Birth/First/Real mothers, It is time to apologize!

I’m sorry, but you are complicit in adoption whether you want to believe it or not. I will never disregard how you experience loss, but what you experience is NOT always what your child who ended up in the system or adopted will experience.

If you are happy you gave your child a “better” life, that is your happy…it may not be their happy. At the end of the day, THEY live out the adoptee life, you do not.

We want you to know that acknowledging our pain as adoptees is the first step to reaching us.

There is pain in adoption from day one. I am an adoptee so I can really only passionately speak from that perspective. But I also work with the other parts of the “constellation” and here is what I have gathered.

ORIGINAL MOMS

We love you. We adoptees really do. But we are not always in love with the outcome. Some of you are super selfish and really believed at the bottom of your heart that you were doing the “right” thing. The right thing for whom exactly? Maybe you did want us to live the life you could not live….but in the end, we could not decide and you chose what was best for us.

Ok. Fair enough, but how about letting us share whether we felt that was best for us or not? We live forever with the thought, fear, and feelings of being abandoned, unwanted. We may also live with the guilt that we should feel happy you gave us to strangers-even kin are strangers and we connected with YOU and only YOU in the womb.

Nine months moms, we spent 9 months connected to you literally-emotionally, physically and spiritually. We listened to you sing, we felt your dancing movement, we heard your soothing voice. We also experienced the drugs, the abuse, and the hatred. We have lived it all, all before we were even out of your body.

Then, for whatever reason, you thought it was ok to have us experience strangers. Some of us loved the new strangers, but some of us were hurt by them and continue to be hurt by them. These new strangers, they became our mom, some wanted us to connect to you, others wanted to be the only ones in our lives.

Both are hurtful. For those who wanted us to connect to you, they don’t understand how confusing it is; who do we love more? Who do we love less? How do we express that we love both without favoring one above the other. For those who didn’t want us connected, we are left to wonder where we got our eyes, our nose, and our mouths from. We wonder why we look the way we do. We ask ourselves if somehow we did something to deserve this.

Moms, we would not be here without you but some of us wish we were taken to heaven immediately and some of us are being still-but still wondering about what it would have been like living with you. Maybe it would have been horrible, maybe it would have been glorious, maybe neither-just life. But we didn’t get the opportunity to choose to be with you. I am almost 100% sure that we would always choose to be connected to the one who we first met immediately after conception, or when our brain started to develop….because, we were knit in our mother’s womb…that is a FACT….has nothing to do with religion, or God, or Jesus.

We were knit in our mother’s womb.

Moms, we don’t always like the decision you made or how that decision may have been made for you. I’m sorry your mom(my grandma) didn’t support you, or kicked you out, or the person who impregnated you (my sperm donor/dad) left you, or was too young, or was on drugs, or wanted to stay but his parents didn’t want to accept him if you brought me home. I’m so sorry about this injustice. But some of you were ok with what happened and truly believe that we received a better life. And some of us did, but some of us, well, we are in heaven because we chose to free ourselves in a different way.

So moms, we know so many of you are pained, but some of you are not. Some of you are ok with this decision and believe somehow it was God’s plan for us to be raised by other people. And that is YOUR belief, but not all of us believe that. Not all of us believe that God separates and then expects us to be grateful. Why spend 9 months together just to leave us, or us leave you?

Moms, please, we ask you to start taking responsibility for some of this. We are not dismissing your pain, or what was done to you. And we are greatly sorry for all the hurt you experienced and anger some of you have towards this system. But we are asking that you be real with us and say “in the end, you were adopted out.” For most of us, this will not make us like you less or more. But when you come at us and blame the system, or you blame your parents, or you blame God, or you applaud God and somehow convince us that this loving God would have you birth us just to give us away….it hurts, and it is confusing, and it is a recipe for long lasting pain. We just need to hear an “I’m sorry” because at the end of the day, we were adopted out.

ADOPTEES

We are plagued with questions that keep us up all night. Why were we given to someone else? What did we do to deserve this? Some of us are ok with it, and some of us can’t breathe because of it.

Those of us who are ok with being given up experience adoption pain and loss in a different way. Some are even in denial that there is pain and loss at all.

Those of us who are not ok with being given up, stolen, taken, gifted….we ask questions that deal with the foundation of what it means to be human.

When we hear you, moms, blame everyone but yourself, we become angry people, and the pain that we have pushed down for so long resurfaces, and ignites, we become fighters, and we become stronger as a result of hearing your words-we push you away…..but if we hear genuine apology, or that you fought for us, or or or….you open a different part of our heart and soul.

I spoke with my grandfather months ago for the first time. He is my maternal grandfather and he did his best to explain to me what went down and how I ended up in the hands of strangers, people who looked nothing like me, people who were abusive. The FIRST thing he did was apologize. HE…someone who is not my immediate family, apologized for something he didn’t have much control over. He said “I’m sorry”…he didn’t blame it on my mother, he didn’t blame it on my adoptive family, he didn’t blame it on the system; he took the time to apologize for the pain I experienced. He chose to acknowledge that YES, regardless of whose fault it is, I am the adoptee who experienced this massive separation. Listening to him apologize put me in tears, like the kind of sobbing that makes your shoulders jump up and down. Hearing him apologize was like a cup of hot coffee on a freezing cold day. It helped me let down my guard and it stopped ME from blaming him.

It stopped ME from blaming him, a man who I’ve never met, a person who belonged to me biologically but only met once. As an adoptee, I could have easily blamed him, but he apologizing kept this from happening. Him, acknowledging my pain kept me from saying to him “you caused me this pain.”

He then proceeded to apologize for my mother who had passed away. Her pain was so great, her anger was even greater. The system failed her, my adoptive parents lied to her, the children’s home deceived her, she spent years looking for me, hoping and praying for my return, and at the end of the day, her father’s apology made nothing else matter. Her father’s apology showed a side of humility that I have not seen even in the church.

Admitting that things didn’t go the way it was planned, but also acknowledging that I have great pain is the start of a syncopated journey based on truth.

But moms, we have seen this way too often, we have seen the need for you to blame everyone, and everything. We have seen you write blogs and posts and comments, and we have also seen you shame adoptees who don’t agree that you “did your best.” Your best would be to apologize, no matter what, because at the end of the day, when all is said and done, the only one who can tell you what adoption really feels like is the adoptee.