Adult adoptees

I've been reading blogs from adult adoptees lately and some have been quite shocking. I just found one last night from a adult Korean adoptee and it's quite interesting, she addresses the differences & points out "inadequacies" in her upbringing, but not in a way that makes you feel she is bitter, which is nice. Some of the ones I found last week were extraordinarily bitter sounding (one person went so far as to say that adoption should be made illegal and that it was "buying babies", yikes!)- which were really a little unnerving. As I process all of the information I have been reading, I think the key to remember is that regardless of how families are formed, there are good parents & bad parents. The good parents are going to be good regardless of whether their children come to them via adoption or from their bodies, the bad parents are going to be bad as well.

I wonder if sometimes it's easier when there is a larger issue in your life like adoption, for someone to say "I had a really bad experience, adoption is a bad thing" and connect the bad parents to the adoption experience. But how often do people speak up and say "I had a bad parent, my parent should not have been allowed to give birth to me."- not so much. Maybe there is a sense of entitlement to protection with an adult adoptee- a well deserved sense I would say, that why would a social worker decide that *this* set of bad parents would be a good choice to raise this child, when clearly they are unfit to parent? That's a fair complaint- and based on my exposure to social workers over the last year and a half, and the descriptions people have given of their various social workers, it's easy to think of them as "godly" people who make the best decisions all the time.

Truthfully, they are only human, and they are doing a job. They are getting paid to give you a homestudy and determine if you are going to be a good parent or not, but most times, they want their cash, and they are going to say "good enough" because....why? Good question. Maybe because they recognize that adoptive parents are examined from every angle left right and center and they want to give them a little leeway. Maybe because they themselves are religious zealots and so are the adoptive parents. Maybe because they themselves had problems with depression and so did one of the adoptive parents. There are a thousand reasons that a bad parent might get a passing homestudy. And sometimes, the behaviors that a parent exhibits as a parent, are not obvious in a homestudy or in the limited contact that the Social Worker has prior to the adoption. And coming back to context- we live in a society where 80-90% of the kids in the foster care system are NOT eligible for adoption. Why bring this up? Because it shows how our system repeatedly looks out for the parents, giving them a 2nd, 3rd, 4th chance to 'figure it out" before realizing how much the parents (biological parents I might add) screwups have affected the children. So if we consider that 90% of the time (maybe more, I'm not sure) these social workers are working with families who have had children removed from the home or are on the verge of having them removed from their home, most adoptive families probably look downright angelic comparitively. And in a job where they see family after family screw up their kids & they meet a family who says "we'll do anything for this child" and they are beaming and have the baby room all ready.....outward appearances point out that compared to the families they see nearly every day, this family seems perfect. I'm not a social worker and I'm not defending social workers who make choices that turn out poorly for adoptees. I'm simply thinking outloud to try to understand this a little better, and understand why these decisions are made.

I think that adoptees absolutely deserve to feel a sense of entitlement to having a good parent approved to become their adoptive parent. I feel bad for the adult adoptees who have had bad experiences. I just finished re-reading Elizabeth Kim's memoirs "Ten Thousand Sorrows" about her adoption experience. It was shocking. There was not a single page that was not shocking and appalling. Yet it's a book I read once and now have read again and will probably read again. It is a vivid reminder of what happens when people get to extremes. In her case her parents were religious fundamentalists. They told her over and over again how bad she was. Please tell me how can a 3 year old be bad when they've just watched their mother be killed, spent a year in an orphanage locked in a cage-like crib, and after one day in their new home they are not bubbling with laughter? This was a terribly tragedy of an upbringing, and this woman spent years coming out of it. She probably still is.

The fact is, there were families like this 30 years ago when Korean Adoption was beginning, and unfortunately, there are still families out there like this now. I hope that there are very few experiences like this now. I hope that I can raise my child with a value of self, love of her birth country and her adoptive country, and a love and respect for life and families, all families- her first family, her foster family if there was one, and her new adoptive family. I intend to bring culture to our lives in the way I live it now, speaking the language, celebrating the festivals, cooking the food, at the same time we are living the American culture (or my rather more liberal version thereof, sans TV, sans McDonalds, sans SUV...). She will have two names- her chinese name and an american name- she will be named after my Grandmother- so she will share in my family heritage as well as her Chinese heritage and we will embrace them both as major parts of our lives. Am I going to get it 100% right? I highly doubt it. But I intend to spend my life trying to do the best I can- learning as much as I can from the experiences of adoptees who came before her, and watching what my daughter needs, so that we come up with our own combination of the 'right' amount of everything. I hope that when she grows up she can look back and say- "you gave me balance" and feel good for the experience.