Dear Adoption, Listen
You are such a big thing. Everyone knows you in a different way. I know you as some good and some bad. I want people who aren’t adopted to know how hard it is to be switched from one life/family/future to another life/family/future. Yes I know that some of us are better off after being switched by adoption but it’s still a hard thing even for us. I’m grateful for the life I have but why does that mean you get all the credit, Adoption? Why does it feel like I have to prove I’m grateful? People just expect me to be grateful I was adopted. It bothers me that people won’t listen to how hard it is even if I was given a better life. Who can say that though 100%? I guess I am somewhat grateful for you Adoption but I’m also not sure I should have to be. I know so many people who had harder lives than me with their adoptive family so how can I tell them adoption is good? I feel like nobody can say if it’s good or bad except for each adopted person. Mine is good and bad. Is anyone’s anything all good or all bad? Maybe I’m the only one.
Adoption you tried and so did my mom and dad. You guys tried to give me so much Chinese culture and really stuffed it down my throat. The only thing is that you don’t understand that I don’t really know how I fit into my culture or if I know it’s really mine. It’s confusing because didn’t you and my parents save me from my country? And now the thing you say you want most is for me to embrace my country and my culture. How can you take somebody away from something and then tell them to embrace it? It’s confusing and I wish you would just see the obvious even when I can’t really speak it to you. I don’t know how I feel about China because I’m confused about who I am and you aren’t really helping even though you think you are. I think you should try harder to listen. I’m trying. I’ve been trying my whole life but it doesn’t feel like you’re trying to do anything besides convincing me I should just be grateful.
I would like people to know if you aren’t adopted you just don’t get it and you never totally will. It’s impossible for you to understand totally but if you want to get close to understanding then you should listen. You want me to just be grateful and I want you to just listen. I would be a lot more grateful if you would just listen.
dearadoption.com 
Well said!
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I am so glad you are studying to be a social worker. You will be a big comfort to children who feel misunderstood and a great trainer of parents who need to better understand the conflicting and strong emotions that their children carry with them every day.
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Reblogged this on Gazelle's Scirocco Winds and commented:
Message to non-adoptees-you just don’t get i9t!
Message to adopted- like DNA we are 99.5 % alike and only 0.5% different… but we ach have our own voces, our own perspectives, our own experiences, and our own ideas about benefits/risks/losses.
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It’s a huge challenge to get our word out to others outside the circle.
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And we keep on trying. Much love xoxo. Follow me at nerdygal.onuniverse.com for more info on how I’m spreading the word.
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So beautifully written and so on point. 100%! Love you my fellow Adoptees! We are all different but feel the same pain. No butts about it.
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Well said indeed. I don’t get why some adoptive parents think their children should be grateful. It’s completely inappropriate. And it’s sad for any adopted children who have had to grow up thinking they should be grateful. We, the adoptive parents, are the grateful ones. I am hugely priveleged to be mother to my wonderful daughter. She shouldn’t be grateful. I’m the truly lucky one.
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I agree wholeheartedly! I promised to bring my daughters up knowing their culture. They fairly soon let ne know this was not cool but painful and not helpful.
My daughters are my life and I adore them. I am so blessed and proud to be their mother. I am the most Lucky one! They had a tragic beginning but Ive loved them as hard as I could and we are a great Family❤️
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My daughters have grown up in this country, and so the culture of this country is their culture. They do have an ethnic heritage that ties them solidly to China, but it is not their culture. Even though they both went to Chinese school for years, and we’re part of the Chinese Community Association in our town, they do not know even the smallest aspects of day-to-day Chinese life that would be part of the culture there. Think about it… here they know the language, the food, how we celebrate holidays, even the crazy little things that we take for granted like cartoons and American humor. Those are the kinds of things that make up your culture. It doesn’t come from your ethnic background. When was the last time any white parent who might be (Italian or Irish or Polish) was asked what they knew about their culture? I treasure the ties we have to China, and we have many Chinese American friends, but my kids know this American culture as their own.
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I find your disregard of reality to be appalling at best, and reprehensible at worse, “B”. You have taken children who is not only biologically tied to parents and family and ancestors, but also language, culture , and religion that is her right and their heritage away from what is HERS, not YOURS! She has only one mother-the woman who with her father conceived, bore and birthed her-and that is NOT you! You share no DNA with her nor do any of your biological family. You nay well have a court-order, but court orders are just as false as the adoptee birth certificate given to the girls who you stole …. they are no more your daughters than I am!
How dare you generalize about others whom you do not know… and by the way, we all have the same genes that monitor and provide adequate protection against harmful UVA rays and which give our skin its tone in relationship to the distance we are form the sun. We are neither separates races or ethnicities… geo-politics do not make one this , that or the other. We are no more nor no less than 0.5% different from one another-the remaining 99.5% of us is the same as any other hominin.
I myself am an adoptee who has spent the whole of her life taking back my own inheritance and identity a court stole from me. My DNA -autosomal and mitochondrial -took my ancestors from what is now northeastern Algeria thru the middle east, into a good percentage of Europe, to South America and thence to North America. I fought for my rights to be me and not someone else-and left my adopters upon my HS graduation -still a minor but determined to dissociate myself from them and the society which allowed them to abuse me and keep me from knowing my own self. In consequence I know very well the languages of my ancestors who travelled the length and breadth of four continents, and the religions which were theirs. (And those girls whom you took without their permission most likely have heart-broken parents on the mainland who were forced by a government to give away children because of the one-child-per-family law… Of course you do not think of that! Your needs seem to supersede the true needs of those tow girls you claim to be yours.
You aren’t even a fit guardian, never mind mother! Only a deluded female who takes her convenience over the rights of the vulnerable children she took far across a huge ocean because of her own selfish desires, whatever they may be.
You are no more a saviour of these girls than my cat-but prove yet again that the ro9ad to hell is indeed paved with ill-conceived and selfish intent! One day I hope those two girls who share far more with the anonymous Chinese adoptee who wrote so eloquently of her estrangement from what should have been he birthright will tell you to your face just what you did in taking them from China … Quel horreurs! TRISTE!
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