“Somebody wanted us” (thoughts on processing adoption)

Photo by Rebecca Tredway

I believe adoptees. I believe them all. The ones who are hurt. The ones who feel rejected. The ones who say they aren’t curious about their bio family. The ones who wish they hadn’t been adopted. The ones who feel they were always meant to be in the families that raised them. I have learned that each adoptee’s feelings about adoption are created by a very complex interaction of the circumstances of their adoption, the supportiveness and love of their adoptive family, how adoption was explained to them, their beliefs about God’s sovereignty, the facts about their bio family, and their own personality.

It’s not that someone has “right” beliefs about adoption and somebody has “wrong” beliefs about adoption, it’s that each of us has a view of adoption that is nearly impossible to distinguish from our experience of adoption. I realize that I am an advocate for adoption because it has been a really beautiful thing in my life (as an adoptive parent), but I also realize my kids may have very different feelings about it. One may be thankful while another is resentful. I can do my best to love them and help them understand adoption in positive ways, but ultimately their feelings belong to them. I want to be respectful of however they come to feel about their adoptions even if I disagree. Of course, I will always speak truth to them about their adoptions, which I hope will help, but how they feel about that truth isn’t up to me.

So in that spirit, I wanted to present you with two thoughts on processing adoption.

I have recently seen this post floating around my internet adoption communities. It describes how science is now coming to understand that babies know they were separated from their birthmother even when they’re adopted as infants. This challenges the idea that a child will never suffer the impacts of loss and abandonment if they were “too young” to remember it. I find this to be a totally credible way to look at adoption and I agree that being separated from that biological connection and all that’s familiar to an infant would be traumatic. In some ways this just seems like common sense. But I don’t feel comfortable going the next step to say this is a loss they can’t recover from, or that this is somehow a greater or deeper loss than the myriad of struggles that are common to being a human in this broken world. Knowing that my child may struggle with this feeling does not mean I am hopeless about their ability to form a whole identity or their ability to love and trust.

The article states:  “Every adopted child, allow me to reiterate, every adopted child falls into one of two categories. She either acts out and is difficult or is quiet, adaptable and compliant. Of course the degree to which each adoptee acts out or becomes compliant is individual.” I find this to be impossible to argue against. Do some of my adopted children act out? Sure. Are some of them quiet, adaptable and compliant? Yes. What other option is there? I would say my bio kid would fit into one of those categories, too. The article goes on to talk about the statistics of how adopted kids are more likely to commit suicide than non-adopted peers without discussing the impact of biology or history on mental health issues. Some children are unable to be safely parented because of mental health issues in their home that may be hereditary. Some children have experienced severe physical abuse, sexual abuse, neglect, the death of a parent, orphanage/institutional life, prenatal substance exposure, and much more all before being adopted. And then some children are (tragically) adopted into terrible home situations. We should not be surprised that these kids continue to struggle, but it seems unreasonable to place all of that burden on the act of adoption. The study he references doesn’t seem to be attempting to account for or address any of those issues, but he is using it to imply that the ACT of adoption causes some kind of fundamental trauma.

But here’s the thing—If my child tells me they feel loss and abandonment from the act of adoption, I need to believe them. They likely will feel it. I think all teenagers feel distance from their parents and even attempt to put distance between themselves and their parents. There is a chance for my kids that will feel adoption related. That is when I get to speak truth to them about their adoptions and remind them of my love for them while validating their pain.

So here’s the other thought I wanted to share with you on processing adoption:

Yesterday I was able to visit with a relative of mine. He’s my mom’s cousin and joined her extended family through adoption as an infant. He’s in his 70s and his adoption was handled much like all adoptions were handled back then—nobody talked about it. In fact, he wasn’t told of his adoption for quite a long time while all the extended family members knew and just didn’t discuss it in front of him. Not AT ALL how anyone would recommend you handle things in today’s adoption world.

So yesterday I introduced him to my children for the first time. I wasn’t sure if he’d be comfortable talking about his own experience of adoption since he is from a generation where those things are kept private, but he didn’t shy away from it a bit. When he met Josh (my six-year-old Liberian who is CLEARLY adopted) he said to him, “Did you know we’re very special people? We’re the same in a special way. We’re both adopted. And we were both adopted into the best family in the world. This really is the greatest family. And do you know why else we’re special? Because somebody wanted us.”

I was speechless.

I do so much reading about adoption. I do so much prep work for the days when my kids may reject me or may feel anger about the choices made for their wellbeing that they couldn’t control. I have been so buried in research and articles and blogs that I forgot there was another way to look at this.

“Because somebody wanted us.”

There are two distinct parts to the adoption journey. Somebody had to say they weren’t in a position to parent. Somebody else had to say they wanted to parent that child. In a room full of people created by accident or a parental plan for pregnancy, this cousin wanted to draw the distinction that the commonality between him and my children through adoption was that they were WANTED in a special way. They are wanted specifically for who they are. When you say “yes” to adopting a child, you are expressing your desire and commitment to love that person, much the same way as you do in a marriage. It isn’t a commitment to a pregnancy process or a commitment to care for a “surprise” blessing, it is a commitment to this specific child you are meeting for the first time in that hospital room or social worker’s office or orphanage. You are expressing your “want” with every document and homestudy update and fingerprinting and reference letter.

My kids will have a choice to make. They can look at their adoption trauma and focus on what they have lost and how they feel abandoned or they can look at how wanted they were. God planned their lives and we prayed daily for them to be permanent parts of our family from the first moments we knew that was possible. My children never spent a day “unwanted” and I hope they are able to focus on that reality. But if they aren’t, I have to believe them. Their personal experience of adoption and how they interpret that experience is what matters. A statistical analysis won’t tell me what’s going on in their hearts and all the research in the world can’t predict the outcomes for my kids. And when I look at the adult adoptees in my life, I am surrounded by people who are actually happy with their adoptions. Who have seemed to internalize this idea that “somebody wanted us.” I pray my kids will be able to see that reality, too.