I was adopted at only a few months old, and I’ve always known that I was. I don’t know how my mum and dad accomplished this. I’ve never had anything more than a slight urge to find my genetic parents, but I feel that I’ve found it difficult to found close relationships, even though I have done so several times. Some ordinary family things seem extraordinary to me - I’ve been to tons of family weddings and christenings and things, but I can honestly say that I’ve never felt kinship with any of the extended family. Plenty people I know do feel this whole extended family thing, but I’ve never been able to understand/feel this. Oh well.
Anyway, adoption is a kind and generous thing to do. It’s just a bit odd for the children involved.
Adoption is very artificial. I have always had a sort of block between me and my family, which is that I was adopted. Nobody else was. When we had things like family reunions I was always feeling sort of at a loss, as if this really had nothing to do with me.
I don’t know, could’ve just been me.
But I recently (last two years) reconnected with my biological family and that has always felt perfectly natural. It’s great, I’m sorry we all lost so many years.
You would think that there might be some reason that the adoption didn’t “take.” The odd thing is that I was taken home from the hospital by my adoptive parents at the age of one day. I basically think I would have been better off if no one had ever mentioned my adoption at all and my parents pretended I was their natural child.
For some reason I am being very imprecise. I should have mentioned that no one in my adopted family–cousins, etc.–ever made any kind of a deal about it, at least where I could know about it. What they said in private I have no idea.
And by “always felt perfectly natural” I mean in the last two years, since I’ve known them (this would be my biological siblings, of which I have three, and their children and grandchildren). I seemed to fit in from the first, where with my adoptive family I have never felt like I fit in at all.
Struan, Hilarity, I feel the same way about my biological family, and I’ve lived with them since conception. Not adopted at all, but I have no great connection with anyone outside my nuclear family - one mother, one grandmother and one stepmother excepted. I’ve made a “family” of friends as I’ve gotten older. I just don’t understand why the accident of my birth means I should feel some sort of bond with people with whom, if I met them at a picnic, I’d have nothing in common and no reason to get to know them better. So it may not have anything at all to do with being adopted.
Yes, I feel this way too. I really don’t see the point in family reunions, or trying to create a relationship with someone you don’t know just because you share some DNA with someone. I actually have blood siblings that I have no interest in connecting with because we weren’t raised together, but wouldn’t dream of breaking the bond with my one non-bio sibling.
Not something that you need to address Hilarity, but I find these comments interesting. I’m glad you posted your perspective.
Someone needs to go kick them into gear. As you note, the longer you wait, the harder it gets, but I have never encountered a person who discovered as an adult that s/he had been adopted who did not feel a huge sense of betrayal. I will not attempt to explain or defend that feeling, but it is universally prevalent in every person I have met in that situation. (I’m sure that someone will now post that such a late discovery never bothered them, but they will be a very rare case.)
Since we dragged our kids home from a foster home, they never had a question that they were adopted. They have “Life books” (not “scrap books”) with photos taken before the adoption and a few other mementos (none of which mean much to them at the moment, but may take on meaning, again, once they are out of their teens).
Sid, your daughter will know that her life has been disrupted at the point you bring her home. Just work out your family story to repeat as she asks about her prior life. If you can get photos and things from her current home, you can keep them on the coffee table and let her see them whenever she asks about it. (She will go through periods of great interest and periods of apparent utter indifference.)
(Our family story–which is accurate–is that our kids’ mother was simply not able to take care of them and that they came to live with us.)
Sometimes I think I will go and find my natural mother, but I doubt that I’ll be able to do so until my mum is dead. My little brother did (he was adopted at age five (when I was six)) and he was glad he did, although it was a shock to find that she was only twelve when she gave birth to him. Broke mums heart a bit when she found out, although she has since come to understand, I think.
I’ve turned out to be quite a solitary person even given my various relationships. I’ve been in love, but deep down - at my core - I’m pretty sure that what I have is merely a simulacrum of what I can see others having. Ach, this is enough bed-wetting. Best wishes to you Hilarity N. Suze.
My girlfriend did the same thing. A completely different celebration from the “natural” birthday. I think she referred to it as “OUR” birthday. Her daughter was an adult and they both still made a big deal about it.
At a certain point a lot of adoptees feel this sense of betrayal whenever they are told. If it’s something the adoptee was told from birth, the sense of betrayal comes gradually as they get older. The betrayal is not so much that somebody lied to them as that the parents who made them did not want them and gave them up.
You could be my husband’s family, he has a full bio sister who was adopted. She was over for a family thing recently and at the end of it we both looked at each other and said “who invited HER.” You are lucky to get reunited with your bios and feel a connection - that isn’t a guarentee. For Brainiac4’s extended family, she fits as well as most shirttail relatives. For his nuclear family she is uncomfortable. Unfortunately, a lot of that has to do with how she was raised - she’d probably be a fairly sympathetic person had her parents been like minded with her bio family. But she was raised by conservative Christians - and Brainiac4’s family are pretty liberal - and not Christian.
yBeayf, we don’t do an anniversary thing. We intended to - then had a bio child before the first one could be celebrated. It got to be one of those “unfair” things we headed off before it happened - “Why does he get two birthdays!” But we aren’t huge anniversary people either.
Can I just state that people who adopt or foster children are some of the best people on the planet? Whether it’s just age or plumbing or whatever else that prevents folks having their own kids, there are many many of us that are hugely grateful to be brought up in a loving household. Stars, every single one of you.
I understand what you are saying, here, (having experienced it first hand with my son), but the trauma described by those I have known who discovered their adoption much later is of a separate sort. Beyond (in addition to) the feeling of abandonment, they have also expressed betrayal that everyone whom they knew and loved had lied to them throughout their entire lives. They expressed the feeling that their entire lives had been lies and that they could never trust any person ever again.
This is me to a “t”. I was adopted as an infant and it was always “known” that I was. I’m an only child and I didn’t look unlike my parents. As a matter of fact, I can recall when a casual aquaintance came up to my mother and crooned at how much I looked like her. We both just smiled.
I have a cousin that was adopted by his bio-mother’s second husband and wasn’t told until he had to have his birth certificate for his driver’s license. He was devastated to find out at 16 that his dad really wasn’t his dad. It took him a long time to understand that his dad really was his dad and not just a sperm donor as his bio dad was.
When my parents died, I found legal documents that show that I was actually a foster child before the adoption was final. It matters not to me. My parents were my mom and dad and to try to find my bio-parents seemed disrespectful to them.
One of my cousin, who is adopted, had the feeling of disconnectedness from our large extended family. She talked about wanting to find her birth parents, which my aunt and uncle said they’d help her do when she turned 18. Her brother, also adopted, never seemed to have those feelings. She was engaged to be married and her father’s business unexpectedly failed. The big country club wedding she had planned was no longer possible. The family pitched together and put on the wedding. with uncles who are chefs doing the food, cousins who do wedding cakes doing the cake, my mother doing the flowers, etc. Suddenly she seemed to realize she was as much a part of the family, as valued, as any other member. There was a transformation of not only her demeanor, but her whole personality. She seemed more content and happier than she’d ever been.
I’m not adopted, nor have I adopted, but a suggestion came to mind–
My son is 4, and occasionally, in the course of things, we talk about the day he was born or something about when I was pregnant with him. (He thinks it’s very funny to hear about how he would step on my bladder and make me have to go pee every 5 minutes. ) He likes to hear little stories about when he was a baby, and also likes to look at baby pictures of himself.
I suppose Sid and family could do the same sort of thing, except talk about the day she came home, or what was going on while they were waiting for her to come home. Like telling her about how he used to look at her picture and think about all the fun things they would do when they were finally together, or something. He could also tell her about her babyhood in Mexico, like where she lived and who took care of her, and so forth.
As long as we are discussing the feeling of belonging/feeling disconnected from a family, it may clarify things if I mention that there are several different ways in which members of my family got there.
I have two adopted Korean kidlets, my brother’s wife has two kids by her first husband (who is no longer in the picture), my cousin has several birth children and two adopted Korean kids who are birth sisters as well as real sisters, and one of my in-laws is one of several adopted-but-Caucasian kids in his family. So you can’t pitch a brick at one of my family reunions without hitting someone who got there other than by birth.
I don’t know if they necessarily have any sense of loss, but it always seems that I am the one pushing the adoption angle on things rather than my kids or their cousins. We once suggested a trip to Korea to find their birth parents, and both my kids said they would rather go to Disney instead. Maybe later they will think differently.
This is basically what my parents did. I do not remember being “told” I was adopted, but I have always known, and instead of a story about the day I was born, they have a story about how they picked me up from the nuns at the orphanage. I think it’s best not to make a big deal of it. If you treat it matter-of-factly, then it is just an episode in a life. But I totally agree with other posters that children MUST be told as early as possible. It should not be something you have to sit down to tell them…they should grow up with the word being part of their vocabulary. They will grow to understand it and ask questions when they are ready.
We adopted my daughter through foster care, getting her when she was 12 weeks old. Her adoption became final when she was 1-1/2. We sent “birth notices” to everyone saying:
September X, 2000 Born into this world
December X, 2000 Brought into our lives
April X, 2002 Made ours forever
Since she was about 3 we’ve talked about her being adopted. We talked about how she has made our family complete. We told her that though she didn’t grow in mommy’s tummy she means so much to us. She understands that the lady she did grow inside of couldn’t take care of her and asked us to take care of her and love her. We got her lots of books (Jamie Leigh Curtis has a great one called something like, “Tell me about the day I was born.”). We also do the dual parties.
Friends of mine have 8 kids, with the middle two being adopted. They always knew they were but it was never made a big deal about. One day, one of the “natural” kids went to his mom and said, “Mom, which of us is adopted? I told David that I am and that you picked me special, not him!” They are all family, all siblings and all loved.
I have a friend who found out about a similar situation at that age. She didn’t handle it well, stopped calling her dad “dad”, got very angry at her mom and grandparents and everyone else who lied by omission of truth. They are nice people and thought they were doing best for their little girl, but postponing the “talk” made for some very rough years. OTOH, I know a girl who is 12, knows full-well that she is adpoted and handles it very matter-of-factly with little or no emotional trauma. Both girls were adopted at a similar age under similar circumstances.
My little sister - we just told her from the beginning. We had to, really, because she’s black and we’re white. She was fine with it - at that age she accepted it as just something she was. (In fact for a long time she thought she was “a doctor” and wondered why she didn’t have a stethoscope…) IMO, if you tell them young enough, it’ll never be a big deal.
