Last night, on meeting an adoptee for the first time, a friend and I were asked “Did you have a good adoption?” In a split second, I had to decide whether to let it go or to challenge this language with a complete stranger. [laughing] “I could give you a rant about why I don’t […]
Category: Personal reflection
But there is a price for this help. Always a price. And that price is having your life put on show, having your complex, raw, unprocessed emotions filmed, Davina leaning in.
Categories
A sense of belonging
I can go back to the first house I was taken to when I was adopted, not far from where I now live. The house I grew up in is in the village where I still live today. This is part of my jigsaw.
Let’s remember that we were children but children grow up into adults and those adults want answers as to who they are and where they came from. Coram IAC owes it to us and our next generation. We are not ornaments or souvenirs, we are people with a past history and an origin story that belongs to us.
Freddie’s inability to communicate her true feelings echoes that of us all. We are silenced, unable to articulate the trauma that lives in our bodies. We as intercountry adoptees are made to feel grateful for being saved from a culture that is deemed inferior to western society. However, those same western societies see us as different. This is the paradox of being an intercountry adoptee. We don’t belong to either society and never will.
Beautiful reading from Maggie Lyng on Mother’s Day from the perspective as an adoptee. This is published in the loss section of A Page from my Life Thank you Maggie!
Every year, I struggled with this Day. Nobody knew. Not one person. Not a teacher, nor my parents, nor my extended family, nor my friends.
Genetic mirroring is being able to see yourself in the family that surrounds you because of your shared DNA, something adoptees are denied
How do we come to recognise that we are traumatised? At what point in your life do you allow yourself to be excused—and to excuse yourself—because you finally realise you have The Trauma? When I say ‘finally’ I mean that as adoptees we have lived our lives thinking that we were ‘not quite right’ because […]
Adoption makes people uncomfortable. If you mention you are adopted you generally get one of two responses: a slight look of horror and a quick subject change, or a tilted head “poor you”. I get it. Adoption is complicated and you don’t want to put your foot in it. Of more concern are those who […]