I read the article, “Did I steal my daughter?” I teared up when she met with her daughter’s mother. It made me think about how much my ideas of adoption have changed.
Before I ever even began to make the decision to adopt I knew what I wanted from our adoption. At the top of my list? I wanted ZERO contact or knowledge of my child’s birth parents. After all, I was in pain. After my hysterectomy I didn’t want to have to deal with the emotional turmoil that I felt would be involved if there were birth parents in the picture in any way. I wanted to be the only mother in my child’s life. If there were no birth mother in the picture, then I felt I would have successfully achieved that.
My face is red with it just thinking about how I felt. But the pain. The pain is real. I understand why I felt the way that I did. When you’re facing the pain you have to protect yourself. That’s what I was doing.
It took time to realize that it is not what is best for my future child. When we make decisions in this adoption, we have to weigh what will be best for our family. What is best for our family has to include what is best for our adopted child. That encompasses so much that it can be overwhelming. There are things to think about. Trying our best to ensure that our child is truly an orphan (which includes the decision on which agency to use). Knowledge of the system and current state of Viet Nam adoptions. Contact or knowledge of or relationship with birth family, if at all possible. Knowledge, respect, and celebration of birth culture. Knowledge of Asian American issues and participation in anti racist parenting. . . . and just raising a child (which entails quite a bit also). I know that I’m forgetting things. . .
I think that it can be very easy for a PAP to feel powerless (it’s the complaint that I hear most often); I know that there are many times when I have felt this way - it is very hard to be well versed in all of those things I mentioned above; it requires a lot of much needed research. I believe that is why I felt the way that I did about birth parents. Introducing the idea of birth parents into my life made me feel powerless. It took a lot of stepping back to see it for what it was. It is a balancing act of doing what is best for myself, my current family, my future child, and my family’s future.
So this is where my thoughts sit - a balancing act. And I don’t yet have my completed thoughts put together - I’m working on it - in case this post seems somewhat incomplete.
