I found this post about angry adoptees on a birthmother blog ring on Suz's blog. Needless to say, I was curious, and when I went to read what was being written , I was a little perturbed, to say the least. But not for the reason one might expect.
There are a lot of birthparents out there in blogland, some of whom I have spoken with at length, who really wanted to keep their children, who would have gone to the ends of the earth had they been able to.I’d even go so far as to say that they are the majority. They are seemingly baffled about why their children do not want anything to do with them, surprised when their children retreat, pull away, or disappear. Although I see the injustice of their actions, I am not particularly surprised.
Those birthparents are offended, and why shouldn’t they be? The children they worried about and cared about for years, even from a distance, are not what they expected. They are not receiving the welcome they had dreamed of. But I think they are making the mistake of mixing up intentions with results, logistics with feeling. While my birthparents relinquished me because they truly did not want to raise me, I know that for many birthparents this is not the case. And yet….there is little difference between myself and the children whose birthparents wanted them. We were all placed, we all know the sting of original rejection, original abandonment, even though in many cases there was really no rejection, no real abandonment. But it doesn’t matter. We can hear the story 100 times about how much our parents wanted us, about how hard our relinquishment was difficult, how we were loved. But that does not change the next part of the equation, that does not remove the “but” that invariably comes after protestations of undying love.
“We loved you, we wanted you, you were cherished and special and nothing was wrong with you…BUT we placed you for adoption anyway.”
The people who brought us into this world did not want to or could not raise us- regardless of the reason. The intentions, however bad or honorable, do not change the outcome for us. We were adopted, cut off from our heritage, family of origin, from our roots. And I have yet to see a reunion that can close that gap, that can bridge us back together. And yet we are expected to be grateful, we are expected to be open and unreserved with our love and affection, we are expected to say “thank you” , to include them in our lives, to value them as indispensable people in our lives.
But yet we are eternally aware of our own dispensability, our own sense of inadequacy. I sympathize with birthparents whose children treat them in a bad way. Some of the things I read on that blog disgusted me (guest towels? Really?). I am embarrassed when I see adoptees entering into reunions, and then taking out their anger (however justifiable) on their unsuspecting birthparents. It is not fair and it is not right. But neither is it right to classify we adoptees as cold hearted, insensitive, or uncaring. I know how they feel, those adoptees. I know the anger, the one we seemingly cannot justify.
I care for my birthfather, I might even love him..but I will always hold back a part of myself. I will always be on reserve, be on alert- certain that if I do anything wrong, he will leave me again. It is that insecurity that feeds this anger, the fear of being hurt, of being left again. Sometimes we decide to jump ship first, though I don’t find it particularly admirable. Some of us lash out, while others keep it all inside. I will never tell my birthfather about these ugly feelings I have. It is not his burden to bear. But on some level I never want to let him get too close. He had his chance at loving me , at having me in my entirety. He had his chance to be my dad, and he let it go. He let me go. I ache when I think of his pain, his regret.
But there is a deeper part, a less forgiving part, that remembers how it felt to be relinquished, that is convinced that no matter what my birthparents say, they gave me to someone else, they gave me away. And there’s a part of me, perhaps even a part of “us”, that can never forget that.
