Love Letters to Anne

This story is my adoption story...It's not always a happy story, full of twists and turns, as well as unexpected victories and crushing defeats. But let's not get ahead of ourselves yet.

It's the early 70's, and a young, unwed teenage girl has a problem. She's pregnant. Her and her boyfriend have just discovered they will be parents. Their parents, well, they have conflicting ideas about how to handle the situation. The end result was that I was put up for adoption and lost my family. I cannot understate the damage this does to an infant's psyche.

It doesn't matter how much love they may have had or felt for me; I was conceived and born in secret. I was stolen from my mother before she could even have the chance to hold me, to bond with me, to reassure and welcome me into the world. This was just the way it was. The child has no rights as an infant.

The agency didn't want to let the mother and child bond...maybe they figured it was easier for everyone involved, but really, it was to cover their tracks and put me into a bondage I fought my whole life to escape. You see, adoption isn't always some Panacea where the baby goes away and the parents' problems are solved and the child goes on to live a better life, no. Sometimes, and more specifically, this time, it was something completely different. From one darkness into another.

You see, back then, the business model was to offer an easy way out and acquire the children and then place them with other families obscuring the origins of the whole affair by manipulating the facts for the child. They must have figured that if the path was erased and falsified, the child would just accept everything and move on with their life. But in my case I just couldn't accept it. I was empty and grieving the loss of my mother. And well meaning people along the way just couldn't understand why I, (as the adoptee who had been placed) wasn't grateful.

I was placed, but the life I was sold into wasn't better. We struggled and the new family I was now a part of, while perhaps well meaning, didn't know how to deal with my anger and resentment, my grief or my sorrow. They didn't know how to deal and after a while, grew distant. Was this the better life? How did their lack of preparedness for a child help me? The people who adopted me had the credentials enough to be parents, (meaning they had the money to afford a baby from the agency) but they were ill prepared to take on the role of caretakers for a child who couldn't yet speak, but knew the sorrow of loss and felt it to his core. It was a festering wound in my soul that only one thing could fix: the reuniting of the child with his birth family.

I remember I was told at least twice as a child that I was different from the other kids, I was adopted, and that meant that even though my parents weren't my parents, they loved me and wanted me, they chose me out of all the others in the orphanage, I was special. What horse shit. I remember the devastation I felt. My mom was not my mom, my dad was not my dad. Everything I knew was a lie. What else would they lie about? What else had they lied about? It was a watershed moment in my life that I will never forget. I remember feeling resentment, although I didn't know the word for it at that time, and the facts presented to me compounded the malaise I already felt, the anxiety of never feeling good enough...all the awful emotions you feel in a loss you have no control over. Whatever I had forgotten about the birth and adoption process, had all come crashing back into the forefront of my emotions and all those feelings that had never went away, now were front and center again. I was maybe 6.

Grateful? For what exactly? That I had been stolen from my family and sent into the world with ineffectual, unprepared, and quite frankly, unqualified people who would eventually just treat my malaise with indifference at best, and accepted it as just a personality defect. But I had been damaged. I had been wounded deeply into my core having been stripped of any choice in anything that related to me. They had even changed my name. The one thing I had left and they tried to erase that too. What did I have to be grateful about exactly?

Don't misunderstand me. I am not entirely calloused to the people who adopted me. That family, for a time, at times, was even a pleasant place, but even this didn't change the facts: I had been stolen from my blood. I was sold to other people. My birth certificate altered, made official, and then they changed my name. I have most of the adoption paperwork still to this day. This to me in retrospect, smacks of ownership. Like one could own another person the way one could go to the shelter and own an animal. We have a word for that condition. What would you call it? I call it slavery. Born into a bondage that the entire world felt I should be grateful for. I belong to me.

Fuck all the way off.