The Ungrateful Adoptee

The right to feel is inherent. The right to feel how you feel and use your own terms to state it is a given. Unless you're adopted, of course.  If you're adopted, all involved parties are aggressively eager to inform you of how you feel, when you feel it, and how you're allowed to say it, all the while diminishing the reality of your feelings by interjecting the comparative importance of their own.  For instance. The adopter. "I love you! I'm bonded with you! You love me too! You're bonded to me too! You're grateful for the better life I'm providing for you! Look how nice your things are! Could your horrible junkie parents give you such nice things?"  In the meantime the Adoptee is wearing her nice clothes and wetting her nice bed because of the nightmares, and by eight years old is already wondering what it's like to be dead. I could give you examples of how relinquishers, gentle adopters, industry flunkies, and even our own fellow Ado

...or at least that's what they call themselves. They aren't really, these relinquishers. Oh yeah, they'll help you with their search angel skills or yell at the Capitol building and wave signs, but it's their daily behaviors in adoptionland that tells their real feelings and agendas. They'll help you if you're "nice". If you're "sympathetic" and "compassionate". As long as you "show them the proper respect". If you don't, they cry, bash, silence, and smear. And what exactly is "the proper respect" to show someone who has given away their child? How am I supposed to look at you, knowing that you did to a child exactly what my mother did to the eight of us, and respect you? Knowing intimately the pain of relinquishment and abandonment, how am I supposed to be expected to be compassionate and sympathetic toward you? When I know for a fact that because of you there is at least one child out there who

I will be divisive, because we need to be divided from you, relinquishers.  We need to be divided from your adoptee-blaming, shaming dismissal.  We need to be divided from your selfish advocacy. Our predicament was caused by you and is not a place to hide from your pain. We need to be divided from your browbeating. It's not our fault you gave us away, and it's not our fault we're angry about it. We need to be divided from your constant need for sympathy and compassion. The onus of your grief does not lie at our feet. We need to be divided from your constant need for validation and congratulations. If you're doing the good work stand up and do it. Stop broadcasting it in the hopes it will score you brownie points with adoptees. We may appreciate the work you do, but it certainly doesn't excuse anything or warrant any ass licking. We need to be divided from your fragility. We need to be divided from your inability to take responsibility for the pain yo

Lost Faith I started going to church when I was eight. If you've kept up with me you know eight was a big year for me. It was the year I really began to understand what it meant to be adopted.  It was the year I started drawing and writing. It was also the year I tried to kill myself for the first time.  Going to church was my idea. Both of my "parents" had been raised by (their own) religious parents. Neither of them had any desire to ever go to church, and they never went with me. We didn't pray at home. My "mother" scoffed at me when I asked if we could say grace before our meals. "I have to say grace at your Nana's at Thanksgiving and Christmas," she snapped at me, "and that's plenty." "But mama, don't you believe in God?" "Of course I do. But that doesn't mean I want to talk about him every day." Don't get me wrong, she supported me going to church in that she got up to drive me and p

An open letter  To all the relinquishers who've decided to slander and belittle me: Dear poor sad mistreated relinquishers: You're losing. You've set your own asses on fire and we are laughing while we watch you burn. You see, your narrative is done. Your pity is worn through. Misery accomplishes nothing and sympathy is no longer power. And we no longer feel sorry for you. So your baby was stolen. So what? My first child was murdered. I dealt with it and I don't whine about it anymore. Hell, I barely talk about it at all. I haven't spent the last 25 years whining and crying about her and trying to change legislative processes so the mothers of murdered children are treated more fairly. You changed some stuff. For yourselves. Mothers aren't treated the way they were in the sixties. Children are still relinquished and redistributed like cattle. Who have you been working for? Thirty years is a long time to be advocating for Adoptees to have ALMOST N

Term coined by Margot Elyse. Very apt term indeed for what is expected of Adoptees fresh out of the fog. When I first arrived in the scene, I was greeted with soft open arms by relinquishers everywhere. They patted my head and told me to be sad. They cheered me on when I tore into the adopters. They lifted me up on celebratory shoulders when I published anti adoption, anti adopter blogs. Then I wrote, "Self Righteous Birthmother? Come, Let's Chat". A bit of a vent toward my mother and many of the ones I read, before they all blocked me, letting them know what I thought of their "choices" and "feelings". Because I didn't, don't, and cannot subscribe to relinquisher exaltation and "birth mother love". You see, I don't need to excuse my mother for what she did. I lost the need to excuse her for her actions when I met her twenty years ago. My mother willingly relinquished eight children. There's nothing excusable there.

A fair warning to my cribmates As you step out if the fog and begin to navigate adoptionland, there are people and places you will have to watch out for. Let's just dive right in.  1) Adoptive Parents: Also known as APs, Adopters, Purchasers, Vultures. These people will tell you how beautiful it all is. How heart wrenching infertility is. How grateful they are for the "gift" of their child. These are exactly the same people who, in discussions about open adoptions and birth parent contact, will say things like, "You can tell the judges and counsellors whatever you need to, once the papers are final you can do whatever you want."  That "whatever you want" includes rehoming Adoptees, 75% of open adoptions being closed by the five year mark, claims of biological unsuitability to stop contact with "their child's" real family. These are the people who, if you say, "being adopted sucks", will quickly jump on you. "You jus

I would call it birth parent fragility, but unlike adoptive mothers and fathers and relinquishing mothers, I've never had a relinquishing father go off the deep end demanding I seek therapy, stop trolling, or calling me an adoption industry sympathizer. So let's put the focus where it belongs today. Birth mother fragility. Yeah. You're fragile little broken flowers. Poor pathetic victims that "lost" your children. Never mind your responsibility in either their creation or putting yourself into a situation of "losing" them.  That's right, I'm going to hold you responsible for that night in the back seat where mindless teen hormones overcame your better judgement. I'm going to hold you responsible for allowing yourself to be manipulated into a maternity home. I'm going to hold you responsible for staying. I'm going to hold you responsible for caving. I'm going to hold you responsible for being unwilling or unable to do whatever