Like many ex-Catholics, I still have strong opinions on the Catholic Mass, and my least favorite part was always the moment when the congregation got down on its knees and chanted as one: Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed.
Lord, I am not worthy. It took me until adulthood to realize why that phrase always stuck in my throat: as both a transnational and transracial adoptee, there was nothing I ever feared more than unworthiness.
When Christ says in the Bible “suffer the little children to come unto me,” he means to allow, not to suffer in the sense of agony. It is about allowing, however, that I want to speak. I want to speak about what we are allowed to say without being called ungrateful; about toxic gratitude, and the idea that we owe allegiance or love, without question and without retort, to the systems that master and subdue us.
Sometimes, you see, questions of allowing are questions of suffering.
Across the vast spectrum of adoptee childhood experiences, I have found a common thread: we saw the world in stark terms of Allowed and Not Allowed. If we did things that were Not Allowed, we thought, Am I going to be sent away?
When I was a child, I thought I was Not Allowed to be angry. From the age of three onward I had infrequent but colossal meltdowns; my embarrassed parents had to send neighbors and friends home from my third birthday party because I wouldn’t stop screaming, and to this day we’re not sure whether it was the heat, the uncomfortable new dress, or the overwhelming amount of people that set me off. My rage rarely felt unmerited to me, but to my parents it often seemed unjustified—and unseemly. My memory is littered with instances of both parents saying to me, with solemn accusation: “If you can’t control your temper, we’re going to have to send you to anger management therapy.” Every time they said it, terror flamed in my mind. For me, therapy was not an offer of a legitimate space to deal with or understand my anger, but a punishment—and an implicit threat: if I “failed” therapy, if I “failed” to fix myself—I could be sent away.
I’m not saying I believed, on anything but a subconscious level, that my parents would pack my suitcase. Nor am I saying it was bad to learn how to control my temper—but here I find myself, even now, trying to soften the blow of my anger. Here is the unedited truth: my sheer writhing dread of being sent away became a lifelong, damaging fear at the thought of receiving treatment for mental health. Therapy should not be used to threaten any child, however implicitly. And I am still angry about these things.
I think a lot of adopted children feel they are Not Allowed to be angry; I think a lot of adopted adults feel, still, that we are Not Allowed to be angry. The predominant narratives of “National Adoption Month” explain why: most adoption narratives, particularly those available to children, leave no room for pain.
For a while my adoptive parents brought me to cheerful cultural-conglomerate parties thrown by my adoption agency, where I met other South American adoptees and we did arts and crafts together. It was better than nothing, but this happy-families picture of adoption leaves no room for the children who do not fit the “perfect” adoption narrative, or for grown adoptees’ legitimate concerns with the multi-million-dollar adoption industry and the pervasive racial, nationalistic, and socioeconomic biases that still lurk within it.
As I grew older I learned how my feelings as an adoptee intersected with similar pressures from my other identities, especially as a woman of color met with the twin forces of whiteness and patriarchy that become impatient and menacing at my nerve to be angry, and especially to react against the prejudices my (white, conservative) adoptive parents sometimes reveal. For years I self-censored these reactions, afraid of the reactions of relatives and friends if I ventured to criticize or interrogate my transnational adoption. They could have sent you back. You have to be grateful. No questions asked.
Beads and craft glue cannot paste over the pervasive white-savior narrative of “rescuing” children from so-called third-world countries, or the toxicity of telling an adopted child she is required to be anti-abortion because “What if your mother had aborted you?” I’m tired of paying a debt of gratitude for my existence to people I never asked for it.
It is deeply unhealthy for adoptees to construct ourselves around what we think is expected of us by the people and systems to which we are supposed to be grateful. When we internalize this fraught, zero-sum economy of Allowed and Not Allowed, it is too often the adoptee’s right—and ability—to express valid pain and anger that gets hacked off at the base.
I was born in 1993 in Asunción, Paraguay, a tiny, landlocked country in the heart of South America, of which American journalist P.J. O’Rourke once wrote: “Paraguay is nowhere and famous for nothing.” I did not learn this last fact until one day in high school, when I did something I suspect was Not Allowed.
The rest of my family had gone to the city for the day, and I took the opportunity, guiltily, heart thudding in my ears, to rifle through the drawer in my mother’s file cabinet I had noticed earlier that week, the one with the file marked Adoption. I’d always remembered my adoptive parents implying they had no information on my birth parents–or at least that anything that did exist could not be mine, on the orders of some Paraguayan court, until I was eighteen—but the file was stuffed full.
Most of it contained once-glossy brochures or disappointingly uninformative paperwork from the adoption agency. There was the P.J. O’Rourke chapter, clumsily scanned; a remarkably unattractive picture of me as a newborn; my father’s notes in his familiar handwriting on the same yellow notepaper he’d used all my life. Then I spotted a business card for the judge who had overseen the adoption process. Next in the folder was a single typewritten sheet.
Squatting on the floor of my mother’s office, with that sheet of paper in my hand, I saw the words Mother’s Name and—the second, greater shock—Name at Birth, in neat black letters. They were very Paraguayan, and my mother’s name was beautiful. Only when I copied the words onto a scrap of paper and went to close the scrap in my jewelry box did I realize my hands were shaking too much to unlock the lid.
Names have the power to summon. All witches and poets know this. Once I learned these secret names I began to conjure from them, imagining origin stories and alternate realities, like a superhero splintered across a multiverse. My mother was younger than I am now, but sometimes I imagine recognizing her as I would recognize myself: by hands as small as mine, eyes as brown. Perhaps I take after my father, and I imagine her hating me for that. I wonder if any attempt to reinsert myself into Paraguayan culture would end with me standing ashamed in an airport, unable to speak Spanish, guilt clogging my colonized tongue and mocking strains of Bon Jovi’s “Who Says You Can’t Go Home” pinballing around my brain.
In other words I conjure, again and again, the old, chest-straining grief of the perpetual exile, a grief I can neither put sufficient voice to nor resolve. In Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? she writes: Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.
Adoption—particularly for transracial and transnational adoptees—often involves pain, displacement, and anger. We invent ourselves around them like skin growing numb around a scar. Be grateful? For this?
Like many adoptees whose adoption records have been sealed, my medical records or my mother’s, if they exist, languish somewhere in a dusty file in the middle of South America. After countless times mumbling “I’m adopted” at confused doctors who inquire about familial diseases—after awkwardly explaining to biology teachers that sometimes, uh, two blue-eyed parents can have a brown-eyed child—the only thing I know for certain about my genetics is that my blood is O-negative, the type often referred to as the universal donor. Whenever I am urged to give thanks for my adoption, this is what I think of: the only thing my blood already tells me is that I was made to give, and give, and give.
Love, in whatever form, should not be a blank check. The expectation of gratitude is too often rooted in toxic power dynamics between the powerful who demand thanks and the marginalized that are expected to give it. Do not ask adoptees to give it unconditionally.
Our birth mothers’ names are always beautiful. I remember the boneless wonder at age 23 when I requested and received a copy of my original birth certificate and read ROSIE.
I was supposed to be Stefania. I often wonder about her. Who she would have been. Because I am definitely not a Stefania now, but I might have been.
There is so much in this that is so powerful. I was particularly struck by how invoking therapy can be an implicit threat. Of course that’s true! But I had never articulated it until I read your words. Thank you!
I am also angry on your behalf at that people who suggest you can’t be pro-choice because someone, at some point, was pregnant with you and gave birth to you. This is literally the case of everyone in the world, not just adoptees. What a silly and offensive logical leap.
This is ridiculously common. In my case it’s usually the same people who think “What if Einstein/other famous historical person who made good contributions to the world had been aborted?” is an anti-abortion argument.
or the toxicity of telling an adopted child she is required to be anti-abortion because “What if your mother had aborted you?”
Oh my god YES, whyyyy was it so important that I hear this flawed reasoning constantly, endlessly, throughout my childhood, before I was even old enough to understand abortion, pregnancy, sex?
THIS. Because of the expectation of gratitude of course, but also. Y’all. The answer to that question is that if my mother had aborted me I wouldn’t exist. And this wouldn’t actually be a terrible thing to me because I wouldn’t exist. It’s not like I wouldn’t exist but would still have the consciousness to wish I did. This terrified me for years as a child. The idea that I was somehow really close to death and didn’t even realize it. I credit A LOT of my anxiety to this. As a kid I was always vaguely terrified that something I couldn’t prevent was going to kill me – I had panic attacks in class about asteroids falling right on top of me.
ALSO, like, if this reasoning even made sense from a moral standpoint, a lot of other things would also be bad? Like, most notably, abstinence before marriage!
I got a lot of hate for saying basically this to other adoptive parents. Apparently being an adoptive parent means you’re supposed to be anti-abortion and grateful the first mother “chose life”, even if she actually wasn’t given a “choice” at all >.<
I told some other adoptive parents that we had actively discussed abortion with a couple of birth moms that we met with because it seems so obvious to me that if you really don’t want to be a parent or can’t for whatever reason raise a child you might not want to go through a lot of physical and emotional trauma if you didn’t have to. If I had suggested that once we adopted a baby I was planning to fatten it up, roast it, and eat it with salt they would have been less horrified.
Sorry second reply – but I also wanted to say that I am not George Bailey. An entire small town would not have collapsed if I had never existed.
Oh man, poor George Bailey, there’s a character that needs an Ayn Randian rewrite from Mallory
I would read that.
Oh man, oh man, oh man, YES. In reading that line I flashed back to standing up in some kind of debate class in high school, finding myself unexpectedly choked with tears as I explained to the class that I would always defend my birthmother’s right to make that choice, filled with feelings I couldn’t process or understand and so surprised by the sudden wave of emotion that I could do little more than choke out the words and stare helplessly at my teacher. I am overwhelmed again.
My father and his brother were not quite teenagers, but both in the double-digit ages when their birth parents put them in an orphanage, so they remember the experience vividly. My dad practically refuses to discuss his adoption, and I think it’s out of fear that his anger at his birth parents will bubble over uncontrollably, and not being in control is, for him, the most frightening thing he can imagine. He never developed much fondness for his adoptive family, either. The closest thing he ever found to gratitude, I think, was for my mom’s family, which took him in like a son when he and my mom married.
I remember when I first learned my dad’s birth surname. I asked if he felt any connection to it at all, and he said he didn’t. It held nothing for him. Neither, for that matter, did his adoptive surname, until he and my mom started our family. For a while, I felt untethered at the idea that our last name had no relevance to its bloodline and that another name out there, one willfully abandoned, did. But I’m coming around to the idea that it’s OK for one half of our family history to be only a generation old. It carries less baggage that way, I suppose.
This is a remarkable essay! Thank you so much for sharing your experience — it deserves to be hard among all the pushy, positive narratives out there.
Thank you for this.
“My rage rarely felt unmerited to me, but to my parents it often seemed unjustified—and unseemly. My memory is littered with instances of both parents saying to me, with solemn accusation: “If you can’t control your temper, we’re going to have to send you to anger management therapy.” Every time they said it, terror flamed in my mind. For me, therapy was not an offer of a legitimate space to deal with or understand my anger, but a punishment—and an implicit threat: if I “failed” therapy, if I “failed” to fix myself—I could be sent away.”
Ana, this is incredibly written (and incredibly moving). So impressed/proud/ahhhh
This is a really powerful essay. Thank you for sharing it!!
“Love, in whatever form, should not be a blank check. The expectation of gratitude is too often rooted in toxic power dynamics between the powerful who demand thanks and the marginalized that are expected to give it. ”
I’m not an adoptee but recovering from parental relationships that are very much “not good” and I needed to hear this today. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
This is so, so good and I am so grateful that the Toast gives adult adoptees a place to talk about these things (Nicole’s piece a few weeks ago was amazing). I want to share them like a weapon at some facebook acquaintances.
Yes, this. My wife and I may end up adopting a child, and it is so very very good to have this expression of what it may be like growing up on the other side of this.
My dad practically refuses to discuss his adoption, and I think it’s out of fear that his anger at his birth parents will bubble over uncontrollably, and not being in control is, for him, the most frightening thing he can imagine. He never developed much fondness for his adoptive family, either.
Thank you. I am printing this out for reference. Not my own.
The recent struggle to find a therapist who can encourage a healthy expression of the complexity of an adoption somewhat like yours–who can support my daughter as she finds expression for her anger, and for her entitlement to life, love and choices–has just about done me in.
How it is possible that after nearly 1 million Americans have been adopted from Asia, most of whom have grown to adulthood, that I the adoptive parent am *telling* therapists that anger/self-worth might be…issues? That need to be expressed in a way that isn’t self-harm? I just…November is hard.
….OK, seriously reconsidering adoption now.
Hey! Author here – I do want to say I didn’t write this to turn people off the idea of adoption, necessarily. It’s a complicated, messy business, but so is the business of raising any child. (I do think transnational and transracial adoption are *particularly* problematic in a number of ways and that anyone thinking seriously about adopting should be aware of the many valid, adoptee-centered critiques of the adoption industry.)
But it’s possible to be considerate without *re*-considering, and I think anyone who goes into adoption with their eyes wide open and makes informed choices, not only about how they adopt, but how they provide for the mental well-being of an adopted child after adoption, stands to provide a very loving and compassionate family indeed.
There are so many children without those families. I didn’t write this piece to slam shut the doors of potential homes on them, but rather to make those homes a little wider, and a little more well-lit. <3
Hey, thanks for the reply!
I’m a gay Brit living with my boyfriend in South Africa. We’re far from the adoption stage yet, but in those light, maybe-one-day talks we’ve had about possible kids, he’s been very keen on the idea of adopting a black child from one of the townships, and raising them with both ours and his heritage in mind. This would mean raising them with one foot in both cultures; ours, and that of their birth.
Which I’m conflicted about, really. On the one hand I’ve been to orphanages in the townships, and while they’re filled with good people doing good things in desperate circumstances, they’re not good places to grow up. I imagine this is true of most orphanages. Being able to share my level of privilege with a child who might not otherwise get even the barest of starts in life would be a pretty cool thing I think.
But on the other hand – racial identity politics in this country is insane. Speaking to my black friends, a lot struggle with the idea of being considered a coconut, not truly belonging to either the affluent white societies where they work or the black communities from which they’ve come. There’s the “rescue baby” narrative, the gratitude narrative, the perception that we’d be doing it as an ego boost or to have a black baby as an accessory (which I’m sure we wouldn’t be! But it does provoke some uncomfortable soul-searching). And coming from a diplomatic-brat childhood, I know what a mixed blessing being a Third Culture kid can be.
I guess what I’m saying is, thank you for giving me another angle to consider. It seems like the decision itself is simple – adoption is better than not adoption! But it’s a mistake to think that it’d be as (comparatively) simple as just regular-ol’ straight people babymaking I guess. I’m 100% certain that, if we do end up going through with it later in life, I’ll be better informed for having read your story. Thanks!
I don’t think you should totally reconsider adoption, but I do think you should really consider all of potential issues if you are considering a transnational or transracial adoption. Your child should not be the first or even the 10th person of that nationality or race that you know. You should have a very clear idea about how you would plan to talk to them about racism and if you feel prepared to help them deal with the racism they experience. Speaking of that, if grandpa is racist chances are his opinions aren’t going to change if his grandchild is of a different race. I’m sure he would love that child, but how are you going to help the child deal with the fact that grandpa says horrible things about their race or culture? Are you going to keep them in touch with their culture? How? Are you prepared to talk to them a lot about how they feel about their place in life? To be able to non-threateningly offer them therapy if necessary? To hear them if they say that they love you but they hate how different they feel from everyone else in the world and seek out ways to help deal with that?
Same race adoption is not necessarily “easy”, but I do think that there are fewer issues of identity involved (not no issues, but it’s easier to feel like you belong in a family if that family and the community around you resembles you even slightly). You still want to do it very carefully.
You could also consider foster care – yes, you will still definitely need to help an older child from foster care deal with a variety of physical and psychological issues, but those kids for the most part actually do need a home and they are better off in a home that is willing to really provide for their needs. Of course, again, you have to assess what you personally feel able to deal with. It doesn’t help anyone in any situation if you rush in without considering what all of the needs truly are and if you are able to meet those needs (and it’s okay if you aren’t; we felt a lot of pressure to claim we were willing to deal with things that we absolutely knew we weren’t going to be able to deal with. Some of the DHS workers probably think I’m a bad person for not being willing to take a child with severe cerebral palsy and maybe I am, but I think it would be worse to take the child to avoid being considered a bad person and then have no idea what I’m doing and feel overwhelmed and possibly end up with the child back in the system because I couldn’t handle his needs).
A white couple saying they only want white children is problematic too, don’t you think? The whole issue is rather fraught.
I absolutely agree that it is. I think white people who only want white children because they think white children are better are problematic, whether they actually adopt a child or not.
But just because white people might want a child of any race doesn’t necessarily make them the best parents for that child and I think they need to be honest with themselves about it. I think someone else already said it, but love really isn’t enough.
I’ve read a lot of comments here and elsewhere by people of color who were adopted by white people and it had an impact on them. Many of those white people were loving and well meaning, and yet that wasn’t enough to make the issues of transracial adoption go away.
I think it’s healthy to re-consider adoption. I’m glad you read this piece and it has affected you to the point that you’re wondering if your approach to adoption would be a good environment for a child who’s already endured so much (or for a child who really doesn’t need a new family, but whose family needs more internal and external support).
As a transracial, transnational adoptee, I wholeheartedly wish that my adopters had “reconsidered” their intentions, how good their intentions were, and whether it really was for *my* (a stranger’s) benefit or their own (hint: it was for their own). The adoption industry shouldn’t have pushed for adoptions such as mine, it shouldn’t have “trained” adopters like mine as it did. And my adopters really should have just left me alone. Doing nothing to/for me would have felt to me like a more authentic life, with any of its associated benefits/disadvantages. Instead, lies, lies, lies – that’s how my adopted life began and how it’s progressed, because those lies have never been properly addressed. But, oh well, it’s just *my* life – which really doesn’t matter to anyone, certainly not to my adopters.
So, if you don’t see yourself having what it takes to really be a worthy person and wanting to be a worthy person in this child’s life, please don’t adopt that child. If you do truly care for a child, then please put more consideration into family preservation, supporting a child’s family to continue to care and love their child. Adoption legally destroys the ties between a child and his/her birth-given family, and does so permanently and unjustly.
My husband and I will adopt children. I have a heart condition and being pregnant would kill me. We plan on adopting through the state system, via foster-to-adopt. We were required to complete a 3-month training program to prepare ourselves for all the challenges that come with adopting children who are old enough to know their birth parents. The court system provides birth parents with a great deal of opportunity to keep their parental rights; those parents are usually given many chances to improve their abilities as parents before their parental rights are terminated. They are provided with attorneys, and the government must prove to a judge at a trial that they are no longer fit parents. After reading your post, particularly the last sentence, I’m curious to know: do you believe a parent is entitled to retain his/her parental rights no matter what? You refer to adoption as an unjust process. Because the goal is reunification unless it’s no longer feasible, and relatives of the parents are given the opportunity to adopt the children before adoptive parents (non-relatives) are screened to adopt the kids. There are many people who should not have custody of their kids because they do not provide a caring, safe environment. These kids deserve better.
I think more should be put into family preservation (keeping families together); hell yes. Meaning give parents the tools and resources they need to be successful. We are notoriously bad at this as a country. Instead of punishing the parents … I am sorry but addiction is often a symptom of much larger issues … abuse, neglect; we need to fix the larger problems and then maybe less children would lose their families.
Oh, Ana – this piece is so beautiful and so valuable. I’m an adult adoptee and I’m sitting her at my desk, suddenly sobbing in recognition. I am having a visceral reaction and I’m totally overwhelmed by it – but I just have to say thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank you.
The idea that an adoptee should never be angry about the circumstances of their adoption is awful.
I briefly knew a woman who was a transracial and transnational adoptee who I thought was brilliant and fun and righteously angry and was horrified (remembering still gives me a pit in my stomach) to find out that everyone else we knew in common, including her adoptive parents, considered her miserable and ungrateful and generally unpleasant.
I hope she’s still righteously angry, brilliant, and fun, and that her parents got a fucking clue.
Same here thomplatt…
Was once a stepmother…. this sounds even worse.
I think I understand completely (I’m the adoptive parent, not the child, so maybe I don’t). Your insight is profound.
“gratitude” and “grateful” should not be part of the adoption discussion. Oh, sure grateful for a wonderful birthday present, or something like that. But grateful for being adopted? Never. Bio kids almost never have to agree/say this (tho sometimes in sad dysfunctional families).
Not to mention that such an assumption pretty much trumps any deep, personal, family, discussions about the ramifications of adoption. Esp international or trans racial adoption.
All adoptive families need these discussions. It does not mean that your adoption was wrong. But you need these profound discussions.
Although talk of therapy may certainly carry an implicit threat, it was in this case quite explicit.
My name was Dandilion. I was adopted through the foster care system and your sentiments about always being the one to “give” and “sit back and take it” hit close to home. Thank you for lending your voice.
Thank you Ana for the insight you’ve given this adoptive parent. I wish you continued reflection, healing and peace.
One matter: It would be great to keep families together and many families would benefit from not many resources to do so. However, what do you do about the parents who don’t want the families they have created? The mothers with unplanned pregnancies that would bring shame on themselves and their families? Those where the biological father will not be with the mother? Nor support the mother? Or threaten the mother? These are all too common situations in the countries that many internationally adoptive children come from. It sucks and at the same time, adoption can be a good choice and not the only choice.
Hello! I’m glad I happened to be glancing over this today and noticed your fairly recent comment. First, thanks for reading! As I mentioned in a reply upthread (to ‘thomplatt’), nowhere in this piece do I suggest that adoption is always or even mostly a bad choice. I wrote this piece to illuminate the complexity of transnational and transracial adoptions. I am in support of informed adoption and would definitely not deny that adoption is preferable to a child being in an unwanted or dangerous family situation (or in e.g. a poor system of foster care / state care).
However, there’s also some rhetoric in your comment I’m a bit uncomfortable with! Unplanned pregnancies, single motherhood, domestic abuse, etc. are not only common ‘in the countries many internationally adoptive children come from’ – they’re endemic here in the wholesome old US of A, and part of the reason I urge adoptive parents to think very hard about *why* they are compelled to adopt internationally when thousands of children are up for adoption for the same reasons in their own country as well. I wonder if there’s such an exotic gleam to international adoption in part because it allows parents to rescue a child from certain living conditions without having to make a concrete effort to change similar conditions in their own nations or in the country the child is from.
It bears repeating, for instance, that encouraging better sexual education, access to abortions, childcare, domestic violence services, etc. is a way to help solve the situations you mention. I’d be interested to know how many adoptive parents support these efforts, or if these situations are only invoked as pithy rhetorical points when people want to ‘defend’ adoption. (I am not saying you, personally, do or do not! I’m just thinking aloud).
Also, I think often these sorts of rhetorical questions – which unfortunately tend to boil down to “But WHY are you saying adoption is BAD?? Here’s how it can be GOOD” – assume adoptees aren’t aware of situations in which adoption is positive (we are!) and work to erase the very complexity we’re trying to encourage when we share our experiences. Collapsing adoptee pieces into either endorsement or condemnation of adoption derails our conversation to return to the honestly tired question of ‘is adoption good or bad’, a question that tends to privilege adoptive parents’ voices over adoptees’ voices in a way I wanted to push back against with this piece.
Anyway, I’m glad you took some insight away from this – thank you for commenting.