Love is a Decision

I am going to say it…the way the adoption process plays out (especially international) is not natural. Nothing about it is. Adopting a child without knowing them is what international adoption is. You, the adoptive parent, conscientiously agrees to love the child first without having a prior connection. This is a high risk endeavor. High risk does not mean that it will always go bad, but it seems like the flipside of that is the expectation-that sucking up any circumstance that adoptive placement creates is the only answer to parenting issues. Gasp. How dare anyone disrupt?

There is NO other relationship that is like this. You don’t just walk down the street and marry the person you first bump into. I guess if you are in Vegas and had a few too many, well maybe, but that doesn’t end well usually. So to expect unprepared PAPs to under all circumstances have a lifetime of parenting a child is ridiculous. Comparing it back to marriage, do we as a society tell a battered wife to stay with her husband? Marriage is supposed to be a lifetime bond too but if an adoptive family is being emotionally, physically or sexually abused, they are supposed to just suck it up? Bull!

Not only that, but international adoption and even most foster-to adopt situations are one-way decisions. Only adoptive parents get to seek and choose the child. Now that sounds like an arranged marriage. Often throughout history those have worked, but it is a high risk situation that can end tragically. While in older child adoption, the child may choose you after meeting you, the child is never in any position to find parents. Does the child get to look through a book of adoptive parents and pick them? Does the child get to go to an adoptive parent fair, with APs on display and interview them? You know the answer to that.

Speaking to the bond between the mother who gives birth and the child, there is a relationship prior to birth and you can’t brush that aside. There is a lifelong piece there that adoptive parents should not forget, because..well…the child will not be forgetting. How the child deals with that differs by individual. Your job is to provide support and comfort for those emotions–not to supplant the child’s emotions with yours.

Over the years, I have heard a lot of adoptive parents repeat:” Love is a decision.” But I usually only see this apply to the adoptive parent-that the adoptive parent must choose to do the loving. But what about the adoptee’s decision to love? Doesn’t the adoptee also have to make the decision to love? I think that often there is this expectation that any child in any orphanage in any country will want to love any adoptive parent that comes along. To me, that is not child-centered as it leaves out the feelings of the child. And what if the adoptee makes a free will choice NOT to love? What does a family do then?

Furthermore, if the child makes the free will choice NOT to love the adoptive parent, then that is not an automatic “disorder” or RAD, either. Pathologizing an adopted child’s emotions is very adoptive-parent-centric thinking and just plain wrong. What exactly is the “normal” response to being taken from your original family and or moved to another country with different language, culture, food and living circumstances? How could someone NOT have a wide range of emotions from this unnatural experience?

Behind many of these emotions is how adoptive parents project what they think the child should feel based on their own experiences. Adoption involves taking in a child and co-mingling your emotions with the child’s rightful emotions and trying to make this new family work.

In adoptive parent-land, I continue to see adoptive parents voice their idea that there is proof that the majority of adult adoptees feel [fill in the blank]. I hope adoptive parents start to see that projecting their feelings onto the adoptee may prop up their own feelings, but it has nothing to do with the individual adoptee may feel. We debunked the study that was being used as the “proof” that all adult adoptees are A-ok, especially transracial adoptees, in a facepalm here.

Adoptive parents are entirely missing the point—it is not about them. An adoptee’s individual experience cannot be argued with. And cherry-picking which adoptees to support is ridiculous. Support needs to be given to those who need it.

Recognizing these emotions is a step to understanding why certain parts of the adoption world need reform.

Real reforms to rectify the past have to occur. Some are very simple in actuality like giving access to adoptee’s birth records. This idea is bogged down by politics and the emotions of projecting what birthmothers were feeling at the time of separation. Opponents of adoptee access create a large laundry list of assumptions while trying to argue against this simple task that would allow people to heal as well as restore their human and moral right to know who they are.

Real reform to root out corruption and to improve processes to make sure that the prospective parents are trained and ready to accept the child and to make sure that the child (who is legally available for adoption) is actually ready and wanting to be adopted also needs to occur.

REFORM Puzzle Piece