I can't remember a time when I didn't know I was adopted.  I also can't remember that many times in my first two decades of life that I really thought about what kind of impact adoption has had on my life.   I never even considered that adoption might have some kind of psychological or emotional impact on who I am today (and no one else mentioned it either).  I've carried with me a lot of the ideas that I think many people have about adoption.  These stereotypes/assumptions include:

 

1) love is all that matters in creating a good home for children

2) adoptees are lucky children

3) adoptees should be grateful for being adopted

4) adoptive parents = good parents

5) adoption is always in the best interest of the child 

6) adoption is equivalent to saving a child from a hopelessfuture 

7) adoptive parents are selfless people who give up time and money           in exchange for nothing

8) treating a child through colorblind eyes is beneficial for the

     child 

9) birthparents do not or cannot take care of their children and   

     that's why their children are given up for adoption 


Let's say I'm not buying into any of these anymore and I'm on the lookout for other ideas like them lurking around. 

 

The stereotypes that people have about adoption are bountiful and wrong.  Why must adoptees be grateful?  Do people go around telling non-adopted children that they should be grateful to have not been given up for adoption or to have parents at all?  Do adoptive parents not get anything out of being given the opportunity to be parents?  Why are we always told we are lucky?  Lucky to have been abandoned as a child?  Lucky to be taken from your heritage and language and shipped to another continent and raised as if you were white?  And why is it we assume that adoptive parents are good parents?  If there were some way to screen out bad parents, some method that the adoption industry had perfected, wouldn't we use it elsewhere for things like social services?

 

I think about all of the times when friends or family said to me "you're so lucky to have been adopted!" or "you must be really grateful to have been adopted".  I never gave those types of comments one second of thought, til now.  These comments seem harmless, until you examine what kind of message is being sent through a constant barrage of these attitudes.  The message was that I should be grateful to my parents to have been rescued.  It implies my adoptive parents are good parents and that they have selflessly decided to take care of me.  It implies that I shouldn't be angry or upset with them for anything, but rather be grateful for all that I've been given.  It denies me the right to be angry, upset or anything else besides happy.  

 

Another attitude I find distressing is the idea of colorblindness.  At first glance, this seems like a good thing.  A Caucasian parent adopts a Korean child and sees her as, not Korean, but "just my daughter."  What is wrong with this approach?  It ignores the fact that the transracial adoptee is DIFFERENT.  She has a different cultural and linguistic heritage.  She LOOKS different.  The differences do not make her less or more, but should be recognized.   See this story.

 

Let's be clear that just because I don't buy into these ideas anymore doesn't mean that I don't love my adoptive parents or wish I weren't adopted.  One doesn't negate the other.  I just think that there's a lot more to adoption than is implied by the glossy brochures and stereotypes that are so pervasive.  Adoption is a complex issue that deserves more analysis, research and thought than it is typically given. 

 

 

   Books I've read recently related to adoption include

  • The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka
  • Outsiders Within: Writing on Transracial Adoption edited by Jane Jeong Trenka, Julia Chinyere Oparah and Sun Yung Shin 
  • The Lifelong Search for Self by David Brodzinksy
  • Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier
  • Journey of the Adopted Self: A Quest for Wholeness by Betty Jean Lifton 
  • Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres 
  • A Ghost at Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption edited by Susan Ito and Tina Cervin

I'm very interested to see Adopted The Movie this fall 2007.

 

For transcultural adoptees, our lives are written in pencil. Everything you think you know about yourself can change in an instant. -Bryan Worra

 

The book/essay excerpts below reflect my own thoughts and feelings.

 

"For me, it's not so simple. I wish that my adoption was a 100-percent-positive thing, that people as well as God did not see the color of skin, that having grown to be the tallest of my siblings was not only a sign of good childhood nutrition but of spiritual abundance as well. How do I explain in the course of polite conversation that my seemingly flawless assimilation into America has yielded anything but joy and gratitude? Yet I do have mixed feelings. I feel ashamed and unworthy of the gifts that have been given me; ashamed for not being a better daughter--both a grateful American one and a forgiving Korean one, guided by filial piety; ashamed for opening my mouth, despite everything people have tried to do for me, in what they thought were my best interests. What an unworthy, spoiled, ungrateful, whining, American brat.

...
"Would I rather have not been adopted? I don't know. The question demands that I calculate unquantifiables. How can I weigh the loss of my language and culture against the freedom that America has to offer, the opportunity to have the same rights as a man? How can a person exiled as a child, without a choice, possibly fathom how he would have "turned out" had he stayed in Korea? How many educational opportunities must I mark on my tally sheet before I can say it was worth losing my mother? How can an adoptee weigh her terrible loss against the burden of gratitude she feels for her adoptive country and parents?"
 -The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka

 

excerpts from Outsiders Within, a compilation by adoptees about adoption:
The voices of transracial adoptees have been silenced, our experiences overshadowed and overruled by the glossy public image created by adoption agencies and sometimes even our own families. Our overall goal has been to provide a counter-narrative to the dominant story, which has been about us but not authored by us. We are not objects but rather subjects in our own histories. Our lives are impacted by the larger forces of colonization, racism, sexism, and globalized capitalism, as well as the intimate conditions of grief, rage, loneliness, and longing. But we are survivors-not victims. In these pages we recognize each other as we have rarely been recognized by those with whom we live, work, and love.
      This is what it is like.
      This is how we turned out.
--Introduction, by Julia Chinyere Oparah, Sun Yung Shin, and Jane Jeong Trenka

They [adoptive parents] are not all-powerful, bestowing life; they have provided me wonderful things, but so have I given them an opportunity to be parents, to nurture, protect, and love.
--Rachel Quy Collier, Performing Childhood

Many adoptees feel the double burden of becoming successful adults as a way to "make good on" the investments their parents, caregivers, and society in general have made on their behalf. The challenge I have felt as an adult is to shed the burden of obligation to my past to realize that those who have helped me have done so out of motives that were never purely altruistic or unselfish.
--Rachel Quy Collier, Performing Childhood

This "Assimilation is Healthy" assumption conveniently corresponds to the ideologies guiding intercountry adoption, at least in Denmark: intercountry adoption is about rescuing children from a poor life in the barbaric Third World and making them objects in building nonracist Western societies. In other words, as I've written elsewhere, "Adoption is perceived as an international social commitment-equivalent to other humanitarian assistance activities. The rationale is that children are at risk in their home countries and adoption is considered an improvement of the child's possibilities. In this view, intercountry adoption is always in the best interest of the child. Another belief is that because intercountry adoptees are often non-whites they should be frontrunners in building a nonracist tolerant international society."
--Kirsten Hoo-Mi Sloth, Researching Adoption

The gap between one's self-definition and the identity attributed to one by others has been at the heart of what I call my "cognitive dissonance" as a Korean adoptee-the fact that people have always identified me with Asian societies and Asian cultures, even though I was raised in Milwaukee by parents of Norwegian and German descent. Their categorization of me causes complications both when whites and other non-Asians are involved, and when culturally Asian Asians are involved.
--Mark Hagland, Finding the Universal

Organizations like these profess, as did Holt, that the mission of the agency is humanitarian in nature-in other words, in the welfare of the child. Closer inspections however, prove otherwise. These agencies are not in the business of finding parents for children, but finding children for parents.
--Jae Ran Kim, Scattered Seeds

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