I was given the link to a blog post a while ago. The post itself is well worth a read – a copied story of an adoptee who grew up in an open adoption. This adoptee in particular had a negative experience growing up. I personally crave hearing about adoptees who have grown up with open adoptions because I wonder every day how my daughter might feel and because I believe deeply in the concept of a true familial relationship between adoptive and biological families of the child.
The problem that I had came with reading the comments on the post. Without fail, almost every comment blamed adoption and specifically adoptive parents for causing the pain and loss experienced by adoptees and first mothers who were “coerced” into adoption. I’m not saying that coercion doesn’t happen by putting that word into quotes. What I am saying is that there are mothers in general who might feel as if they were coerced into relinquishing their children when they might not have actually been coerced. I’m not speaking of the biological mothers who commented on the post or even of the author of the post.
There seems to be a universal attitude especially from people whose adoption experiences were painful that life would have been dreamy and perfect had they been either raised by their biological parents or been able to raise their biological children. One cannot know if this is a fact or not. I was raised by both of my biological parents. They are still married, in fact. But was my life pain free? It wasn’t by any definition of the word. My father was abusive to me when I was a child, and I can vividly remember thinking many times that life would be much better if I were being raised by someone else. However, those experiences have made me who I am. They’ve helped mold my life into what it is now.
This general attitude also spills over into adoption coercion and some hopeful adoptive parents who may feel entitled to the child of someone else simply because they feel or are told by the adoption industry that a person’s circumstances don’t present an “ideal” environment for raising her child. I regularly encounter birth moms who were told that their child would be “better off” with an adoptive family and some of them believe that without reservation. In fact at the beginning of June there was a passionate discussion on the BirthMom Buds Facebook wall about whether one gave their child a better life or not by placing them with an adoptive family.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that my daughter’s adoptive parents aren’t doing a great job being her parents, nor am I saying it’s impossible for a child to be happy and content in an adoptive family instead of being raised by his or her biological family. However, my argument is that one cannot say that their child is in a better place or a worse one, for that matter. Different, yes. But not better or worse. Divorce happens in adoptive families just as it does in any other family. There is just as much chance of job loss or loss of health with an adoptive parent as there is in a biological parent. One can also not guarantee that life would be better or worse for that child had he or she been raised in his or her biological family. There are several birth moms who seem to believe that because they might be in a more stable long-term relationship than their child’s adoptive parents or because they might be making more financially than their child’s adoptive parents that they would’ve been able to provide the same things to that child had that child been kept. Unfortunately they cannot say that. The decision that was made, whether they made it without coercion or were coerced into making that decision, led their life down a different path than the one they might have gone on had they parented and not placed. If I hadn’t married my ex husband, I wouldn’t have divorced him, gone on to make the same decisions I made and met Nick. Yes, marriage and relationships are major decisions where it’s easy to see how life might have been different had things not gone exactly the way they did. But why then does the same logic somehow not apply to adoption or parenting one’s child? It’s very possible that had the birth moms I mentioned raised their kids that they might not have been provided the same opportunities or met the same people that they met because they relinquished. They might have. However there is absolutely no guarantee. Hindsight is 20/20, but we can’t go back and change circumstances just slightly and expect the same results to happen with slight variations for the “better.” The other issue I have with the “better” sentiments as it applies to adoption is that there would be no basis for comparison. If relinquishment hadn’t happened they wouldn’t know any different. The parents of that child wouldn’t know what life would have been like had they relinquished, and the adoptive parents of that child would simply never have known that there was a possibility. They may have adopted another child or they may not have adopted. But where there is no possibility at all there is no chance for regret.
That of course is the basis for use of the sentiment that our children are better off with or without us: regret. Whether one regrets placement or whether one regrets the choices that led them to adoption in the first place, there can be a lot of regret associated with adoption. I know as a birth mom myself that it’s easy to get caught in the lands of “if-onlys” and “what-ifs.” I’ve also talked with enough people who have struggled with infertility to know that their loss of either not being able to conceive or to carry a baby to full term can easily put them into the same what-ifs and if-onlys. That dreaming about what might have been is exactly the reason for believing life would be better or worse if we hadn’t adopted or relinquished our child to adoption. We can imagine what our life might have been like, but even that is only a maybe. Even if we had changed whatever decision we want to change, we don’t know that life would go exactly the way we envision it might have gone. I’m certain we’ve all made plans that were then destroyed by something unexpected.
I do have sympathy for especially those birth moms who haven’t come to terms with their adoptions as I can easily put myself in their shoes. As much as I’ve come to terms with my own adoption decision, I still deal with regret. I know what pains that regret can cause and the grief that inspires the regret in the first place. But our children do not have a “better” or “worse” life since relinquishment, just different, and life is pain. There will always be something that will not go as planned. There will always be pain and loss. I admittedly cannot stand Justin Bieber and will change the station if one of his songs gets played. But in his song “As Long As You Love Me”, there’s a line that says, “The grass aint greener on the other side; it’s greener where you water it.” That is a genius line. We like to convince ourselves that if we could only go back and change a certain something, or if we could change our circumstances to be something that they’re not that our lives would be “better.” But not only should we worry about our own “grass” instead of thinking life would be so much better with a different set of circumstances, there is no way to guarantee that life would be “better” if we were able to make the change(s) we want to make. It would be different. But since we wouldn’t know what our life might have been if we hadn’t made the change, we cannot compare and decide with access to full information.
