National Adoption Awareness Month, past the smiles

National Adoption Month. A month to highlight adoption. Smiling faces and smiley faces on hands, on twitter feeds to celebrate the joy brought to so many. But adoption is so much more, and for me, it is joy and sorrow and identity and longing and belonging. In highlighting adoption through this month’s awareness campaign, the points to the adoption triad become sharp and isolated, making one role more valid than the other.  Adoptive parents are hailed as heroes, when in fact we are people parenting in the every day. Adoptees are somehow expected to take on the life and history of their adoptive parents, keeping identity just past our reach. And  we are told that birth mothers are unable or unwilling to raise their children, expected to get on with their lives, when the truth is we are connected to these children forever, never truly getting on with our lives. To those of us who live these truths, campaigns such as National Adoption Awareness month must tell the entire story of adoption. Yes highlight the love, but validate us and all that is adoption, not just the smiles.  

1 comment:

  1. We are all strong in our own way. I am an adoptee who has lived my life with my adopted families cousins etc...as my own, knowing I had blood people out there, my birth mother took my existence to the grave, as a mother myself, that took fortitude, my mom who raised me gives me love and never a second doubt that I was her own baby. We all play our parts with integrity and love.

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