There has been a slow realization washing over me the last few months. In January I paused my counseling for awhile due to external circumstances. I needed to focus on another part of my life for awhile, but have made it a point to purposefully continue healing and processing.
It’s taken me four months… no a lifetime…
to realize that I am angry.
With adoption comes grief. And anger is a part of grief. Up until now I have survived on the trite phrases the church and optimists have fed me such as, “You were chosen,” “you were wanted,” “God had a plan,” and “you should be grateful.
There are many aspects of my adoption I am grateful for.
But not this.
Not my anger.
Not waking up every day and having to fight for my sanity. Literally.
I am angry I cannot be the kind of mother I want to be. I am angry I cannot be the type of wife I want to be. I am angry that my daily energies are engaged in a fight with my very own brain that is hardwired to be against me.
I didn’t ask for this.
I don’t want this.
Did you know that one in four adoptees will commit suicide?
That adoptees and foster kids have drastically higher rates of addiction, self harm and criminal involvement?
There is just no getting around it.
No matter how you slice the adoption bread loaf, or how pretty you make it, how many Bible verses you cover it up in… Adoption involves abandonment and/or human trafficking.
If you think that’s an overreaching statement, then I beg of you to start doing your research.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not against adoption. I am all for ethical adoption for children who really need loving homes.
This post isn’t about that.
This post is about the guttural anger that adoptees rarely get told they are allowed to express.
No. We don’t get to be cruel. No we don’t get to have revenge.
But we do get to say we are angry. We are allowed to talk about it and express it and process it.
Adoption sometimes glorifies the adoptive parents and pities the biological parents, but forgets entirely that the adoptee is the victim. And current rhetoric silences the victim’s voice.
I’m not writing or expressing myself to gain pity or revel in my victimhood. I am writing because it’s time to change the rhetoric. It’s time to change the policies and accountability surround our current adoption laws. It’s time adoptees, the children, had their voices heard.
I am writing because I am angry. In my very core in the bottom of who I am, I am angry. As I discovered what trauma was, how it affected my brain, how it affects my body, how I can heal it, etc., it uncovered a vile anger that has been laying wait for 36 years, growing, simmering, bubbling and seeping out in ways I cannot control. Such as tantrums, violence, addiction, self-sabotaging and the inability to process emotions.
And I have to hold myself accountable for that and process my grief in a mature and healthy way.
I don’t know what that means or what that looks like. But I know it looks like taking care of myself. I know it looks like boundaries. I know it looks like I am changing and maybe not looking like what you would define as, “myself.”
But you’d be wrong. What I am doing is finally allowing myself to become who I am beyond the trauma.
I’m not sure who that is yet, but I know she’s a lot less angry.
Andie.ink 
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