Policy on Adoptee Returns

This question might sound much more conservative than my life's political and personal choices would suggest, but whatever has happened to the ability to keep a commitment?

Okay, so culturally, we seem to be transitioning away from the "till death do us part" part of the standard marriage contract; we live in an economy that supports multiple job, career and geographic changes across the lifespan; and our President signs legislation with signing statements that amount to saying, "Well...I might not really follow this law if it doesn't suit me."

And the latest trend in negotiable or contingent commitments seem to be with the children we've adopted. The latest from Theresa's Digg involves an obviously deeply disturbed 14 year-old adoptee who brutally attacked a family member (Family deals with nightmare adoption). In typical Fox fashion, the intro reads, "... not all adoptions are made in heaven, sometimes they turn into horror stories." Somehow, in the eight years since she adopted him, Rhonda Gary-Jackson's son went from "cute" and "animated" to a sociopath, according to her description. He's now on the block for being disowned although "Florida law doesn't allow her to un-adopt her son."

Of course it doesn't!! There's no such thing as to 'un-adopt,' legally, even in light of the increasing incidences of (euphemistically labeled) "disrupted" adoptions. Adoption's for life, get it? We're just not an ugly sweater to take back to WalMart. Yes, we can be troublesome....as a former firestarter, oppositional defiant, authority disordered, "troubled" and "angry" adopted teen, I can attest to that. Although my behavior never rose to the level of violence described in the press, I suspect that, even if it had, my 50's era aparents, would never have even thought to consider shipping me back to the agency (although amom often did threaten relinquishment to either police custody or "the gypsies!"). Even though I still believe I should have been raised in my natural family, I'm confident that my aparents (despite all their faults and pathologies) were committed in their adoption.

In Bae Gang Shik's Transracial Korean Adoptee News there's discussion of a therapeutic ranch for "troubled" adoptees in Montana (Ranch raises hopes for adoptees). This piece (with subheaders like "Problems lurk beneath the surface" ooooh! scary, scary adopted demon spawn...look out!) describes a residential setting where, according to aparent comments , seems to do a good job providing treatment to kids with obvious trauma and attachment issues and helps to give parents tools necessary to help their children.

I'm not so sure, however....read on:

The wind howls across the craggy landscape here, 5 miles from the Canadian border. There's plenty of physical activity and virtually nowhere to run. In the early days, Sterkel didn't have much of a treatment plan beyond keeping the kids busy and nurtured.

Yeah....why would a traumatized kid from an orphanage in Eastern Europe, Central America or south Florida, for that matter, need an actual treatment plan? I'm sure there's plenty of chores on the ranch, and we have a long cultural tradition of orphans doing chores, right? Chim-chiminy, chim-chiminy, chim chim cheroo....Please, sir, may I have some more?
And while therapeutic horse brushing (equine assisted psychotherapy - a methodology offered to my autistic son here in Vermont in lieu of actual school programming!) is available, "[t]raditional counseling, meanwhile, is available, but only at a parent's request." So who's calling the shots in terms of kids' treatment? Aparents? I can see it now..."I'm just not comfortable with Johnny processing so much about his biological family..." I remember during my teen years being referred to counseling through school, and when conversations made it around to identity issues, suddenly my adad just didn't have the money for the sessions any more and didn't feel a need to "air our family's dirty laundry" to others.

The article also sites staff telling kids that their "brains are screwed up," and they have a coding system for kids right out of Homeland Security:

Children are listed as green, yellow and red, based on the difficulty of finding replacement families for each. Their numbers have risen so dramatically that A Child's Waiting plans to build transitional housing specifically to accommodate that group, said Crissy Kolarik, co-director. "The red kids have the most significant issues, such as sexual predators," she said.

"Build transitional housing"?! Yeee-haw!! Looks like bizness is boomin'! That angry teenage adoptee gettin' on yer nerves? Well, shucks, send 'em on out to the demon spawn ranch, and we'll fix 'em up with another set a pardners!

Here's another gem:

"It takes a lot before Bill and I will cry 'uncle,'" Sterkel said. "But we have the staff to think about." From here, about one-third will return home, while another third -- mostly those 16 and older -- will move on to Job Corps, an education and vocational training program run by the U.S. Department of Labor...The remaining third will discover that their parents are relinquishing their rights...He rarely judges those adoptive parents who arrive at this painful conclusion. Sure, one couple sent a one-paragraph e-mail ("just incredibly lame," Sutley said). But for the most part, such families are held hostage -- especially when adoptees act out sexually or falsely allege abuse by their adoptive parents. "Sometimes, parents have no choice ... otherwise they risk losing the rest of their family." [emphasis mine]

...the "rest of the family?" The biologically connected rest of the family?

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And to top it all off, they also facilitate adoptee returns, or "double dipping" as some folks describe it, through the notorious A Child's Waiting agency. How many times can you sell a kid, really?

According to one aparent "held hostage" by her adopted child and left with "limited options,"

"All I can tell you is that we grieve for what might have been."

Amen.

We grieve, too, but for different reasons...not for the loss of the dream of the perfect child who would heal our infertility, who would stand in as if he or she was our real child, who would never, ever be violent and unpredictable and volatile. We grieve for our own ghost parents, for the lives we never had, for the lack of a legal right to our own identity, and for our poor brothers and sisters in adoption, these poor wrecked kids from eastern Europe and Guatemala and Korea and California, Texas, Florida and New York, drug addicted, fetal alcohol, traumatized by abandonment and institutionalization, we grieve for you.

And we grieve especially for hope lost, promises broken, and a dream deferred

I'm not naive; I know these kids, and perhaps even little Jade (formerly) Poeteray have a lot going on and need some pretty intensive care. But when things get rough, they are our kids! They're our kids whether or not we knew their full background (quit yer whining! Not many of us adoptees know our background, and we're able to make it thought the day); they're our kids whether or not the agency lied (big surprise!caveat emptor, baby! And next time, employ some critical thinking on your way to saving the world one child at a time!); and they're our kids when they fuck up in conscious and unconscious expressions of their trauma and grief. While I acknowledge that, even with a biological child, we may feel forced to terminate parental rights in a situation where the child rapes a family member as described in the case above, or when that TPR somehow is in the teen's best interest in terms of treatment or adjudication, let's be honest here....would you be relinquishing this child this easily if he were born to you?

The promise of adoption is to parent forever. The dream of adoption is a loving home for a child who needs parents (not parents who want a child), and if we remember our Langston Hughes, what does happen to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Adoption Loss, Resilience & Cultural Identity

I've been thinking a lot about the possible relationship between how we identify ourselves culturally as adoptees, the dynamics of our response to the secrecy and shame of adoption, and the development of emotionally healthy and intellectually critical perspectives.

Adoptees know well how the social status ascribed to us plays out; we say, "I'm adopted." Usually not, "I was adopted," referring to a legal act in a moment of time; we say we are adopted; it's part of who we are, an integral component of our identity, in my opinion, whether we recognize it or not. We know well the implications of being adopted on our individual development, and we listen to many of our first moms talk about how their experiences of relinquishment contributed to their sense of identity, how the experience of giving up and living without their children influenced who they are as individuals.

I believe, too, that for some of us, as part of healthy emotional development, when we come into contact with other adoptees, with first mothers, sharing our stories and struggles and searches, we come to take our status as adopted as part of our cultural identity, our group identity; we name ourselves ("first mothers", "bastards"), form organizations, groups to network politically, socially and emotionally, and in becoming "proud bastards" or "angry adoptees," we healthily reclaim our adopted identities. Especially in light of the known personal and systemic adversities faced by those who experience the negative aspects of adoption (I feel like I'm tiptoeing around saying 'oppression' here), I think the process of group identity development is comparable to racial/ethnic/gender identity development for minorities, in that individuals tend to experience general movement from a limited awareness of 'self as other' to greater consciousness of the (usually negative) impact of difference, to an active search for positive identity (I believe this is an innate human characteristic, seen across cultures throughout history), to, finally and hopefully, achieving an internalized positive identity. In this way, "proud bastards" and "natural mothers" share political and social space with "black is beautiful," "gay pride" and "grrrl power."

So here's the question I keep coming back to (based on my assumptions outlined above):

Does our experience of adoption loss and its subsequent marginalization (for both adoptees and relinquishing mothers) lead us to a more critical worldview?

Associated thoughts/questions:

• Do complex family dynamics and/or inherently complex family constructs lead to more complex cognition?
• Does growing up with lies, suspicion and hypervigilance lead to a generalized critical view of power?
• Is it by virtue of our adoption loss experience that we adoptees find so many of ourselves gadflies, de-bunkers of myth, exposers of lies, organizers, resistors, general crotchety pains in the ass who refuse to ignore 800 lb. gorillas in the room and recipients of oppositional defiant, authority disordered, borderline personality diagnoses in childhood ?!

And if so, so what? What are potential implications for further thought?

I am not generally a silver-linings type of guy (every one's got a touch of grey, ya know!), but I want to believe that there's lessons in human resiliency here. I want to believe that there really is some hope of reforming the adoption industry, or, better yet, knocking the whole thing down and starting from scratch in a way that serves orphaned and fostered children rather than the emotional needs of the bourgeoisie. Can we find ways, as folks caught up living and exploring the ramifications of that legal swipe of a pen, to take what sucks, turn it around on those who -- wittingly or unwittingly -- are complicit in the abuse, and make the world more honest and just?

why am i here?

Having, in the space of a year, gotten married, had a baby, started a restaurant (putting my family at great economic jeopardy), closed said restaurant, and having found myself unemployed with time on my hands for the first time in twenty-five years, I started wandering in the desert* of the adoption blogoshpere. Amongst the gems and the rubble, I was lucky to find Ungrateful Little Bastard, who said, "Contact denial is just the cherry on top of the ice cream sundae of adoption."

For sure, it is. When I first contacted my bmom, she refused contact, not doing much for the deepening cynicism and paranoid disorder that characterized "Jesus year" of 33. Synchronistically enough, however, it turns out her son, my half-brother, was at that time preparing for his marriage, and when he went to public records for a copy of his birth certificate was surprised to find himself not listed as the first live birth in the family. After repeated pestering of bmom, she finally discloses the deep, dark and shameful fact of my relinquishment to him. It was he who applied enough pressure over time for her to agree to meet me and begin a reunion that for while I'm deeply thankful for (don't wnt to sound ungrateful!), is still tenuous ten years later.

One huge thing that I've learned in reunion is that, while my whole life questioning and search was "all about the birthmother," the main gift has been relationship with my half-sibs, which continues to resonate and strengthen each passing year. Of course, that doesn't keep me from constantly and in both conscious and unconscious ways pushing my bmom, making emotional demands she's incapable of fulfilling, and wanting her to be her ghost-self, the rightful and present mother of that ghost-baby -- roly and poly and cute and smiling and loving with adoring eyes as my little (birth)son is, looking wordlessly deep into the soul of his mother.

For us, bmom and me, ongoing contact denial is a foregone conclusion because those ghost part of ourselves can never be together. That shamed part of her, forced into dissociative and cold detachment, denies contact with that outraged, screaming and abandoned part of me. We both have a core of inner sadness that stems from our mutually unwilling separation that occasionally, if the time and setting are right, we can see in each other and wordlessly acknowledge. But for the most part, she is frozen and I am pissed off. It feels like it falls to me, being of the 60-s era of abundant psychology and gratuitous self-reflection, to put the effort forth to forge the "healthier relationship," and I try, but I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a voice inside repeating, "But isn't it her job to come to me?"

To Theresa, thanks for your blog, the tears it inspired and for inspiring me to join the conversation. Thinking of your birthmother's denial of contact, my heart goes out to you; it's raw, I know. But I also know, especially if it comes to other birth relatives, it ain't over till it's over.

why am i here? to start to have these conversations again with my fellow clanfolk of the adoption diaspora...and, as i recognize somehow in hindsight, today is also the twenty-fifth anniversary of my adoptive mom's death....forty-three years old and it looks like i'm still waiting for permission to be a little....ungrateful...





* please tolerate ongoing archetypal adoptee references, i.e. Moses.