I'm adopted...

[umsami]

Hi All:

Just thought I'd chime in and let you know that both me and my brother were adopted at 6 weeks. Back then, all adoptions were closed, and the babies went to foster care for 6 weeks before they could be adopted. (I think this was to ensure that the baby was healthy, and give the Mom time to change her mind). Anyway, we both *always* knew that we were adopted...and it was never a big deal. My Mom and Dad are, of course, the people who raised me--and there never were any issues on that regard. I consider myself so blessed to have them as my parents. To be honest, I don't think about my bioMom much... except on my birthday I try to send her some vibes letting her know that I'm doing great...and thanking her for the gift of life she gave me. I think that being adopted has influenced my opinion on abortion...as I'm acutely aware that had I been born post-Roe v. Wade, there's a good chance I would have been aborted. When we were kids, my brother and I used to say that we were so glad that we weren't genetically related...LOL... probably how some kids tease each other as to being adopted.

Anyway... adoption rules.

Karla

Personal Pet Peeve: I HATE It when magazines refer to celebrity's adopted kids as eternally adopted, such as Tom and Nicole's daughter and son. The adoption happened once. After that, they are just their son and daughter. Period.

[Tinkymamma]

*waves* I'm also adopted...from birth. My adoption is a little odd, though.
My birthmother is my adoptive father's sister. She had a lovely habit of getting pregnant A LOT and having abortions. She actually had 3 kids before me which she also gave up for adoption...she *wanted* to abort me, but the doctor said that it was too risky because she'd had too many beforehand. So she gave me to her brother and his wife.

So yes, adoption does rock!!!

[GruppieGirl]

Me too!

I was adopted when I was just over two months old. I think I was with an abusive placement before that because I was hospitalized with a staph infection for two weeks and I was malnourashed when I came home. I also was able to peek in my records that I was baptized. I don't think foster parents can do that.

My brother was not adopted. When I was 5 yo my parents had him. They had been trying for 10 years and were totally shocked. The two of us never really talk about it. We are just brother and sister.

I met my bio. Mother and spoke to my Bio. father at 18. My bio mother really wanted me back in her life 100% and I was not able to handle my family, her large family, college, friends, etc., so I ended our relationship. Sometimes I look back at that time with regret and sadness for how I handled the situation. Now I am mostly grateful for having my questions answered.

I grew-up in the 80's. Back then NOBODY talked about adoption. Not even my closest friends knew. I felt like that joke, "You aren't like us, you must be adopted." I am really glad to see that adoption is more out in the open today.

A little OT. I have met two other women in my neighborhood who are adopted. Isn't that wonderful?!

[LisainCalifornia]

Thanks Karla and Sarah and Avery's mom! Your stories mean so much.

Hugs,
Lisa

[DreamsInDigital]

I'm adopted too, from the age of 1 month old, and then I was adopted again at the age of 7. I never knew until CPS took my brother and I away from my first adoptive family.
My new family was wonderful, though, and they allowed me to come a long way toward healing from the abuse my first family inflicted upon us.
I have a relationship with my bio. mom but she is a bit of a flake so I don't spend that much time with her.
I love my adopted mom like she is my bio. mom.

[Skim]

I'm also adopted, and just posted a thread in the Finding Your Tribe forum - before I found this thread!

The paperwork for my adoption was completed before I was born; I was placed at 6 weeks in my adopted family. My brother is also adopted.

Since I was adopted in 1969, the age of closed adoptions, I never knew a whole lot about my birth family, but my being adopted was never a secret kept from me or kept from others. My parents never made me feel ashamed for being adopted, and I grew up feeling special instead. My adopted family and I have a good relationship.

There's been some medical stuff I wish I knew about my bio-family, but other than that no problems for me. After my dd was born, it was very odd to have someone around me who also had dark brown eyes. I'm used to it now, 2 years later. It has made me curious about what else she will inherit, and what I've inherited, and from whom.

I have also said that I am glad I am not genetically related to my adopted family! Not that I don't love them.

I've initiated a search for my bio-mom, but don't have any expectations. I know very little, and wished I could see a photo or her and/or my bio-dad. I find that when I tell people this, many assume I'm looking for a replacement of my own family. That somehow I should be happy enough with them and that should end my curiosity. None of these people are adopted.

Anyone else have a moment or some thoughts about seeing your bio-parent(s) and seeing a likeness (or not)?

thanks for starting the thread!!

[wemberly]

My son is a 3rd generation adoptee. My husband is adopted, and in the records about his adoption, he found that his birth mother was adopted as a toddler.

Adoption is a beautiful way to make a family!

[GruppieGirl]

Anyone else have a moment or some thoughts about seeing your bio-parent(s) and seeing a likeness (or not)?

Yes! It is more than weird to have someone that looks like you. My bio.mother looks very simillar to me with an added 75 pounds or so. The same freckles on the arms, same mouth, same unrully hair.

My entire bio family is overweight or obese. Even the children! I am not overweight. That fact spoke volumes to me about the nature vs. nurture question.

It has taken me a little while to get used to people telling me that my kids look like me. I almost don't believe them. I also never played the "he has my nose" or "she has your smile game" like my in-laws do. It just isn't important to me. My dh has been wonderful. Everytime his family says the dd looks like great-aunt Sally or third-Cousin Emily, he always just smile and says she looks just like her Mommy.

[Leonor]

Re: I'm adopted...

Originally posted by umsami
To be honest, I don't think about my bioMom much... except on my birthday I try to send her some vibes letting her know that I'm doing great...and thanking her for the gift of life she gave me.

This is such a beautiful thing to say!

[ramblinrose]

Thanks for your post!!!

Mommy to two beautiful kids, ages 6 and 14 months

[geekgolightly]

Re: I'm adopted...

Originally posted by umsami
To be honest, I don't think about my bioMom much... except on my birthday I try to send her some vibes letting her know that I'm doing great...and thanking her for the gift of life she gave me.

thanks. i hope that my son feels that way too. you sound very comfortable w/ being adopted.

[sabrosina]

Adoption has a dark side.

I'm not sure how to articulate my thoughts on adoption, and on being an adopted child. My experience has likely been different than most, but is an experience all the same, and I thought I'd share.

I grew up in a family with 4 adopted kids, always knowing I was adopted, and always hearing that meant that I was special. But the family was and still is very disjointed and disfunctional. I guess everyone I knew had a wacky family in some way or another so I didn't think much of it then. My dad died when I was 17 and my mother flipped out and, well, I guess I've felt like a bit of an island since.

I always knew that I'd search for my birthmother. I always wondered what she was like, if I had siblings, what the situation was and what circumstances I was conceived under. I did some serious serching, hit a roadblock, waited several years, got a bug, did some serious serching, etc.. etc.. and eventually learned of a program in Indiana that used intermediary search consultants and was relatively inexpensive so I decided to give it a go. Two months later they found her.

She wasn't happy. She threatened to sue the state and me for invasion of privacy. But her children were thrilled to know that I existed and were eager to meet me. So we met, one by one, found several common interestes and began to 'bond' in some ways. They all talked about how much I looked like her and were reporting back that I was actually kinda cool, not a money grubbing freak at all. (She apparently has some money and was seemingly afraid that I was after someone to pay tuition or whatever.) I actually just wanted the opportunity to say 'thanks, for giving me life.'

So anyway, we met. She was pleasant enough, answered my questions and filled me in on the story. Which is too long to post here by the way, but suffice it to say it would make quite a story on Jerry Springer. She's really stand-offish so I didn't really know how to take her. But she had all sorts of rules around the conditions we could meet. If she ran into anyone she knew I was to pretend that I was just a friend of one of her kids. That after driving 5 hours to see her. And I do understand that she's created a whole different life by this point, but I think I began to get a little perterb'd (sp?).

Eventually the relationship went to hell. Too much confusion for me with adoptive family, bio family, keeping track of what I could say and couldn't say to which party.. who would be upset with knowing what. I'm just not a liar. I can't pretend to be someone that I'm not. And in the end I couldn't pretend to be what my bio mother wanted me to be. There were just too many expectations, and too many words spoken that neither of us really wanted to hear.

In the end I am glad that I found her, because now the 'wondering' has ended. I know. And for that I am grateful. But I didn't need to know that being pregnant with me 'ruined her life' nor did I need to know that she was going to fly to Amsterdam for an abortion until she learned that it was only legal there if she was a citizen. (1965) More recently I've learned that she 'doesn't even like' me but is willing to have a relationship 'for the sake of knowing her daughter.' And after all those and other unkind words she doesn't understand why I don't return her calls or emails. By her own admission I've learned that she did what she did not for my sake, but for the sake of her career and for the sake of her other 4 children that were still with her.

I would imagine that on this board there are more women than in most social circles that would agree that developing a mother child bond early in the childs life is paramount to the child learning to trust her caretakers, her environment, and herself. We talk about the need for attachment parrenting and how right and good it is for a child to be with a mother at all times, babes in arms, breast is best. I guess you'd say I am rethinking my adoption advocacy stance. Not because I don't think there are abusive situations that children need to be away from, but because I just don't know how I feel about it being the 'best' option for a baby.

I say this because with all the research I've done on the subject I've been enlightened as to my own shortcomings and issues and have been suprised to find that many if not most adoptees suffer those same disfunctions in life. So many of the issues are SO deeprooted they surface only as you get further along in life and hurdle more obstacles.

I don't know.. everyone has issues.. and I know I've been vague here.. its just too much to type in a post. But the gist of what I'm saying is that adoption isn't all 'hunky dorey' as many would like to believe it is. The seperation, abandonment issues, identity crisis, intimacy issues, focus and direction issues, etc.. I could just go on. These are all common threads that have been linked to adoption over and over and over.. so much so that the laws were eventually changed to allow only the 'open' adoptions that we have today.

I read recently an interesting idea. Adoption is the only child welfare institution where the best interests of the child are not considered first. Just food for thought.

Sorry for the typeos.. its late and I need rest.

[geekgolightly]

sabrosina,

you sound like youve had a rough time of it, both with your adoptive family and with finding your birthmother. frankly she sounds like a cold b($#@ and i cant imagine treating anyone like that. not even a stranger. youve been dealt a rough hand in life. i dont think that your situation is typical, unless we are discussing fostering/abandoned children, because your situation sounds that tragic.

when it comes to adoption of wanted children where it is planned ahead and good parents are picked out, i believe it IS in the best interest of the child. like i said in another thread, i planned my adoption of my son and wanted to do right by him. if i were selfish i would have taken him h9ome from the hospital. i was a horrible mess. i was in a violent realtionship and before i became pregnant, i was on drugs and alcohol adn as soon as i could get up and walk after the birth i was on alcohol again. i wanted so badly to keep him, but i knew i was the wrong mother for him.

the two days we spent in the hospital i kept him in my bed and we stared at each other and slept next to each other and the nurses would come in and say i was spoiling him. my heart still wrenches when i think of those two days. its hard. its hard to love someone so much and not see them anymore. but imagine if i had kept him. i would have ruined his life.

im sort of rambling... i wanted to address the attachment parenting issue.

those two days he wasnt with his mother, he was with me: the woman who gave birth to him and who thinks of herself as one of his mothers. he was held and loved and then i handed him to his parents and watched them love him and hold him and cry and take pictures. i dont see how that is against attachemnt parenting. unless you mean that the mother has to be there from the beginning, and then you discount any parent who practices attachment parenting with preemies who are not allowed to hold their babies.

i want to hear from my son. i really want to hear from him. i am eager to share my life with him as much or as little as he wants. im SO THERE.

your biomom sucks as a mom. it has nothing to do with adoption.

[Skim]

Sabrosina: Thank you for posting your thoughts about the "dark side" of adoption. I agree that it's important people consider all aspects of adoption when trying to plan one. As an adopted daughter who practices ap with my dd, I went through a lot of grief soon after her birth about my *own* lack of ap, about how much the little baby Skim missed, ykwim?

Well, I worked through all that, and now I've just found out that my b-mom, whom I have never met or contacted, is dead. After more than 30 years of hoping for some kind of contact, even a "get the heck out of my life!", now I have nothing. I'm a little numb, and very sad. Because I'm not her legal daughter, I'm not even entitled to know when or how she died. I only know (from the agency who is doing the search for me) that her death was not medically related. Since I don't know her married name, I can't find out any more than that. I'll never hear her voice. I may never know anything about my history. The next step for me is that I'm going to try to meet one of her sisters and see if they will meet me.

There's so much I'll never know, and such a big, sad part of my heart today.

I say to people afraid of letting the child know anything about their birth parents: what would happen if her b-parents died before she came of age, and was able to initiate a search? Imho, denying access to ancestral information is immoral, and denies the birthright of the children. Like sabrosina said, adoption is and certainly has been the only child welfare institution that does not consier the best interests of the child first. And I won't even get into the politics around taking Indian babies off of reservations and into White homes.... Talk about dysfunctional. I recommend you check out the bastard nation website for more information about adoptee rights.

Really, my rant is only about how sad I am today. The reasons are political, but the reality is just my heartbreak. Take what you need, and ignore the rest.

And now I'm off to make a little prayer to my b-mom.

Skim

[BunnysMomma]

I am both adopted and an adoptive parent, so I guess I've been on two of the three sides of the adoption triad fence. I also used to work as an adoption social worker, so I have had experience with birthmoms, too.

I was born to a young girl who was of the Bretheren faith. Her family was so appalled that she had become pregnant that they sent her to her father's cousin (my adoptive dad), who is of the Amish faith. They hoped that living in that rather isolated community would bring their daughter around. It didn't. My birth mother stayed with the Amish family for 6 1/2 months before I was born and 11 months after I was born. One day, she vanished. I was subsequently adopted by the Amish man and his wife and raised Amish, the 5th of 11 children. I grew up in rural NE Ohio.

When I grew up I decided that I was not interested in continuing in the Amish tradition, so I left my town and moved to a city, where I attended college and became a social worker. I worked in adoption and foster care for many years. I met my husband through my work.

When I was 30, my littlest adoptive sister, who was then 17, got pregnant. My husband and I adopted her daughter.

I used my adoption work connections to track down my birthmother. She is very nice, a little strange, but someone with whom I have a nice relationship. We actually don't live very far from one another, and she participates in my daughter's life. Actually, my birth mother and my daughter are biologically related. How's that for weird?

I have never felt that adoption has had a huge impact on me, other than that I am an adoption advocate. Perhaps it's because I was raised in a community that is so much more close-knit than most of the other communities in America. I knew my adoption story basically from day one, and I always felt that I understood it emtionally, so I never struggled with feeling abandoned or untrusting or some of the other issues adopted people often feel. I consider myself lucky that I never had to deal with these issues. I don't in any way deny that they exist, because I have seen them over and over in my work as an adoption social worker (from which I am currently on hiatus).

But regardless of the issue that are unique to adopted people, I still feel that adoption is, on the whole, a positive thing for children and families. I have met very few people who are emotionalyl crippled by their adoption experiences. I have met lots and lots of people who have adoption-related issues but are still thankful for having been adopted by their families. It always makes me sad when people say that because adopted people can have adoption-related issues, adoption is not a positive thing.

Anyway, I don't mean to rant. That's my story.

Wilma