Why adoption wouldn’t exist in a perfect world
Because in a perfect world, children would be raised by the people who gave birth to them.
Thin Pink Line : More adoption musings
As I’ve mentioned before… the fact that I blogged about my adoption experience has led me to meet HUNDREDS of adoptees. True. On any given day I receive five or six emails from people who have stumbled onto my site. On the basis of their request… I don’t talk about them… but I hope you will believe you when I tell you this. The very vast majority of them were raised in healthy loving adoptive families… but…. oh my goodness… what a huge ‘but’. I have been forced to face a very unhappy reality… being raised by loving adoptive parents has done little to nothing to help my fellow adoptees cope with the issues they perceive to be a result of having been given up for adoption. I’m not talking about woe-is-me type attitudes here… far from it. These are intelligent functioning members of society… who bear a secret yoke… a burden they don’t dare express out loud for fear of hurting the expectations of others. Because after all… adoption is such a wonderful thing… this is what adoptees are lead to believe… and when they feel otherwise? It’s something you just KNOW will have massive ramifications if they are voiced out loud.
Now when I say this to people say things like this, “But would you rather a child be raised in this or that horrible situation?” And so I will point out that we’re talking about a perfect world where horrible situations don’t exist. Remember? Because it’s perfect!
As I’ve said before, I haven’t read Primal Wound and I don’t know if I will but I’ve read other books based on primal wound theory. I’m not sure if this wound really is purely biological or if it has a hefty dose of cultural tied up (both, I’m sure) but I believe in it. I believe that adoption is second best to a perfect world where babies are raised by the people who birth them.
But here’s the thing — when I say second best I’m not saying that J should have done this or that she should have done that. We don’t live in a perfect world and I trust J’s ability to make her decision and I don’t think that she harmed Madison. I want that understood. The ramifications of the adoption for Madison are not anyone’s fault — they’re just a fact of adoption.
It’s kinda like my parents’ divorce. In a perfect world it wouldn’t have happened but living in an imperfect world with flawed, human parents doing the best they could with what they had meant it did happen. There’s no telling what my life would have looked like if they had remained married but I can tell you that their divorce had a negative impact on me. That’s simply true. There are good divorces, done well with an eye to the kid. There are horrible divorces, done badly and using the kids as emotional pawns. Good is better but it’s still not best. Best is happily married parents.
Divorce can both be the right thing to do and a rotten thing for the children who live it. The rightness of it doesn’t take away from the rotteness of it. And, too, the rotteness doesn’t automatically make it wrong.
I’m not anti-divorce and I’m not anti-adoption (obviously). But it’s important to understand that the reality of parental lives is that our decisions impact our kids in ways we may not like to think or talk about. There is no crystal ball where we can say that Madison would have grown up happier or better adjusted living with J than she will living with me but we can understand that the loss of J as her primary mother will have ramifications for her.
I don’t feel insulted by this. I don’t feel less than. Even saying, “Adoption is second best” doesn’t make me feel second best because this is not a contest I’m trying to win. And, as I said, we don’t live in a perfect world so maybe in this imperfect world, second best moves to the front. (Or even third or fourth best since we are not members of Madison’s extended birth family and we do not share her racial make-up.) Which is to say that acknowledging deficiencies is empowering because it will help us be better parents.
The one thing that I don’t think I’ve seen addressed here is something like surrogacy. I’m very happy with the size of my family, but I also really enjoyed being pregnant and bringing a child into the world. So I’ve sometimes wondered about doing it for someone else who wanted a child (and not for the money).
But maybe in a perfect world there’s not infertility either?
I’m not sure about this…I am not very good at imagining a perfect world. What is the means of learning if not through our mistakes? In a perfect world, we all already know everything and thus, no mistakes? No learning & growing?
Yes! Exactly…. I’ve been thinking, pretty much non-stop since I wrote that post that you reference above… and I also came to the conclusion that I’m placing my beliefs in the context of a perfect world. It’s sad that adoption exists at all… but… it’s also sad that there are infertile women who can’t have children… but both realities DO exist (for example), so all we can do is make these realities as open, and honest, and real as possible.
Like Felicity, I can’t imagine the perfect world, because there never was nor ever will be such a thing. We all deal with what we are dealt. Some are adopted, some are children of divorce, like you said. Some live their childhood in countries where there is poverty and war. Some children have to deal with chronic or life threatening illness. All of that shapes, and forms, us in some way, negative and positive.
Very few people live their life without carrying some sort of burden from the past. We all learn to deal with it - or not. And while I understand that there is loss, and pain, involved in not being raised by one’s birth family I don’t believe it is a heavier burden than most others.