May 21, 2010

Adoption Perspectives ²

by Wendy • Adoption Shmoption, Headline

Every Sunday I wholeheartedly look forward to the adoption links posting on the Our Little Tongginator.  Tonggu’s mom does a fabulous job of compiling a list of articles and blog postings that have been written from the perspectives of adoptees, birth parents, and adoptive parents.  As an adoptive mother, it would be easy for her to just list the the postings that are easy to digest but without abandon she posts easy reads and difficult reads.

To be quite honest, most of the time I pause before I click on an adoptee’s blog that I know will start stirring me up emotionally.  I am a white, adoptive mother to a Chinese child.  Automatically the defenses go up.  However, as soon as I click and begin to read and push away some of my own ignorance and I fears, I find that in so many ways I can relate to what these adoptees are trying share…because I am adopted.  I get it.  Well, I get most of it.  I truly can’t say that ‘I totally understand’ where they are coming from, because I am not them.  But, I can definitely relate.

As an adoptive mother reading adoptee blogs, most of the time I feel hammered by the authors.  Even though I feel like I made the right decision in adopting my daughter from China, I also can’t help but wonder if this was the biggest mistake I could have made because I might ruin her.  Will I  ruin her because I took her out of her birth country, or we haven’t moved into a community that has more Chinese than Caucasians (we live in a very diverse neighborhood by the way), or if we don’t enroll her in Chinese language classes by the time she is five?  Reading the surface layers of these blogs put me on the defensive.  But as I read through to the heart of many of the posts, I kept seeing the perspective of an individual who has been hurt by adoption.  As an adoptee myself, I could relate to some of their feelings and some of the points that they were trying to make.

As an adoptive parent, I sometimes feel like AP’s as a whole become the punching bag.  Yes, there are a few bad apples out there…okay, maybe there are a lot of bad apples out there that give AP’s a bad reputation but I also believe there are many, many more that have the best intentions and want to do the best for their child.  As an adoptee, I have felt attacked or belittled, most recently by someone stating that I wasn’t really adopted since I still had my birth mother caring for me as a child.  This person didn’t know my story, didn’t realize I have adoption papers, and probably didn’t realize that I’m a trans-racial adoptee.  It makes me crazy and a bit angry when my adoption and my story isn’t validated, especially by others in the adoption community.  Sure, my story is a bit different but when it comes down to it, there is common thread that adoption and brought joy and has brought pain to my life.

I feel very lucky that I get to have the perspectives of being both an adoptee and and an adoptive parent.  Sometime I feel those two labels are like oil and water but if you swirl them around enough, they do mix for a while.  I’m glad though that I can separate the two out on most days.  I feel like this this will give me a better understanding on my child and some of the emotions that might come in to play for her one day.

Really, I think whether you are a birth parent, an adoptive parent, or an adoptee, when it comes down to it, we are all just looking for validation.  We want our stories and our feelings and our experiences to be validated, because when they are validated then that means that they were heard.  And if we are validated and heard, maybe changes can happen: changes in the adoption system, changes in parenting, changes in laws and in governments, changes to lives not yet born.  I know that as an adoptee and as an adoptive parent, I want my perspective to be heard and validated.  I am sure there are many birth parents who feel the same.  I am incredibly thankful to people like Tonggu’s Mama who can put all of these perspectives down in one place.  Even though it can be a tough read sometimes, I want to hear.  I want perspective.  I want to validate.  Because when I do that, I do that for myself and for my daughter too.