As an adoptee…

For adoptees only.

Thought I’d open some discussion with “finish this sentence.” As an adoptee….what? Here’s the way I’d finish it.

As an adoptee…you’re never conferred full adult status.

Now, go ahead. Give it some thought. How would you finish the sentence? Please write your response in the comment box.

NOTE: I’ll keep this post open and on top for an indefinite period of time, checking in to post the responses as they come in. But I won’t be posting any new entries for quite awhile because of a busy schedule..

Thanks for your participation.

Update: Thanks to Laurie C. for these links– Shotgun Adoptions from the August 2009 issue of The Nation magazine: “Christian agencies lavish support services on pregnant women–if they give up their babies…”: and from the L.A. Times: Chinese adoption: Some Chinese parents say their babies were stolen for adoption.

Throwaway Mothers

Adoption isn’t about unwanted children; it’s about unwanted mothers (women).

I don’t consider myself a feminist, but the tilt of the playing field artificially sanctioned against women is (in my opinion) responsible for most of the misery on the planet.

One of the reasons young women are forced to give up their babies is because of drug addiction. To me this reflects the punative, pathological aspects of Western society visited mostly upon people of color, the poor, the young, the old, and women in general. Not just because drugs are so freely available and seductive when your life is just too painful to deal with, but because there is so little support and understanding for women in their designated role, struggling under externally imposed rules.

What fragile sense of identity is it that must malign and mistreat women? What a centuries’-old epidemic of fear and ignorance of human behavior and its consequences. I found a poignant post written by a blogger I’ve long admired called Throwaway Women. It expresses what I’m trying to write far better than I can. I strongly encourage you to read it and add it to what you know about women who are forced to adopt their babies.

And don’t get me started about forcing women to carry their babies full term to birth, and then separating them. Don’t get me started on save the fetus and toss the child.

Adoption, Private Property, & Identity Theft

I’m always coming up with another metaphor in an attempt to describe the loss and emptiness of being adopted at birth without access to what is rightfully mine: my identity as a human being.

But before I sink another one, I want to talk about the whole idea of private property, which, along with money, is sacrosanct in Western societies. If children are considered the private and sacrosanct property of their parents, why are less-well-off (i.e., poor) young mothers coerced to give up their babies if they are seen as too poor to raise their babies (i.e., too poor to protect their private property)?

The obvious answer is that the aggressors (i.e. the state, the church and their vampiric agencies) stay away from more well-off mothers not so much because they are perceived to have enough capital to raise children but because it the aggressors know they’d be in for nasty litigation if they dared to disrupt the sanctity of the family, of stealing private property euphemistically called “children.” Well-off people tend to be better educated and tend to know their rights or pay attorneys to protect them.

The concept of poverty vs. wealth is like rent vs. own in the eyes of the aggressors. Poor mothers are seen as squatters, or at best as renters, machines that only temporarily and inconveniently house what will presently become the private owned property of more entitled parents. (For an excellent description of the exploitation of the poor, see The Capitalist System by Michael Bakunin.) The entitled would never allow the aggressors to swoop in and take their property, neither real nor intellectual, and certainly not their children.

So adoptees are legally stolen by profiteers from poor mothers or couples though unnecessary vanity adoptions by entitled, childless couples. It’s clear to most thinking people nowadays that such practice must be struck down as criminal. But as it stands, corrupt, sated, bully justice systems in the “developed” world are selective to favor money. And until this criminal practice ends, poor natural parents and their children will continue to suffer on many levels for their entire lives after the theft.

The fact is that adoptees have had their identities stolen. Wikipedia reflects the general ignorance about identity theft when it involves adoption:

“The term is relatively new and is actually a misnomer, since it is not inherently possible to steal an identity, only to use it…”

Now for the metaphor I spoke about in the opening of this post. I use open-source Ubuntu software as my operating system. When I brought home the computer I built with the Ubuntu OS on it, I used the default login and password for awhile and uploaded a lot of data including meaningful family photographs.

But one day last month I decided I wanted to change the password and login, so I clicked on a system preference called “pack for shipping,” which I learned from tech support was the way to change the P & L. I typed in my new choices and hit “enter.” The screen went blank, then after several minutes, the log-in screen came up. I didn’t see any of my desktop icons. I looked in my files, but they were all gone. I looked everywhere for my data, but it had been wiped clean.  One click, and my data disappeared forever. Wiped clean. Just like the identity of adoptees.

But the difference between computers and people is that people are infinitely more sentient and that means they grieve, they long, and they carry their loss with them to their graves. But the law is set up to favor those who take ownership of children who don’t belong to them, to wipe their data clean so everyone can pretend that life starts from zero with the new ownership.

Given Up

I wake in a sweat again,
stuck in my head again.
Feels like I’m no one,
invisible,
and no escape from
this sick feeling.
Suffocating,
unfocused, scared, unprepared,
I hyperventilate.
No pills to take,
no help anywhere.
They signed papers
built an invisible cage,
adoptee detainee.
Infant foreclosure,
given up.
Given up.
Cardboard box.
All gone.
Buried in babyhood,
moving around, but
stillborn in my head.

Click on image

The Pathology of Secrecy

No one ever keeps a secret so well as a child.–Victor Hugo

As an adopted child, I had a recurring dream about the emptiness inside me, always symbolized by a black, empty room that had no foundation, no floor…nothing to stand on. If I dare took a step across this floor, I knew I’d fall forever.

I suffer from the universal hallmarks of being an adoptee: disconnectedness, free-floating anxiety, and an endless search to belong but never belonging. I’ve lived every day of my life with this loss and unresolved grief.

With the loss and grief associated with divorce and death, the larger society has resources to offer people comfort, support and recognition for their grief through accepted universally known rituals.

A common experience for adoptees is the grief from the loss of an unknown person without understanding why, but there’s no social context in which this loss is recognized. There’s no real adoption language or rituals to help adoptees cope and grieve, unless you can afford health insurance for expensive, private, long-term therapy.

This lack of support excludes adoptees from that larger society and infuses them with an existential emptiness that can result in various behaviors like difficulty with intimacy in relationships, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, thoughts of suicide, suicide, homicide, and so forth. Like living in an invisible, socially accepted, psychological concentration camp. At the very least, those who were adopted unnecessarily (see my post on vanity adoptions) are second-class citizens.

Which is more harmful in the long run, physical or psychological trauma? I’ll leave that for you to answer.

Unnecessary adoptions are saturated with secrecy. Secrecy, by its nature, hides something that protects its keeper(s), which in the case of unnecessary adoption, is a sociological conspiracy.

Here are just a few of countless reports by and about adoptees who bear the scar of pathological secrecy–

From tribe.net

“i am not able to master anything i try in life, always giving up, feeling like i will never be good enough. but i am more determined than ever to find and clear the issues that stand in my way. it is weird, i feel also like i have a hard time forming relationships, and keeping them….”

“My adoptive parents told me at a very young age (when I was young enough to understand) that I was adopted. I have always felt fortunate to be raised by my adoptive parents. They made me feel like I was special to have been adopted and treated me as they did their own biological children. I grew up in a pretty functional nuclear family and am grateful to have received the love I did from my parents, siblings, and extended family. However, no amount of love has replaced the emptiness that I feel as an adoptee…”

From Pushpa’s Blog

One of the biggest voids is understanding of the adoptee and their suffering that occurs without a foundation of familial background.  We all need to know our ancestry and our families regardless of the situations we came from, it is only natural for humans to have this desire. Another problem are the legalities, who is really watching over these adoptions to make sure that they are done properly?

All of us affected by adoption are being called forth to help in our own little ways to make a change.  There is no change with ignorance and complacency nor without acceptance.

From Stolen Nation

Many native adoptees suffered from not only geographical displacement and cultural confusion but also emotional emptiness, violence, physical and sexual abuse, and drug or alcohol abuse.

“My brother was adopted at four years old,” recalls one of the birth relatives of native adoptees interviewed for Our Way Home. “His adoptive parents divorced when he was 12 and they gave him back to the agency like returning merchandise. His life after that was a living hell of abuse, violence and alcoholism. My brother hanged himself at 20 years old.”

Unnecessary adoption requires a conspiracy of secrets

Q. Every day we read/hear about and see racism, sexism, and homophobia. Where is the same broad publicity and discussion on unnecessary adoption, the deceptions that surround the institution of felony kidnapping?

A.It’s as invisible as the ongoing grief carried around inside adoptees because aggressive colonizers have always secretively, systematically, and deceptively coerced and manipulated the voiceless members of society (in this case, vulnerable natural mothers and their children) and their environment with the express purpose of extracting profit.

One thing is clear to me. Society would no longer tolerate unnecessary adoption if the secrecy behind it was exposed to the light of day,

Where secrecy or mystery begins, vice or roguery is not far off.–Samuel Johnson

Sewing the Torn Soul Back Together

Living in the Dark Ages

As I’ve written before, I see vanity (i.e. unnecessary) adoptions as symptomatic of a far deeper and more insidious pathology that runs through Western (particularly American) society.

For me, vanity adoption is part of the evidence that the Dark Ages never went away.

Some medieval laws and attitudes are withering away, as well they should. The number of states that have legalized same-sex marriage, for example, are on the rise and soon those states that still enact laws that prohibit it will feel enormous pressure to join the rest of us in the 21st century.

Why, then, do medieval institutions (institutions because they’ve been embedded in the national psyche from day one) such as war, genocide, torture, racism, sexism, animal and child abuse, wrongful imprisonment, economic injustice, the death penalty, entitlement, sweatshop labor, competition, exclusion, and vanity adoptions (i.e. slavery) still grip America in their stranglehold?

Seriously, I have to ask if there’s a correlation between the fact that over three-quarters of Americans still identify as Christians and the harmful, prevailing attitudes and practices that step on our collective necks and rub our faces in the hell that rules the minds of psychopaths in power. By psychopaths in power I mean authoritarians in political office, religious leaders, military hierarchies, and so on. These psychopaths ensure for their benefit that fear and ignorance prevail. Meaning, they force the rest of us to suffer the torturous agonies that they themselves are going through.

I also have to ask if that Christian stranglehold on the nation works in tandem with the fact that bankers own Congress so that America now looks more and more like an impoverished police state brought to its knees by fundamentalist principles in all sectors.

It’s so past time that these dominant American Christians put away their childish things (like blind obedience to patriarchal authority, bullying, ideology, insistence on being right, and fear and loathing of sharing and cooperation) or we’re totally doomed as a species. I mean, their own bible says

When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.

But then they haven ‘t proved that they take their bible seriously have they? except for when it’s convenient for them to do so.

But we’re not helpless victims even though most of us are reduced to sniveling puddles who gripe among ourselves and hide away in our safe hovels.

If we’re ever going to get through this, we have to stop listening to and obeying all the babies in power. We have to begin thinking and risking for ourselves.

The Torn Soul

Relevant to my usual rant, unnecessary adoption is, in my opinion, a form of kidnapping, and should therefore be construed as a felony. America has always trumpeted itself as being a nation of laws. But the status quo that legislates justice does so only when that legislation favors the status quo. Otherwise it turns a deaf ear and a blind eye to critical and intelligent appeals for justice. Make no mistake. Adoption is an extremely political issue.

The other day I heard an interview with an actual adult, Michael Meade and decided to share some of the notes I took away from that interview. I think much of what he has to say offers insights that adoptees can take home with them.

Meade suggested that there’s always a deeper voice behind politics because the soul requires an outer drama to release its inner mythos. Mythology (stories that explain origins, causes, identities, adventures, etc.) has been obscured and occupied by rationality. Over the past 300 years the word “myth” has been bastardized to mean “untruth,” but myth has always been about finding the truth; stories are the way we find and reveal the truth.

We feel anxiety because we don’t have enough shared stories; we get caught up in the dominant surface battles of rational facts and figures that never tell the whole story. The bombardment of facts and figures produces fear. We shrivel under the rule of facts and fundamentalism in all areas of our lives.

The politics of fear shuts things down to more easily control a population. The original meaning of fear was “to try, risk, come over, go through.” If fear means “to go through,” then it can guide us through danger.

Nature has provided us with a choice when we face danger: fight or flight. Patriarchy has beaten us down and taught us to obey for so long that we end up doing neither, so we get stuck in the fear which turns to panic and paralysis.

[My thoughts on this: The panic and paralysis result in a stasis that turns in on itself rather than finds a way out of our challenges. So we flail around in our neurosis rather than act in our own best interests...Dude. I'm a poster child for this stasis.]

If we (including those of us struggling to mature into real adults as adoptees forced to remain children all our lives) don’t descend with the darkness it will come back to haunt us in another form. We’re suspended in a kind of delayed tragedy.

But here’s the good news, according to Meade.

The mind always wants to ascend, to be in the high places;  but soul is a matter of descent. Right now, in these times, it’s better to travel with soul, to learn to trust our ability to move from ideas down into the realm of soul. We’re currently going through a soul initiation as it descends; it knows how to move in darkness. We’re slowly catching on that danger and tragedy are opportunities for healing, meaningful change, and imagination.

You can feel it in your bones. Something is trying to be expressed. For example, currently the subject of torture is all over the news. It’s  imperative that we open the discussion up to see that torture has long existed inside the American soul, and now torture is trying to find its voice. Any torturer is always himself tortured.

Fundamentalists  refer to their ideology as the only ideology. Ideology means an inability to hold two thoughts at one time. It produces single vision. On the other hand, stories have many views. Stories are deeper, richer, and more resourceful than the monolithic belief of an ideology.

Stories can bring shattered people back together using hidden resources we can find within ourselves  to heal our own brokenness. We are all wounded warriors with the ability to gain soulful intelligence from our wounding through our underworld journey. If we don’t bring back soulful intelligence, our wound will be passed down to generations that succeed us.

The courage we bring into our battles can be expressed in the truth of our own stories, not by reciting lifeless ideologies. We walk between love and battle which tear our souls apart; our stories can sew the torn soul back together.

Further reading: the poetry of Hafez and Rumi.

…

As inspiring as Meade’s philosophy is, I’m skeptical that stories or anything else could ever sew the pieces of my subjugated soul together, but I’m going to keep on writing my truth as if they could. If nothing else his philosophy gives me courage and perspective when I witness the horrors taking place everywhere on the planet.

When the Beginning’s Forever Missing

Imagine, if you will, walking into a dark theater about fifteen minutes after a movie you really wanted to watch has begun.

You sit down and try to follow the movie. You try to make sense of everything you see, but you cannot because it’s all based on the first fifteen minutes that you missed.

You don’t know anyone in the dark seats around you, so you can’t ask for information. And even if you tried, you’d cause them to stop watching and they’d be angry with you for disturbing them.

So, even though you watch the movie to its end, you can’t see important aspects like character motivation, plot set-up, or relationships between characters (unless they formed after you began to watch) and you never have a seamless, settled satisfaction about what you’re watching.

Throughout the movie you can only guess at things. Many things makes no sense. What hangs together with meaning for those who began to watch from the credits to the end is meaningless to you. You never quite get your bearings. You begin to wonder why you kept sitting there, waiting for things to click together, but of course they never do. You realize you’re the only one in the theater who is missing vital information, but there’s nothing you can do about it.

After the movie ends, you ask the theater manager for your money back, but he or she looks at you strangely and scoffs. Of course you can’t get your money back. That’s not the theater’s policy.

This is a metaphor for how I feel as a “chosen baby,” a product of closed adoption. Nothing ever feels settled for me. I’ve never been privy to information that is seamless and organic for others. I’ve always felt like an outsider without information that others have, information that would make me feel like a complete human being. Information  that would help me to relax and flow through my life’s movie.

This post asks even deeper questions, not only about the grief and loss of adoptees and their biological parents who didn’t understand the consequences of relinquishment, but of the grief and loss felt even by those who weren’t adopted. What are our obligations to other people and the non-human world? How do we create meaning in a world that appears to be playing a cosmic joke on us — a world that gives us consciousness, the capacity for complex thought, and language with which to express those thoughts, but then denies us any obvious answer to the question, “Who am I and how do I fit into the bigger picture?”

And even deeper, Who is responsible for the culture of domination that’s destroying the earth? Who will actually benefit from a dead planet? I don’t have the answer to any of these questions. All I do is mourn. Every day I mourn.

In addition, Heather Rainbow, a first mother who lost her daughter to adoption, wrote a powerful post on Adoption vs. Kidnapping. I recommend it highly.

Velvet Genocide

In previous posts I’ve written about how adoption is a form of slavery based on the definition of slavery. A slave is “a human being who is owned as property by, and absolutely subject to the will of another.” In the broadest sense, an adoptee is a slave of the state.

Slavery (and by extension, adoption) is an economic convention upheld by entitled members of a society: Poor people have babies for the people of means to pluck and own.

The modern adoption machine is lucrative and locked into the political status quo because money is still the mandate of power.

Society supports adoption via a plantation of ignorance and a house of fear created by subtle brainwashing that goes largely undetected by all three members of the adoption triad. In this sense adoption is a velvet genocide.

This form of genocide is most apparent when entitled adopters remove children from natural parents in “developing” countries to raise in a more affluent environment “for the good of the child.” This is the mantra that’s been repeated and accepted as the watermark for adoption for over half a century.

But velvet genocide isn’t always race-based. It’s above all class-based. No matter what your race or where you live, if you’re poor and fertile, you’re fair game to be separated from your children, especially if you’re too young and powerless to say “No!”

It’s easy to gloss over the powerful bond between natural mother and child with the brainwash so rightously promoted, “For the good of the child.” The natural mother is a baby machine. She has no feelings, and certainly is evil for wanting to keep her child, even if she can’t provide for it. Evil is in the eye of the beholder, and it can be weilded like a political bludgeon.

Granted, there are exceptions to the rule. Some mothers are unfit–they are chronic substance abusers, they die, they are mentally unfit, they’re abusive, etc. And sometimes no other family member is willing or able to adopt the child. I’m not talking about such cases. I’m talking about a wholesale baby market where young mothers are tricked out of their children and live to regret it forever. The bank bailouts are a great metaphor for this trickery: save the banks, not the taxpayers/save the privileged infertile not the integrity of the natural family.

Adoption is just one more way that monied power has of separating families. Once this is understood by those victimized by velvet genocide, it will be held up to the light of day and scrutinized for the lasting harm that it perpetuates upon the human race.

Life-long Post Partum Blues

This post is a continuation from the previous post, I’m a Black Swan. I seem to need to blog out my feelings right now so that I can go on with my own life.

I’m sitting here in my house with all the curtains closed trying to figure out where to go from here. Families are multi-headed beasts, though, in that everything I do effects everyone else in the family. It’s not like being single and independent.

I think that huge events like childbirth bring out the real person behind the mask. If anyone has been hiding something in the name of political correctness, if they’ve been deceiving themselves and/or others, the huge event shakes up the dice and spills them out onto the table. I’m distressed as hell, but it’s unhealthy for me to keep feeling so depressed. It’s time to focus on other people and things in my life besides my daughter and her family. Too bad that I’m here and willing to help her, but I refuse to push myself on her or insist on being a part of her life when she made her feelings clear that I bring “fear and negativity” into her house..

I was just reading about post partum blues and depression. I’m not saying she has this. I’m saying that I have these feelings even though I’m not the one who had the baby. I think I’ve had most (not the ones in parentheses) of these feelings all my life, now that I think of it.

• Depressed mood-tearfulness, hopelessness, and feeling empty inside, with or without severe anxiety.
• (Loss of pleasure in either all or almost all of your daily activities.)
• Appetite and weight change-usually a drop in appetite and weight, but sometimes the opposite (eating pushes down pain).
• Sleep problems-usually trouble with sleeping, (even when your baby is sleeping.)
• (Noticeable change in how you walk and talk-usually restlessness, but sometimes sluggishness.)
• (Extreme fatigue or loss of energy.)
• Feelings of worthlessness or guilt, with no reasonable cause.
• Difficulty concentrating and making decisions.
• Thoughts about death or suicide. (Some women with PPD have fleeting, frightening thoughts of harming their babies: these thoughts tend to be fearful thoughts, rather than urges to harm.)

After all this blog is about me, not anyone else. My daughter is the hub of attention now for people around her. All I can do is to stand away in the shadows and finally turn in another direction. I wish I’d never moved a thousand miles away to be with my family. I was a fool to think it was a good idea.

This situation is minor compared to the overall world situation where real physical and mental agony are on the rise affecting huge swathes of people everywhere while fat cats get richer, fatter, and more entitled. My pain is no more than a whimper in a Category 5 hurricane.

I’m a Black Swan

In case there’s any doubt that being adopted can really fuck up your life, here’s my current situation. The same daughter who I had to give up for three weeks the day after she was born (due to a medical condition I had which is now considered safe to keep your baby with you), just gave birth to her own daughter this Saturday.

After losing my daughter the day after she was born I had severe PTSD, re-living the separation from my own natural mother just after my own birth. Being separated from my baby for three weeks was unspeakably difficult, as cruel as you might find in the Middle Ages. Nowadays, the medical profession doesn’t deem such separation necessary. But back then I was judged and ostracized for having, you guessed it, herpes. I had a c-section, but not because of the herpes, because my pelvis was too small to deliver naturally. The herpes lesion appeared after the stress of the operation. When the nurse saw it she had me banned from even seeing my baby let alone touching and holding and nursing her. So, with my first child I relived my own birth separation, deja vu all over again, and I very nearly died of anxiety, grief, and worry.

And now? My firstborn daughter doesn’t want me in her life because my severe separation anxiety which I did a poor job of hiding when I learned that the new baby had blood in her stool (her doctor told her nothing serious, but not until after my anxiety apparently filled the room and freaked my daughter out). She says I bring fear and negativity into her house, which is bad for the baby. Well, she’s probably right. She has every right to protect her family from a freak like me.

How can I live with this? I was separated from my natural mother, my daughter, and now my granddaughter at birth. This is hell. Because of my adoption and my inability to deal with my grief and loss (reliving it over and over and over and over and over and over…) and possibly some residual subconscious memory she carries that has to do with abandonment at birth too(?) I’ve been rejected. I’m barred from my daughter’s life and from seeing seeing my own granddaughter the second day of her life on earth. I’m banned. Rejected once again.

But that’s not the worst of it. Three years ago my daughter really wanted me and R to live near her, and when a house came up for rent across the street, we moved in and everything seemed great. R and I would help out when we were needed and be supportive. But it doesn’t work that way, folks. My advice is, never move so close to your children except on a month-to-month rent set-up (we signed a year’s lease in November) because if bad feelings develop, if you face rejection, there’s no place to escape.

Yes, I know, the advice is to sit down and have a family talk. But how is that going to erase so much loss, grief, separation, rejection, and abandonment? The truth is, right now my daughter is hormonal, post-partum, so it’s better to let her have her way or else things could get a lot worse. I just want to go away and never come back right now. I’m a rejected daughter and mother; a grandma who lives across the street from her new grand baby and might as well live a world away. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. What should have been a joyous occasion with my first grandchild born this past Saturday, is now only a bucket of grief and sorrow. My daughter has her husband, her baby, her doula, her friends, and her inlaws, Somehow I think if I moved away she’d get along just fine. It’s my own insecurity and anxiety that tries to protect and support my loved ones whom I worry about constantly. But as the adoptee in the family, I need to learn once and for all that I can’t control the tsunami of rejection and grief that has defined my life.

Thom Yorke sings Black Swan*. I couldn’t express the feeling any better than this.

What will grow quickly, that you can’t make straight
It’s the price you gotta pay
Do yourself a favour and pack your bags
Buy a ticket and get on the train
Buy a ticket and get on the train

Cause this is fucked up, fucked up
Cause this is fucked up, fucked up

People get crushed like biscuit crumbs
And laid down in the bed you made
You have tried your best to please everyone
But it just isn’t happening
No, it just isn’t happening

And it’s fucked up, fucked up
And this is fucked up, fucked up
This your blind spot, blind spot
It should be obvious, but it’s not.
But it isn’t, but it isn’t

You cannot kickstart a dead horse
You just crush yourself and walk away
I don’t care what the future holds
Cause I’m right here in your arms today
With your fingers you can touch me

I’m your black swan, black swan
But I made it to the top, made it to the top
This is fucked up, fucked up

You are fucked up, fucked up
This is fucked up, fucked up

Be your black swan, black swan
I’m for spare parts, broken up

*Maybe referring to the Black Swan theory.

Here’s how I wish I could be: I’m similar to Gregory House. I have an IQ of 138. I am an emotionless curmudgeon who does good in the world despite my blighted stump of a personality. My head always overrules my heart and I have no patience with overindulgent dreck of any kind.