Greetings my Blogville friends. A calming chamomile tea steeps beside me as I write today’s blog. My thoughts today are mostly for my fellow adopted persons and their parents because, once again, I’ve been thinking. People who know me would say, ‘uh oh, here she goes again’. I’ve been thinking that there is no real guide offering step by step advice and tips for adoptive parents and their children help them learn to handle the often rude, and frankly personal, questions that people feel entitled to ask members of the adoption constellation.
I’ll start with the classic ‘real’ parents questions. People seem infatuated about the relationships, or lack thereof, between adopted people and their birth parents. From the moment I understood my ‘status’ and would tell people that I was adopted the focus immediately shifted to my birth parents, like my birth parents were the important plot point of my adoption story. I continue to wonder what made people assume that my birth parents were/are my ‘real’ parents? They are my birth parents, or my biological parents, two people who were really no more than egg and sperm donors when it comes down to it. Real parents actually parent their children, not just give birth to them. There are many parents whom society then would not consider to be ‘real’ parents by the ‘giving birth to’ standard (e.g. kinship parents, step-parents, adoptive parents). Instead of ‘giving birth to’ the child, these people actually parent the child. I believe, that they are the actual ‘real’ parents. Growing up wondering what people meant by ‘real’ parents led to asking myself who else gets these kinds of questions. For example, when people learn that a person was born to their parents by IVF (in vitro fertilization) or by ART (Assistive Reproductive Technology that uses egg or sperm or embryo donation) do they immediately ask them about their ‘real’ parents? I honestly did not know. However, that being said, I feel that a person disclosing that they were born to a surrogate would face the same ‘real’ parent questions as adopted people do. Though I think that those questions would be even more awkward, such as: ‘Was it your real father’s sperm or some other guy’s sperm?’ ; ’How did they get the egg out?’; “So, are your parents both your real parents, or just one of them?” Wow, this could get complicated. I just had to worry about adoption questions. Clearly I believe that a ‘real’ parent actually parents the child. You know doing parenting stuff like: losing sleep; changing diapers; toilet training; teaching life skills and lessons; reprimanding; keeping the child safe and healthy; driving to extracurricular activities; meeting with teachers; surviving adolescence (being loved and hated simultaneously); dropping off at post-secondary institutions (crying most of the drive home without their child); walking their child down the aisle or helping them with their first apartment; and finally, launching them into adulthood. So, I am confused when you ask about my REAL parents. My REAL parents took responsibility, adopted me, and raised me. For others, their REAL parents might have been or may be their grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, step-parents, or even members of their Band that took responsibility when their birth parents did not. In my case my REAL parents were my adoptive parents who chose to raise me and be my parent(s). For others, their REAL parents may be or may have been a Kinship caregiver, or further, a Kinship caregiver who wanted them to have a sense of permanence so they legally adopted them, really just legalizing their emotional adoption. So, who do you mean when you ask about my REAL parent(s)? ‘Do you want to find your REAL parents someday?’ I so badly wanted to say, I live with my REAL parents, who are you talking about? But my mother raised me better than that. “Two wrongs don’t make a right.” she would say, “they just don’t understand”. I so badly wanted her to let me explain it to them. Don’t worry, I heard the things they would ask my parents too. Things like, ‘Would you still have adopted even if you could have had your own children?’ What does that even mean? When a child overhears those comments it begs the question, “If I’m not my mother’s child, whose child am I? She sure treats me like I’m her own!” Then, just before, or sometimes even as we walked away, my mother would often look at them and politely comment, “She is my own.” In hindsight, I admire her ability to not say what I’m sure she would have liked them to hear. I respect her for that. Adoptive parents, when people ask you about your child’s REAL parent, I strongly suggest you respond with, “I AM their REAL parent.” If you are so inclined, you might then follow up with questions of your own such as; Oh, did you mean their birth parent? In some circumstances, and only if you and your child are comfortable with the words, perhaps ask them if they are referring to the sperm donor, or the egg donor? Maybe even the embryo donor? Whatever the case may be. Not only should responding to the questions about your child’s “real” parent in that way make you feel pride in yourself as your child’s parent, but it will also reinforce your ‘real’ parent role for your child, maybe even empowering them. Being prepared and ready for these intrusive and often inappropriate questions is good modelling. When they see you reinforcing your role as their REAL parent when people ask you very personal things, your child will not have to worry about you feeling hurt by these questions. Instead, your child will see that you know you are their REAL parent. People often would say to me, ‘aren’t you curious’? Yes, I am curious, every single day. I grew up with so many unanswerable “what if” scenarios. Some things I have found the answers to, and others I will likely never really know. Frankly at this late stage in my life I am more curious about medical conditions that I might have inherited than I am about who my birth parents were. But the question remains, why are so many people curious about my curiosity? Do they think they might know how I feel? If they were not adopted then I can assure you, they do not know how I feel. To be honest, I truly do not even know how other children that were adopted feel. I only know how I felt and feel about having been adopted. I believe people think I should be curious about where I get my height, my build, my talent, or whatever. However, they might be shocked to learn that in reality, I am still curious about what I did wrong in utero or at my birth to make my birth parents able to give me away. I am still curious, even at my age, about what I did that enabled them to release the very infant/child that they created together. How they could allow me to be parented by other people and never look back, or more to the point, never look for me. That is what I always was, and still am curious about, not who they were or what they did, but what I did. Thank you so much for visiting with me. If it was your first read, welcome. If you have been reading regularly, welcome back today. I am always curious if my blogs have meaning to others and look forward to any and all comments my readers might share. If you prefer a more private contact than posting your comments here, please feel free to email me at [email protected] “See” you next time. Lynn
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Hello Blogville friends! Welcome back, it is so nice to see you. This morning I am drinking a hibiscus white tea as I write this blog. As an adopted person I blog because I feel it is important to open up a dialogue about adoption topics (and sometimes other topics too) that impact on so many of us.
I mean, this is not the first time I wonder if any of you will relate to the blog’s content, but as you know by now, I simply share my thoughts and feelings anyway. Maybe someone out there will say, “Hey! Me too!” and will no longer feel alone. As an adopted person I was never able to look at the people around me and relate to them based on physical features. I simply grew up learning not to bother to making physical comparisons. Most of my friends seemed to look like, or share distinctive features (good or bad) with one parent or the other, or with their siblings, and sometimes even with their extended family members. Not me though, so at some point I simply gave up looking. Well, at least looking within my family and extended family. I cannot truly express how it felt the one or two times I did look at someone outside of my family and see a tiny resemblance, or when others saw and pointed out a resemblance between me and another person. So many of my friends wanted to help solve the ‘mystery’ of my birth ‘roots’. There was once a same-aged girl in high school that everyone thought could be my sister, or at the very least, a cousin. What does one do with that? Go up to her and say, ‘Hey, did anyone in your family give up a baby for adoption around the year you were born?’ Then, while considering approaching this girl, the overwhelming feeling won out as I considered, ‘Even if it’s true, what right do I have to intrude?’ Let me tell you, it’s hard being some family’s secret. In hindsight, it turns out the girl from high school and I are not actually related so, “phew”. With the best of intentions, many folks would make comparative comments about me looking like my parents or even my maternal grandmother in an attempt to make me feel accepted, or feel like a “good match” with my family. There are no clear words to express how not sharing DNA related features feels inside. I do know that for me, even at a very young age, I simply stopped looking for similarities that I might have with someone in my family. I feel this made me a little oblivious to people’s looks and to comparative self-awareness. I had no bar as to compare how I should look while I aged. Of note, I often imagine how challenging this must be for inter-racially adopted people. Do you think those same well intentioned type of folks try to justify their “match” with their family? Somehow I don’t think so. Though I will add that I often felt that inter-racially adopted people were lucky because everyone simply knew and accepted that they were likely adopted, while society still tried to offer me a charade of ambiguity about how I became my parents’ daughter. I still cannot fully understand why a child’s joining a family through adoption, or even kinship, needs any more explanation than that. When my husband and I had our birth children the ‘well meaning’ comparisons started all over again. Remember, by now I had given up on searching for physical likenesses between me and others I met. I was confused by people asking who the baby I had given birth to looked like. I mean I understood in some way how, when I was young, people felt they should make me feel that I had been a good ‘match’ with my parents but I then began to wonder whether or not my children looked like me made them any less mine. In fact, sensing my confusion (frustration?) I remember my husband telling people, in a simple and matter of fact way, that our children looked like themselves. Usually that ended the questions. Fast forward many years. People remark that my little granddaughter looks like me, especially my daughter’s mother-in-law; who has always insisted on it. I do not know if I was surprised that a grandchild might look like me but I do know I had stopped looking for resemblances between me and my children and even my grandchildren when I finally considered it a moot point. Whether or not I looked like my parents did not make me any less their daughter, nor do their looks or resemblance to me make my children and grandchildren any less mine. In fact, just the other day I showed my granddaughter a picture of my birth mother and asked her who was in the picture? She looked at me strangely and said, “That’s you!” like I was playing a joke on her. She is correct, I do look very much like my birth mother did. I look very much like my birth mother and it appears that I get my height from my birth father. Yet, it was decided they would not be my “parents” so I learned that looking like your birth parents is not a factor in whether or not they choose to keep and raise you. After all, when my birth mother made her relinquishment decision I was just a tiny baby that probably looked like all the other tiny babies. It took me years to come to terms with the fact that how I looked (or behaved) as a newborn did not have anything to do with her not keeping and raising me. Other life circumstances were responsible. As I have discussed in other blogs, when I met the daughters that my birth mother kept and raised together with her husband, they were literally overwhelmed with the resemblance between their mother and me. In that moment, for my birth half-sisters, there was no doubt that I too had been born to their mother. All that to say I do not identify as a birth child with familial features. Therefore I do not automatically relate to others, specifically based on physical features, in my everyday life. I also do not relate to how I look to others either as it turns out. I saw a picture of an older woman the other day and noted her wrinkled face simultaneously as I thought that she was dressed very nice for an old lady. Then, literally moments later, I walked past a mirror and realized that ‘old lady’ and I are probably the same age. It was at that time that I realized, “I don’t identify with wrinkles.” Thank you so much for visiting with me today. I so enjoy your company and I hope you enjoy my stories. As always, feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail at [email protected]. Or you can follow me on Goodreads and be the first to get new blog post notifications. 'See' you next time. Hello Blogville friends! It looks like I lost my math skills briefly and published this blog on Jan 7th instead of January 14th (to keep up with my every second Tuesday post schedule). So, in case you haven't read it yet, here is The Market.
Welcome to 2025, and welcome back, it is so nice to see you. This morning I am drinking a camomile tea, for its stress reducing properties. As an adult adopted person I feel it is important to open up a dialogue about adoption topics (and sometimes other topics too) that impact on so many of us. Today might be a tough read. I want to start a dialogue about recruitment of adoptive families for children. At my age, I can still remember a couple of Canadian adoption recruitment strategies from my childhood that stood out to me, even as a young child. If there had been shopping channels back then, a television show called Family Finder would have reminded me of one, except people would have been shopping for children. If I had known the term back then, I think this show made me feel more like a ‘commodity’ than a human being. I vividly remember my brother watching this show and asking our parents to ‘please, please, please’ get him a brother. He would actually pick out boys he saw on this show and suggest my parents call to enquire about adopting him. To this day, I really cannot understand why my parents continued to let us watch that show. I do remember feeling grateful that I was already adopted and that I didn’t have to go on the show to find a family. There was also a newspaper column (written by Helen Allen) that appeared in the Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star (1964-1982) and was dedicated to the recruitment of adoptive families for “hard-to-place”children. The column was called, “Today’s Child” and it was initially launched in an effort to reduce the social “stigma” of adopting “non-white” children. I vaguely remember seeing photos of children in a newspaper but I do not imagine I saw these Toronto papers much while growing up in my Northern Ontario community. So I did some research. In the Journal of Childhood Studies (Vol. 46 No. 4), Daniella Bento, Taryn Hepburn, and Dale Spencer authored an article called: “Compensating for Stigma: Representations of Hard-to-Adopt Children in “Today’s Child”. They were studying how stigma and values were attached to children featured in the column and the compensatory strategies required to manage the stigma and make adoption in general, and particularly adoption of non-white children, socially acceptable. I would encourage you to read the full article to really get a sense of how this type of advertising adoption of ‘hard-to’adopt’ children devalued them. I learned that initially, Children’s Aid Societies worried about the harm of ‘advertising’ children and only four agencies initially participated in this very public recruitment plan. However, when 18 of the first 23 children featured children were adopted, agencies across Ontario began signing up to feature their children. But a newspaper picture and article really could not showcase the living and breathing actual child; not like showcasing the children live and in person on television. So, a television program called Family Finder, was created on CFTO. I think it is important to note that where children understood and could consent to being on the show, this was done. For some children, their worker consented on their behalf. It seems like the television show was successful in encouraging people to consider older children, sibling sets, interracial adoptions, and adopting children with special needs. It appears that adoptive parents were more open to considering parenting these children because they had gotten to ‘know’ them through the media. Was it that prospective adoptive parents could see the child’s personality, rather than focus on their missing limb? Was it showcasing how a large sibling group got along and were determined to stay together? Was it just that television and newspapers were able to reach so many more families than the Children’s Aid Societies could? At any rate, Helen Allen became known as an adoption advocate and the “fairy godmother of adoption”. Though no longer available in those very public forums due to confidentiality, adoption recruitment strategies continue today. For example, according to their website, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption hires recruiters; these are adoption professionals whose goals are to recruit families for older children in foster care. The website notes that children are up to three times more likely to find an adoptive family through this program. You may have noticed the donation boxes in Wendy’s Restaurants to support the Foundation’s work. As you may, or may not be aware, Dave Thomas was adopted as an infant, which likely led to his passion to have children moved out of foster care into adoptive families as quickly as possible. In Ontario, there is a recruitment strategy called the Adoption Resource Exchange (ARE) where approved adoptive applicants can review photos and profiles of children and youth who are currently available for adoption in Ontario. There is a semi-annual in-person conference where workers and prospective adoptive parents can meet and discuss children or youth and their potential for a match. This is a private event in terms of attendees being connected with a Children’s Aid Society, or a Private Adoption Practitioner. Keeping up with technology, there is also a platform where prospective adoptive parents can view pictures, profiles, and even videos in some cases, of children available for adoption in Ontario. Again, it is not a public forum, and prospective adoptive parents must be granted access to the confidential website. I feel the need to point out that the approval process for adoptive applicants can best be described as an arduous journey, immediately followed by a difficult selection, or matching, process that frequently ends in disappointment. Simply put, it is not an easy process for anyone. In my career as an adoption worker, I too, prepared profiles of children and youth to assist in the recruitment of adoptive parents. I even drove a photographer around from foster home to foster home to take ‘candid’ pictures of children and youth for recruitment purposes. I reviewed the profiles of adoptive applicants that were hoping to be chosen for a child, youth, or sibling set. Why? Well, this is how we match children and prospective adoptive parents. I felt that choosing an approved adoptive family for a child, youth or sibling set was a huge responsibility. As long as I live I will wonder how the children I helped to match with their adoptive parents are doing. I am lucky enough to keep in contact with some of the families I helped to match, which allows me to breathe a sigh of relief. As for the others, I hope they know I did my very best with the information I had at the time they were matched with their adoptive family, and that they are happy and healthy. When I worked directly with birth parents it allowed me to let them help choose the parents that they wanted to raise their child, when they could not. I felt better about those matches. I felt that it would be helpful when or if birth parent(s) and their child met one day, that the child would know their birth parent(s) chose who would raise them. When birth parents could not be personally involved in the selection process, I tried to fully represent their wishes when matching their child with prospective adoptive families. So what have we learned? Well, as an adult adopted person, I learned that recruitment strategies are necessary tools to match children and families. It was hard to accept that, had all of these recruitment options been available when I was made a Crown Ward and freed for adoption, I might have been on the ‘shopping channel’, or my photo and a profile of who I was might have been showcased in newspapers. Some little kid might have pointed at the television set and asked their parents for a sister. Honestly, I do not really know how I feel about recruitment strategies, except to acknowledge that they are often necessary to match children with adoptive parents. In my case, my adoptive parents had simply been ‘next in line’ for a baby girl, and were willing to take a child who needed surgery immediately upon being placed with them. In fact, I recently learned that my foster mother and my adoptive mother had literally raced to see who could get a surgery date for me first. How’s that for a recruitment/placement strategy? Thank you so much for visiting with me today. I so enjoy your company and I hope you enjoy my stories, or reading my thoughts. As always, feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail at [email protected]. Or you can follow me on Goodreads and be the first to get new blog post notifications. See you next time. Hello Blogville friends! Welcome to 2025, and welcome back, it is so nice to see you. This morning I am drinking a camomile tea, for its stress reducing properties. As an adult adopted person I feel it is important to open up a dialogue about adoption topics (and sometimes other topics too) that impact on so many of us.
Today might be a tough read. I want to start a dialogue about recruitment of adoptive families for children. At my age, I can still remember a couple of Canadian adoption recruitment strategies from my childhood that stood out to me, even as a young child. If there had been shopping channels back then, a television show called Family Finder would have reminded me of one, except people would have been shopping for children. If I had known the term back then, I think this show made me feel more like a ‘commodity’ than a human being. I vividly remember my brother watching this show and asking our parents to ‘please, please, please’ get him a brother. He would actually pick out boys he saw on this show and suggest my parents call to enquire about adopting him. To this day, I really cannot understand why my parents continued to let us watch that show. I do remember feeling grateful that I was already adopted and that I didn’t have to go on the show to find a family. There was also a newspaper column (written by Helen Allen) that appeared in the Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star (1964-1982) and was dedicated to the recruitment of adoptive families for “hard-to-place”children. The column was called, “Today’s Child” and it was initially launched in an effort to reduce the social “stigma” of adopting “non-white” children. I vaguely remember seeing photos of children in a newspaper but I do not imagine I saw these Toronto papers much while growing up in my Northern Ontario community. So I did some research. In the Journal of Childhood Studies (Vol. 46 No. 4), Daniella Bento, Taryn Hepburn, and Dale Spencer authored an article called: “Compensating for Stigma: Representations of Hard-to-Adopt Children in “Today’s Child”. They were studying how stigma and values were attached to children featured in the column and the compensatory strategies required to manage the stigma and make adoption in general, and particularly adoption of non-white children, socially acceptable. I would encourage you to read the full article to really get a sense of how this type of advertising adoption of ‘hard-to’adopt’ children devalued them. I learned that initially, Children’s Aid Societies worried about the harm of ‘advertising’ children and only four agencies initially participated in this very public recruitment plan. However, when 18 of the first 23 children featured children were adopted, agencies across Ontario began signing up to feature their children. But a newspaper picture and article really could not showcase the living and breathing actual child; not like showcasing the children live and in person on television. So, a television program called Family Finder, was created on CFTO. I think it is important to note that where children understood and could consent to being on the show, this was done. For some children, their worker consented on their behalf. It seems like the television show was successful in encouraging people to consider older children, sibling sets, interracial adoptions, and adopting children with special needs. It appears that adoptive parents were more open to considering parenting these children because they had gotten to ‘know’ them through the media. Was it that prospective adoptive parents could see the child’s personality, rather than focus on their missing limb? Was it showcasing how a large sibling group got along and were determined to stay together? Was it just that television and newspapers were able to reach so many more families than the Children’s Aid Societies could? At any rate, Helen Allen became known as an adoption advocate and the “fairy godmother of adoption”. Though no longer available in those very public forums due to confidentiality, adoption recruitment strategies continue today. For example, according to their website, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption hires recruiters; these are adoption professionals whose goals are to recruit families for older children in foster care. The website notes that children are up to three times more likely to find an adoptive family through this program. You may have noticed the donation boxes in Wendy’s Restaurants to support the Foundation’s work. As you may, or may not be aware, Dave Thomas was adopted as an infant, which likely led to his passion to have children moved out of foster care into adoptive families as quickly as possible. In Ontario, there is a recruitment strategy called the Adoption Resource Exchange (ARE) where approved adoptive applicants can review photos and profiles of children and youth who are currently available for adoption in Ontario. There is a semi-annual in-person conference where workers and prospective adoptive parents can meet and discuss children or youth and their potential for a match. This is a private event in terms of attendees being connected with a Children’s Aid Society, or a Private Adoption Practitioner. Keeping up with technology, there is also a platform where prospective adoptive parents can view pictures, profiles, and even videos in some cases, of children available for adoption in Ontario. Again, it is not a public forum, and prospective adoptive parents must be granted access to the confidential website. I feel the need to point out that the approval process for adoptive applicants can best be described as an arduous journey, immediately followed by a difficult selection, or matching, process that frequently ends in disappointment. Simply put, it is not an easy process for anyone. In my career as an adoption worker, I too, prepared profiles of children and youth to assist in the recruitment of adoptive parents. I even drove a photographer around from foster home to foster home to take ‘candid’ pictures of children and youth for recruitment purposes. I reviewed the profiles of adoptive applicants that were hoping to be chosen for a child, youth, or sibling set. Why? Well, this is how we match children and prospective adoptive parents. I felt that choosing an approved adoptive family for a child, youth or sibling set was a huge responsibility. As long as I live I will wonder how the children I helped to match with their adoptive parents are doing. I am lucky enough to keep in contact with some of the families I helped to match, which allows me to breathe a sigh of relief. As for the others, I hope they know I did my very best with the information I had at the time they were matched with their adoptive family, and that they are happy and healthy. When I worked directly with birth parents it allowed me to let them help choose the parents that they wanted to raise their child, when they could not. I felt better about those matches. I felt that it would be helpful when or if birth parent(s) and their child met one day, that the child would know their birth parent(s) chose who would raise them. When birth parents could not be personally involved in the selection process, I tried to fully represent their wishes when matching their child with prospective adoptive families. So what have we learned? Well, as an adult adopted person, I learned that recruitment strategies are necessary tools to match children and families. It was hard to accept that, had all of these recruitment options been available when I was made a Crown Ward and freed for adoption, I might have been on the ‘shopping channel’, or my photo and a profile of who I was might have been showcased in newspapers. Some little kid might have pointed at the television set and asked their parents for a sister. Honestly, I do not really know how I feel about recruitment strategies, except to acknowledge that they are often necessary to match children with adoptive parents. In my case, my adoptive parents had simply been ‘next in line’ for a baby girl, and were willing to take a child who needed surgery immediately upon being placed with them. In fact, I recently learned that my foster mother and my adoptive mother had literally raced to see who could get a surgery date for me first. How’s that for a recruitment/placement strategy? Thank you so much for visiting with me today. I so enjoy your company and I hope you enjoy my stories, or reading my thoughts. As always, feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail at [email protected]. Or you can follow me on Goodreads and be the first to get new blog post notifications. See you next time. Hello Blogville friends! Welcome back, it is so nice to see you. This morning I am drinking a green tea with a lemon slice as I write to you. As an adopted person I feel it is important to open up a dialogue about adoption topics (and sometimes other topics too) that impact on so many of us. This, is why I write to you. I thank you for your ongoing support and a special thank you to those who take the time to send me a comment. It helps me to know you are out there.
So, as you know, the holidays are behind us. I sit at my desk, look out the window and wonder. How many kids found out they were adopted over the holidays? How many kids found out their parents are actually their grandparents or aunts and uncles? Ah, the holidays. It is a great time to gather with friends and family who often know more than the children do about their adoption or kinship placements. When I was young, I can remember hearing, (actually overhearing I suppose), things like: “It is lucky Eddy (my dad) is so tall and slim, she’s built just like him. You’d almost think she was his.”; “It’s so sad that Leona (my mom) couldn’t have children of her own.” Wait, you mean I’m not her kid?; and “Wow, the agency did a good job, you’d never know Eddy and Leona’s kids are adopted.” These are just a few examples of what people should never say when around the very children who might overhear them. Comments like that might just make us feel like strangers in our own families. Also to the parents, I’m pretty sure its offensive when people say the children you are raising are not yours, your children agree! That being said, I also strongly believe, children should already know that they joined the family through adoption or that they are currently being raised by kin family members. Overhearing others should never be the way they find this very personal information out. People’s opinions seems never ending. I even remember as a grown adult, a parent and grandparent myself, my mom (in her 80s) and a family member standing by my dad’s casket looking down at him. The family member, with her arm around my mom’s shoulders looked at her and quietly asked if my mom had requested an autopsy. My mom looked back at the relative with a rather stunned look on her face. The relative then looked my mom in the eye and said, “Never mind, of course you didn’t, after all, it doesn’t really matter how he died since he has no biological children to have to worry about passing anything on.” Wow, way to compound old grief with new grief. I had to force myself to remain seated until that person walked away before I got up and hugged my grieving mother. As I got older I remember thinking that it was lucky I already knew I had been adopted because some people really can’t keep a ‘secret’! I was fortunate that within my parents’ circle of friends many of us children had been adopted. As a result, I was used to hearing the word adopted and it did not come as a surprise to me. We even knew that there were public and private adoptions though I don’t think we fully understood the distinction. My brother and I just always knew that this is how we had become our parents’ children. Sure, I wondered about my birth mother and my birth father, but I never once wondered who my parents were. They were the people loving and caring for me, and teaching me how to be a good adult one day. As an adult adopted person, and later as an adoption and kinship worker, I always advocated, and still do, that children who were adopted, or placed with kin, should hear about it from their parents. Finding out from others that you were not born to your parents/caregivers reminds me of children who learn about the “birds and the bees” from other children. Shocked and dismayed with this new information, they often run home and ask for clarification in the hopes that their parents can tell them what they heard from their friends isn’t true. Hearing from other children, or even adults, that you were not born to the people who are raising you is kind of like that. If some kid, or even their parents, try to say you were adopted, or that your parents are not actually your parents, you are going to run home and ask them so that you can prove that kid, or their parents, wrong. Imagine for a moment, how it feels to find out they are actually right. Discovering that your parents did not actually give birth to you can come as quite a shock. Always knowing it can help prepare children for dealing with other children’s, and even adult’s insensitive adoption comments. I am forever grateful to my parents for telling me my ‘origin story’ before some kid could weaponize my reality. I remember, if I made them mad, other children would throw that at me, “Oh yeah? Well you were adopted.” Like I was supposed to be shocked, or even insulted. In hindsight, my parents’ normalization of the fact my brother and I were adopted probably helped me save face pretty often as a kid. Sometimes I feel having been adopted was a bit of a double-edged sword. If there was no shame in being adopted, why was it often kept such a secret? Why did people whisper? Why did people sometimes abruptly stop talking when I came into the room? Plus, if I was the subject of that secret, was there something I should have been ashamed of that I wasn’t aware of? I feel the same way today about adoption and kinship. If their/your (adoptive) parents, their/your birth grandparents, their/your birth aunts and uncles, or members of their/your Indigenous Band are caring for children or youth/you, should they/you be ashamed? Hell no! In my experience, children and youth do not typically get to choose to be in need of caregivers, nor choose who exactly will raise them instead of their birth parents. There are some beautiful examples of exceptions to children and youth having a choice, a say in their permanency plan. I have seen some lovely examples of step-parents asking a child or youth if they can become their legal parent. I have seen prospective adoptive parents asking their older children or youth if they are ready to finalize their adoption! It must feel amazing for a child or youth to be part of this decision making process. To choose their family. Personally I feel that children will only tease other children if they think it will bother them, or if they let them see that it does. In my humble opinion, being adopted, or living with someone other than your birth parents, should not come as a shock to a child. Certainly they should not learn about their adoption or kinship by having it thrown at them by their peers like it’s something they should be ashamed of. I feel there could be nothing worse than confidently telling those teasing kids ‘where to go’ and then going home and finding out they were right about something you should have already known. Instead, I would love for children to hear that they were adopted, or that they are living with kin, from their parents/caregivers, not by accident from someone out to hurt their feelings. I would love for kids to be able to respond confidently with words like, “Pardon? Is there something wrong with how I joined my family?” Or “Do you understand that it means my family actually chose me to become a member?” Or even, “That’s right, I am their child by choice!” There are many tools that can help you start this conversation. Hopefully, your child was provided with a comprehensive non-identifying social and medical history, perhaps a life book, or at least some photos of birth relatives. These tools will help you talk with your child, or even your youth, about their life before you. These are some of the tools that may have even helped you to select them to join your family, and they are the tools for your child to learn the history of their birth family, and even learn about their time in care of others (i.e. foster care). Why hide these things? In my view, your children should never hear, especially overhear, these details from other family members or friends. They should hear these things from you, so they know they should never be ashamed of how they joined your family. They should know you are never afraid to talk with them about their lives before you, or their birth and birth family history. They should never have to ‘overhear’ these details. Act, so your child and you don’t have to react! Thank you so much for visiting with me today. I so enjoy your company and I hope you enjoy my stories and thoughts. As always, feel free to comment here or send me an e-mail at [email protected]. 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August 2024
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