Adoption Revelations: Centering Adoptee Perspectives
As adoptees, we are often the last people to define and share opinions about our own adoption. For most of our lives, our stories are told from the adoptive parents’ perspective. As children we are told how we should feel by them, friends, media, and society at large. Comments, like: “Adoption is so beautiful!” or, “That’s amazing, you must feel so lucky!” or, “Your parents must be wonderful people!” or, “My friend’s cousin’s niece is adopted. You’re both so fortunate.”
All of these comments seem to tell us, “The adoption story is black and white. You now have a better life.”
Photo courtesy of Claire Magenheimer
For many adoptees, this flies in the face of our personal experience—one of loss, confusion, and curiosity. Adoptees grow up with a cloud of wonder about how they came to be, and question what the world would look like for them if we had not been adopted.
Holas Graves, a transracial adoptee, often asked himself;
“Who do I look like? Since I was able to talk, I always had someone to call Mom and Dad. However, it never dawned on me that I not only didn’t look like either my mother nor father, but my skin color wasn’t even close to being the same as theirs. It wasn’t until I was older, when I began to receive looks and questionable comments, did I notice that something was amiss.”
“Every day I’d dream about who my bio mom is, what she looks like, how she smells, how she would feel while she’s holding you in her arms. I longed to know her and wondered if she thought about me as often as I thought about her.
To have someone who looks like me, to have someone to teach me about self-love, being proud of my culture, my race, my heritage. To have someone who sees me for me! Because everyone else says “they don’t see race. Or they don’t see color.” What they actually mean is they don’t see you for you. They see you as the child they wanted to have but could not.”
It is not common for adoptees to have space to share these questions and feelings. For some of us, the questions caused our adoptive parents sadness, so we stopped asking. For some, the answers wouldn’t really be answers, so we stopped asking. For some, we felt a said or unsaid obligation to remain silent, so we never asked. For some, the answers we received from our adoptive parents weren’t accurate.
“I was brought up to know that any questions I had regarding my adoption would be well received and welcomed. I was informed of the name I was born with and a bit about my birth mother. I carried all of that with me each and every day. I considered it fact. But when I met my biological family, I asked more questions and got answers in return. What my adopted family had told me wasn’t what my biological family told me. Basically, I found out that I was wanted. I found out that I was wrongfully taken out of the arms and house of my maternal grandmother. A few weeks later, without being aware, I had an emotional breakdown. I wasn’t as prepared as I thought I would be. My life, as I knew it, turned upside down”
Photo courtesy of Mary-Noreen Lynn Carter Troup
An adoptee sense of self is often disrupted and we spend more time searching than knowing. Adoption is not a one-time event; adoptees live with the aftermath their entire lives. If we’re lucky, we find answers and truths that assist us in our healing, but for many there is no way to discover our stories. Instead we have to sit with all the unknown and unanswered questions. So it seems clear that when people say: “But God had a plan for your life!” or, “Your birth parents loved you so much they made the ultimate sacrifice,” that they may be more to comfort others and aren’t truly helpful for adoptees in processing their grief and loss.
“I used to sob for my mother, wondering what I did wrong for her to give me away, despite all the love and material things my adoptive parents showered upon me. I grew up learning to equate love with loss and pain because I was told by my adoptive mother, ‘Your birth mother loved you so much she gave you away”
To escape these feelings of loss and abandonment, it is no wonder why so many of us would dream up stories about our biological parents to fill in the gaps. This common adoptee coping mechanism was dubbed “Ghost Kingdom” by Betty Jean Lifton, an adoptee, psychologist, and author of Lost and Found and Journey of the Adopted Self, among others. It felt much safer to keep our complex feelings about adoption in our own minds.
Yet this internalization of our feelings, including the need to always present as grateful, ends up affecting our mental health. According to a study by the University of Minnesota, adoptees are over-represented in mental health care. The American Academy of Pediatrics found the odds of being diagnosed with ADHD and ODD were twice as high for adoptees, and in a separate study found that adoptees are four times more likely to attempt suicide. If we want to truly improve adoptees’ lives, we need to listen to them and support them—and these statistics tell us we aren’t there yet. As an adult adoptee, my hope is that in the future, these common experiences and statistics will no longer be true for adoptees.
I didn’t share my own complicated feelings about my adoption until I was in my mid-forties. If you had previously asked any of my friends or family how I felt, they would have told you I was grateful to have been adopted.
I don’t believe I ever said that outright, but I also didn’t dissuade people of the notion either. I would smile and nod and internally I would wonder if I was doing enough to earn my existence. If I needed to be grateful to my adoptive parents, it meant I had to show them every day that I was worth it. I strived to be perfect and emotionally inexpensive. In fact, I prided myself on not asking for much from anyone, ever. I was an easygoing, eager-to-please person. Tell me what you want from me to be happy, and I will do it with no thought on how it affects me. This, too, is not an uncommon reaction.
“Remember all those times when you were afraid to make mistakes, be corrected or scolded, or you just didn’t have a good way to express yourself? You felt the intense need to blend in, be a good girl, afraid to cause any problems or cry, because of how you thought that you would be ‘sent back’ wherever that was”
In a way, adoptees need to learn the language. Through my own research, I learned terms like “ghost kingdom,” as mentioned above. And “transracial adoption,” which is when a child is adopted by a family of a different race. And “coming out of the fog,” when an adoptee starts to separate the dominant story of adoption and reconcile their own feelings and thoughts (which has now been expanded upon in The Adoptee Consciousness Model). While this process can look and feel different for each adoptee, Mary-Noreen Lynn Carter Troup shares how it felt to her.
“Something happened to me. I can’t fully explain it. But something in my head, deep in my soul, clicked or cracked. It was like someone ripping off my comfortable sunglasses and forcing me to look directly at the sun.”
“My life, as I knew it, turned upside down. With the help of therapy and close friends who were adoptees as well, my mental health improved. I learned that there was a thing called ‘the adoption fog,’ and I had just come out of it. I was able to see and accept the truth. I have come to terms with the fact that though I had loved my adopted mother, I had come to hate being adopted and what it actually entails.”
When I began going to therapy with an adoption-focused therapist, I learned many of my behaviors and experiences were common amongst other adoptees, and that some behaviors I had thought were personality traits were actually coping mechanisms related to my adoption. This wealth of new adoption knowledge had me feeling like Sir Isaac Newton discovering gravity. It was all around me, it weighed me down and affected my entire life, but I’d never had a name for it or a true understanding of it before.
When adoption conversations center adoptee voices, we start to understand the impact of adoption on child development and we also honor the work adult adoptees had to do, and do so frequently on their own. Instead of pathologizing their coping mechanisms, we can create environments where those coping mechanism are no longer needed.
We learn better ways to care, nurture, and support adopted children when we listen. We have the ability to make adoption truly child-centered and move away from viewing it solely as a family-building tool. It allows us as a society to ask “Are we focused on finding homes for vulnerable children, or finding children for hopeful parents?”
When we look at adoption from the child’s perspective, it allows us to see the grey and the in-between spaces, where a child can feel loss. Where a child can understand, as many adoptee advocates claim, “Adoption didn’t give me a better life, just a different one.” Where, when grown, adoptees can openly claim their parents weren’t perfect without receiving personal attacks. Where society doesn’t assume someone is a good person just because they’re an adoptive parent. Where society doesn’t assume someone is a bad person just because they’re a birth parent. Instead, we hear the nuance and see the complexity. We allow adoptees to truly own their stories and decide for themselves which parts of adoption they found beneficial and which parts they didn’t. They need time and support to take this on.
“I’m now 52 years old and healing. Still. My biological parents are healing in their own ways as well. My adoptive parents never wanted me to find my biological parents and were disappointed I didn’t turn out the way they wanted. Adoption for me created permanent loss, pain, and trauma for all involved. My healing is a process that isn’t linear.”
Adoptees sharing their stories with others is the result of an internal process that touches deeply on identity. To speak up, they need to know who they are outside of all the external pressure. They also know that speaking out will result in negative reactions by loved ones and strangers alike (just ask Colin Kaepernick or Michael Oher). Knowing this, it makes sense that it can take so long—even well into adulthood—before many adoptees feel confident enough to share their own stories. As they go through the process, their opinions change and grow along with them. As adoptees, we understand adoption is not a one-time event; it is a lifelong revelation.
Hearing more adoptees speak up is also helping other adoptees. Each adoptee story empowers other adoptees to find themselves, to look within and define it from their point of view. While I speak of common adoptee experiences, you can’t truly know unless you listen to the individual adoptees in your life.
Identifying and articulating adoption from my perspective happened after years with an adoption-specialized therapist and multiple adoptee community groups. Claire, Holas, and Mary-Noreen, fellow adoptees who are part of my adoptee community, graciously agreed to share some of their experiences with you as well. All of this support and personal reflection culminated with sharing my perspectives as a panelist for the Adoptee Mentoring Society’s A Fireside Chat with Adoptees in July. In a way, I’ve come full circle.
By listening to other adoptees’ voices, I’ve found my own.
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
- bell hooks