stupidhippy.com

I feel sort of stifled. I have a lot of feelings about adoption but don’t feel able/willing/something enough to write them all down, let alone here in public. I read a lot of adoption-related stuff on the ‘net, though, blogs written by people who were adopted, parents who adopted children, and mothers like me who, under a variety of circumstances, lost children to adoption. I can relate to so much of what I read but sometimes, you know, I read something that strikes a chord in a powerful way. I’ve been introduced to many amazing blogs by Dawn (whose own blog I love big big time!).

This entry from Adoption Truth really spoke to a lot of my feelings.

There is a change, a shift, I believe happens, even today, to women who are led to believe, whether through so-called counseling or the message from society in general, that they are not good enough mothers for their children. That another woman. Someone better. Richer. Married. More successful . . . is the one who deserves to raise her child.

It’s so true for me. I really don’t feel like the person I was before my son was born. Like the author of the blog, I have looked at photos of myself from before I was a mother and I can’t fathom who she was or what she believed her future would be, or she came to be me today. Sometimes I look at my daughter and try to figure it out, either with myself as her mother, or her as a daughter who will one be a teenager who might become pregnant. It makes no sense.

I’m sure many first mothers can relate to the worry that our children’s adoptions might have harmed them. I knew my son’s parents, and although our adoption was closed and I never saw them until our reunion, I never worried about my son’s whereabouts or anything like that. I knew they were good people, I knew they loved our son, I knew they were going to love him and raise him well. More, I worried just the fact of his adoption would hurt him in some fundamental way. That he would feel I didn’t love him, that his father and I didn’t want him, that we discarded him without a thought. The fact that we were so young when he was born didn’t seem like much of an excuse to me, that emotionally, our youth wasn’t a good enough reason, I couldn’t imagine it would be much of a comfort to him. I worried he would feel disconnected from himself, like a stranger in his family, in the world, without roots.

Most people don’t understand how debilitating it is sometimes, being adopted. We have no anchor, no roots, no way to ground ourselves to the world around us.

I have never been particularly interested in genealogy, but then, I can take my own family history for granted, my mother and father were there to tell me where my great-grand-whoevers came from, England or Ireland, wherever. There were scrapbooks of old photos, people I can’t name, but I can look at them and find bits of my own self in them in the shapes of their faces and bodies. I can see how they lived and dressed, how I might have come from them. I was already firmly grounded in my roots, no wondering needed.