Sunday, June 29, 2014

Why?





"Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful" - The Reverend Keith C. Griffith, MBE


I often find myself asking ‘Why’

I think like most adoptive parents, the people who adopted me started out with good intentions, a yearning to have a family that they could not conceive on their own. But the good intentions, at least for me, went awry.  When I look back, I can pinpoint when it all changed for me. I
became damaged goods, and the way my adoptive parents treated me changed.  Many adopted children will show the after effect of their adoption in different ways. For me, it started to show when I was 9. I started to have problems at school, I was the target of severe bullying. Unable to stand up for myself, or fight, it became a waking nightmare.  I understand why I wasn’t able to stand up for myself, my parents had already been bullying me. Apparently they felt I talked too much as a child, and started to call me ‘motor mouth’ every time I spoke too much. I can recall being in the back of the car, in tears that I wasn’t allowed to express myself, and being bullied by my parents. It was so rampant, that even their “adult” friends joined in. (Many years later an old friend of theirs came by after an absence of a decade or more. Upon seeing me, a teenager at this point, the first words he spoke to me were “MOTOR MOUTH!” in greeting. Bullying was acceptable to my adoptive parents, and it is a life-long habit of theirs.) As a 9 year-old, school for me became about survival, long gone was learning. I was just trying to survive, and I shut down.  Soon I fell behind in school, and found myself seeing school counselors and other “professionals” to figure out exactly what the issues was. I remember having my IQ tested, seeing a psychiatrist, ink blot tests, and pages of questionnaires in an effort to figure out what was wrong with me.  In the end I was told that my adoption had nothing to do with my ‘issues’, but the experts did seem to feel that because I spent the first two months of my life in a commercial nursery that kept sterile conditions with the use of facemasks. That it was not adoption that affected me, but rather not seeing a full human face for the first two months of my life that affected me.  I just like to interject here, what a complete cart of bullshit that is.  So at the age of 9, I was misdiagnosed, and never received any help.  Neatly because of the “experts” diagnosis, anything I felt or said was dismissed because the “experts” said…….  I spent a lot of time curled up in my closet crying, trying to find comfort. I remember begging for my mother (biological) to come rescue me from this house, but she never came.  I recall at 9, wanting to die. Trying to figure out how to hang myself with a belt in my closet. I wasn’t able to make it work, had the internet existed in the 70’s I would have been much more successful I’m sure.


My adoptive mother wasn’t exactly the best mother even in the best of times. And now I was ‘damaged goods’ in her eyes, and her parenting started to rapidly decline. She showed less interest in me, and I started to become love starved. I can recall making over-the-top declarations of how much I loved her, hoping that just once she would reciprocate….. but she never did.

Like many adopted children, as I got older I started to have abandonment fears. For an adopted child, the worst has already happened… you’ve already been abandoned by your mother.  So waiting and watching for other adult care takers in your life to do the same, is a survival instinct.  My fears presented when I was in public places with my parents, fear of getting lost from them. My adoptive mother felt the best way to deal with this, was to wait until they were in a parking lot…. And start running to the car, jump in, lock the doors, and drive off without me.  In her warped narcissistic mind, she was teaching me a lesson for being to ‘clingy’.  I can recall the feeling of helplessness watching them drive off without me.  When I complained, my feelings were always dismissed, they came back after all… and how dare I be upset.  Time and time again, I would watch my mother start walking faster, poke my father… and they would start running to the car in an effort to beat me to it. So many times I remember standing their knocking on the glass, begging to be let in…. wondering if they would drive off without me again.

In later years, she would decry that they only drove off without me once, and I was making a big deal of nothing.  But at 9 I learned that they could do whatever they wanted to me, and I had to take it…. I had no voice…. Again I think she viewed me as ‘damaged goods’ and why not just treat me badly….

 I think deep down she just wanted me to go away.





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