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I don't know where exactly to start. It's one of those topics which make people shift uncomfortably in their chairs, and while it's not illegal or immoral, it evokes very strong images and feelings in many people.
Let me therefore start with myself. I was adopted when I was a baby--the actual adoption happened when I was about a year and a half old, with me going to the adoptive parents when I was just nine days old. The biological mother, however, remained in my life, as she had given me to her brother--my uncle--and his wife to raise. So I knew my biological mother as my aunt throughout my life. Seeing that it was an open adoption, there were no secrets involved--at least not at the time it happened.
This is the hard part though--it wasn't until I was 18 before my mom tried to tell me about it. That was a stressful situation, and made even more stressful by the fact that I had known since I was 11 that I had been adopted. No one knew, though, that I was well aware of my status--I'd kept that from everyone for over 6 years. And as far as life changing event in one's life, this one is/was a doozy. Imagine having such a secret throughout the most tumultuous years of one's life, and it is easy to see how my life was significantly changed as a result.
Did I have my father's eyes, his smarts, her bad habits? Did I inherit the tendency for being overweight, for my love of animals, the streak of independence I possessed? My biological mother was an alcoholic, a smoker, a sex addict and had heart disease. I vowed as I went through my teen years that I would never be like her--the thought of doing so frightened me significantly. But while I never smoked, drank that much or even had much sex, I found there were some things I could not shake, as I inherited heart problems relatively young, even having a heart attack at the age of 43.
Well, now you've heard my story, and it's now time for me to address the reason for this post. If you are an adoptive parent, please do your children a big, big favor--tell your child the truth. Don't hide it from them, and certainly don't wait until they're almost an adult before owning up to the fact that there is a set of biological parents out there somewhere. Don't make them feel like they're second class citizens, either, for being adopted. And certainly, NEVER use their adopted heritage as any kind of punishment, even in the worst of arguments.
During the years in which I was aware of the truth, but kept it a secret, I often viewed myself as the scum of the earth, a child so hated that someone "threw me away" rather than keep me and raise me. As an adult, I know that is ludicrous, but a child doesn't know and certainly doesn't understand. Imagine feeling so unwanted that you question your worth, and come up wanting. Imagine that you look in people's faces on the street, wondering if you look enough like some man that you think he might be your biological father? I grew up looking at my biological mother quite often, but after finding out the truth, I was repulsed by her hypocrisy.
It's a fair assumption that a lot of adoptees feel like this, but usually, they have the support of their family when nagging questions arise, and indeed, most adoptees never find out who their biological parents really are. As I had stumbled on the truth and felt I couldn't tell anyone, both options were out to me. I always thought I wasn't achieving a lot in high school because I was too lazy, but there is a part of me that says I was, in fact, traumatized. Okay, so now there are some who believe that I should have picked myself up and moved forward. That's fine; but how many out there were 11 years old when they found out something similar, and who could move on from there without any problems? You can't just go on. If you talk with someone about it, you might be able to recover faster, but when it happened to me, there was no one for me to talk with.
I sit here now, wishing I could go back in time to hug my younger self and say that it's okay, and things will work out in the end, and to give her hugs and kisses, and promise that they will have a better life. I can't obviously, and obviously, no one did. It has altered my life, though, and in some ways extremely negatively. I rarely dated, rarely trusted anyone enough to trust them with who I really was, and if fact, while I had many good friends, I rarely had any close friends. Even now, I don't carry a lot of trust for anyone I don't know very well.
Still I try to keep going. At my recent birthday, when I turned 53, I reviewed my life and realized how much I'd lost simply because I had no support group to help me move beyond the shattering things I lived with for so long.
To other adoptees, was it any better for you? Or am I part of a eclectic group who faced similar doubts and fears with their revelations? How did others cope with this kind of dilemma? It might not be too late for me to learn something and apply it to my life, just when I need to feel that life isn't as unkind as I believed it be so long ago.
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