Tags
abaondonment, abuse, adoption, attachment, failed adoption, foster care, mental health, mixed race children, parenting, post traumatic stress, recovery, trauma
It came to my attention through some surfing on the web, that I am part of a special class of children who are considered “failed adoptions”. I read an article with interest about kids who were adopted and sent back to the system. The thought of this had never crossed my mind until I was 40 years old. These are my thoughts on this.
I can’t remember not knowing that I was adopted. Perhaps this was one of the very few things that my parents had actually done right. What I did not appreciate until just recently, is just how much worse it makes them, if that is at all possible.
I was born in 1971 to a Caucasian mother and an East Indian father. I imagine at that time that having a child out of wedlock, not to mention with a white woman, would have been an absolute aberration to my bio sperm’s family, so I am not shocked in the least that I was put up for adoption. On good days, I am happy that I was not sucked out of a vacuum, and on bad days, I think that my birth mother would have opted for the Kirby if she had any idea what a cluster fuck my adopted parents would turn out to be.
About ten years ago, I got it in my head that I wanted to understand more details about adoptions. I called up the maternity ward of the hospital that I was born at and as luck would have it, I ended up chatting with a nurse who had been working during the year I was born. She had an unbelievable recollection of things, and I wish that I had got her name for all those times when a follow up phone call would have been helpful.
So I will call her Nurse Betty. Nurse Betty sweetly explained to me how “it was the seventies, there were lots of babies”, and not many people were wanting to adopt a mixed race kid. My birth mother was probably thrilled to see this wonderful, perfect looking white family with some past generational 1/100th of Indian blood in it come across her lap as a potential family. I really can’t blame her for trying. Nurse Betty told me that it was actually law that I had to wait out 10 days in the hospital to make sure that my birth mother did not change her name, which cleared up my assumption that I was a second or third choice. Still, my start in this world was daunting. Nurse Betty said that while the other babies were put in front of the large window during visiting hours for their families to ogle them, the adoption kids were kept in a back room. It was unusual to have more than baby up for adoption, so I most likely started my life solo, much how I feel on the best of days.
I am pretty sure that this was the onset of my massive, catastrophic reactive attachment disorder. On a very few occasions, I let my mind go there, and think of what it was like. I wonder if I longed for the scent and voice of my mother, and never found it. Nurse Betty says that babies were shuffled away from their mothers after they were born to prevent further emotional turmoil, so there is a very good chance that she never even touched me, let alone saw my small tuft of dark hair on my big 9 pound body.
The social worker that handled my government adoption must have been from the slow class. I say this because if he/she had done ANY homework, it would have been obvious that my mother was in no shape to adopt a child. She or he would have learned that my mother was an incredibly depressed, unhappy woman, who had demons that would give hell a good run for the money. She gave birth to my brothers ten months apart, which to anyone, would seem somewhat strange. She had all sorts of medical issues, and birth was far from a natural beautiful experience for her. Women with personality disorders are like that. Any event that knocks their bodies away from normal functioning is an epic event, and one to take to the bed. I wonder why no one asked why on earth she would want to take on another child, with two in diapers, and an already unhappy marriage. Then again, it is not uncommon for people like my mother to narcissistically believe that offspring are an extension of themselves, and if it is attention getting, they go for it every time. I don’t think that she considered the vast difference between a natural child and an adopted one.
I have no fond memories of her from my early years. I have thought so hard to try and remember something. Surely it all could not have been bad, right? Not one.
Anyway, back to the failed adoption knowledge. So here I am…a bouncing baby girl, already damaged, going home to a selfish depressed mother, an ignorant father and two infants. Five years and an affair with my next door neighbor’s dad later, the moving truck was backing down the driveway of our rural house and loading up the kids and my mother’s belongings and moving us into a welfare town house complex.
Two years later, my mother remarried. Three years later we moved three hours away from my dad to a hick town that did not even have a McDonalds. Six years later I was lying about bruises on my body to teachers. Eight years after the divorce, the only shit that was leaving the house was mine and I was back on the radar of the Ministry that so haphazardly gave me to this family. This is what is known as a failed adoption.
The first time I accepted that this marginalized term applied to me, I was outraged. I wondered, if at any time as she sat on that couch in front of my brothers and her new husband, she even stopped to consider that she was breaking a promise that should have been one of the most important of her life.
Nah. She didn’t.