Nor am I, but as parents we make what we feel are “best chance” choices for our kids. If I were a celebrity, I would feel that the “best chance” choice was out of the limelight - certainly not being made into poster children for international adoption and third world poverty.
There are a lot of warning signs normal adoptive parents (and social workers) look for in adoptive situations - none of them are guarentees of a screwed up kid (or a screwed up parent/child relationship) nor is doing anything right a talisman for perfect kids. But Jolie’s comments and behaviors speaking on adoption pretty consistantly ring those warning bells for me. As a celebrity, Jolie would have likely bypassed most “adoption workshops” where they tell you to avoid - even with close friends and family - the very behavior she is spreading all over the cover of People magazine.
I’m adopted. At the risk of sounding weepy or self-pitying, I always felt sort of outcast.
I’m different in looks and emotional nature from the rest of my family and most of the people in my family’s world. I have one sister who is the biological product of my adoptive folks. She looks and acts and more or less thinks like them. (Except for her politics; in that way I am exactly like my folks.)
My folks have also always seemed more comfortable and approved more of my sister’s friends and boyfriends and way of life. I believe that this is not intentional on my parents’ part but just the way it is.
I’ve talked to my parents about this and they agree that it’s probably true but unintentional, as they have tried very hard to keep things even-steven between my sister and me our whole lives as much as possible. I appreciate their effort and honesty and because of that we all get along pretty well.
So yes, I attribute feeling outcast to my adoption, but who really knows? I bet there are plenty of kids who are the biological product of their parents who feel the same way. I try not to get too weird about it. I only honestly think about it when I’m angry at my family for something.
Huh, I babysat for a couple when I was a kid that couldn’t have kids*. They adopted a baby girl who was one of the most beautiful kids I’ve ever seen, and I am not a person that really appreciates babies. So of course as soon as they adopted the baby the wife got pregnant and they had another daughter who was rather ‘plain’ I guess the word is. But the worst thing was they called the bio-kid “the blob” :eek: I used to wonder how that turned out.
You’re right, there are, and I’m proof of that. I never felt quite like I belonged, and I’m kind of the misfit in my family. On the other hand, I’m too much like my parents in too many ways to really buy the idea that somewhere out there are my real parents, as I used to wish when I was a tween. I think a lot of it is just that some kids have more in common with their parents.
Not only is it condescending, but it’s not even true. These kids were adopted at such a young age that none of them will even remember the time when they had to “survive” in a third world country until Angelina Jolie came around.
They will grow up as the spoiled children of two megacelebrities, not as “survivors” of anything.
Our family was two adopted kids and five not. There never was an issue or even any complexity. We’re all brothers and sisters, no effort is required to remember that. It just is.
During the whole Woody/Mia brewhaha, he tried to claim Mia treated her biological children like family and her adopted children like servants, all to justify his own affair with Soon-Yi. When her adopted children defended her, he claimed they were “brainwashed.”
And you don’t have to be adopted to look like nobody else in your family.
Any pair of parents who can’t see the playground difficulties inherent in being named “Shiloh Pitt” start out with their common sense already called severely into question.
God, I never thought of that! As if celebrity baby names aren’t weird enough, they throw this unfortunate label on the kid that Angelina affectionately referred to as “a blob”.
And this was 25 years ago!