The Feelings - Adoption, trauma, growing, becoming

When adoption is Brought up by adoptees so often it is a conversation met with denial, justifications, excuses and more often than not defensiveness from adoptive parents (APs), hopeful adoptive parents (HAPs), foster parents (Fps) and even social workers.  At first it is the involved families, then it expands to more people and as we tell our stories as adopted people we meet other adoptees who support us, but we massively encounter strangers with agendas far more often.  

So often we are called bitter and hateful, we are labeled as angry and vengeful, we are called ungrateful for the "saviors" of the stories we have been told.  There are so many stories about loss, good parents, young mothers, lack of community support, lack of family support and pressure from outside sources to relinquish custody.  There are so many truths mixed into the lies, so many similar "SAVIOR" stories that we as adoptees are told, however they are massively untrue.

I could start with statistics, like these:

If neither the biological parents nor the adoptive parents are criminal (as defined by court convictions), 13.5 percent of adopted sons turn out to be criminals. If the adoptive parents qualify as criminal but the biological parents do not, this figure increases slightly to 14.7 percent; however, if the biological parents, but not the adoptive parents, qualify as criminal, 20 percent of their sons turn out to be criminal. The rate is even higher (approximately 24 percent) if both the biological parents and the adoptive parents qualify as criminal (Source)

Adopted offspring were nearly 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than nonadopted offspring (Source )

In all honesty, the point of this is to talk about the feelings, the pain and the disconnection we as a society have from the raw, painful, emotional and maybe illogical truth that is.... well... the guts and bones of adoption.

I am adopted, and I am one of the cases in which removal was absolutely necessary, the state had a no contact order on my biological mother to me due to abuse, neglect and many other offenses including child endangerment, abandonment and drug use.  She was AND STILL IS a train wreck.  But as a child I remember always wondering who she really is, what she was doing, if she had my older brothers, if anyone knew where I was in my family.  I knew my birth name, I knew I had brothers and an aunt, but all I "knew" about them was from my APs.  I thought I had 2 older brothers when I in fact have 3, I was told no-one in my family wanted me, when in fact my aunt was fighting for us.  I never saw my original birth certificate and never will as my APs had that changed to reflect their names and the name they had chosen for me.

I remember sobbing while being abused by a VERY toxic if not narcissistic parent, that I just wanted someone to save me.  I knew even then as a toddler that it wouldn't be my mommy.  As soon as I knew I had older brothers, I started thinking if they were there with me that no-one could touch me, and I started filling my life with surrogate brothers and praying, hoping, manifesting and casting spells along with research to find my REAL brothers. 

I spent my whole life wondering, I spent my whole life hoping, I spent my whole life protecting my BIOLOGICAL siblings from that awful, horrible abusive AP who (in my opinion) chose to adopt for appearances.

Let me explain, that AP was an ex police officer, ex therapist, and has worked MANY jobs with gave her notoriety, honor, recognition and a level of self-righteous pride.  She took her trauma and tried to fix it by controlling her image and that is what led her to become as awful as she was.

Her need to control her image was exactly what made her an ABSOLUTE NIGHTMARE of an adoptive parent to myself and my siblings.  Her biological daughter did not suffer as we did, and I truly believe it is because she took the opportunity to reparent herself through her own daughter, but what she failed to realize was that reparenting means self reflecting, re-living and changing the pain, being and becoming a more healed, whole and kind human being.  I am simply expressing what made her who she is, but not excusing what she did.  In all honesty it has damaged me in too many ways to count, but here I am reparenting, relearning and re-living in every attempt, every chance to grow.  But the MOST important thing I do, is I reparent MYSELF and simply PARENT my son.  

Like I said, life is a video game and each level grants you skills you will need for the next level.  In the game of MY life, I had the not very unique experience in the ADOPTEE community, emotional neglect and abuse at the hands of my APs, being parentified, raising my siblings while also being infantilized, physical and verbal violence was a daily experience.  I am so tired of fighting the PTSD and hurting from this.  

                                                              

I am tired of being ashamed of my body and all the parts of me that were not up to my APs standards, I am tired of being cruel to myself.  I am tired of her voice bullying me in my head, and so I no longer accept that.  I have to wage a spiritual war every day to combat the cruelty that raveges my brain.  My pain, my hurt, my sexual, physical, mental and spiritual anguish has (while unwarranted and uncalled for while also undeserved) built me into a strong, capable, loving, caring, relentless, strong, powerful woman, mother and sister.  I have become the rock of so many, to the point in so many cases I have put everyone except myself at ease.  I have been subconsciously repeating the pattern of placing other peoples emotions above my own witch was learned by catering to the needs of a toxic parent.

I never knew what permanency meant, for adoptees everything can change at any moment.  Rehoming is real, "youth centers" that focus on "troubled children" often pin point issues that many adoptees do have.  I cannot explain how unsettling it is to know you can be uprooted and relocated at any time.  Children are vulnerable, easily manipulated and gaslit, but adoptees are told to be grateful and any abuse that we do endure are told is "better than what you would have had with your real family." Real in this case means biological, but in all honesty that phrase was only uttered to me with disgust, hatred and fear.  Every time I challenged anything, acted in anger and/or sadnessI was compared to the absolute monster who gave birth to me.  You know that I was told she was a whore.  I know now that that isn't true, she was diagnosed as a sociopath and later as a psychopath.  I truly was lucky to be removed, but I was not lucky to be adopted.

As I have grown, and faced the trauma it has not erased the pain, the trauma, the sadness, the anger or the feeling of betrayal.  My anger, my pain, my hurt, my refusal to bend, my stubborn nature, my hyper awareness, the time I lost with my big brothers, the time I lost as a child, the time I lost to BE a child.  No-one ever really knew me and only one person knows me now.  I am definitely terrified to repeat the mistakes of my mother and my APs, but I also know it is that fear that has driven me to address all of it in the somewhat rambling post that will maybe be seen by a few.  I am worried that in all honesty no-one cares.

The system is broken now, and it was broken then, and the only thing that truly matters is that if we work together, if we really listen even when it hurts, when it sucks and when it is not when we want to hear, we can create and exact change.  So many of us feel it, so many of us are speaking out, so many of us are writing about it, but how many KEPT people are reading it?  How many KEPT people are talking about it?  How many of us are hurting and how many KEPT people are yelling that we are wrong about what we lived?  We have to do this TOGETHER and change the system so that going forward, into the future we are working toward minimal trauma, minimal hurt and maximum support, love, and connection in any and all SAFE situations to keep families as intact BIOLOGICALLY as possible.

If you made it this far, thank you.  I love you, and please try to help me make a difference.