...know about, understand, and/or acknowledge your loss? How did that affect you?
To clarify, what I mean by "loss" is the loss of the biological family. Adoption cannot happen without the loss of the first family. I understand each individual processes this loss differently. I'm just curious if the aparents acknowledged the loss.
Thank you all for wonderful answers!
LaurieDB
Favorite Answer
I was adopted back in the "old days." There was no such thing as open adoption. People often did not know why a child was available for adoption. There weren't many books available on the subject of adoption.
Despite this, I think that any parent with common sense understood that a loss had occurred. I don't say that to sound snippy, it's just that most of the people who adopted back in those days tell me that they realized there had been a loss.
My amom said she thought about that every one of my birthdays. When I was very, very young, I remember my younger abrother (my parents' biological child) complaining about how I reacted to something. My afather said to him that he needed to understand that I didn't have parents to hold me very early on. (I was adopted out of foster care, and my aparents envisioned foster care as an orphanage.)
So, yes, they understood that there was a loss. I was very, very glad that they didn't think I just "metamorphasized" out of nothing and dropped into their home one day. I was glad that they could acknowledge my beginnings, the loss in those beginnings, and how it could have affected me.
Anonymous
As Phil said, my adoptive parents did the best they could with the info they were given. No loss was acknowleged then by anyone involved with adoption.
It made me feel there must be something terribly wrong with me--to have been given away in the first place and to have feelings about it that were not supposed to exist. This led to my believing that none of my "negative" feelings about anything should be shared. I don't know how many times some problem came to a head and one of my parents would say "But why didn't you ask for help? Why didn't you tell us you were sad/angry?"
We didn't talk about it openly until I was in my late twenties, and I still feel there are things I can't quite say. I think--I hope--we're doing better by adoptees today.
Anonymous
I don't know if they fully knew how much it was going to affect my relationships as I grew up, and some of the fears I had, but as those things came up they were very understanding as I went through it. They didn't make me feel like I was a crazy or anything lol for feeling the way I did. They just helped me deal with problems as they came up.
Obviously, this made my adoption experience a lot better then it could have been.
L M
That's hard to answer, because even I don't fully understand my loss. My "adoption journey" is still developing even though it's been 44 years since I was adopted.
But yes, my parents acknowleged that there was loss and pain involved. The difficult thing is that they were encouraged to "just make me feel like one of the family", and not to focus on my biological/enthic differences. I spent a lot of years knowing nothing about my birth culture, which was hard since I grew up in a multi-ethnic family.
I am now raising a daughter who we adopted who was born into another culture. I am trying hard to accept all of her feelings about adoption/loss/pain/birth relatives, and to share as much of her birth culture with her.
Anonymous
It was never acknowledged - and I was never allowed to talk about my adoption/first family - as it upset my a-mother.
She made it all about her - not about me.
This in turn caused me to daydream constantly about my first family.
It also made my adoption a 'bad' experience / an experience to be somewhat ashamed of.
If a-parents aren't open and honest - and keep their own feelings in check - adoptees can feel as though their adoption is shameful - and therefore they are to be shamed.
I'm sure it had a major effect of my personal skills - and I became the ultimate people pleaser - trying my hardest to impress so that peeps would like me - hoping that they wouldn't reject me.
I think that only when there is openness, honesty, respect and complete transparency in adoption - about the losses (not all may feel it - but their ARE losses), about the reasons, about the history, about the people - that adoptees can feel more OK about themselves and about their adoption.