18. I just thought I would cease to exist. I was never convinced that I had existed to begin with.

What other people called trauma, I simply understood as life. Living with my adoptive mother was an exercise in survival - physical and emotional - from a young age. I have no memories that are not connected to pictures after the age of three. All of these things are piece of my life that I tuck away so that I don't actually disappear. Despair and sadness are not accessible emotions to me especially around my adoption. The only emotion I could exhibit as a child was anger. I knew at four that how I was living, how I was being treated and how my mother behaved were unacceptable. I have always understood that, as a human being, I deserved better. Not more, I simply deserved to live better.

My life has been discontent. Not because of my adoption directly, but because of the constant sense that i was running toward something. I knew for a long time, and in several areas of my life still, that I had not met my potential. I just had no idea what that potential was. Having spoken with only a few of my genetic relatives, I already have a sense of what that potential looks like. My genetic family is educated, published, accomplished people. There are authors, career military and performers across the family. My adoptive family is filled with people who don't work, spend their lifetime in a relationship with a married man, look for ways to get more money from the federal government and all around are content with the minimum. Even thought I came very close to being that, it never felt right to stop trying.

When i think about adoption trauma, I am unable to figure out if it is a single trauma or a succession of traumas. I would like to think that children who need homes and are adopted into a loving, intentional, transparent and stable home would sustain minimal trauma. But, for the rest of us... does the trauma ever really end? If not, how do we get to a place where we are functioning in the present. How do we get to a place where we are living our best life without the shadow of adoption, rejection, dis-alignment and liminality haunting us.

One of the thoughts I am resisting lately is that THIS, the adoption reunion, is what I have been waiting for. Can you imagine leaving a human being to go 48 years waiting for someone who gave them away to show up and reclaim them? I can. And I am still pretty certain that isn't who I am or what I am doing. But this reunion in many ways feels healing. I prided myself on not wanting to find my genetic parents. My origin narrative is centered around not needing or wanting to find "them". I always say my mother, adoptive mother, tormentor, killer of dreams, is enough. I also say other unflattering things like "this is the woman the state thought SHOULD raise me. I don't want to see what the one that didn't is like." I still feel that way. I understood that the grass was likely to not be any greener, if there was grass on the other side at all.

For my entire life I was told, directly and exactly, that I was not wanted. I have always known that I was discarded if not disregarded. The mythos narratives that are woven to soften that reality never worked for me. "She was young." "You are better off." "She wanted what was best for you." were, to me, all lies. They still are unacceptable equivalents to the "it's not you it's me". None of these articulations of intent and no-fault self-protections can alleviate the pain you feel knowing you were abandoned. That other people get kept by their parents, maybe even your parents, and you did not hurts - plain and simple. There really is no kind of pain that even comes close to that. Narratives of gratefulness are also problematic.

I am thinking a lot about genealogical inheritance and disruption. Adoption, especially before 1990, certainly severed people from their genealogical realities and intimate others. When I set up my account on MyHeritage, I did my family tree as I understood it - with my family. I quickly realized that this was something DNA sites were not set up for or had intentionally ignored. I couldn't figure out how to represent my adoption on the site. And realized that by sharing no DNA with the people on the tree, in very real ways, the family tree was telling me yet again that I had no family except for my children.

The trauma of adoption is that even when you know who or what you are., if you define yourself outside of your familial status, you can still be undone. I have come unglued many a time over the years as my children and grandchildren are asked to do genealogical work in K-12. Why we still do this is beyond me. But those family trees, the DNA site's family trees... they all leave me cold, outed, disconnected. The trauma of adoption is to feel unloved, even when you are. It is to feel missing when you are standing still. It is to feel disconnected and disassociated. It is to feel unwanted. And it is to not recognize most of the reflections and iterations of self.

The trauma of adoption is that, even when you have done the work as many of us have around creating our own version of self, you cannot trust your sense of who you are. I do not have, or did not have, a conscious sense of not knowing. I understood not belonging. I knew I had no real membership - racial, gender, class, etc. but I never connected any of that to my adoption. During my data gathering phase for the dissertation, I put out a call for participation to those who identified as mixed race. I was stunned when i got so many transracial adoptees and adoptive parents who, genealogically, we would not consider mixed race. The intimate reality for those families were, however, as mixed race people and families. I am now realizing that my fascination with mixed race is about my transracial adoption. It is about my adoption, period. It is a manifestation of trauma. It is a survivor response to my genealogical interruption.

I am tired of accumulating things on my list of events, conditions and incidents that I have survived. I don't want to survive another thing. I want to live. So, here I am - well past 18. I have raised a family. I have achieved a terminal degree. I am about to be a vice president. And, I am still a hurt little girl looking for her mother. I am receiving that as a reality. I have no idea what to do with it yet. But I will sit with this trauma, as I have sat with others, and I will wait. I have no idea who I am waiting for.

More soon...

Baby Girl