Dear Adoption, I’m Insignificant
I do not know why people go through so much trouble to adopt and then forsake their adopted children.
If you look at me you won’t see anything significant. I am a normal mom that works a normal job. I am not pretty or ugly or fat or skinny. My hair isn’t really brown or blonde. It is a non color. My eyes are just eyes. They do not sparkle.
I was insignificant as a child too. I was left at the hospital by my mother at birth. I lived in a group home until I was 5 years old and those are my only happy memories from childhood even though I had no parents. I lived in two foster homes after that but one was only for a night or two. The second family adopted me a few years later.
I remember how much paper work and house cleaning they had to do so the adoption could go through. I remember all the complaining about how much trouble this was for a “kid nobody wanted” and hearing my adoptive parents say “they should just be thanking us”.
I was insignificant.
Once I was adopted everyone was so relieved to have the whole thing over.
Life went on and there was no more house cleaning besides my chores. I covered my ears when they screamed at each other and at me. I hid my bruises from my teachers and my friends. I hid loneliness, scars, worry and fear. I hid my curiosity over why they adopted me. It is really hard to understand why people do this and then don’t act like a family should.
I did not feel accepted or loved. My insignificance never wore off. I felt safe because I knew I had a place to live but I wasn’t safe except for the roof over my head. I was hurt in my home by the people who adopted me and the ones who were supposed to keep me safe.
Who should I blame? I know life is luck or no luck. I guess I didn’t have any luck on my side.
Adoption, you have hurt me. People always try to tell me who to blame but I think that when you are the person who was hurt you get to decide and I blame you.
Please do not be mad at me for blaming you because I cannot take anymore anger pointed at me. You can take it because you are just a thing. I am a person even though I am insignificant.
dearadoption.com 
to whoever wrote this- you are not insignificant. your story is important. you are important. you are not alone. this is something that has happened to other adoptees as well and we need to raise awareness about this. thank you for sharing. your story will make a difference.
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To all persons reading this: In the USA, Persuade your local and national politicians to frame their election platform to PASS the Equal Rights Amendment. If the ERA is ratified as part of the US Constitution, adoptees can try arguing in court, that the ERA upholds the Rights of the Child laws, written in the United Nations Human Rights amendments. With good attorneys and adoptees such as “insignificant” as live witnesses, OBC may be opened, and infant-stranger-adoption will be a rare occurrence. No human being should experience separation from their gestational caregiver, their biological family. Family preservation, health care, and education, is where the greatest amount of money should be spent…and in that order…and world-wide. Best to all, Ginny.
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Ginny’09 – This account is heartbreaking and unjust, to be sure. But your conclusion, that no human should experience separation from their gestational caregiver, is ringing hollow with me, especially in the last few days when I’ve read TWO stories in regional news from the past couple weeks of pre-schoolers being murdered by their mother’s boyfriend; in one the Mom was also arrested because there was evidence of long term abuse prior to the fatal beating so she knew her child was being abused; and the other mom was arrested, although I’m not sure she directly partook in inflicting severe burns on all her daughter’s extremities before the child died. And to top it off, there was a story about a man getting sentenced for murdering his girlfriend’s young child, and yet the dead child’s mother still stands by her man.
Don’t you think these poor children would have been better off being separated from their gestational caregivers? Or were these short tortured lives ending in brutal death worth it just so we can all say “Yay!! At least the child stayed with its own mother!”
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Wow I couldn’t disagree with you more. Obviously there are terrible parents who do terrible things to their children. But to use that argument to minimize the experience of insignificant and a large number of adopted children upsets me.
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Yeah. Same. It’s that same ole “you should feel lucky you weren’t aborted” sort of talk.
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In all industrial countries, except the US, there is no such thing as “low-income”. All occupations have a lving base union wage. Check out Sweden, Norway, Demark, etc.
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How about addressing mental illness in America first? That makes more sense. I don’t know if we have enough psychics out of training who can lead us to the next victims. If you can predict these things you should get out there and help the kids. If not focus on a plan for mental illness for preventative measures.
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What a powerful indictment of the adoption process. Adoption is a selfish act. It’s about the people adopting and less about the child. I have known quite a few adoptees and the majority had unhappy childhoods.
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That has been the opposite of my experience. The ones I know, even older ones from the era of closed adoptions, feel they had stable, loving, regular homes. Not rich, not pony rides at their birthday party. They are still connected to their parents and get support as needed (the younger ones I mean, who are ssetting up their adult lives and needing advice, babysitting help, etc). No one got kicked out at 18 as I see it claimed happens to everyone; no one got dropped by extended family when parents died. Just generally normal existences except the additional relationships with birthparents.
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Kurt, just because you didn’t hear of them doesn’t mean they didn’t happen. You must move in completely different circles to me. I hear unhappy adoptee stories every day of every week. You’ll find that adoptees who claim to be “happy” are often in denial and still “in the fog” (Google it), or won’t tell their truth until their adoptive parents pass on for fear of “hurting’ them. Please don’t negate other adoptees realities.
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Right. Ugh. I can’t stand that crap. People really are this close minded??
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That’s because they haven’t faced the reality and Live in denial (which is fine. It’s more safe than Alternative which is crazy) and they don’t want to admit to anyone how they feel. It’s easy. You don’t tell everyone your deepest darkest thoughts I’m sure so don’t disregard Adoptees and assume things like this.
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Hey, Kurt! Listen (or look!) up! )
I’m one of those older adoptees who arrives to call your bluff -and btw, closed adoptions still happen in 36 states. Best try checking facts before passing misinformation
Want to hear about the anything but stable environment I had? Be forewarned it isn’t very pretty and would read like a Steven king novel were it a book.
The time when it was a mandate that adoptees have their own room? One where the male adopter could molest the terrified little girl who being an adoptee had neither protector or guardian., and whose wife enabled him? The little girl who was left a home alone at night during a raging and very dark an stormy night because she dared ‘talk back’. The little girl who had terror of being left alone and abandoned just as she had been at age 2? The little girl who had been cruelly separated from her two siblings yet made to call the adopters’ son her brother? Child who got beaten for reading? For remembering her own Catholicism in preference to the adopters’20th century Puritanism? The plucky child who found multiple ways to leave her torturers, and who eventually was labeled incorrigible by the court who refused to see the reality that was mine. The valium shoved down my throat because I suffered anxiety, in many forms, depression, and other facets of the adoptee syndrome that only recently has this country discovered are ours -many for the whole of our lives. And my non-friend, there are more of me than of you with your fairy tale views. And this is a mere soupçon of my childhood, one which haunted my early adulthood, and one that still comes out to haunt me from time to time almost seven decades later.
People like you are an anathema to people like me. States and agents of the rah! rah! rah! adoption advocates love your lies and delusions as it helps them delude both those who for whatever reason want to relinquish their newborns to strangers or those strangers who want to take the relinquished child.
How is it Kurt -and others -that I knew at five years of age that identity theft by courts was an injustice done to the child who was to be sacrificed for the convenience of others?
And question for you: If, as you claim, we older adoptees were so thrilled with having been conscripted (look it up!) into the system which is adoption searched for our own identities and fight legislators and courts for access to our own records-birth and other?
People like you prove the veracity of a phrase attributed to PT Barnum: Their is (indeed) a sucker born every minute! And you are one of millions! Be gone with you and others like you , or I will find the pail of water Dorothy and Toto left behind to, as the Wizard so aptly stated, liquidate you. Grow up Little Boy Blue!
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An even worse adulthood. Midlife crisis struck and coming out of that has been a joy.
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Reblogged this on Gazelle's Scirocco Winds and commented:
For all of those who are so certain that adoptees are happy with their unnatural lives, I suggest you read this from a now adult who because of a system of throw-a-way identities and those attached to them gives this woman pain and angst which no doubt will accompany her throughout the remainder of her life.
Listen to her pain and know that countless others know this pain and worse. Also know that we don’t like screaming at the brick walls to make this system be banned and to disappear forevermore.
We deserve all rights given to non-adoptees. We are not insignificant and we are not rag dolls you can toss about …. at a court’s or agent’s whim!
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Hugs…I can understand these feelings of insignificance. Peace…
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You are not insignificant, You are important enough for me to read this, think kindly of you, care that hopefully things are a little better now, want to know you and feel everything you say. You are you and even though we often think we are nobodys , together we are everybody. We matter. YOU MATTER. I could cry for you right now so you are a significant person who sounds sad but lovely.
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I feel like I could’ve written this myself except for the group home. I often wish I’d been left in such a place rather than being adopted, because my story is so similar to yours. Yes why do they go to the trouble? A question I’ve often asked myself. I’m alone in the world now and I blame adoption just like you. Thank you for sharing.
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The strikingly raw self-blame is adoption’s tragic byproduct. I am distressed that this writer’s voice, so childlike in its apologetic shame, still carries a tone of one still cowering from abuse. Why – why would someone adopt a child they hate, and who are they trying to save?
People need to realize that children absorb every microscopic spear aimed at their self-esteem and sense of security. This contributor said it perfectly: S/he was safe within a physical space, but that didn’t guarantee a trauma-free life. That’s the hidden truth in many adoption stories.
Thanks so much for sharing. I respect the decision to remain anonymous; by doing so, you add a universal cry that many of us silently shout.
-Sunny
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Yes DEFINITELY not insignificant! I feel the same way though and I really don’t know why in the hell some adoptive parents can’t see this in their kids??? There’s no excuse. I come from supposedly two very smart parents but when it comes to making me feel like an insignificant pos they’ve done a great job. I’ve tried. Idk. You’re not alone and hugs!
We have each other and that’s significant.
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We are gathering and we will never forget our brothers and sisters who were unable to escape.
We are Gods children. We are not found yet we are not MISSING.
Yesterdays thrown away children.
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