What Price Victory? An Alternative Look at the Adoption Triangle
By Stephen Morgan
In the UK, this week is Adoption Week. The one time of the year when all the Organisations and Charities involved in all the aspects of Adoption get together to try and help raise the awareness of what Adoption is really all about.
Now in theory this is all “fine and dandy” (to coin a phrase) but as with all things (Adoption is no different) there are Winners and there are losers.
Now it may be a crime of immense political incorrectness to look at this way but there really isn’t any other truthful way of looking at it.
It is called the “Adoption Triangle”, the Holy Trinity of Adoption, The three sided equation but in reality there is more.
On the surface of it there is just the Birth Mother, the adopted child and the Adoptive Parents but would that it was that simple. In reality the adoption triangle involves two families in total. On the Birth Families side you have the Birth Parents (everyone tends to forget about the Father), the adopted child’s siblings (that’s brothers and sisters to you and me) and their Grandparents, Uncles & Aunts etc.
On the adoptive families side there are an equally large number of involved personnel (albeit to a different degree) and these all will have in truth some impact though none fall into consideration when the Adoption is processed.
It sounds cold and clinical to talk of Adoption as a procedure, but that it is what it is. In an attempt to heighten and increase the awareness of Adoption, Organisations involved tend to couch their terms in warm comfortable phraseology that tends to wash over the fact that for every “warm cuddly adoptive family” waiting to welcome into their arms “the child of their dreams” their will be sometimes be a Birth Mother who is going to be forever separated from her child.
Now in a great many cases, this entire process is for the better but in the past the separation of birth mother and child has quite often been a forced and painful one and there are very few Birth Mothers in existence today who haven’t thought regularly of the child they had and what could, possibly might have been.
People forget that the role of being a Birth Mother isn’t always filled by the Alcoholic drug ridden typecast incapable young girl, the image so lovingly played upon by some Adoption organisations. Quite often the conception and actual birth of a child is a complete social disaster for a number of reasons some of which lie beyond the control of the birth mother herself. The adoption is a traumatic experience that will leave scars of guilt forever etched in the psyche of the birth mother herself.
It is said that time is great healer but there are some scars and experiences that even time cannot heal.