Andie.ink

You know maybe some of us… even those who had good adoptive parents, want to make adoption look bad. Because you can’t understand the amount of grief unless you are a birth parent or an adoptee… and maybe if we scare you away… maybe if we all paint ourselves as angry and bitter and make it seem like there is no good that comes out of adoption… you will just move on.
I adopted while I was coming out of the fog.
I’ve always wanted to adopt because I believed as a young girl that my life was serene and sepia toned. I was the quintessential adoption that lines the pages of story books and Movies…
My parents were teenagers and Evangelical Christianity drove their choice to place.
They were told my parents were a Doctor and a Teacher… and ironically they really were.
I had what appeared to be the perfect childhood which was why so many still can’t swallow my stance on adoption.
I always wanted to adopt but at some point after my first child, I knew I could never privately adopt. I couldn’t do what was done to me. I couldn’t face a baby and say I was complicit.
But I wanted to foster because it was a need in my community and I needed to be needed and we ended up adopting.

Now I hold my adopted daughter and her parent’s grief on top of mine and some days… that’s just too much for me to hold.
And if people can’t understand that this grief has almost killed our birth parents and us adoptees… if they saw the results of my “picture perfect” adoption. Where 38 years later we are all having to feel the grief we’ve all ignored within ourselves…
including my adoptive parents… they have loss too.
They don’t talk about it to me… but I see it in their faces and I hear whispering about it from other family members and friends.

We have to deal with our traumas or they will deal with us.

And as I lay here in my bed and I can feel myself slipping away again into another round of severe depression but this time knowing why my prefrontal cortex has gone off line… I think…
I feel like the grief will never stop chasing me and so it seems it would be easier to give up and let it overtake me… it would be easier to let my body die.

And that’s why I think so many birth parents and adoptees are sick both mentally and physically… that’s why so many of us kill ourselves.
Because that moment and every moment since, our bodies are screaming that it’s been torn in half and that can never be repaired.
Reunion can’t fix the damage.
Adoption isn’t restorative.
And you all need to stop believing that evil lie that comes from false prophets.
Because even those of us who still believe this was for the best have evidence in their lives that it’s not.
Those of us who live in the fog and choose to remain there are doing no different than I am now as I fight severe depression… holding onto an umbrella so we can try to avoid the rain of immense pain pouring down on us.
But if you ignore the rain, the flood will still overtake us.