Dear Adoption, CAN YOU NOT HEAR ME?
Here is a list of things I have been saying daily which you cannot seem to hear.
Perhaps I shall shout so you can better hear me.
- I LOVE MY ADOPTIVE FAMILY AND I MISS EVERYTHING I MISSED WITH MY BIOLOGICAL FAMILY.
- How can I even miss something I have never known? Good question and thank you for pointing out that all I have missed is so great and so unknown, I cannot even KNOW what I am missing. You just assisted in proving my point.
- I HAVE BEEN CONNECTING TO PEOPLE ALL MY LIFE BUT I HAVE HAD TO WORK VERY HARD AT IT. IT IS A FULL TIME JOB.
- Indeed many people must work to connect and I am not interested in competing for who has it worse. I’m only stating that I have struggled with this as an adopted person. Is it not enough for me to state this challenge I have worked to overcome? Why must you point out that everything seems to be fine?
- I DO NOT WANT TO BE PART OF THE BIRTH MOTHER FIGHT.
- I’m well educated on adoption coercion. I have heard their stories of manipulation, fear, and being forced to sign while under the influence of high doses of medication. What happened to these birth mothers is unacceptable but it isn’t my doing. I have lost without any choice. Yeah Mothers should speak out and work for change but that is not my fight and that is okay.
- I DO NOT WANT TO BE TOLD TO BE GRATEFUL.
- Telling someone to be grateful for a loss of this magnitude is asinine.
- I DO NOT WANT ANYBODY TO TELL ME THAT MY LIFE IS BETTER THAN IT WOULD HAVE BEEN HAD I NOT BEEN ADOPTED.
- You do not know that my life is better any more than I yet you continue to state that with confidence. You sound like a moron.
- I AM DOING FINE AND WELL. WHEN I TALK ABOUT ADOPTION YOU SHOULD LISTEN OR WALK AWAY (EITHER ARE ACCEPTABLE).
- Some days I lose myself in loss and grief. Some days I swim in gratitude for the people and the things I have. Many of my days are lived being wholly enveloped by all the good and all the hard. Allow me to be and to feel. This is my life and experience, after all.
CAN YOU HEAR ME?
dearadoption.com 
This is wonderful and perectly says what many adoptees, including me would like to say.
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So Mr. Foster father-cum-adoptee-so-in-love-with-his-adoptive-parents-that-he-SHOUTS-at-the-reader, just who are you trying to convince-Yourself or others? You haven’t convinced me, an adoptee for many more years than you and who learned the hard way that screaming at the world only served to give me laryngitis, and much later on the loss of a lyric soprano voice I had spent years cultivating only to have lost it and my hard work and my pleasure in being able to make others smile with the music I could produce.
What I hear is you SCREAMING -in what psychologists might call a primal scream …Fine for a child but not so great for an adult, adopted or not. SCREAMING in your male whorl of Oh woe is me nobody-loves-me-I-am-going-to-go -eat-worms. Or, perhaps this one: You Don’t Own Me recently made retro popular by Midler-Keaton-Hawn in a movie /book First Wives Club.They had chutzpah and set about changing their lives … and those of others. You don’t. BTW: Megaphones are for CHEERLEADERS, not those who screech.
You’re doing well, are you? So well as to deign to allow others to make-up their own minds in your passive-aggressive permission -one that no one asked for. No one has disallowed you to be/to feel. But just as you are allowed these so too are the rest of us-including our too many detractors.
Adoptees make up about 2% of the global population, and we all loose basic identities, families, siblings, culture, religion, language and so forth in consequence. We also loose our civil, federal, state/country and human and, in the US, our Constitutional rights to our own birth certificates, adoption files as well as to where our siblings might be. We all have been abandoned and discarded, and kept the perennial minor by courts and its agents. We re not treated equally under the law in the US or in the West. We are one of , if not the smallest population of minorities in the world -except for those with naturally pale hair and eyes who are 0.5% of the world’s population. (Most people have the dominant genes of dark hair, eyes ad skin … look
around people!)
To Mr. Foster Father and others, I suggest that instead of wallowing in your adoptiveness, that you work to change what denies us our OBC, our families, our sibs, our birth rights and what we inherited from our DNA, and mostly what keeps us from being afforded what all non-adoptees are given, EQUAL TREATMENT UNDER THE LAW. That you work to keep children IN THEIR FAMILIES via a Guardianship as was the custom before adoption and fostering reared their ugly heads; that you help another adoptee regain his/her identity as others of us are doing; that you help someone obtain their OBC even if that is by joining groups working towards that or joining groups like those of us who lend our support to the bills in senates or legislative branches of state government which seek to redress the wrongs of adoptees who are denied access to any of their files. Go read the laws pertaining to adoptees in your state and contact your senators/legislators to seek redress and procurement of you and other adoptees documents.
Yesterday, on my 73rd birthday I learned that because I reached out to the daughter of an adoptee who had died a few years ago in partnership with an attorney who is also an adoptee, the three of us were able to convince a court in KS to release her mother’s original birth certificate by a court order. The daughter was able to fulfill her mother’s dying wish.. It came after her death, but it came and can be among the other items which tell family history to future generations. Not a cent exchanged hands, only the hope that we could obtain a document that should never have been denied in the first place.
As Ebenezer Scrooge said, and I paraphrase: Do it now before you dot another (I) or cross anther T, Adoptees. It takes more than one to raise a child, and it takes all of us to change the lot of any adoptee.
PS I invite you to view the webpage/FB page entitled Adoptee Rights Law which is maintained and updated by a young lawyer who tracks current state laws concerning OBCs in each of the states. It also has updates on pending legislation in affected states-Like NYS who is currently reviewing a bill that could allow the adoptee access -finally-to his/her OBC.
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I hear you. Thank you for sharing
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