You just had a bad experience

 Every adoptee who's talked about adoption trauma or the adoption industry on the internet has had the titular phrase lobbed at them as a means to dismiss, invalidate, and shut us down. People don't want to believe anything can be wrong with adoption and therefore can dismiss our extremely valid complaints as one-offs. We "just had a bad experience," therefore adoption is still beautiful. 

I often hear this coupled with, "because you were abused." As if abuse isn't baked right into the system, as if a disproportionate number of adoptees aren't abused as compared to their kept peers. Okay, sure, my abuse did make my "experience" bad. Sure did! But also, my trauma began before my adoptive mom came into my life and compounded it. But also, I experienced deep and meaningful loss on my first day on the planet. But also, in lots of ways, my adoptive parents did a lot, that many would argue, right! I'll come back to that.

I also hear, from adoptees and strangers alike, that my seeking reunion was "easier" for me because I didn't have good adoptive parents. Which is like? Not the point of reunion at all, but also, I had two adoptive parents, one abusive yes, but also one who was loving and kind and did his best, despite being in over his head with adoption. But also? I have a big extended adoptive family who love me and support me and I'm not betraying them or rocking the boat by seeking my first family; I'm simply searching for my roots and finding the lost parts of myself and they know that...and support that. 

But ALSO??? Reunion was not and is not in any way easy! It was hard and scary to even begin the process and continues to be challenging. I took terrified little baby steps toward it for decades before I made any big moves. I was scared, like many adoptees, of secondary rejection, of what and who I'd find, of feeling out of control and traumatized again. And, yes, it became a little easier when I found my birth mom was dead, because the risk of rejection by an aunt is quite different than from a parent, but that alone came with a huge amount of grief and pain. 

The loss and pain of knowing I'll never ever meet the person who brought me into the world and then gave me away, will never dissipate. I see reunion stories where adoptees describe recognizing their birth mothers' voice or scent and I just ACHE for that feeling, inwardly crying that I'll never have that bond ever. But I still sought reunion because I needed it. I needed to know where I came from. And it still took me over a decade to email any single family member, because it's fucking scary. It's scary for all of us. 

If anything at all made it easier for me, it was having the support and even pushiness of my adoptive family throughout my whole life. If an adoptee is scared of reunion because they're scared of losing the support and love of their families, that's on the families, not us. That's because their adoptive parents haven't been supportive of the need and right to know all of who we are and where we came from.

I didn't seek reunion to replace family or to even create new family. I knew, at my age, that very little relationships could be salvaged (though I still hope for some kind of friendship with my sisters). My adoptive family is still who they are. I was lucky in that, when I estranged from my adoptive mom, my mom, I was able to curate my family and keep the good ones close and so those are the people still here, supporting me and loving me. They're not being replaced. I'm simply filling in the much needed pieces. 

But that does bring me to what they did right! I often say to my therapist how ironic it is that my mom was abusive, because she had the capacity and knowledge to be, at least in theory, a "good" adoptive parent. She could've been a good mom if not for a personality disorder and the ungrieved loss of too many babies. If we set aside the abuse for now (I know), there's a lot she did right on paper.

She was an early childhood development specialist for fuck's sake. She knew about development and trauma, and, while the knowledge of adoption trauma at the time was abysmal (and really not that much better now), her approach would have been considered progressive. 

She asked for an open adoption, knowing outcomes are better for adoptees who aren't severed from their first families, and she was denied. She asked for my family medical history and was mostly denied, except my birth father told her his personal medical conditions. She asked for photos of my parents and sister and for a letter from at least one parent, and she was denied. When they went through the adoption process, my parents were in a cohort of other hopeful adoptive parents and my mom wanted to keep in contact and form a cohort of adoptees to grow up with, so we'd all feel less alien and have a built-in support group. No one was interested. 

Then they raised me to be open with my adoption. They always told me I was adopted and I knew what that meant. They told me everything they knew about my first family and were totally honest with what little they were told. And they ALWAYS encouraged me to find my family when I turned 18 (we all naively thought it would be easy at that legal point) and pushed me over the years to do it, even when I wasn't necessarily ready to. I'd say sometimes they were TOO pushy, but I'll take that over the horror stories other adoptees have told me. 

They allowed me to express distress and feelings of abandonment and didn't make me feel like I had to deny my biological heritage. BUT, the problem with that was, in my view, that while they understood abandonment trauma, they didn't understand the preverbal loss I'd experienced and which is baked right into adoption. Every adoptee experiences loss and that loss is necessary for adoption to occur. How we process and react to loss varies of course, but we have to have loss to have adoption. So I don't think many adoptive parents understand this, but adoptees need to be taught how to and encouraged to grieve that loss, like any death, instead of providing platitudes and believing love can fix it. 

Adoption loss is the only loss which isn't granted the permission of grief. If a child's parent dies, that child is allowed to grieve (even in the clumsy ways our society addresses grief). But people recognize the tragedy and pain of that loss. Adoptees are simply traded into a new family and are expected to not feel any loss at all, because they have new parents, so what's to grieve! But we now know that every human, regardless of age, feels loss and that grief is necessary. And that's not even addressing that, for most adoptees, we lose our entire families, not just one person. 

My parents often "comforted" my abandonment distress by giving me platitudes of my birth mom's "sacrifice" so "she can bring you to us," or "god's plan" for me, which, while that sounds benign (but is pretty selfish imo), totally squashed my very real need to grieve a loss I'd experienced before I had words to even know what it was. So that taught my developing brain that loss is apparently a good thing and I should just accept it and welcome it, abandonment is inevitable, and then, weirdly, for a long time I equated death with abandonment, because that's what I learned. I remember at the death of a beloved aunt when I was 7, feeling like I didn't understand why she'd left ME. I didn't understand loss; I only knew abandonment.

The other big problem with doing everything right and trying to love away the trauma is that it doesn't change anything, because, by design, I would always BE adopted. I had a big extended family that loved me as one of their own and often forgot I was adopted because I was so good at "fitting in." But I didn't forget. I always knew. I still noticed every tiny difference every single day. I still hustled to adapt and conform and perform and fit in. Every adaptation, however small, was due to effort on my part. I was constantly aware that they loved me, but that "as if" one of their own hung over my head like a guillotine, threatening to come down if I made a misstep, severing me from them and leaving me abandoned and alone again.

It's important to note that these weren't messages coming from the people themselves. This is a bug of the system, of adoption itself, that a traumatized, abandoned child will be afraid of losing any love we receive and will do everything we can to not run it off while feeling like abandonment is inevitable, because why else were we abandoned in the first place if not because we didn't deserve the first person we knew, the person who created us and birthed us? Because, even though that was not the messaging my parents told me over the course of my childhood, it's what I learned when I was born and not given to the person my body expected, when I didn't hear the familiar voice or heartbeat or the familiar smell or the touch of the person who'd carried me as I began to exist, our blood mingling as one. It's what I learned when I was alone in a hospital without the person I needed most. That was the day I learned I was disposable so I'd better be better than I was if I were to survive. 

As an aside, I've been doing some preverbal trauma healing in therapy and it's fucking powerful. I'll tell you about it sometime. 

It's also important to note that hiding the adoption and lying to the adoptee doesn't prevent the issues I experienced while knowing about my adoption. Late discovery adoptees, for one, always find out eventually, and often describe spotting the differences and feeling out of place and feelings of loss before they knew. Lies only compound the trauma and the later discover is traumatic on its own. 

So it doesn't matter how loved we are, how supported we are, how informed our adoptive parents are, because the trauma comes from adoption itself. Other traumas compound that initial trauma, such as abuse. And trauma-informed adoptive parents can do lots of things to help their adoptees grieve, cope, and heal. But we can't pretend the trauma doesn't happen. It doesn't really matter if the adoption was absolutely necessary and the only option for that child (which honestly I've begun to think was true in my case), because that child will still have experienced trauma and loss and that will require attention. 

So yeah, it's not that I just had a bad experience; adoption is a bad experience.