This is something that’s bothered me for years and years and I want to explore it here so I can jot down ideas without feeling pressured to formulate a neat and tidy essay for this.
1. Why is there such pressure on adopted people to “find [their] birth parents”, even when that thought has never crossed the adoptees’ minds? Why must one set of parents (the adopted parents) not suffice? We’re more than happy to have biological children have only the one set of parents. Why must we create an “othered” situation here?
2. By insisting on there being two distinct sets of parents instead of one “real” set (the adopted parents who raised the adoptee and who are the real parents in this situation) and another set who are essentially nothing more than biologically tied strangers. Would we pressure everyone to accept a set of virtual strangers as “parents” regardless of how they feel about it? No. Then why do so for adoptees?
3. Adoptees are constantly told they’re incomplete unless they know anything and everything about their “biological parents”. They must go and seek and find. They are rarely allowed to accept that they have only one family — their adoptive family — even if said family is highly dysfunctional. Biological families can be and frequently are highly dysfunctional too, but we only encourage the children in that situation to welcome friends into their lives as a surrogate family. Why can’t we say the same toward adoptees?
4. Whenever someone talks about wanting to have a child, it’s invariably tied toward biologically siring/producing a baby. If one cannot do so naturally, one is encouraged to explore alternate avenues of siring/producing a baby. Every time adoption is brought up as an alternative, there’s this chorus of people saying that said suggestion is offensive, that adoption is impossible, that it’s not a sufficient replacement for biologically siring/producing a baby, etc. Every time those comments are uttered, it wounds an adoptee who feels as though they themselves are being rejected as being “inferior” by those very same people, who comprise the majority of people out there.
5. Invariably when adoption is offered as an option, people’s minds automatically think either toward adoption through foster care or international adoptions. Little thought is put forth toward private, domestic adoptions. This also makes the adoptee from a private, domestic adoption process feel inferior and “unwanted”.
6. Laws need to change to make it easier on those people who wish to adopt via private, domestic channels. There need to be more closed adoptions of the kind that traditionally took place over 30 years ago. Women who give up a baby through that system should be encouraged to do so but should also be encouraged not to rethink the process or to insist on hand-picking the couple or making it an “open” process. By hand-picking the couple over a set of personally defined parameters, we turn the adoption process into a game show or popularity contest minus the studio audience, cameras, high school corridors, or lunchrooms. By making it an “open” process, that too “others” the adoptee by forcing him or her to live in a nontraditional environment where they can’t simply have the one set of parents.
And yes, I know that there are plenty of households these days with children who have two sets of parents from divorce (including one set of parents and one set of stepparents), but this is from a completely different process. If an adoptee is to have two sets of parents, (s)he should have them via divorce as well, where both couples include one of the child’s original parents and a stepparent from the secondary marriage. This should be the only acceptable way of any child, biological or adopted, to have two sets of parents, as having it any other way leads to an “othering” of adopted children.
7. Why should we be concerned with this “othering” of adopted children? Because it creates a special situation that indicates that the adoptees aren’t to be treated as normal individuals but as “others”, saddled with special situations, condescending attitudes, and a sense of living life as one unwanted by the mainstream. An adopted child should feel no different, no less or more “special”, than any other child out there, and should be allowed to have as uncomplicated an upbringing as possible.
I forgot where I was going up there after typing out “no less or more ‘special’ than any other child out there”, so I’ll leave this be. These are just random thoughts and ideas that have come into my head after reading numerous discussions online from various sources.
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This writing exercise actually inspired me to submit whatever it was I would write down for it, and after a couple of false starts one finally started to coalesce. The following is what I wrote, so that if it’s rejected by McSweeney’s, at least it’s here. It’s titled, “An Open Letter to My Jealousy”.Dear Jealousy, I have spent many years trying to live without you, but every month or so you come sneaking past the security gates I have erected around my soul in a valiant attempt to keep you away and you whisper bittersweet nothings at the sleeping child within. I have tried out endless self-help aphorisms and mantras serving as inner bodyguards, only to find out that they’re nothing but stereotypical 90-pound weaklings attempting to do battle with your hulking, 6’ tall, 255 pound, linebacker-shaped being. I try to change the security codes on my personal alarm system by approaching life in new ways, but you sneakily disarm the system as if you were a big screen superspy who wore cool sunglasses and drove around in a pricey European sports car. Damn you for that. Damn you. Every time I read about someone doing brilliant things and living a brilliant life, I can feel you knocking on the door of my heart. Actually, it’s more accurate that you beat down the door until someone — the logical self residing within me, most likely — stops you from doing any further damage to the structure. Typically this happens after I read about a major element of stress and strife that said person has gone through — the highly regarded author living in a tony neighborhood who suffered abuse at the hands of a violent parent; the youthful doctoral genius with a picture-perfect life who was almost driven to suicide by bullies while growing up; the glamorous Hollywood superstar who lost both parents at an early age. Each of these moments of major personal tragedy provides fuel to the logical being inside, much like spinach did to the comically muscular sailor in the comic strips, and enables it to send you flying. Only problem is — you keep on coming back! Like a bad rash or a terrible earworm, you cling to me as a dryer sheet clings to an item of fluffy cotton clothing. You batter my soul until it’s black and blue every time someone comes into my life for whom life has never delivered many bruises. You make me look at their relatively picturesque life and wish they’d been the victim of relentless bullying in their childhood — like I did. Or underwent embarrassing psychological exams in their youth because they were so profoundly ostracized by their peers that they hadn’t yet gotten the opportunity to develop their conversational skills and thus had major speech impediments — like I did. Or was depressed to the point of being suicidal throughout their adolescence — like I was. Or had to suffer through the loss of a parent in their early twenties — like I had to. Or had to balance work and caregiving duties for a disabled mother because she ignored her health when her spouse was living out his final years with terminal cancer and, as a result, she became profoundly ill to the point where she suffers from multiple health issues to this day — like I have to. Then there’s my extremely poor chances with love and romance, my own chronic health problems, those two weeks in 2009 when I was in such severe pain that I didn’t want to live anymore — I would give just about anything for these problems to be visited upon the people whose life journeys were charted on smooth, well maintained roads, and that’s all because of you constantly clamping yourself onto me. Why is that so? Why can’t you go hang out in the middle of the highway? Or why don’t you clamp down on someone else? Is that not possible? Are you tailor made to pester me and only me and be welded to me until the day I die? You know what? I’m going to wish instead that those people whose lives I covet find their own selves being turned into hosts for the blood-sucking, soul-trashing succubi that is their own jealousies. May they lie awake at nights writhing around in anguish from the troubles their own personal demons plant inside their heads. Ha!Your unwilling life companion,[my name]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2liv33OiS1qee12to1_1280.png)
