exposing the dark side of adoption
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Overwhelmed

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Sometimes the sadness hits me like a lead pipe to the head... I feel the loss, and it gets stuck, in my throat, and I can't swallow.  It's not my own loss, as it is the Collective Loss of so many people... so many haunted in ways I know all too well.

There was a period of time I was very active on various websites, where I would reach-out in an effort to make contact with someone as loser-like as me.  (Truth be told, I am without a doubt, the biggest loser I know.)  I needed a sense of connection, identity, belonging... anything that helped define me as a group-member.  If not for the internet, i would not know just how starved for attention and connection i really am.  For a person as anti-social as myself, making friends through forums/emails has been surprisingly easy.  Some of my greatest, deepest allies and kindred spirited soul-mates are all written words set to a photograph or two.

I am amazed how strangers quickly become part of me... all because of what gets shared in quiet confidence.

I've been reading some old letters... and the stories told to me... addictions, abuse, suicide, self-mutilation, depression, rage, and sorrow felt by so many different types of people, from vastly different walks of life... all unified by one word:  Adoption.  How can such grief be kept so quiet?  Because adoptive parents in the 21st century are more aware and better educated in terms of the Unwanted Child, generations of babies lost, taken, stolen, and sold have no right to be angry and voice a disgust in a system that places money above a child's natural mommy?

Is it because we are not physically deformed?  We're not color-coded, or leave a residue, so our pains and ills escape detection?  Is it coded language unheard by those untouched by family betrayal that keeps adoptees from being statistically significant in terms of anxiety, depression, divorce, detached parenting and worst yet, suicide?

Mine is by far not the most difficult or saddest story around... yet it hurts each time i allow myself to Think about all that was done, and not done by parents/people who called themselves parents.  When I begin to feel sorry for myself, I read the stories i have kept... and have a good cry.  Someone has to cry for those who will share only with faceless strangers.

It's knowing I'm not alone in my silent grief and shame that breaks me down enough to write to anyone who will read.  Just because the majority of published/outspoken adoptees voice little to no feelings of anger, pain or moral conflict doesn't mean that is fair representation to all who have been less fortunate in their formal final family placements.  After all, not all children removed from their families get adopted.  The multi-transplanted foster-child with a RAD label who turns 18 is transformed into a mature, capable and adult-like simulation of the child born into loving, protective biological parents?  I bet the foster-child can give a convincing rendition of Normal!  Until real studies, real statistics and real follow-up care is standardized, and enforced, Rage and Revenge is a trigger-word away from anyone's family.

Maybe times ARE different in the sense that children of the open adoption system aren't stained like those of us from the darker, more devious days of closed doors, and sealed documents.  But for those of us who live in complete unknown broken ties and lies... what becomes of Us and our children?  Surely our mothers did not sacrifice their bodies and a live birth, for a lifetime of disconnected loss and shaken security in concepts like Real, Truth and Trust?

Family Values.  Seems laughable, given the fact that babies are still for sale, and adults are given 12-step options that include the added pill-support of prescriptions with names like ativan, effexor, paxil, prozac, welbutrin, xanax, zoloft...

by Kerry on Sunday, 22 April 2007