So How DOES It Feel?

Another adoptee I know recently mentioned having a feeling I think all of us have had: Not wanting to be adopted, maybe for just one day, so one wouldn’t have adoption in one’s head all the time.

But one does. I typed “Some days adoption seems to take up more than all my energy even if I don’t think about it much, like a background program I can’t close.”

So I can verbalize how it feels to be adopted (to me). I really didn’t think I could. I’m going to keep trying.

Here’s how else it feels: You know the part in Catcher in the Rye where Holden’s walking and every time he steps from the curb to the street, he asks his dead brother to keep him from disappearing? Adoption feels like that to me. I don’t trust the ground to hold me up. (This is not entirely metaphor. I wish I could explain it better.)

Allie, Allie, don’t let me disappear.

Or, as Stephen Wright put it, “You know how it feels when you’re leaning back in a chair, and you lean too far back, and you almost fall over backwards, but then you catch yourself at the last second? I feel like that all the time.”*

I think I’ll have more to say on this later. For now, how does it feel to you?

 

*They say we can be “hypervigilant.” I jerk awake two or three times a night  if I’m sleeping in a strange bed. (I also occasionally hit and kick my lovers in my sleep, but I dunno whether I can pin on that one on adoption. Maybe I’m just a bed hog.)

Questions I’ve Always Wanted to Ask

You’re not adopted? But you don’t look like your parents at all! What’s it like not being adopted? Are you sad because you weren’t chosen?

Knowing why you look that way and where many of the things you like and dislike about your appearance come from, being able to see these things in the people in your house and in the people you see at family reunions: What’s that like? Do you feel like a part of your family? Does having the same eyes or nose or laugh as others make you feel ordinary, not special? Do you ever think about other, unreal parents?

Is it embarrassing to fill out all the paperwork before your first visit to a new doctor? What’s that like? Did an employee ever fail to notice your “not adopted” note on the file and ask in front of everyone how you know all this family history stuff? How did it feel to be singled out like that?

Knowing your birth story, knowing how many hours your mother was in labor with you; knowing what name she gave you because it’s your name forever, knowing where your father was at the time: How does that feel? When you were young, did other children make fun of you for not being adopted? because nobody but your own parents wanted you?

When you were little, did you entertain fantasies like those Freud called the family romance? Pretend you were adopted and one day your real family would come and love you better, love you right? How did that feel? Did it fill an emptiness for you, or did it turn out there had never been any emptiness, and you were only seeking the love you had at home all along? Did you, as a child, feel sure you were adopted and announce it to your parents, only to see them  smile and roll their eyes rather than rush you to a therapist or accuse you of being disloyal to the family? What was that like?

Are you grateful you were kept? Does it make you feel special to know your parents made you right there at home, literally between them, and waited nine whole months for you and gave you their name–that you were literally created by and for them? Are you grateful you weren’t aborted? How does it feel to know you belong where you are, that at least two people made or changed their life plans, sacrificing countless unlived lives, just for you? Does it make you feel blessed like this non-adoptee I met once and this one my friend knows and this one in this magazine and this one on the internet?

If you don’t feel grateful, do you think this is because knowing so much about yourself and your heritage mean you missed out on many of life’s wonderful surprises? When your friends did their “birthparent” searches, did you feel left out? Does it make sense that this still bothers you, or do you feel you should simply get over it?

Did you ever consider searching for your might-have-been adoptive parents, for that one “looking to adopt” couple who would have provided the perfect home for you? Why? Why not? What went wrong? Are you unhappy? Were you abused? Why? Why not? Why? How does this feel?

When people find out you aren’t adopted, do they say it’s wonderful and then change the subject? Do you sense they don’t know what to say to someone whose parents didn’t even have to pass a home study? Do they accuse you of being spoiled? Do they compare you to their non-adopted relatives? Do they expect you to be an authority on all aspects and schools of thought on parturition, and to be able to explain it from the points of view of the mother, father, baby, OB/GYN, all members of the attending medical staff and any deity/ies involved or not involved? Does that bother you, or do you feel honored to be a spokesperson for parturition?

Has not having your amended birth certificate ever prevented you from obtaining either US citizenship or a passport? What was that like?

Maybe you don’t think about it, like fish don’t think about water, and that’s understandable, but have you ever tried imagining how it would really feel to be adopted?

Have you ever tried really hard to imagine it, to the point that your psyche began to feel uncomfortable in some way?

And have you then gone a little bit past that feeling, and wondered if you weren’t wrong about a thing or two?

Yes? Kinda disconcerting, wasn’t it? (Thank you for making that effort. It means a lot.)

No?

Then STOP TELLING ADOPTEES IT “WOULDN’T BOTHER YOU” IF YOU WERE ADOPTED, BECAUSE AS LONG AS YOU HAVE A LOVING FAMILY IT “DOESN’T MATTER.”

Thank you.

This is not unique. This is happening now. This requires witnesses.

I really thought I had posted this, but no. And I thought I could embed videos here, but I can’t, so you’ll have to take my word for it: You should watch this documentary about the adoption of two Ethiopian siblings. *It will fuck you up unless you have a smaller, colder heart than I do, which is not possible. You should watch it anyway. Everyone should watch it.

Mercy Mercy

 

 

*Consider this a trigger warning. If you have a soul, this film will fuck you up. If you’re adopted, and/or have adoption issues, it may well fuck you up in a very personal, debilitating way.  I still think you should watch it–maybe when you feel strong, maybe among people who truly love and care about you.

The World Notices, Jim Bob.

When Stars Adopt, the World Notices!

But famous people really don’t get special treatment, insists a reasonably famous woman who is so important the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis found time to stymie her childbirth efforts. I don’t get it either, but it’s right there in the article, so it must be true! Just like it must be true that Madonna was able to adopt from *Malawi, a country that doesn’t do adoptions, twice, just because she’s a nice lady who loves babies, not because she’s Madonna.

“[...] I have met so many people who think you have to be so pretty and famous and go to another country to find a child,” says pretty, famous Nia Vadarlos. “Madonna and Angelina Jolie have broken so many myths about adopting from another country and I commend them for it. But there’s a way to do it here. I wanted to talk about all the ways that worked for me and show all the ways to adopt.”

“All the ways” are adopting from foster care. Waiting your turn, crazy, antiquated crap like that…? So last century. Good for you, Ms. Vardalos! I’m glad you’re so excited about foster-to-adopt you’re writing a “how-to” guide, if less excited that it’s also your adoption memoir (your daughter is eight years old!).

“I think the public has the impression that celebrities have an edge on and get breaks with everything, including adoption,” says “adoption expert” (social work proffie) Devon Brooks, who goes on NOT to dispel  this “impression” a single bit. And Ms. Vardalos can’t dispel it either. Although she did everything right, the article mentions that Vardalos admits in her book that a Hollywood lawyer recommended she buy her way to the front of the baby-waiting line.

I get it now. You don’t have to be so pretty and so famous and go so far away to get special consideration for your adoption wants. You just have to somehow know a Hollywood lawyer and be rich as hell and have no morals. Well color me shocked. Shocked! All this time I thought celebrities got paid in smiles and admiration, that people walked up to them and said “You’re so pretty. Please raise my baby.” But Ms. Vardalos is right, it had nothing at all to do with how pretty and famous she is!

Somebody better tell the Duggars! Jim Bob, who’s been a “patriarch” for so long that he expects the universe to fulfill his every whim, is sure his family’s “influence” will get him a baby from El Salvador faster than it should take. (He’s used to getting a new Mini-Jim every year, after all; why should he and his have to wait three to five years like the schmoes do?)

Their influence.

Their INFLUENCE.

Sir, you have a reality show whereon you display to the world how awesome it is to have so many kids that your kids raise your kids. Here’s your influence: Any agency worker in the USA would (or should) run screaming from your adoption application, terrified of being “the agency that gave that family yet another kid and let them name it yet another J-name.” And you know that. But you and your gigantic family do mission work of some kind in El Salvador, so you’re entitled to one baby, quick quick quick, the cameras are rolling.

I guess being the king of your own private nation can do that to a man. You think the people who watch you and notice what you do admire you and find you very Christlike and very wise, don’t you, Jim? You don’t even know you’re a freakshow.

If you get an El Salvadoran baby, and if you get it in record time, it will be because you did what Ms. Vardalos was not willing to do. I hope your viewers are paying attention: If the Duggers get a baby and get it fast, it’s not because Jesus loves them best, it’s because they did something unethical.

Notice, World. Please, please notice?

*Thanks,  PMD, and apologies to both Malawi and Mali.

A Phrase I Have Come To Detest

“Open to adoption.”

Here’s what it most often means in “news stories:” I am or used to be a celebrity of some sort, but nobody’s looking at me right now, and that can’t be. I’ve scored an interview, but I don’t have a new project to push yet. Hm. How can be sure to get a press release out there so people will remember who I am?…I know! I’ll adopt!

No screw that, adoption’s hard. I’ll say I’m open to adoption. Open to the idea of adoption. Yes, I am absolutely open to the idea of adoption. Stop the presses! Everybody look at ME! I’m special because I’ve done nothing and plan to do nothing! Isn’t that sweeeeet?”

Sometimes it means, “We want to adopt. If we use this magical phrase, we’ll get a kid.”

Or it means “Open for business.”

But every time I hear or read it, I read this: “Hey, if someone, like, threw a cute little baby at me, I’d totally catch it. I’d probably even keep it and let my staff [or in the case of the Duggars, my older daughters] raise it right and everything. You’re looking at me now, aren’t you?”

So fucking what? You want a cookie? I mean, I thought really hard about joining the Peace Corps for like an entire minute when I was young, and nobody tells me how awesome I am for almost having done something.

And yes, I remain open to the idea of being a Royal Wizard in a long blue robe covered with golden owls. [looks about expectantly] Shit.

What the World Thinks of Our Mothers

They’re stupid and evil and they live in the sewers where no news of any kind can reach them. For all I know, they think shoes are little houses for mice and Christmas is for boiling. Just ask this anonymous Craigslist Ranter and/or Raver! (Also, they are black and their children would be happier with white people. Just look at the photo!)

You might retain a bit of your sanity and your temper if you imagine the below being read by one of Monty Python’s Gumby characters.

People need to start thinking more about adoption.

Interestingly enough, Our Ranter begins by referring to the inhuman incubator-thingies that owe good people babies as “people.” He means, of course, “women,” who for purposes of this discussion are not people at all. This is why I’ve decided Our Ranter is male: if he isn’t, she should be.

People think about adoption all the time, Sir. People think about how cute orphans are and how Jesus wants them to have one. People think about the unfairness with which god assigned infertility all the time. People read about celebrity adoptions and they read stories in the newspaper about a local family’s quest to have a jillion yard sales so they can bring Baby Madison home from Ethiopia all. The. Time. What people don’t do so much anymore is give away their babies, because they don’t want to and nobody’s leaning all over them to do so anymore…if they’re lucky. How dare they? How DARE these people get pregnant and not consult you as to the fate of the conceptus, Mister Ranter and/or Raver?!

There is a baby shortage in this country.

NO. THERE. IS. NOT. Nobody owes anyone else a baby. It is not sad and tragic and that millions of women have, since 1973, taken control of their own reproductive lives. It’s wonderful!

More people need to stop wondering what benefits they will get if they keep their baby and think of what kind of life they want to give their child.

Maybe more people need to stop obsessing over the adoption tax credit and consider letting someone else with more money adopt the kid they want to adopt, too, eh? No, that’s crazy. All people who want to adopt are virtuous beyond the dreams of any gutter slut who got herself knocked up out of wedlock, and who now sits in the dark somewhere clutching that baby and drooling about all the Welfare she’s going to get by raising him in a cage and feeding him bugs. Birth mothers are special, selfless, loving Oh who are we fooling here?!

What Our Ranter is saying is that black women shouldn’t be allowed to keep their babies. Of course there are many more white women than black on welfare, but what color is a”Welfare queen”? What color, in the average American mind, is a woman so scummy she’d give birth just to get some money? She definitely exists, and by the millions, because otherwise USAians would pay no taxes at all, but she ain’t white. That means she probably knows damned well her baby would be a PAP’s second, third, or even-more-distant-from-first choice. She also may know her baby will have a lower price tag than other, whiter babies. Maybe she doesn’t believe your bullshit about how people who’ll settle for her cheap, inferior child can raise it better than she can. Hey, speaking of money:

Also, consider that many families will cover your expenses (even living/rent) if you place your baby for adoption instead of having an abortion. There are a LOT of great families out there who want a baby. They often pay $30,000. and sometimes even $50,000. just to be parents.

They have stuff you don’t. That makes it your duty to make them happy. So STOP, Women of America! STOP thinking about all the “benefits” you could get for your child NOT! (Why is “Welfare” a benefit and “your share of the adoption fees which are totally not selling your baby” not a benefit? What makes this schmuck think he can fool women into thinking they get all the money the lawyers and agencies get? WHAT PLANET IS THIS?!)

These are people who own homes, have good jobs,

Which you, People-Women-Things who are getting pregnant without having a daddy around, do not. Not one of you. Not a single woman in the history of everything who got pregnant but didn’t get married has ever owned a house or had a job worth spitting on and you know it, you hussies. Hand over the babies! People who are richer than you want them!

have passed background checks and who have taken parenting classes.

Did YOU have to do that before you had sex, you filthy slut? DID YOU?!?!?!?

It’s time for people

women I don’t approve of, I mean

to stop being selfish

and wanting to raise their own kids, just like they’re real people who really have money! Horrific! Unbelievable! It’s almost as if they could feel love, but we know that’s not true.

and start thinking of the welfare of babies being born

to women on Welfare. (Yes, there’s a reason I keep saying welfare and benefits: you bitches are on welfare and you don’t deserve benefits!) Benefits are not for people who really need them: poor ones, black ones, brown ones. Those inferior people need to give me a baby NOW. I have a perfect right to raise the kind of person I currently cross the street to avoid!

(or not having the chance of birth)

A baby that never got born is….um…nothing. Not the weeping ghost of an embryo berating its “mother” from heaven. Simply nothing. Not. A not-baby is not a baby.

in this country instead of just thinking of themselves, how they will look to others or what they can get out of becoming a “parent”.

FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS BITCHEZ! Why won’t you stop thinking of the money and THINK OF THE MONEY?! And you know you can’t be a parent. You can’t, whoever you are. You had the gall to reproduce, which makes you a parent, which means you totally don’t deserve to be one.

There is a shortage of babies!

No there fucking well is not! What there is, is a special circle of Hell for anyone who ever says this. People are not products, and nobody owes anyone a baby. What we have a shortage of is people who understand other people’s boundaries. What we have a shortage of is people who understand that other people are people and not means to their end of “growing a family.”

Only 20,000 babies are adopted in the states each year, but about 200,000 people are trying to adopt.

I don’t give a single fuck. Adoption was supposed to be about the children. Why don’t YOU go make them some babies? Why aren’t you fucking a woman you can control completely for the next nine or so months right now, Sir? Isn’t it your patriotic duty? Actually, the way the numbers seem to add up, you should have a dungeon of ten captive women you’re raping right now to make your share of all those missing babies. And are you doing it? Are you raping ten women right now? No, you’re sitting there writing a Craigslist rant!  Evil prick! People with money are waiting!

Many never will because of the cost and the lack of babies. Their chances of becoming parents are thwarted by not only their infertility but also because selfish women who will be terrible mothers keep their children.

You know what, fuck you. How can you tell which women are the terrible mothers who only kept their kids out of “selfishness”? You can’t. You see a poor woman or a loud woman or a woman who slaps her kid in the supermarket or a woman who argues with you or a minority woman, and you think “Bitchez shouldn’t be allowed to have kids” because you and you alone, Mister Ranter and/or Raver, are the Decider in Matters Parental. (And selfishness?! Does this person have any idea what it is to raise a child? how very much giving one does? No, it’s all take, take, take, candy and cake! ….when you’re a good, ie.e., adoptive parent. Only bad, selfish parents have to spend time with their children or change their diapers or hear them ask “Why?” seventy thousand times. Trufax!)

Meanwhile, my chances of having a second husband are thwarted by the evil, selfish legion of bitches out there who won’t give me their husbands. How dare they not give me theirs? Don’t they care that there’s a chance I have a house and a good job? Selfish jerks!

In 2008 1.21 million abortions were performed in the US.

Do you know what that means, O lover of babies and hater of women? It means one-third of USAian women in our childbearing years will have an abortion. Approximately one-third of the women you know have had or will have abortions. Was it your mother, Mr, Ranter? Will it be your sister, Mr. Raver? Your girlfriend, friend, cousin, teacher, aunt? You’ll never know, because they all know better than to tell your sorry, shallow, high and mighty judgmental ass. And you’ll go on believing that you and those around you are a finer breed of human than those people who have the nerve to make babies and not give them to the rich, or to have sex and get pregnant and not have a baby, or to get raped and not have the baby and/or not give it away. (Say, it’s almost like women can’t win with you, innit?)

In the early 70′s almost half of all unplanned pregnancies were brought to term and the babies were placed for adoption. Not anymore!

GOOD! Women have bodily autonomy now, sort of. Good, good, good, good, GOOD! I’m going to find your harem, and I’m going to release all ten of those women, and I’m going to tell them exactly where Planned Parenthood is, and I’m going to end ALLLLLL the adoptions MuAAHahahahaaaa!

Now people

by which I mean bitchez

just abort or live off of the government

Why are both these things equally wrong? Because they mean no baby for Mr. Ranter (or his friends or whoever in his life wants one so fucking bad he has to tell Craigslist all about it). OR because these are both the actions of Bad Women, and Mr. Ranter is a Ms. who needs us all to know she is not a Bad Woman and never will be. No, Ms. Ranter is one of the Good Women: the kind who laugh at rape jokes are almost as good as a man (and twice as decorative!) so long as there aren’t any actual men around. If the ranter is a Ms., she’s the kind who (and they try to hard, it’s so cute!) thinks she can ever be accepted as a person without busting her ass to change the repressive society she’s beginning to suspect she’s trapped in. But change is hard and scary, so she’ll just point at the other women and yell Sluts! Because if you do that often enough and loudly enough, you’ll grow a penis of your very own.

instead of actually considering the fact that adoption is an option

Things that rhyme in four words or less are always true and are never complicated. (If they were complicated, I wouldn’t be able to cram them into four words! I don’t understand how you people can not know this. Nothing is really “complicated” anyway, that’s just your excuse for being sluts!)

and a bad situation

i.e., being pregnant when I think you don’t deserve to be, no matter how happy and well-prepared you are

could become a good one

for whom?

by thinking of others.

And shouldn’t you always, always always be thinking of others, women? You know you should. That sure is a nice Everything you have there. I’ve always wanted an Everything like that. And I can afford to buy it, which makes you duty bound to give it to me. …What do you mean, that makes no sense?

Adoption is something we don’t talk about enough in this country!

Oh, shut up.

This is how the average person with an average amount of knowledge about adoption in the US feels about it. My mother is still an irresponsible slut and I am still a trinket to be awarded to the worthy. Someone do tell me again how very much our attitudes about adoption have changed?

A Poll

From the A-S Facebook page: We (or I, anyway) need a word that’s the equivalent of “mansplaining” or “whitesplaining” to refer to:

1) non-adoptees who lecture adoptees on adoption/their own experiences

2) non-adoptees who make a conversation about adoptees all about them

Here are the suggestions. What say you, Bastards and others?