Disliked adoption phrases Part One

I am giving credit back to this post https://medium.com/@Flip.Side/phrases-from-adoption-ideology-ad3caf09c6a2 for giving me the material to write about.

After spending so many years of hiding my feelings of loss and not dealing with my son’s adoption my eyes were finally opened up.  The support has been great and I wish I had known about it years earlier ago.  On the other hand I also found out people can be very cruel and hurtful by their words and actions.   I was shocked in the early years how judgemental people can be towards other sides of adoption. After 16 years I am much more ‘hardened’ to the unkind side of adoption and naivety of people who think surrendering a baby is ‘the right thing to do/mother to young to parent.’

One of the early comments that made me laugh as it is stupid.  It’s when adoptees are asked if they know their real parents.  Even if I didn’t have an adoption connection I would still think it’s a ridiculous question.  A real parent to me is the one raising the child whether they are the mother, father, adoptive parent, foster carer, family member to the best of their ability.  All parents make mistakes and not all parents are decent.

My son’s adoptive parents are real parents and so am I.

In the early days of the reunion I got sick to death of the ‘you were chosen’ lines given to adoptees.  Adoption in the UK has evolved since the 1940s but even so, adoptees haven’t been ‘chosen’ they’ve just been the next available baby.  Over the years changes have been an end to private adoptions, the number of babies adopted has dropped, and, open and semi adoptions have been introduced.  Since the contraceptive pill, abortion easier to have, changes in benefits and social housing has made it easier for mothers to either raise their children or not to have a child.

Telling an adoptee they were wanted is terrible because the person asking doesn’t know the circumstances behind their adoption.  The mother could have died in childbirth, the mother (or father) may not have been given the chance to prove they could be a good parent.  Not all adopters should have adopted in the first place.  Just because a single person or couple has been approved to adopt (in the UK) doesn’t mean they will be good parents.  There are cases where adopters have killed their adopted children or abused them, it’s not just natural parents who abuse their children.

Telling an adoptee their mother loved them enough to give them up is cruel as far as I’m concerned.  I loved my son so much I didn’t abort him but neither did I plan for him to be adopted.  His adopters believed the adoption agency when they were told I wanted him adopted.  It took a reunion for them to find out I never agreed to the adoption.  In fact they found out the three letters I supposedly wrote to them were written by someone else and I only received one of the letters they wrote.  That was bad enough as they thanked me for allowing them to adopt my son.  It was devastating to read that as they didn’t know the truth. Yes there are mothers who choose adoption but I’m not one of them.

Adoption isn’t a selfless sacrifice generally – I get back to my comment that some mothers do choose adoption.  I felt worthless when my son was adopted, that I didn’t matter and it reinforced what a family member said to me that I wasn’t capable of raising a child.  It has been a lifelong feeling of worthlessness.  Nobody knows what kind of a mother I would have been because I wasn’t given a chance.  There are other reasons why I didn’t have other children but that is going off-topic.`  I was a victim of forced (illegal) adoption and had I known my rights I would have raised my son.

I don’t like the ‘adoption is in the bible’ argument either.  Yes I know Joseph wasn’t the biological father of Jesus but Mary was his natural mother.  Oh and Joseph didn’t pay a huge wedge of money to buy Jesus he stepped up as a father figure as he was commanded to do.  For Jesus to fulfill a prophecy he had to be born into this life and God wouldn’t have been in the physical world as nobody could look at his face and live.

Moses isn’t, like Jesus, an example of adoption as we understand it.  His mother placed him in a basket and put in water to save his life.  He was raised by a pharaoh’s daughter and his mother was part of his life, in other words he wasn’t officially adopted.  Later on, in life, he killed an Egyptian, returned to his family, and led the chosen people to the promised life.

Telling adoptees they were given up is quite commonly used alongside placed.  I didn’t ‘give up or place’ my son he was in effect stolen from me.  I never agreed to him being adopted and as far as I know I didn’t sign the Consent to Relinquish form.  If I did I didn’t know what I was signing and very conveniently nobody can find the form so I can’t prove anything.

The blood/DNA doesn’t matter argument is open to debate but they do matter.  If they didn’t then parents wouldn’t care what baby they had as long as they were raising one.  Apart from that people have a right to know who their family is with medical information high on the list for being important.  I have had mother figures in my life but they’re not the mother who carried me for nine-months then raised me.  They have been important in my life but can’t be compared to my mother.  Some people should never have children but that doesn’t mean any child of theirs who has been adopted doesn’t have a right to know who they are.

I hate adopters referring to the mother of their adopted child as their birth mother as she didn’t give birth to either of them and it’s a type of entitlement.  When these people feel offended when they are pulled up about it they should then educate themselves.  I am not my son’s birth mother, I am his mother the same as his adoptive mother is also his mother.  Parents can love more than one child so why can’t a child love more than one mother?

I shall continue with this another day.