What National Adoption Awareness Month Means to Me
Feature, First-Moms — By FauxClaud on November 5, 2009 at 8:00 am
Why this Birthmother will NOT be Celebrating This November
When you are painfully aware of the coming of November, the dreading commences upon the first days of school. The air begins to stir and the word adoption gets tossed about in the media with an increasing popularity. The feelers go out by those who think to plan ahead:
” What are we going to do to celebrate Adoption Awareness Month?”
My answer is usually a wistful , “Sleep until December?”
I mean really, if I could avoid the whole month, I would. It’s not just that it is National Adoption Awareness Month. It’s not just that every time I turn around someone is discussing, usually with complete ignorance, how adoption is just so wonderful for everyone. I am, well enough, aware.
Birthmothers don’t lend well to the celebrations.
It’s not just that I know my very existence on this earth is completely being ignored. It’s not just that I know that my very existence has not even been considered. People have to be taught to think about the birthmother and we have not achieved that on a national level yet. November is hard on a birthmother; we become invisible because we don’t have all the happy stories to tell.
And it’s not just that either. It’s that Where the Wild Things Are is in the movies and all over everything I see. It’s that Thanksgiving is in November and that is all about family and being that adoption laden word “grateful”. It’s that on Thanksgiving, I make all my mother’s recipes and I think about her and miss her, and that makes me sad. It’s that the bulk of my adoption related experiences, aka Max’s birthday, the relinquishment signing, etc., all happened in November. And on top of that, it is stupid National Adoption Awareness Month and it gets a bit annoying having to hear about everyone “celebrating” adoption all month long.
November is like the month when I have PMS for the whole year.
You know that feeling when you almost kind of know that there is nothing hugely major wrong, but man, you hate everything and it is all really bad and you know, you just really know, that you are really very unhappy and there’s is not much more you can take. It’s like that…..for the month.
Like it’s really hard to be exposed to all these almost “fringe” organizations, that think they are all PC-like, and they come out with these shallow ways of celebrating National Adoption AwarenessMonth for publicity. You know they really don’t “live” adoption in any form as they rattle off some blank platitude about “saving all the unwanted children out there that need homes”.
Nice liner notes there, bud. Who wrote that song and dance? You got any more feel good fairy tales to tell me before bed?
It’s obvious, I know. It’s snarky. I hear it too. I don’t usually go for such blatant sarcasm, or at least I like to think so. I can’t help it. Sometimes I find that I don’t even have the strength to begin to try to talk to people in November. Normally, I welcome a chance to respond to an article, or state some facts when there is an inaccurate discussion regarding infant adoption in this country, but not in November. There are just too many. It’s overwhelming. If I could spend every day, the whole month, running around online, then maybe, just maybe, I might feel like there is a bit more honesty out there, but I don’t have that leisure (or masochistic) privilege. Plus, as I said, it’s like everyone and his brother jumping on the adoption bandwagon and basically talking out their A$%. If I paid attention, then I would spend the majority of November trapped in an adoption induced internet rage.
So I have to tune out big time. Halloween provides a great distraction, but after that’s over, I am pretty much in trouble. BANG! In rolls November. The leaves are all dead and the tress are naked, .Daylight Savings time rolls in and it gets all dark and cold early. The adoption celebrations commence and whether I want to or not, I will always, on some level, be affected by November and my son’s birthday.
I would like it much more is we could all stop all this CELBRATING Adoption during November, but rather maybe we could work on HONORING Adoption during November. I can’t celebrate the thing that cause me the greatest pain and loss in my life. I cannot celebrate something that has caused my family sadness and, on some levels, kept me from being all I could for them.
Can One Celebrate Adoption Loss?
And while I can understand that for many people adoption is cause for celebration because it brought something good to their lives, the fact is that ALL adoption is somewhere, someplace, somehow resting on a foundation of loss. That’s not a cause to celebrate. It’s a cause to honor. One honors a loss; one does not celebrate it.
I’m not proposing that anyone has to do anything other than acknowledge the truth and think about what truly applying the word “Celebration” infers. It doesn’t have to be about you. It doesn’t have to be about what other people would like adoption to be about. It’s about what is right and truthful. It’s about what takes into account all aspects of adoption.
Maybe, then, just maybe, if we stopped all this one sided celebration, people who have lived through adoption separations could feel like we have some say in the month. Maybe, we wouldn’t feel psychotic during the month of November. Maybe, if we talked about some of the issues with adoption instead, then people might give a darn about the fight that adult adoptees must endure to get their birth certificates. Maybe, then, if enough people cared, we would have some sort of cause to celebrate. I don’t know.
For now, wake me up when November ends.
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Since she won’t be sleeping, the whining will about life as a birthmother shall continue on Claudia’s blog; Musings of the Lame.ca-pub-3017103269052419
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24 Comments
Celebrating November as “National Adoption Awareness Month” is like celebrating Columbus Day.
Columbus came over to the Americas where he tortored and killed many native americans (some burned alive) and he is celebrated!
I was taken away from my natural parents and given away to complete strangers. My ethnicity, my identity, my birth certificate were all sealed upon my ADOPTION treating me like a purchased human and second-class citizen!!!! Hooray!!!!!
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Thank you, Claude.
It is ignorance like “Celebrating” National Adoption Awareness month that is a prime example of the disrespect and invalidation for the very children adoption is supposed to be serving. And the amazing part is that this celebratory month was probably instigated by the businesses that “serve” us by making money off us and fight hard against us when we become adults. And then people wonder why we are angry? I am getting angrier, especially when people find it their mission to tell me I’m angry when voicing a different opinion other than theirs about these issues.
Thank you for writing and thank you, Grown in my Heart, for posting.
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I started writing a post for us and realized that National Adoption Month was ALL about children, young, foster children, and young, adopted children, and how to help them and I just could not write it. How could I be fair to adoptees and birthmothers if NAM is just all about adoptive parents and their children (who are young)?
Thank you for writing this Claudia. I could not have said it better. And, I REALLY think that if this month is to be “celebrated” it needs to be reformed so that it is about the entire triad and about adoptee rights, birthmother rights, and changing the face of adoption in it’s entirety.
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As a mother who is blessed with two beautiful, wonderful children through adoption I have been working on a few adoption related posts for my blog. Although that has more to do with the fact that I am leaving on Monday to pick up my youngest daughter than the fact that it is National Adoption Month. But here is my take on the whole National Adoption Month – I think it undermines the normality of my family. Where is National Natural Delivery Month? Or National C-Section Month? To us and at this point in our kids lives adoption is just how they came into our family. Yes, one day their feelings may be more complex than that but for now it is not something to celebrate (nor something to condemn) – it just is what it is.
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Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t adoption of a child (in the majority of cases) instigated by a CHOICE of the birth mother to give the child up for adoption? I am not aware of guns being held to the birthmother’s head until she signs the papers. I recognize that there are exceptions to every majority as well (abuse, drugs, etc.) and I am not trying to diminish those circumstances. Adoptions are based on a foundation of loss. True. However, several, if not most of those losses are either directly or indirectly due to choices made by the birthmother. That loss should be honored and remembered-but not to the detriment of the celebration of the new life the child was allowed by being adopted.
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Claudia – I honor your right to cope as you need to. I can not just sick back with covers over my head and allow atrocities to continue as long as I have breath, a pen or access to a computer. Knowing that babies are kidnapped in Guatemala for adoption, stolen in China and India and trafficked to the US….I much prefer to take a more pro-active stance against the coercion and exploitation of adoption.
We each must chose to be part of the problem or part of the solution.
I invite all to read:
http://familypreservation.blogspot.com/2009/11/national-adoption-
awareness-month.html
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“Forgive my ignorance, but isn’t adoption of a child (in the majority of cases) instigated by a CHOICE of the birth mother to give the child up for adoption?”
No.
Most “birth mothers” have no real choice. None. Zip. Zero. I wouldn’t call “signing because you have NO alternatives” a choice.
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Mei-ling, you are so super awesome. Biological parents have a choice, however it’s kind of like the “choice” that people in poverty have to work in inhumane sweat shops or starve.
It’s a very tricky slope, and claiming that biological parents are all or nothing of anything is probably a little exaggerated. However, the reality is, most women do not want to place their children for adoptoin. They may be overwhelmed by all the wonderful things an adoptive parent has (home ownership, marriage, a pool, money, savings, career establishment) and being feeling very inadequate about themselves.
The way adoption is advertised today, it really does lead a biological parent to feel right in feeling bad about herself and her ability to parent, and guilty that she wants to keep her child at all. Parents who choose to become single parents, despite the fact that it’s a popular choice, are not considered to have made the “best” decision for their children.
Many women follow all the rhetoric to the T and do what they think is necessary for their child to have a good life. As they do more research in the years to come, they may find (like many of us) that adoption isn’t so black and white. It’s not a “perfect” answer. And in many of our cases, it wasn’t actually necessary for the child in question to have a healthy happy, enriching and wonderful life.
Women placing usually have only a few months to do all the research in the world about adoption. In the past there was NO information available on negative affects to adopted children. This is changing.
The new information available on the internet has women who placed completely crumpled and in misery. Not only was all the pain they went through overwhelming and unbearable, but in many cases IT WAS PAINFUL FOR THEIR CHILD AS WELL.
To realize that not only was your loss meaningless, but may have added a wound to your child is excruciating. And it has left many of us wanting to make sure that accurate information about the the CONS of adoption for children available to women considering placing. Biological parents have been completely shocked to discover that, unlike the adoption agencies message that “adoptees love their biological parents and are so grateful for a better life” adoptees in many cases AREN’T grateful for being given up. They’re grateful to the adoptive parents who saved them from a mother so cruel she would abandon them.
And because many adoptees have souls, they often try to word this nicely because DO have compassion for the b-mom, wheatever anger/distance is within them as well.
Adoptees don’t necessarily think all that much of their bioparents, or think that what their bioparents did was particularly magnificent or amazing. They think what their adoptive parents did was magnificent and amazing and therefore they say they are grateful to their biomom.
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WOW! I came upon this site to find a quote about being thankful for being a birth mother and I read all these posts and am so saddened by the selfishness! It’s not about you, it’s about that beautiful life that you have been blessed from God with! I get that everyone’s situation isn’t the same, but you have to put that life first!
I got pregnant when I was 17. Nobody knew, not even my mother, with whom I lived with until I was 8 months pregnant. I graduated high school, walked across that stage to get my diploma, and moved out on my own. I went through the entire labor process…by MYSELF, which resulted in a c-section. (17 hrs with no epidural, no pain meds NOTHING!) No one was with me but the nurses. Two weeks prior I chose to put my absolutely beautiful son up for adoption. That was, by far the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make in my life!
I met the adoptive parents 3 days after I got out of the hospital. They were, and still are the most amazing people I have ever met! I never saw my son after he was born because I didn’t want to risk the chance of changing my mind. The first time I got to meet him was when he was a year old. I am very lucky that they wanted me to be included in his life and we have an open adoption. I am so thankful for the chance to have my son grow up in a stable, loving home with two parent who loved him before they even knew him! Yes, the choice that I had made was very difficult and oceans of tears have been shed, but I know if I didn’t make that decision, he would not have had the life and opportunites he has today.
He is now 20 years old and is going to college, with interest in International Adoption! He has such a great head on his shoulders and is very smart! Looking back, if I wouldn’t have put him up for adoption, he would’ve never had that opportunity. I talk to him about once a week and we are very close.
Women…giving up your child is one of the most unselfish, loving things you can do for him/her! You need to search your souls and find an understanding within yourselves. Find a way to be thankful for those mistakes, and they will become your blessings!
May God help you to find peace in the decisions you have made. He has with mine!
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Wow! What a martyr you are. Good luck with letting your adoptee know they should just shut up and be grateful.
Most of us stopped drinking the adoption kool-aid long ago.
Perhaps it is you that needs a reality check.
I personally am glad that my mother does not need to go searching for adoption quotes to validate her bad decisions.
IMO you are the one who needs to search your own soul and really evaluate what you have done. Your child does not owe you a thing. It makes me sick to think that you are sitting there expecting a child to be grateful to you for abandoning them.
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Stephenie,
i’m actually sad for you. How do you know that your son would not be where he is today if you had kept him? The fact is, you dont. And will never know how life would have played out had you parented. Seems to me you had a pretty good start. you already had a place of your own at age 17? thats amazing to me. Chances are, you could have kept him.
How could you deny not just yourself, but your son, by not seeing him or even holding him! until he was a year old?
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Thank you Claude! No matter how this “choice” is made we have the right to feel pain over the loss of our children. I, too, am sick of being denied my right to own my emotions and sick of being pushed into a corner like a naughty child should I voice those feelings.
As always I look up to your strength and hope that someday I will be able to be as candid about my experience as a surrendering mother as you are.
I also want to add that if Ms. Stephanie really equates surrender to love she should be seeking out adult adoptee blogs to educate herself about the intense range of emotions adoptees experience… Feeling abandoned sure didn’t feel like love to me.
Always,
Andraya
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BAH! I should never comment before a coffee… can you mod my last comment and take the misplaced “e” off your name (is that possible?) and then deny this one? So sorry!!!
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Stephanie, I am completely gobsmacked that you truly believe that a child needs anything more than the love of their own biological mother. The fact that you shed tears, the fact that you refused to see your son in case you changed your mind says to me that you had the right instincts, that you should have kept your son and raised him yourself. Whether or not he had the best adoptive parents on the planet is completely irrelevant. The best interests of a child are served by being kept with their natural family.
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Actually, Stephanie, as I hear it, adoption IS about ME, the adopted child. The “wonderful opportunity” I received was two adoptive parents who seemed to make it their life’s mission to undermine all of my self-confidence and self-esteem. I was SO grateful for this that I was suicidal for a good part of my adolescence.
I got pregnant at 18 and I kept MY son. I wasn’t about to throw his chances at a good life to the whims of fate. It was MY responsibility. I won’t say it was easy at all, but I always made my children my priority. Today he’s an amazing individual – smart, witty, kind-hearted, and extremely successful. I doubt any adoptive parent could have had a better outcome with him than I did.
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“it’s about that beautiful life that you have been blessed from God with!”
You’re right, it’s not just about that ‘beautiful’ life I was given. It’s about what caused my life to end up this way… meaning lack of resources or any help for my mother. She did not “choose” to place me.
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“Since she won’t be sleeping, the whining will about life as a birthmother shall continue on Claudia’s blog; Musings of the Lame.”
Whining? Does this prejudiced attitude towards the voice of a relinquishing mother have ANYTHING to do with adoption awareness? Your closed mind astounds.
This IS another valid voice, something you would conveniently dismiss. We can not always have our cake and eat it too. In your perfect world, you’d like to think that all relinquishing mothers are like Stephanie above, but that is just wishful thinking. You would like to believe that this is a win-win scenario for all involved so you can sleep at night and enjoy the fruits of her labor guilt-free.
But true awareness would reveal that Stephanie is the exception and Claudia is the rule. And Stephanie is not, herself, free of whining…
To my mind, we can’t even begin to have a real dialogue about adoption until ALL THREE members in the triad have an EQUAL VOICE. But Adoption Awareness only seeks to promote only the voice of ONE of the members. There is no room for dissenting opinion, and those that do are vilified – never mind that one of the parties had few REAL choices and that the other party had NO choice.
So go ahead and pat yourselves on the back this month for exploiting the vulnerable and gaining a child, but don’t call it AWARENESS. Call it what it really is: WHITEWASH
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Stephanie,
Good for you that you get to be a part of your child’s life. He still has somewhat of a connection to who he really is. Does he know his father? If not, good luck to both of you when reality hits. He’ll be just like the rest of us adoptees who are lost without a connection to the foundation of our being. A connection that has been ripped away from us just as quickly as your baby was ripped out of your cut open uterus. We had no choice. We still have no choice. I have every material thing I could ever want but something, a very big something is still missing. Glad you can pat yourself on the back for how much you’ve “given”. I hope against hope you don’t give any more.
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An oxymoron: Celebration = National Adoption Awareness Month
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I don’t think the 6 million adopted persons in the US today who are denied access to their original birth certificates, are denied passports, driver licenses, pensions, security clearances (among other “normal entitlements” that legos take for granted), need a special month to be made aware of adoption. We are adoption.
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When I read comments like Stephanie’s, it does always make me think. I wonder where Barack Obama would be had his teen-aged mother surrendered him to adoption. Perhaps he too would be looking to prove his so called “gratitude” to the adoption machine by finding a career in International Adoption like Stephanie’s son instead of slumming it in his current role as the leader of the free world.
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“Looking back, if I wouldn’t have put him up for adoption, he would’ve never had that opportunity.”
I assume you mean the opportunity to take part in the lucrative and unethical practice of separating mothers and babies across the world. This to me demonstrates how family abuse is perpetuated; you relinquish your child and the child becomes an abuser – someone who wants to continue the separation of mothers and babies. How swell.
Claud, Thanks for the post. It is very difficult to see all of this happy crap about celebrating adoption when we’ve lost something so precious as a son or daughter. Not only do we suffer the personal loss, but we have salt rubbed into the open wound by having an entire month dedicated to the joy of the adoptive parent despite our loss. And, of course the celebration is picked up by all of those hoping to get a baby, and all of those hoping to sell a baby and stay in business. It is the fact that while people suffer from this horrendous practice, it is yet cause for celebration, and that celebration, and the practice of encouraging young mothers to give their children to strangers when the known consequences can be so devastating, is what keeps the wound open and flowing for me.
Carol
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Wow. Why is everyone so judgmental of Stephanie? She has her particular situation, and while it’s not everyone’s situation, it seems things have worked out all right for her. She said she has a great relationship with her bio son. Sounds like HE is pretty well adjusted about the whole thing, if what she says is right.
I love the idea in the original blog post about HONORING adoption instead of celebrating it, to honor birthmothers more. There is pain there, no doubt. If I look at the NAM objectively, without too much emotion, I don’t so much see it as this month where adoptive parents party and celebrate and kick up their heels because they adopted. I can see that part of the purpose of it is to get people to perhaps open their hearts and homes to children already in foster care who desperately need homes because they were removed from bio parents due to abuse or neglect or drugs or whatnot. I mean, one could even call it “marketing” for that purpose. But the reality is that those kids have already been removed from their homes and it’s dangerous for them to return, and now adoption is the best way for them to have a family life. If we need to have a NAM and it helps some of these kids get homes, I’m all for it. And arguably, haven’t we all seen cases where they OUGHT to have removed more children from their homes, but they don’t, and for some in abusive situations it becomes “too late.” They cannot be saved.
I am 40, an adult adoptee, closed adoption. I have never met my birth family. Sure I’m curious, but I’m not filled with angst and rage and unable to cope with the whole thing. I may never meet my birth family, and that is ok. (Again this is MY situation I’m not saying “how come YOU aren’t all like me”). If my birth mother felt it was the right decision to put me up for adoption, then I’m ok with it. How I came to that conclusion in adolescence and never felt suicidal or rage or depression, I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m so objective about it. It just IS. I had great, albeit flawed, adoptive parents, and who I am as I sit here today, well I would not be exactly ME if I had a different upbringing, and I’m fine with me. I am not rich, I put myself thru college and now I just have a govt J-O-B. My adoptive parents divorced when I was 11, we were not rich nor had boundless opportunities. But I love them and love my extended family, and as I sit here right now in my 2 bedroom apartment, with my own adopted child asleep in the other room, I can say if my life went as it was meant to go, being given up for adoption as part of it, and it led me to right here, right now, with myself being the self I turned out to be, flaws and all, and led me to this child that I am blessed to have in my life, then thank God for it all.
And for the record, my 6 year old child knows her birth mother in Haiti (as do i), knows her siblings there as her sisters, and yes, I know that tough questions and perhaps anger and confusion on her part will come, especially in adolescence, but we will always maintain contact with them and visit, and she will always know she has 2 families who love her very much. She won’t have the pain of not knowing, at least.
The hard part of this argument is the whole “if adopted, they have a better life, more opportunities, more food, they won’t get caught in the cycle” part of it. Those things are TRUE, for the most part, but the adopted child would never KNOW about what was missed if they stayed with their birth family. They would only know THAT. If my Haitian child grew up hungry and uneducated in a shanty in Haiti, likely selling wares on street corners and probably pregnant by 16 or 18, if she made it through childhood, THAT would be her normal. And she would have been with her birth family. But here she is now, soccer fiend, swimming fiend, smart as a whip, wanting to be a farmer or a policeman or rock star or who knows what. Her teachers say she has the personality to be a leader. So like, what….the WORLD is better off because she was adopted, and now she can go to school and be what she wants to be in life? Is that a reason? She may become a farmer, may become some kind of agricultural researcher and go back to Haiti and do some wonderful agricultural THING for her country. Who knows. And yes, it’s ALL built on the pain of her birth mother having made an adoption plan. All that happiness is built on her pain. But isn’t there ANY glimmer of happiness in her when she sees what her child is becoming or has avoided by being adopted? one of those “bittersweet” kinds of things?
Closed adoptions, I can see how much more excruciating the pain would be. Not to know. To HOPE that you should have that happy glimmer in the midst of the pain…that your child is happy and well, but not to know. Yeah. That would suck. I know my birth mother doesn’t know how I’m doing. And to think that she has such pain in her, well, that is reason enough for me to actually consider really trying to track her down. (Of course I have also heard of those birth families that do not want contact or anything….)
Anyway I am kind of rambling now, but….the point is nobody should judge anyone. Stephanie seems to have done what is right for HER, and is at peace with it, and so are the adoptive parents and the adopted child. Why is that bad? I think somehow finding peace, even if that means working hard to try to meet your birth child or parents, or at least initiate contact with them, if that will bring peace, then everyone should do it. I don’t know any other way for everyone’s very raw wounds, which are evident from these comments, to have any chance at healing.
Peace,
Stephanie #2
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