GRACE GRACE GRACE GRACE GRACE

(Old news, but I wanted to post something.)

I wonder how many adopted girls/women have been saddled with this name? Well, here’s one more: The little girl delivered in the back of an ambulance by a fireman has been adopted by the fireman and his wife. Grace is her middle name, but they’re going to call her by it. You know, in case she ever forgets how lucky she is and asks too many questions.

“We have never hidden it from her,” Marc told “Today.” “If you ask her where she was born, she says, ‘My daddy delivered me in the back of an ambulance.’ She knows the whole story. I wanted her to know as soon as she was old enough to understand.”

Sir, that…is NOT the whole story. Her story began when her mother got pregnant, just like yours did.

His wife says they wanted more children,

“But I was pre-term with [my biological sons], so we knew that it wasn’t possible to have anymore babies.”

I do not know what that means. Can anyone explain it?

Hero Fireman added: “I don’t even think about her being adopted. She’s ours and we love her.”

And your not thinking about it (because you don’t give a fuck about her mother or where she came from) means she’ll never think about it, right? That grace god reserves for adoptive parents truly is amazing.

Why don’t they start calling all the male adoptees Lucky? It’s the same damned thing.

“Babies have become commodities” complains baby broker

Kinton, who founded Amazing Grace nearly 20 years ago, says licensed agencies like hers are struggling to stay in business because pregnant women are choosing to give up their babies through independent facilitators.

Look, Lady, we all know why your business is failing: Most women want to keep their babies, and nowadays, they can. The pickings were slim when you started, and they’re slimmer now. And that’s great!

“When I first started, we were pairing 20 babies with forever families every year,” Kinton said. “Now a good year is 10.”

If adoption were really about the children this would, of course, be cause for celebration, not whining. But no: God’s “Amazing Grace” is supposed to benefit Ms. Kinton and her paying customers, not babies and their existing families.

With fewer babies to pair, agencies such as Amazing Grace have fewer families paying to complete the adoptions, which keep the agencies afloat.

The fact is, PAPs want what they want and they want it now, regardless of cost. They always have. I wondered where on earth they learned that a baby is an item to be purchased? Surely it isn’t anything private adoption agencies ever did. Surely Ms. Kinton isn’t complaining just because those facilitators are stealing her money.

She adds that adopting families are vulnerable to adoptions that may not follow all legal protocols, plus there is a danger to the pregnant woman with no guarantee of the health and wellness of the new baby’s home.

Lady, you crack me up. Nobody cares about the pregnant woman. And no woman who relinquishes has anything like a guarantee of a well and healthy home for her baby.

“We have social workers who we know have gone into these homes.”

That’s right, it’s that “one home study makes you the best parents evar” nonsense again.

“If you have a mom here and the baby is going, say, to the state of Utah, we don’t know if anyone has gone into the home.”

Isn’t it IN ter est ing that she mentioned Utah of all states? Utah, which makes it easiest for a woman to relinquish without the father’s knowledge? Pure coincidence, I’m sure. Couldn’t possibly be that Ms. Kinton loses big bucks every time one of her pregnant women absconds to Utah. Obviously, the only reason a woman would got to Utah is to deny her baby a safe home and deny Ms. Kinton’s rightful fees. Sure it is.

Ms. Kinton, you got into this business twenty years ago, which was already twenty years too late for you to be pitching this BSE bullshit. I don’t care about your business going under. I care about the women you’re complaining about having sniped out from under you because you are the one who believes babies are commodities.

Seriously, who do you think you’re fooling?

The very first sentence

…of this article about transracial adoption begins with the phrase “Adoption, like parenting…”

Dear people who write about adoption: STOP IT. Stop assuring us adoption is exactly like raising biological children out of one side of your mouth and saying this shit out of the other. We hear you. We see you. And adopted children who are supposed to be “helped” by this article see and hear you.

Both dads say honesty is important while raising your kids.

If you honestly don’t think adoption is parenting, Dana Kozlov, then don’t write articles about adoption. You’re not helping.

Stuff People Who Know Who Their Blood Relatives Are Say

Parenthood Requires Love, Not DNA!

PRLND is the name of a Facebook Group. You can click the link if you want, or you can take my word for how awful it is. It’s page after page of disembodied baby feet being held in disembodied adult hands, and posts about how love knows no color, and god’s plan, and how giving up a baby is not giving up a baby, and how Moses was adopted and every other nauseating trigger I or other adult adoptees have ever discussed. But this image took the motherfucking biscuit. Look at it. LOOK AT IT:

Sacrificing family is for adoptees and their original families. So is sacrificing your heart: The adopted will love who they are told to love and like it. Dignity? Are you SHITTING me? Adoptions are all about the loss of dignity–but not for youuu, you special, special parents who know DNA has nothing to do with love but also know who you are and where you come from.

Fuck you all with rusty rakes. Doesn’t cognitive dissonance ever reach a conscious level with you people?!

I May Vomit

…in an extra special way. When will this syrupy, patronizing, manipulative crap end?

Whoever invented the term “tummy mommy” should die. But “tummy baby”?! That is a new low.

Social Worker: I Hate Telling People No Families Have Been Shattered Lately

“I hate telling people we don’t have a child for them,” says an anonymous “social worker” who’s just so brought down when s/he is not immediately able to pony up the goods to the many, many couples who apparently make New Year’s resolutions to order up a kid. No, really:

I love my job, but returning after the Christmas break I find a mountain of inquires that have built up, each someone wanting to know how they can adopt. They are full of hope and motivated by a new year and a fresh start.

As wonderful as it is to know so many want to open their lives to an adopted child,

Oh, here we go again. If you have your own child, your life doesn’t have to be opened, your heart doesn’t have to be opened, and your home doesn’t have to be opened: they just ARE open. If you want us to think adoption is wonderful, stop implying adoptees are inferior.

my heart sinks. I know I, or a colleague, will have to contact them and the likelihood is we will dash their hopes.

Because that’s what adoption is about: meeting the desires of people who decide every year that this January is the month they will order up and be supplied with a child. Isn’t it odd that a social worker would fail to mention that these children are not in fact manufactured to order, but were given birth to by real live women, and are only available because something terrible has happened? I mean, don’t social workers have anything to do with securing those children for adoption in the first place? Aren’t social workers the people facing relinquishing a child are referred to? To this “social worker,” those original families just…don’t exist. You will not read of them once in this article about how tragic it is that everyone who requests one can’t have someone else’s child. Nor will you read of the effects adoption might have on children.

We have lots of adopters approved already, and for many this will be the second or even third new year since they made a tentative inquiry and started the adoption process. Back then, we were welcoming all potential adopters with open arms, explaining how the number of children waiting was growing month by month.

Ah, the good old days when kiddy vending machines operated above capacity! You’re talking about the 1950s, right? No? There were oodles of snuggly wuggly adoptable children available to anyone who wanted one three years ago? That’s not the story anyone in adoption has been telling for decades now. For decades now everyone’s been moaning about a “shortage.” While an article this author links to says adoptions have fallen 50% in the last two years, I find it hard to believe there was a booming child surplus before that. And if there was, well, that was a failure of the social system, wasn’t it? Adoption almost always represents a failure of the social system.

How I wish we had known the change that was about to take place; how we wish we could have prepared these people better for the frustration and heartache to come.

You could have. You could have said “There are no guarantees. This is how things are now, but the institution of adoption is subject to change. It has changed before, and it will change again. At present, the average couple waits from between X and X [months, years, whatever].” But you didn’t. You gave them all a cutesy reply instead:

We were always honest, we explained there is no timescale to be matched with a child and when asked “how long will it take?” would reply “how long is a piece of string?”.

So you’re sorry you weren’t preparing them, but you say you were preparing them?

But we certainly hadn’t anticipated that small ball of string would become a huge knotted boulder.

In November 2013, judge Sir James Munby said in a case ruling that councils must consider alternatives to adoption, such as extended family members. This meant adoption placement orders decreased, while special guardianship orders rose significantly. It feels as though adoption has been in freefall ever since.

Oh my god, what a tragedy. I mean, the horrible, unjust burden of considering keeping a child in his or her own family whenever possible–such a thing is unthinkable. You are not a social worker, Sir or Madam; you are a procurer of flesh. How dare you. (When I first read this noisome claptrap, this is the point at which I actually began to cry. My go-to emotion, anger, dodged right out of the way and made room for sadness. This isn’t normal for me, but it happens, and it’s part of why I don’t blog more often.)

Recently, the government announced proposed changes to the law that would mean adoption is always pursued when it’s in a child’s best interests.

And we all know what that means. It means that if someone wants to adopt, they are immediately in the child’s best interests and the child’s own family are immediately not. If I didn’t know that before, I would know it after reading the article linked to at “proposed changes,” because it bemoans the decline in adoption numbers and proclaims that the new law is intended “to increase the number of children adopted.” Adoption should never be about quotas.

In 2012 when I moved from safeguarding work to adoption, the approved adopters on my caseload were generally matched with a child within two months. Now, anything less than a 12-month wait is said to be speedy.

A year. An entire year! Some people wait three months longer than it would take to make their own baby to adopt! Can you imagine?! Horrific! Outrageous! Why, my own APs, in the mid-sixties, waited a mere eighteen months to adopt me oh wait.

It’s not just the length of time; it’s the emotional impact of waiting and hoping, seeing a profile of a child, imagining your life with them in it and then being told stronger links are being pursued. Or as one adopter put it, “someone else is better than me”.

Mr. or Ms. “Social Worker,” that is not a product of the last two or three years; that is how adoption works. Waiting, hoping, and fearing “someone else” might get picked instead of you have always been part of the adoption process. If this “social worker” is saying people could have a kid dumped into their laps on request two years ago, then s/he’s really arguing for the changes s/he dislikes so much.

Well, on and on it goes: those poor people, they want a kid so badly, they are so unhappy when they can’t have one. No other parties to adoption are worth considering–except, of course, the “social workers:” This makes adoption practitioners feel helpless, but all we can do is lend a listening ear when it gets too much.

So you are not a social worker at all: You are, as I said, a flesh peddler.

And PAPs have other problems, too, like not being in the best interests of the children they want at all:

To complicate the situation, the majority of adopters do not feel able to meet the complex needs of the children waiting. The vast majority of those needing adoptive placements are over the age of five, larger sibling groups, have complex needs, or are from black and ethnic minority backgrounds.

(B-bu-but their open lives!) At this point, Mr. or Mrs. Baby Broker is a hair’s breadth away from demanding that more healthy white newborns be produced for his or her clients, and that’s just evil. You’ll notice s/he didn’t waste a second considering the feelings of the kids actually needing adoption, either. Feelings are for “social workers” and PAPs.

Here is where the “social worker” links to a letter from adoptive parents who, having scored one adorable child, are very disappointed because they were assured their second adoption would take six months. Not the length of a piece of string, six months. Mr. or Ms. “Social Worker,” if people are let down because you and people like  you have been misleading them, that’s your fault.

The “social worker” concludes by saying s/he is really looking for parents who are willing and able to handle the complex, too-old, wrong-colored, sibling-having children available now, but gosh, one has to be very very nice to and sensitive to the wants of those who put in orders every January because the Baby Scoop era really did just end in England or what the fuck ever.

Personally, I think this Mr. Munby sounds like a reasonable, compassionate man.

Oh hey, look how fast the comments were closed on this one.

 

ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE

…is the set of people for whom “adoption is.” Surprised? I know I am, but Jenny Jerkins says Adoption is for Everyone, even those of us who don’t want children. So when we click over to her article, we are immediately ordered (by a graphic that doesn’t differentiate between upper-case O’s and C’s very well at all) to do it:

“ADOPT.” Um, no. I don’t want to. Nobody should ADOPT because some graphic on a website told them to.

“If you can’t adopt, FOSTER.” No. Stop telling me how to build the family I don’t want, ‘kay? I know, if everyone took just one kid home we could theoretically put Child Welfare out of business…but why do we have Child Welfare in the first place? Because some people have their children taken away after they are deemed bad parents. Therefore, children adopted or otherwise are not “for everyone” who can acquire them.

Also, who are you fooling? Fostering is not necessarily so akin to adoption that it can be called “the next best thing.” People who want to adopt want “their own” child/ren. Many people who want to adopt expect to support their adoptees after age eighteen in some form, be it letting them live under their roofs after their eighteenth birthdays or helping with college tuition. We can judge how much a significant percentage of foster “parents” cares about the kids they foster by looking at what becomes of those kids after they age out and their foster “parents” stop getting paid. It’s not pretty. Even other advocates for fostering can admit that. Fostering is very often nothing like adopting.

“If you can’t foster, SPONSOR.” I think if you have extra money and want to support a child or children with it, that is great, especially if your money goes toward keeping a child  in his/her own family. But that’s not “sponsoring,” not to Jenny Jerkins. Sponsoring is for “adoptive hopefuls.” (I’m sure we’re all terribly shocked.) There follows a paragraph about the money and the paperwork, but nothing about the position of relative privilege that allows people to adopt in the first place. Sigh. Then there’s a paragraph about how you could help foster families, but that’s the second way to sponsor, not the first and best way. The best way to be involved in adoption (as everyone already is) where sponsoring is concerned is to give PAPs money (why are you even reading this when you could be writing out a check?) .

SPONSOR my prickly ass. The nerve of those people. Are PAPs and APs being involved in adoption (as everyone is) by sinking money into other people’s children without expecting to raise those children in return? Then what makes them expect others to?

But “if you can’t sponsor, VOLUNTEER.” You kind of have to. I mean, like it or not, you are involved in adoption because it is for everyone.

And where does Ms. Jerkins suggest you volunteer? Just guess, I dare you. The answer is crisis pregnancy centers. Crisis fucking pregnancy centers. Why not just mosey across the street to the real women’s health clinic and be these assholes?

Finally, “If you can’t volunteer, DONATE.” They’ll take your time or your money. Say, is anyone else starting to detect a little…overlap here? A little overlap of ideas signifying that everyone owes APs time and money, especially money? Ms. Jerkins says donating “may not look like” giving money or time. It may instead, take the form of “buying a cute new shirt from a couple who is selling t-shirts for an adoption fundraiser. Or maybe it is donating items for a yard sale or consignment sale benefiting an adoptive couple.” Those things don’t “not look like” donating money; they look exactly like donating money, especially the first one.

“If you can’t donate, EDUCATE.” Hey, guess what education consists of? Does it mean warning women about open adoptions that slam shut or first mother coercion? Does it mean warning PAPs about GSA or lack of mirroring or even access to medical histories? NOPE: “Maybe [people you seek to “educate”] are contemplating adoption and need that extra encouragement. Or maybe you know others who have many misconceptions about adoption itself.” (Oh hey, I know people like that!)

“Use your sphere of influence to help break down those barriers and educate them about the adoption process and to share stories of hope.”

What barriers? A person’s “contemplating adoption”? That’s not a barrier. To me, “contemplating adoption” means doing the introspective work and research everyone who adopts should do. They don’t need cheerleaders anymore than they need naysayers: They need to make their own damned decision and they need to be very sure about it.

A lot of this stuff seems to come from a place of good intentions–the place otherwise known as AdoptoLand, where every child up for adoption really needs adopting. But AdoptoLand is constructed of nothing more than the myths and fantasies that best serve P/APs, and so is this article.

People involved in animal welfare know better than this. They don’t demand everyone adopt a pet–in fact, many shelters/humane organizations screen prospective pet owners and turn some away. Despite the fact that we euthanize millions of animals every year in this country, they don’t run around on the internet yelling “Pet ownership is for everyone,” because it isn’t. Nor is being a veterinarian or volunteering at a shelter “for everyone.” When one thinks about the animals first and people second, that becomes obvious. Don’t we owe young humans at least as much consideration?

Not everyone has “a role in adoption.” In fact, plenty of people who want and have roles in adoption shouldn’t have them. I do believe everyone has some sort of role in the basic welfare of humanity, even if it’s just doing one’s part to leave a livable planet for future humans and other living things. We all have some role in the welfare of children, or should (yes, even in the USA, where we generally reserve the right to think poor people of any age are subhuman). But no, not all seven billion of us have a role in some people’s desire to raise other people’s children.

“Adoption truly is for everyone.  Maybe your role in adoption is not to adopt or to foster, but as you can see there are many roles that you can have.  Each of us plays an integral part in making forever families happen.  What role are you going to play?”

Adoptees are expected to play the role we were assigned. We didn’t audition for this. In the play that’s supposed to be all about us, we often aren’t even mentioned in the libretto. By me, that means you can take your crisis centers and your garage sales and hang them in your ass, because adoption snarker is the role I’ve chosen for myself.

Some Pedestals Are Higher Than Others

A friend called my attention to this blog post. I don’t want to critique the whole thing, because I don’t find it 100% horrible. But something really struck me about the way the a’mom involved chose to describe herself. So:

Has anyone else noticed The Adoption Process Moral Pedestal has levels? That it’s more an Adoption Process Totem Pole? Andrew MacDougall got to climb it because he brought a whole kid from overseas instead of just sending money for food. The maker of the “adoptees dodged a bullet” graphic got to climb just it for not being a relinquishing mother, which seems like a lower level to me. Pastor Boob Job Baby got to climb it for being just a little less ignorant about international adoption than the average person who isn’t involved with adoption is–fairly low, but probably still higher than Graphic Maker. Deb Goldberg got to climb it for presuming to tell the poor they need to save their money, which any non-adopting slob can do. And Jeff Gates got to climb it just for being insulted about being taken for a pedophile. (His pedestal’s probably pretty low, but he can still lord it over Masha Allen’s “adoptive dad,” right?)

So I’ve been thinking about the pedestals and how they’re measured. Here’s what I’ve gathered from the way I’ve seen people react online and IRL to adoption stories about APs (hey, is there any other kind?).

Rich couples who advertised themselves to “birthmothers” and scored a white, domestically adopted newborn get the lowest pedestal. Not only is there a chance they waited less than nine months to get their baby, they didn’t even have to get a passport. And they didn’t have to settle for a lesser product, the way people who get foreign or older or otherwise special needs kids do (did you know not being white is a “special need” in adoption?). All they had to do was put out a lot of money and get chosen by a “birth mother” who didn’t change her mind. Hell, they probably didn’t even do it because god told them to.

As the adopted person becomes less ideal (less white, less healthy, older) the pedestal gets higher. The pedestal also gets higher to the extent that the adoptive parents talk about religion.

International adoption is complicated: The pedestal might get higher because the APs have rescued an orphan, often for Jesus. But it might get lower because “American kids weren’t good enough for you?!”

The pedestal gets higher the longer the APs wait to adopt, and it grows a yard or more for every adoption they don’t complete because the first mother changed her mind. And if they ever had physical custody of a child and lost it because that custody was not entirely legal, their pedestal shoots into the clouds, borne aloft on a fountain of righteous anguish. Your pedestal grows if you claim your adoptee has RAD, and it gets taller the more out-of-control, dangerous, or even murderous the child becomes while in your care. Oddly enough, it retains its height should you decide to get rid of such a child. And, as we’ve learned recently, having one’s adoptee search still boosts the pedestal in some people’s eyes.

But the very highest pedestal is reserved for those for people like Megan (sorry: Megan!!!). Not because she adopted six times. Not because at least one of her children is from overseas. Not because she is a cheerleader for adopting older children, as if everyone were equally prepared to do such a thing. (Yes, it really is that simple–do it.)  Not because she has adopted four older children, and not because she congratulates herself for doing such a “simple” thing. (Most would snarl their faces with the thought of adopting an older child, let alone an older boy but not us.) Not even because, at least in one case, she and her husband had “paperwork approved for an infant” but instead chose to adopt an older kid (and let me tell you, very few things ramp up a pedestal in most people’s minds like turning down an infant in favor of an older kid).

No, Megan is the best kind of AP because, for her, adopting was never “plan B.” If there’s one thing that sets my alarm bells off, it’s the AP who takes pains to point out that s/he didn’t have to adopt. Not like those infertile slobs who had to settle for less…wait, not for less, because adopting is universally wonderful and your kids rock! So what the Hell were you doing just now besides taking potshots at people who couldn’t have their own kids?! I mean, isn’t that kinda…low?

I know, I’m silly expecting this stuff to make sense. So I’ll accept it. Nothing (except maybe ditching a kid you adopted) proves your worth as a human being and an adoptive parent like bragging about owning the functioning reproductive system most people take for granted. AdoptoLand is a strange place.

 

Oops, Part Two

The answer, of course, is that nothing has changed. Read this article. Read how horrible it makes Mariette’s adoptive mom look.

Mariette was adopted in October 1986, at a time when adoption in Haiti was barely regulated. Most of the children in Haitian orphanages had at least one living parent, and the concept of signing away rights to see children was foreign, and still is.

Mariette’s adoptive parents were Sandra and Albert Knopf, at the time empty-nesters in their 40s with three grown sons. Sandra said she felt God’s call to adopt.

“I believed that I was doing it for the Lord,” she said. “I was not doing it for the children and I was not doing it for me.

Really, Sandra? I mean… you know you’re supposed to pretend you’re doing it for the children, right?

So they found a man named Henry Wiebe who could arrange an adoption from Haiti for $3,500 per child, or $6,000 for two.

He came by with photos of older children, but Sandra only wanted girls under 2.

Because fuck the Lord’s opinion, right? Sandra wanted what Sandra wanted.

He called the next day. He had found them. She was going to call them Christa Gail and Jennifer Lynne, but they already had names: Mariette and Patricia.

This is the worst kind of pile-all-over-the-shitty-a’mom clickbait, isn’t it?

Sandra never met the Haitian lawyer who processed the papers, or went to the hearing where the judge approved the adoption. Platel handled all that while Sandra got visas. It took a month.

As the plane took off from Port-au-Prince, she felt overwhelming relief.

“Circling the airport, I just looked down and thought, ‘God, I never want to see this place again.'”

Sandra’s awfulness is the point, surely? Because when Mariette discovered she had never been relinquished for adoption,

her adoptive mother didn’t seem surprised. Yes, she conceded, there had been red flags about the adoption. The fact that Mariette’s age was off, the way the birth and other documents weren’t available at first and then suddenly appeared, at night, some filled out by hand.

We’re supposed to hate Sandra and her pious hypocrisy, aren’t we? The article could not have been written to make her look any worse, could it?

Now read the comments. Read the comments and tell me how much our attitudes about adoption have changed.

Adoption and Masculinity

November is full of Good Adoptees, the cheerleaders for adoption who DARE to STAND UP and parrot the dominant public narrative about adoption as if we couldn’t get that story everywhere and anywhen. Blessing, gift, real parents, better life, blah blah blah. It’s old hat, and it makes it tough to blog in November because one feels one has written about it a million times. So today I want to point out that I think men and women tend to talk about the blessing of adoption differently.

For one thing, fewer men than women search. My a’bro has told me more than once that he is not interested in knowing where he came from, and that his first mother was a “military slut.” He does not seem to take into account that, unlike mine, his parents were married at the time of his conception and birth. He also doesn’t take into account that, if what his non-ID info says is true, his mother wanted to give him the sweet, sweet gift and blessing of adoption from day one, but his father chose to hold up the process for months not because he wanted to keep his son, but because he wanted to hurt his wife.

I think men often blame women for the evil that men do, and I think male adoptees are no different in this. As evidence, I offer a furious male comment on an article about a good, happy, bestest-ever adoptee who had the gall to find out where she came from even though he, himself did the same damned thing.

Please read the article. It is written by an adoptee so fawning and so Good she even starts with “I’ve always known I was adopted,” as if not having one’s parents lie to one about one’s identity all one’s life is evidence of having The Best APs Ever. Having experienced basic human decency (and a thing experts have been telling APs to do for at least fifty years now) is a low bar, but a Good Adoptee makes sure to congratulate his/her parents for clearing it. So far, so good, probably even in the mind of Furious Male Commentor.

The Very Good Adoptee who wrote the article admits to wondering about her birth family growing up, which is a crime Furious Male Commentor cannot forgive. I say he thinks wondering is her crime because he can’t take her to task for searching: He did that too (but for Virtuous Reasons, as we’ll see).

As it turned out, Good Adoptee’s first father was a hero. She couldn’t find out much about her first mother, so she met her father’s family, which made her feel awkward, especially after her paternal grandparents stopped contacting her. But she was thrilled to meet her half-sisters later on. And she discovered her father regretted relinquishing her and that he had written her a letter saying so. And then she typed the sentences that apparently sent Furious Male Commentor over the edge:

At times, I wanted to push my adoptive parents away. I was so upset about not knowing my birth father.

Never mind that she followed it up with But looking back, meeting my birth family has strengthened my bond with the parents who raised me. She has the gall to end her article with I love having Deena [her father’s widow, not her mother] and my sisters in my life. I’m still coming to grips with the fact that I’ll never know Tom. But because of my ongoing relationship with his widow and daughters, I do feel close to him. She feels close to her dead father. She had feelings and she has feelings. And that means she must be punished by Furious Male Commentor, who says

I too was an adopted only child. I am offended FOR her adoptive parents. I never cared about my bio family. I never had “fantasies” of a heartfelt, tearful reunion with the bio fam.

(Funny, I never had fantasies of a reunion like that, either. I simply wanted to know who I came from and why I was so different from everyone around me, which questions my loyal adopted self did not even ask until I was over twenty.)

I love my adoptive parents

Can’t love your APs and care about your own DNA dont’cha’know, even though searching has been acceptable, even expected, for decades now.  This is so sad. It’s so old and so stale, and I read it and I see a dog standing on its hind legs so someone will give it another treat, I swear I do. Look, unless you say differently, the entire world will assume you love your adoptive parents. Because they’re your Real Parents, right? Right. Then why are you punching air?

and feel as though hoping for something more or better or famous is horribly disrespectful

Read it again. That is not what the author of the article says she did.

to the people who took me in,

“took me in.” I was in a cardboard box in a gutter, I swear, not in the loving arms of a selfless woman who made a beautiful choice for me.

loved me,

NOT LIKE THAT SLUT who cared enough to give me away

and gave me a million

A MILLION. ONE THOUSAND THOUSAND OPPORTUNITIES

opportunities that, otherwise, I’d not have gotten.

I’ve read many missives like this, and am disgusted by them when I do. My adoptive parents were tough, hard people,

oof

but I am better for it. I would not trade them for my bio parents if I could.

You know what? Given what little I know about my biological family, I wouldn’t make that trade either. And nowhere does the author of the article say she would make that trade. Yet she and I still searched: AND SO DID YOU, you hypocrite. How dare you take this woman to task?

I found my maternal bio family when I got married merely because I wanted to find my medical history because m[y] wife and I wanted to have a child.

“Medical history” was my excuse, too, once upon a time. Guess what? I still don’t have it.

My bio mom had committed suicide several years prior. The rest of her family was nice, but vastly different than me. We met, and we’ve not spoken since. I wish them the best, but we’ll never speak again. My adoptive family is my family.

In other words, your experience was similar to the author’s: You searched, and you found one dead parent, one live parent, and a family you didn’t fit into. This apparently resulted in your feeling closer to your adoptive family–you know, kinda like the author felt when she said “meeting my birth family has strengthened my bond with the parents who raised me.” HOW DARE SHE?!?! How DARE that ungrateful–

I ended up with the family that wanted me, and could handle the burden of a child.

“The burden of a child.” Please tell me you haven’t reproduced. Please?

Every time I see a 16-year-old girl with an infant, I am bummed that she

Oh, now we get to it. Now we get to the misogyny inherent in the system. Come and see the misogyny inherent in the system!

(Look, I don’t think every male adoptee who insists he wants to know nothing NOTHING about That Woman is a sexist oaf, just the majority of them. It’s funny, because if that slut hadn’t spread her legs, you wouldn’t exist…and I suspect that’s what angers you so, the fact that a mere “teenage whore” might once have had complete power over the fate of you, a MAN!)

cannot see the value of adoption. Give the child the best, strongest opportunity to be successful.

Which is anywhere but with you, you slut.

Blood “family” be dammed.

Responsibilities of men who have unprotected sex be damned. SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT SLUT why wasn’t my daddy a hero? why didn’t he write me a letter? Why?

Give the child the best environment in which to flourish, and young welfare Moms

CONCEIVING CHILDREN PARTHENOGENETICALLY AND LYING ON YOUR ASS EATING BON BONS YOU SLUT

cannot provide it. Love the child enough to adopt them out. Closed adoption.

You gave me away and I want to punish you for that forever, no matter how much it might hurt me–but of course it doesn’t hurt me because I am a man and I have no feelings about my first mother at all. None. Couldn’t care less. That’s why I looked for you.

Let them succeed. Don’t be selfish.

Try to convince me otherwise.

I wouldn’t dream of it, Sir. Lower your manly fists, please.

You know what, Furious Male Commentor? I would love to have discovered that one of my parents was an actual national hero (or even someone whose inclination, talents and temperament resembled mine in some way). And a letter saying s/he regretted giving me up would be a precious artifact to me. I wish very much that I had been born in a time and a place wherein open records were available. Unlike you, I care about these things, and I have feelings about them.

Yet I am not angry at my first parents or at this young woman. You are. Try to convince me otherwise.