Another rant

Well it's been a long time since I last posted. That is partly because I haven't really had much to say. Well I do now....and holy hell do I ever.

I have to take this adoption thing in bits and pieces. I deal with it for a little while. Then I have to put it on the backburner for a little bit. Then I can re-examine it. Lately it's been back on the frontburner and today it just exploded. I'm sitting here with nothing better to do than to blog and to ruminate about what I just heard.

Here's the thing. A good friend called me up and told me to listen to an upcoming segment on a local radio station. It was called "Ask a Birthmother". Since I don't live in the area anymore, I pulled up the website and streamed it as I sat here.

So they brought on two birthmothers who had placed their children for adoption at various points. I thought I would listen to see if adoptees were properly represented as well. They weren't. The adoptee representation was one of the show's hosts who doesn't seem to give a rat's ass about his birth family. He didn't find out he was adopted until he was 13. His parents literally told him the "baby store" story and meant it. The only reason he found out that they were serious was because he found the paperwork. Somehow he's magically OK with all of this and "he has his family" i.e. the same family that lied to him for 13 years. But that's a whole other story.

So here's where I have to try to be just a little bit diplomatic. I get it. Not all adoptees have problems with their adoptions like I and so many others have. I also understand the whole "no one can make you feel inferior without your consent" thing. But I stand by what I think and feel. When adoptees who have no problems with their adoption (God bless them) are given the microphone, it tends to minimize those of us who do. Why? Because people who aren't involved with the subject and therefore don't engage in any nuanced thinking about it, have the take home message that the adoption purveyors have been hoisting on the general public for decades.....that adoption is a neat and tidy solution and everyone is happy with the outcome. Bleeccchhh!!!!!!

The entire segment was just wrong on so many levels. God bless them....they tried. But they really really missed the boat. The first was the host that was adopted. It was almost to the point of seeming like a token effort. The choice of birth mothers was a feel good choice. The birth mothers that they had on the show talked about their lack of regret. Yes they did talk a little bit about depression and one even mentioned being suicidal. But then she quickly qualified that by saying that it was something that she had struggled with before she was pregnant.....not because she had JUST GIVEN UP HER CHILD.

But none of this compares to the two things that irked me the most. The first was that there was a call-in from a birth mother who was struggling with whether she should go to the baby blessing. She was so emotional and I could feel her raw edges in my soul. She was struggling because she didn't want her emotions to ruin the occasion. That's fair but at the same time it's not. In a way it's perpetuating the same things that have been the problem all along. This woman has every right to every emotion that she has. She gave up her baby. If she shows up to the baby blessing and can't hold her feelings back she is judged because her emotions are socially unacceptable. If she doesn't show up, she is judged for being selfish and not putting her baby's "well being" ahead of her own by joining in the "celebration" of her baby going to a different family.

Seriously why is it that adoption is supposed to solve so many problems but so many more are created? The birth mother who "gave up", "placed", whatever the damn PC lingo is.....who is lactating for a baby that's not there anymore, who still wakes up in the night when she can feel her "placed" baby crying. Some live their lives so racked with guilt that they never move on from it and never have any more children. Or the child, who, whether they acknowledge it or not, will always have a hole in their heart for blood relations that were taken away without their input. Then, when and if they get the opportunity to reunite, something that should come so naturally usually doesn't. Blood relations that never got the chance to grow and develop and must be so awkwardly worked through after years of change and evolution of all involved. Not to mention trying to fit in with people that weren't always designed to fit together. Now I realize that even blood relations can feel out of place amongst each other. I can't claim special circumstances from that. I'm learning so much from the adoptive parent perspective too. Some have even said that if they knew now how difficult it would be to merge with another person's child, especially if that child was older and severely traumatized, they probably would have reconsidered and definitely had different priorities.

Expectations are surely dashed all around. It's not the pretty picture it's purported to be. When will people, not just those affect by it, get real about adoption? I don't see it ever going away which is sad because I tend to think that it hurts more people than it helps. But that is just my perspective.

P.S. I sent a text message to radio show asking why there was no adoptee representation. The hosts feebly answered that the one host was an adoptee and the other was an adoptive father. Yeah! And how awesome did your segment turn out to be? MY POINT EXACTLY!

What's the balance?

OK what gives? I have spent so much time wrapped up in my past, tossing it around in my mind, reliving it constantly etc. You always hear the quotes about not remembering the past and therefore being condemned to repeat it. Even one of my favorite Bob Marley songs says "In this bright future, you can't forget your past."

With some really hard emotional work I have learned to not get so caught up in my past destructive cycles. I've put my behind in my past as Pumbaa so eloquently said in "The Lion King." I have a real chance at grabbing something that would be representation of the hell that my past was and the partial victory that I have acheived over said past. I have decided to help adoptees who don't have the voices that they need in a sort of unconventional way. It is absolutely perfect too. I get so excited just thinking about all the possibilities.

Interlaced with this past is a life that I have built in the city where I am at right now. That includes old friends and attachments to this city and things I would do here. It also includes great newer friends who I feel have possibilities for more great times and learning experiences. I've built a life here. But in some ways I can feel doors closing as well.

I'm just so torn because I see the fantastic possibilities and I'm so excited for them. On the flip side, I feel terror at giving up something that has in some ways become mediocre (even with the good new stuff) for something which I'm pretty sure would launch me into what I dream about versus what I let myself live with.

Change of Gratitude, Change of Attitude

I've done a lot of venting about various adoption issues so far which has been very cathartic. I just re-read some of my posts and can see that the venting did its work because the edges don't seem quite so raw today as they did at the various posting times. Don't get me wrong. There is still anger and sadness attached especially to the issue of sealed adoption records. I've done plenty of reading over the past couple of months to know how saturated this issue is with special interest influence. I've learned a lot more and been disgusted a lot more.

I don't want to focus on the disgust though right now. I want to focus on what is right and good with my life. I've spent way too much time living in a fear-based mentality. Over my lifetime I have suppressed so much. I was one scared puppy. When I learned about adoption issues and started to tap into it I was absolutely inundated. I dwelled in it because I was so scared by the massive volume of it and I just wanted it all out. That is a sure recipe for life drainage. So I've done the work I needed to get the catharsis that I needed....at least for now. I'm realizing how truly blessed I am in many regards now that the edges of my pain aren't so raw and many issues have been mitigated if not eliminated. I don't want to say that my grief work is done because I don't know what life has in store for me. Something may happen that may trigger it again. I don't know. I do think that I am better equipped now to handle it should it appear though.

So like the changing of the seasons, I find myself changing. I'm feeling more in sync with the universe. Somehow it is showing me how to function without the things that I used as defensive coping mechanisms in world that didn't understand me and understanding myself even less. It is lovingly teaching me how out of touch I was and showing me a better way. I've seen the life that I have created in my unconsciousness. My life was just a manifestation of that unconsciousness. I don't want that anymore. I find myself craving a life with less anger, more acceptance and less grief, more joy and less emotional violence.

I didn't ask for any of this adoption stuff, but I can't change it either. I can't change the fact that I was given up, both chosen and denied. It's a paradox that still messes with me even if it doesn't define me as much as it did. I can't change the fact that none of us understood the nature of adoption so there were a lot of needs that weren't met on all sides. Believe me, that takes a lot of grief work and eventual forgiveness to get to the bottom of it. I also didn't ask for this perpetual hole in my soul that never completely goes away. I didn't ask to be placed with a family (with huge societal expectation of gratitude) that still feels a bit alien to me. The beautiful thing is that this has all worked together to teach me just a little bit about the grace of God. For whatever reason, I had to go through being chosen and denied. I was granted a family that for all of our personality struggles, they all have good hearts and they are trying harder now that they know better. The hole in my soul is being somewhat filled by some friends who are more understanding than I could have hoped for and by acquaintances who share my same struggles and have become a "virtual family" that I can depend upon. I've been very blessed to make the acquaintances of many people over the Internet who are touched by this issue. I've learned from their wisdom and strength. I have also been able share some of my own wisdom and knowledge. We are all at different points on our journeys and some have definitely had a rockier road than I. These are all kind and beautiful souls and I feel blessed to be able to call them friends even though we probably never will meet in person. I found a fantastic counselor who validated me from the start and has been a lifesaver at helping me get rid of most of my negative coping mechanisms and replace them with ones that are infinitely more productive.

So it goes. I have seen what I have to be grateful for and I'm making it concrete for myself in the form of an anonymous shout to the world. I am so blessed. I feel it growing too. Feeling and expressing gratitude makes room for receiving more and more things to be grateful for. Even things that didn't previously seem like blessings have the benefit of hindsight to show that they were blessings in disguise. It truly is a beautiful and transforming thing.

Emotional Vomit

I've only told one friend about this blog. I know that it is publicly searchable so I don't know if someone in Timbuktu or Vancouver or Ireland has found this. This was my reason for creating this blog. I still want a degree of anonymity but I also feel this fantastic need to reach out and share my story and my struggles. That is why I made it publicly searchable. I will tell you why one more time.

I know the nature of adoption, especially if its a closed adoption. For the adoptee, it forces a certain silence. It requires a degree of self sacrifice. It forces your knees to bend and to bow in submission and gratitude for being "saved" or "chosen" even if the circumstances they come into through adoption are even worse. Some can deal with it. Some...like me are continually dealing with it. Some force it down and pretend like its not an issue. Who are they harming? Themselves. Denial is never a good thing even if it is serving the purpose of sheer survival as it did for me. It will come out in the end in some way, shape or form. There is a beautiful side and a truly ugly side to adoption. Never has there been more of a need to understand the truly ugly side than now. I find myself repeating over and over again both here and in my conversations with people the need to look beyond the "rescuing" aspect. I repeat a lot of things. I find myself thinking of new ways to say the same things hoping that maybe that will be the ticket to universal understanding. This is why I use the term "emotional vomit". I stole this from the friend who I've told about this blog. But to me it fits because when you are truly sick to your stomach you don't just vomit once, you do it multiple times....however many times it takes to get the junk out. I'm speaking. Its not pretty. Maybe someday people will start to listen.

Christmas this year!

I really had such high hopes for this holiday season. No working retail. It sounded like a good start. I even decorated a big tree which my roommates love and several visitors have complimented us on. It all worked for a few days. Then reality set in. All the Christmas trees and music and holiday sweet treats are not working.

MY FAMILY (SO WHOSE FAMILY ISN'T DYSFUNCTIONAL ON SOME LEVEL?)

I had a wise friend of mine who I chat with over the Internet just put my dilemma so simply today. He talked about how his family is in no way traditional. He is a fellow adoptee and talked a bit about his struggles with his family. It made me realize that perhaps I'm fighting for and wanting something I won't ever have with my current family. Maybe I can find a spouse who can give me what I am looking for. But with the personalities of my family right now it will never be "traditional". That would involve me changing them to fit my ideal and that just won't happen. To their credit, my parents have come a long way in being more sensitive. But those annoying personality things will always be there. The sooner I accept that, the better off I will be. I just get so tired because of the face I have to put on when I am around them. I can't be myself around them. I never have been able to. I have to be the me that they are comfortable with. I know that this is a common dynamic with parents and their adult children. It doesn't change it from being utterly exhausting and fodder for self-flagellation for months to come. I realize that there are people who feel misplaced in their natural families. it just seems a lot more common in families touched by adoption. I hate it. I crave having somewhere to belong. I really want to believe that my family has my back. They do help out a lot but some of that is contingent upon the face I present to them.

FELLOW OCCUPANTS OF PLANET EARTH

I put on a face for the world. It says that I'm ok with being a lone wolf. Most of the time I am. I also know that we humans are programmed to be interdependent, to need each other in various ways. I guess the trick is to find the healthy balance of independence and dependence.....interdependence. Throughout my life I have reached out and tried to include people in my life. Some say great and stick around for a little while. Some say whatever and stick around even less and some have flat out said no. I know that is just the way life rolls and I can accept that. Humans tend to have some sort of game or angle or need that they are stealthily trying to fulfill. This adoption thing is me. Its part of my package. I've had everyone tell me all kinds of stuff about how I should feel and how I should deal with all the crazy feelings I have about my adoption. They try to fix me. They always have. It destroys the happy stories they've always been told about adoption. Yes I am not good for adoption image and PR. It messes with people's equilibrium for me to be like this. So to make themselves feel better I become a fixer upper project. I cannot stand that! I am me. I am occasionally witty. I try to be empathetic all the time. I like to smile and laugh to get a break from the constant dull ache in my heart. I have my issues but I am trying to deal with them in my own way and learning more and more all the time. I've had to learn and relearn a lot of things about human interaction throughout this process. Just because I want to spread the truth about adoption and increase awareness does not mean I am an evil monster.

LOSING FAITH IN THE FELLOW OCCUPANTS OF PLANET EARTH

I took a dumb quiz on the Internet not too long ago where one of the questions really summed up how I feel right now about the holidays. It has been there in the past when I worked retail because the same feelings would come up watching the lengths that people would go to for the commercialized ideal of Christmas. It was sickening. My head would literally spin. But I digress.....back to the quiz. It said something along the lines of when do you know it's the holidays. One of the answers was.....when I have once again lost all faith in humanity. This is too true for me. I thought I might escape it this year and be able to stay hopeful because of not working retail. The election this year about did me in. In past election years I have tried to get involved and then just lost it because of the whole game of politics and how dirty and ridiculous things would inevitably become. But I stuck it out. It took me weeks to decompress but I somehow managed it.

I voted for Obama because I felt that he spoke to hopes and dreams. I felt stirred up in fear and loathing every time I listened to McCain and the thought of Palin just gave me the dry heaves. For my own sanity, I can't afford to lose all faith in my fellow human beings. I'm already wrapped up in various fears about my past and how to live my life now. I have to have some hope. For example, I want to believe that I made the right choice by voting for Obama. I want to believe that he and his buddies had NOTHING to do with the whole Blagojevich thing, not just being two steps ahead of it. I want to believe in you Pres. Elect Obama. Please don't make me a fool for believing in you. I'm willing to stand up and do more to help out like you asked for. I'm kind of worried about Rahm Emmanuel and Hillary Clinton as Cabinet choices. People like Joe Lieberman and Evan Bayh are sticking in my brain too. These two are the guys who are going to be the monkey wrenches for Obama. Between these guys and the fact that Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi seem to be showing more of their true colors I'm starting to lose the hope that I felt on November 5th. The fact that Palin's 15 minutes haven't run up yet and blowhards like Mitch McConnell and Saxby Chambliss managed to get reelected make me want to put a gun to my head. Then there were a couple of local elections that just iced the cake of ridiculousness. See! I told you! Politics make my head explode! I need to believe that Obama really isn't going to be Bush-Lite. On that note, I need to believe that Bush, Cheney, Rove, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld etc. will not be able to escape justice anymore. They need to be held accountable for their actions. There needs to be justice for Darfur and people caught under regimes like Mugabe's too. There needs to be justice for those whose greediness has brought our economy to its knees. There needs to be justice for all the things done in greediness to this planet of ours. We have been given a stewardship and we are failing at it. There needs to be justice for all things done in private which have so completely damaged the lives of its victims. People who profit off of other's pain and misfortune are particularly irking to me. They are the ones that I would most like to see brought to justice. I come from Christian upbringing and have spent a lot of time trying to reconcile everything done in the name of God, religion, etc. It is utter insanity. No love, just greediness and selfishness. I believe there will be justice in the end. That brings me a lot of comfort. But how many people have to die and suffer so exquisitely before the justice comes?

Quandaries

I've been in a bit of a quandary the last few days. I've wanted to write because so many bloggable thoughts have crossed my mind. I would think about it and then literally not know where to start so I would stop. The result is a brain that is stuffed to the gills and ripe for spontaneous combustion. Here I go off into Blogger Land for awhile so that hopefully I can get some things off my chest and I can then get some sleep.

Maiden Blog, Maiden Post

Well here I am! I am welcoming me, myself and I to the illustrious world of the BLOGOSPHERE! Yeah! The cheers are echoing! I can just hear them. I'm really good at living inside my own head so maybe I'm just being a semi-legend in my own mind. Whatever it is, the important thing is that this is my way of getting out of my head. I also looked at my journals earlier this year and did kind of an abridgment on most of them because they were just so damned depressing. I just rehashed the same dramas endlessly. I hardly ever wrote when anything was good. So this is my way of keeping my promise to myself to live more fully in the moment. I will write when things are good, not so good, and even downright depressing.

There is a reason for the name of this blog. I am giving myself the permission to my thoughts, my feelings, my reactions. I've spent way too much of my life censoring myself and changing my feelings, thoughts and opinions to make those around me comfortable. Plus I and others have stories to tell. People need to see past the stories that they are sold by the purveyors of adoption. It is not a panacea. It is a more legitimate alternative than abortion but there needs to be WAY more information, education and safeguards out there then there is. Most of all, if adoption does occur, there needs to be a fundamental shift in thinking that dictates that the adoptee DOES deserve his/her information, not just patchy medical histories and selectively chosen non-identifying information. Everyone else can have their birth certificates. Why must adoptees pay for the birthparents' mistakes? Yes I am a bastard child. Yes I do get fired up about this issue. But that doesn't mean that I deserve to be discriminated against in the midst of trying to protect my birthparents. But I will save that rant for another blog.

I learned to be quiet and squash my feelings from an early age. My parents never hid the fact that I was adopted. It was always such a joyous thing for them. Aunts, uncles and family friends would always corroborate this story too. Yippee! Everyone is happy happy happy! The only problem was that I wasn't. I was sad beyond belief sometimes. I never said it though. I never felt like I could. I didn't want to seem ungrateful. I got told what a spoiled and ungrateful person I was too many times for other things that I didn't want to have this on top of that. It was just something I had to deal with.....this sadness I felt. I did have a couple of friends who I let my guard down with. I remember my friend Mita from the fifth grade (?). She used to ask me if I ever wanted to find my birthmother. I really did. But something changed at that time. I still wanted to but I convinced myself that it wouldn't be right to try because it would bring up bad memories for her. I denied myself and made it all about my birthmother. Then there was my friend Sarah in junior high. I used to judge her so badly because she was so rebellious and I was the "good girl". I didn't dare rebel especially against my father. I was always so intimidated by him. I also said I was OK with being adopted which I knew deep down that I wasn't. Looking back now I realize that it was my survival mechanism. That and eating, eating, eating. I never got really fat per se but I was definitely pudgy. So that made my growing up years even more tumultuous. I learned to eat my feelings away very early and very quickly. In my twenties, once I was finally away from parental control I lost it. I did everything I had judged my friend Sarah for doing back in junior high......and I had no idea why. It felt freeing but I also became so clingy and vindictive too. I was feeling so small and had literally lost almost everything. But I still had no idea why until...........

One day I was wandering through Target and picked up book called Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew. Its by a fellow adoptee named Sherrie Eldridge. I was immediately bowled over by the title and reading it while standing there made me breathless. I felt like I was reading my life story. How did Sherrie know? What was this extremely visceral reaction that I was having ? Was it all possible? All my sadness, craziness and bad decisions were attributed to my unmourned adoption losses? Mourning? What was mourning? Death was and is such a cerebral concept to me. Its one of the few things I haven't been able to touch yet even with all the work I have done. Suddenly everything started making sense. All my survival mechanisms, all my dysfunctional ways of dealing with my sadness.....everything. I started voraciously reading other adoption books by other authors and doing A LOT of thinking and analyzing. I'm going to put the favorites down in my book link section. Now several years later I've made so many strides through several avenues. But this is the one thing that remains......a persistent feeling of voicelessness and helplessness.

So I now declare that through this blog I am no longer voiceless so hopefully it will help in making me feel less helpless and help to dispel some of the madness that surrounds the issue of adoption.

TTFN