Maybe. I’d have to ask if such people are also more likely to be in severe poverty, lack access to medical care (you can’t get hormonal birth control without access to modern medicine), or have other conflating factors besides just “impulse control” issues.
I’m not sure how this part applies to my post, since I specifically said:
Anyway, your clarification called to my attention what I’d somehow glossed over in the first place… the “de facto” part. Now I see what you were saying and I can’t see how anyone could ever deny that some women were forced to give up their children. That just seems like such a no-brainier that I can’t imagine using up any energy to refute it.
In junior high, I was good friends with a girl who was adopted. She was a hell raiser of the highest order- doing drugs, having sex at 13 with many different people, hitch hiking, running away, etc. I’ve known other adopted people since her who were very well adjusted- I think her problem was that she blamed all of her issues on being adopted, and her adoptive parents allowed that excuse for too long.
I have to wonder how much mythologizing adopted children might do about their birth parents- those with adopted kids who are in contact with the birth parents, is it difficult? I know my friend, though in contact only through letters/phone/email, seemed to think of her birth mom as her “real mom”, which must have been extraordinarily difficult for her adoptive parents. I think now, as an adult, that maybe this was because her bio mom never had to do the difficult parts of parenting, like discipline, so of course to her 13 year old eyes, she was perfect. Is this dynamic really tough to navigate?
In my personal experience, yes, to an extent. When I was a rebellious teen, I blamed a fair amount of it on being adopted. I had the “You’re not my REAL parents / My REAL parents would (whatever)” attitude. I romanticized my bio-parents, made up a back story, something my adopted parents couldn’t ever live up to.
My dad, after one of my hissy fits, snapped “I AM your real father. I walked you when you cried, I changed your diaper, I attended every damn recital you were in, cheering you on. THAT’s what makes me YOUR father!” I snapped out of it real fast.
I’ve known I was adopted since I was around 6ish, when I read through my mom’s date book. There was a note about signing papers for me and a note when they brought me home. I asked her about it, and she explained it to me. In her mind, the conversation was over. It wasn’t over for me, and attempted further discussion was met with a brick wall. We didn’t have a decent conversation about it until I was pregnant (24 years old). I discovered my mom and dad wanted another child, but my mom had taken thalidomide, so was afraid to get pregnant. I also grew up with a grandfather who treated my cousin (also adopted) and I differently, since we were bastard orphans.
I’m horribly normal. I’m lucky to have the parents I have. I’m sorry I put them through hell when I was a teen, but in retrospect my rebellion was nothing close to what my older sister (their bio kid) put them through. I’ve no desire to locate my bio-parents. I understand the situation that brought about my existence and am thankful that my bio-mother was selfish enough to give me away. It’s my understanding she knew she wouldn’t be a good parent at that point in her life. My bio-father was married, so that was not an ideal situation, either.
That is MY experience. As I said, my cousin was also adopted. She’s had a hellish adulthood. Mental illness, chemical dependency and criminal activity has estranged her from her mom and her children. Her childhood / teenaged years were fairly identical to mine. She fell apart when she went to college. Does adoption have anything to do with it? I, personally, don’t think so. Her mental illness didn’t show until she was 20ish, which would’ve happened - adopted or not.
One of the issues of an adopted child or an adoptive parent is you really don’t know if its an adoption issue - or just an issue. I have two kids, a bio kid and an adopted kid. And if they had been reversed, I would have blamed a lot of my daughter’s behavior (she is a drama queen, who could throw spectacular tantrums even when she was four, and has some emotional stability and anxiety issues - she is now 14 and is a great kid, but still flight, slightly irresponsible, and prone to emotional outbursts) on adoption - she’s bio.
On the other hand, my son (adopted) was a model, well adjusted kid until 14, when he had middle school issues (failing classes, weed, disrespecting his parents and teachers, brains falling outside of his head, common sense becoming amazingly rare) - was it adoption, something “inherited” from unknown birthparents, or being 14? Funny, most of his friends are bio kids and the whole group of them had a weird couple of years.
That would be her mother, whether you like it or not.
If your friend could not manage to wait until she was 18 to search, that was due to other issues and he parents can’t be faulted for making her wait.
Waiting until you are of legal age to do certain things is part of life and growing up.
I know of two teenage girls who were students at a local catholic girls college who got pregnant and had abortions because they would have been expelled from school (and in one case - disowned by her family).
I honor the wishes of my dead friend and do not refer to that woman as her mother. And absolutely, the people who adopted her can be faulted for refusing to help when she so obviously needed help. With real parents we would call what they did emotional abuse and I wish there was a hell they could burn in for what they did.
Just to comment that abuse is abuse whether the parentage is natural or adoptive (and most adoptive parents are as “real” in their children’s lives as those who are so by the flesh).
Also that the parents are parents whether they’re abusive or not. Refusing to call the abuser your friend’s “mother” is juvenile. She was her mother: she was just (apparently) a terrible mother. I don’t see the gain in denial or pretense.
We don’t all get great childhoods. My father was adopted by his stepfather, and while that caused a lot of unnecessary trauma, his stepfather was a much better influence in his life than either bio-parent or (on the other side) his stepmother. But he doesn’t refuse to acknowledge his bio-parents just because they were horrific case studies in how not to parent.
It’s Chinatown, Jake.
ZPG Zealot will never agree that the adoptive parent is an actual parent.
Let’s throw in a couple success stories to balance the OP’s anecdotal evidence.
[Even though many here know very well how I feel about anecdotal evidence.]
My neighbor was adopted. Over the years, he revealed to me that his last name was Hispanic but his ancestry was probably Greek. Nevertheless, he grew up in the barrio amongst a lot of other Hispanic kids and understood the culture and passed it along to his kids. He noted, however, that he had never learned to speak Spanish. Over the years, he revealed to me that he had almost failed out of Junior College – except that some economics teacher named Galbraith recognized that my neighbor learned and remembered well, but just didn’t take multiple-choice tests very well. Galbraith encouraged my neighbor to talk to professors at the beginning of each course and ask to be allowed to take essay tests. Most of his professors were willing to accommodate him. My neighbor graduated with honors and continued on to get an MBA while simultaneously serving as a Sheriff’s deputy for a huge California county. He changed jobs a couple times and eventually wound up in charge of telecommunications systems for the military (a joint command because the branches wanted to be able to talk to each other once in a while, particularly if there was a war going on).
I asked my friend in high school which part of his family was Japanese, since his surname refers to a lake in Japan. He told me his father was adopted. Apparently, upon their release from an internment camp, my friend’s grandparents moved back to the central coast of California and adopted a [Caucasian] kid whose father had been orphaned during WWII. It was very clear to everyone that the kid was adopted. That kid spent his free time playing volleyball on the beach, which would have been considered a waste of time for most kids except that he and his beach buddies went on to the Summer Olympics during the 1960’s. He went on to coach winning college teams and eventually coached US Olympic teams.
My uncle was adopted, shortly after WWI, by a Jewish couple in New York. He served in the Navy in WWII and used his discharge pay to get through college, studying sociology in Chicago and contributing to The Chicago School’s impact on sociology, particularly urban sociology, neighborhood planning, and geo-environmental effects on human behavior. He was a professor of geography for decades at Chicago State University and organized a think-tank of professionals and research for helping communities solve local problems.
And we should not necessarily gauge success/failure by looking only at the adoptee. My neighbor’s kids were all valedictorians, both in high school and college; my friend is on staff at Cornell; my uncle’s son is working on his 6th or 7th PhD and heads a think-tank in New England that gathers the best researchers from the great Ivy League schools there and coordinates their knowledge of the brain and its complex workings.
Successful enough?
–G!
I’m telling you once and for all: NEVER speak in terms of absolutes!
It shows my support for a dead friend’s wishes and rights and honors her memory. And it demonstrates to other people trapped in her situation by adoption that other people do understand how they feel and support them.
Could be. Could be both.
In any case what we know is that there is a slight but real statisitical increase risk and given that kids are not blank slates it makes sense that there would be. Let’s face it, I can take credit for my kids values to some degree but much of who they are is due to their genes. For my adopted child I can take no credit for her great voice, her amazing social skills, her talent as a dancer … all I can do is try to not block the blessing as they say and help her be the best she she can be. She has no ADD, nor “reactive attachment disorder.” Most adopted kids do not.
That’s one of the things that bugs me. My daughter is adopted from China and the big trend was to be concerned about “reactive attachment disorder.” Thing is the same exact behaviors could happen in non-adopted kids and they’d have been labelled something else - maybe autistic spectrum or anxiety disorder or ADHD. The presumption in those kids that the orphanage experience was the cause because there was an orphanage experience always bugged me. And yes one of my bio kids is ADD and another well treated for a past depression. The adopted child has no such issue. Could the orpahange experience contribute? Of course. But why presume that these kids do not have the same chance to have things on a genetic basis that our bio kids have?
My mother’s cousin adopted a daughter back in the 1970s. They were expecting a white baby, but she was born and surprise surprise, she was biracial. They went ahead with the adoption. It was no mystery to her or anyone else that she was adopted, as she was a biracial girl growing up with two white parents and a white sister. My mother said the adopted daughter was wild and crazy from the start, got put in rehab a bunch of times, and was altogether a big disappointment to the family.
Before you read too much into this, my friend S’s best friend was a very successful businessman who had two biological sons of his own. One grew up to be an author and a tenured professor at a well-regarded university. The other became… a crackhead. S, who knew the two boys from their childhood to their adulthoods, told me that he never saw any favoritism from their father; the two were treated just the same. But one was a fuck-up who eventually OD’d and died and the other was a successful intellectual. And these were biological brothers who were raised by their biological parents. Sometimes, these things happen. Maybe my mother’s cousin’s daughter would’ve been just as much of a screw-up if she’d been raised by her birth mom.
SylverOne, thanks so much for posting this. It’s not that often that the birthmother’s perspective is shared. It sounds like you were and are courageous and that you have handled your part in the adoption triad with courage and wisdom. Good for you. (Side note - my husband and I are in the process of being approved to adopt through the county - classes, home study, etc. - and hearing from birthmothers like you is very helpful and uplifting.)
My sister and I are adopted, we are 11 years apart in age. She’s the elder, I was born in 1961.
I was adopted at 4 days old and have always known that, my sister was 4 I think when she was adopted. She apparently had a harder time coming to terms with it than I did, but she certainly isn’t any less “normal” than anyone else out there. The one with severe mental issues was our sister, who was our mother’s (yes, the woman who adopted us IS our mother) bio-daughter.
I have never wanted to know anything about the people who engendered me. I have one set of parents, and they are the people who raised me. Well, I had… they’re both gone now 
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both adopted. Make of that what you will.
So were these folks. Make of it what you will.
I hate how the anti-abortion crowd representa adoption of some kind of magical la-la land where nobody suffers.
So were David Berkowitz and Joel Rifkin. Make of that what you will