What is wrong with adoption because you want a family?

Open Question

Ok I get the hole not telling the adopted child they are adopted, I am in favor of not amending OBC (Original birth certificate0, and just getting an adoption certificate, I am have even changed my opinion on closed adoptions, in fav of enforcing open adoption. However i don’t get why so many of you say it is selfish to adopt. People don’t give birth thinking about the kids needs. They have kids because they want kids. Some people can’t so they adopt. .

Answer

“People don’t give birth thinking about the kids needs.”
I’d beg to differ with you here. By nine months gestation, a mother is thinking a lot about the kids’ needs.

“They have kids because they want kids.”
I’d beg to differ again. Many kids are accidents. By nine months gestation, they are wanted. It is outside forces and circumstances which can sometimes make this want a conflict.

“Some people can’t so they adopt.”
Agreed.

I don’t understand why everyone can’t admit that wanting children is selfish? What’s wrong with that? Nothing, in my book.

What’s wrong is when that selfish want GROWS so large it is to the exclusion of reason. When the ripples it causes that effect others and even the child are of no consequence. When self-reflection and honesty to the child are abandoned to justify this lack of responsibility. When social and personal ethics are set aside for the ultimate goal.

Being selfish is okay. Being selfish without regard to others is not okay. Being selfish and calling it a selfless act is repugnant. The inability to recognize the difference indicates a level of maturity most parents should be above.

So it’s not being selfish which is the indictment. The indictment is for predatory practices, blind ambitions, narcissistic tendencies, and anything that is BEYOND responsible selfishness.

Children deserve not only basics and opportunities and love, but they also deserve to be considered and cared for by balanced, mature, emotionally responsible people.

btw, thank you for taking the time to recognize the child’s civil rights. good job, indeed!

Loving My Captor

A while back, just prior to being banned from an adoption abuse website for daring to confront a particularly Virulent Adoptive Parent who disrespected the website, I had brought up the topic of Stockholm Syndrome. The VAP took great offense to this.

According to the above wikipedia link:

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in abducted hostages, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker…

I was comparing the act of adoption to the act of abduction, as the editors of Transracial Abductees had done previously, only adding my own spin on the relationships that form with our adoptive parents.

Also, cited in the wikipedia entry:

According to the psychoanalytic view of the syndrome, the tendency might well be the result of employing the strategy evolved by newborn babies to form an emotional attachment to the nearest powerful adult in order to maximize the probability that this adult will enable — at the very least — the survival of the child, if not also prove to be a good parental figure. This syndrome is considered a prime example for the defense mechanism of identification

The VAP didn’t like this at all.  He didn’t want to recognize that his transracial internationally adopted children didn’t come to America of their own free will.  He didn’t want to recognize that they had no recourse but to get along with these benevolent people providing so much attention and basic needs, because they were totally dependent upon them.  He didn’t want to recognize his power in that situation or the child’s helplessness.

Okay – so adoption’s intent is not to abuse or exploit in most cases.  But isn’t adoption a benevolent form of abduction?  Isn’t taking someone anyplace against their will abduction?  And in the case of adoption, isn’t Stockholm Syndrome what adoptive parents are hoping for?

I bring this all up again due to a really amazing conversation I had with my daughter last week, as she asked about my relationship to my mother, and my siblings (her biological children) relationship with her.

I described my older sister feeling hurt that my mother did not communicate, and my oldest brother feeling resentment for being ignored by her, and my next older brother getting angry because we sometimes had cereal for dinner instead of the kind of meals he expected of a housewife to earn her keep.  I described my sadness for her, for having such self-centered children, for the tedium of her days, for her frustrated fantasy life, her sense of worthlessness, and her unsatisfying roles and the lack of respect she received.  I sensed her loneliness and hopelessness.  I wanted to make everything better for her, but could do nothing but watch her retreat into herself.

My daughter, amazed, wondered how it was that I, the adopted daughter, the transracial international foreign born daughter, was the only one who seemed to have empathy for this woman.

I thought about empathy.  I thought about how helpless people can relate to helpless people.  I think I recognized my situation, though perpetrated by her, as a reflection of her own situation…

Enter Stockholm Syndrome.

Witness Natacha Kampusch, the Austrian girl who was abducted and held captive for eight years in a basement, by a socially inept man named Wolfgang Priklopil.

Kampusch has sympathized with her captor.  She said “I feel more and more sorry for him – he’s a poor soul”, in spite of having been held captive for eight years by him, and according to police she lit a candle for him at the morgue.

Ms. Kampusch was labeled as having Stockholm Syndrome, which she denied.  Later, Austrians were shocked when it was revealed that she carried a photograph of Priklopil’s coffin in her wallet.

For me, that was not shocking at all.  Eight years she lived under that man.  Not only did he tear her away from her less than ideal family, occassionally beat her, deprive her of liberty, and probably molest her, but he also showed her tenderness, brought her gifts, and tried to make her captivity more comfortable.  She was the most important human being in his life.  And everything she could hope for had to be through him.  Eight years you get to know someone really well.  You start to understand what makes them tick, what brought them to such desperate acts.  You begin to feel for them.  They become dear to you.

Yes, I am projecting here.  This is my adoptive mother I feel for.  And I weep when I think of the desperation that brought my adoption into being.  And I weep when I read of her letters to Holt, and how important my capture was to her.  And I weep when I think of all those years seeing that it didn’t fix anything for her.  And to my mind, I am a victim of Stockholm Syndrome.  And I am okay with that.  Just like Natasha’s treasured photo of a coffin, we can’t condemn her or tell her that her feelings for him, whatever they were, weren’t real.  My adoption was bad, a crime really.  My relationship with my parents strained.  But more than anyone, I saw her for what she was.  I think I was the only one who really knew her.

I hate that I was captured.  I hate adoption.  This is no way to start a relationship.

But I loved my captor.   We’re all we had.

New Year / New Life

Best Wishes for a great new year and years to come!

I’m sitting in my almost empty fragrantly cedar cabin in Washington
State, after having given away a lifetime of possessions, my goods
reduced to two suitcases full of stupid clothes I would rather replace
in Korea if I had the cash, and an instrument I can’t yet play. Last
day before I mop the floors, turn in my key, and spend three weeks at
my daughter’s house prior to boarding the plane for TESOL training in
Thailand. After the training, I’ll spend a week in Seoul at Koroot,
doing the requisite orphanage tour, traveling to the nearby mountain
town of Wonju as personal identity sleuth, and then on to my new
teaching position in Anyang.

As I sit here avoiding cleaning the oven and contemplating this life,
it’s quite stirring to think about the future and the past and the
epic in between. Almost 3 years of mystery followed by 42 years of
what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, followed by starting over
halfway around the world in a place I know nothing about yet feel I
know on a cellular level, is almost too incredible for me to
comprehend. Do you ever think that way? Do you ever think about how
unbelievable and incredible this odyssey is we’ve been sent on?

Transracial, transcultural, intercountry adoption feels like a brief
interruption of an inviolable destiny. I blinked and I have a head
full of gray hair, but I feel somehow like I am a 3 years young old
soul, picking up where I left off.

In this generous moment, I want to thank Holt for f’g up my life so
badly. It’s made this homecoming all the more sweet.

I’m just grinning ear to ear and bursting with love love love love
love for all of you and wanting to wish you half of what I feel right now.

Holt orphan 4708