On my Adoption Day: Reckoning with my Adoption FOG

 

3mo old me on my adoption day

It's my adoption day. Usually I talk about my adoption story on this day, but I've done that here and here, so you can go read that should you desire. Instead I want to talk about the Adoption FOG, about how it's different for every adoptee, about how I was a little out of the FOG most of my life, but still de-FOG every damn day. 

First, what is it? For those that don't know, FOG is an acronym: Fear, Obligation, Guilt. Abuse survivors of any kind can experience the FOG. It's the world we build for ourselves (with the manipulation of outside sources, usually the abuser, but also societal expectations, etc.) out of survival and self-preservation. 

The Adoption FOG, then, is just that but applied specifically to adoptees, but also affects first parents in their way and also even adoptive parents (who are often manipulated by the adoption industry and suffering their own unhealed trauma of infertility). 

The Adoption FOG often lifts through education, therapy, finding other adoptees, etc. I've spoken to adoptees who describe coming out of the FOG like being thrown off a cliff, because it's so earth-shattering. I've also spoken to adoptees who never felt in the FOG, especially some Transracial Adoptees (TRAs) I know, for who the pretending of "Happy Adoption Land" was never really possible due to the specific kinds of trauma that occurs for them. 

For me? It feels complicated. There are parts of me that were never in the FOG while other parts firmly were, because I was raised by an abusive mother who was an early childhood development specialist. I was informed that I showed signs of abandonment trauma by my adoptive mother and it was something that was accepted and normalized. She rubbed my back while I cried for my first mother and my sister and looked for my birth dad at truck stops and never told me I had to stop or made me feel guilty for those tears. She encouraged me to find my birth family and talked about them as who they were: my family. 

But at the same time, she would threaten to send me back if I displeased her (not to mention the beatings, but I suppressed those memories) and she certainly never sought therapy for me for the trauma she told me I had. So, even as a child, I knew I had trauma and I knew I had "issues" regarding my adoption, but I still clung deeply to the family I felt was my second chance and still very much bought into the institution of adoption. 

I secretly hated being adopted while fearing admitting as much would make me an orphan again. I just wanted to feel normal and thought the problem was me. I recognized the trauma but blamed myself. I saw the issues I had but didn't connect that the problem was adoption itself. 

When I was in college, I wrote a monologue about hating being an adoptee and being abnormal. I just wanted to feel like everyone else. I think I wanted to be IN the FOG more than I was capable of being. 

When I was 23, my doctor found a lump in my breast and ordered a mammogram. I had to fight with the mammogram tech to do the test because she said I didn't have a history of breast cancer in my family. I sobbed that, "not knowing your family history isn't the same as not having one." I hated being an adoptee that day, not knowing if I might die young because I didn't know and couldn't know my family history. 

When I started with my first therapist at age 27, before I even admitted to myself that I was an abused child, I told her about my a-mom threatening to send me back and how I was afraid of abandonment due to being adopted. Again, I knew my adoption "issues," but I didn't know how to deal with them. Then, with that therapist, I recovered memories of my abuse and finally chose estrangement from my a-mom, but it felt more about the abuse than adoption. I came out of the abuse FOG, but adoption FOG was too big to face at that time. 

When I started with therapist number 2 at age 33 or 34 (I think), she taught me about maternal separation and showed me studied on what infants experience in utero. She taught me that I probably felt that separation before birth and then the subsequent developmental traumas I experienced at birth being removed from my mother, never being held by her or fed by her, going to the foster home, and then to my adoptive home. She showed me an age chart of how I developed differently than my peers. She educated me on naming my adoption trauma so much more clearly than I'd ever had before and helped me feel validated. For the first time, I really admitted to myself that adoption trauma happens to all adoptees, not just me or not just those of us who were abused. 

With therapist number 3, she helped me through my DNA test and the unexpected grief that came tumbling out when I learned how I my first mother died, the delayed grief I hadn't been allowed to feel from losing her at birth. She helped me navigate that grief and validated those feelings and then helped me through some preverbal healing exercises - healing specific to adoption trauma. 

I've been truly lucky to have all 3 of my therapists be validating of my adoption loss and trauma, despite little to no training in such for most therapists in our country. 

But, friends, the biggest steps forward happened during the first year of the pandemic when I found the adoptee community. Finding people like me was SO incredibly validating, but it's what they taught me that really pulled me out of the last bit of FOG. I remember vividly still resisting the "all adoption is bad" idea even though I was ready to finally share all of my adoption trauma and knew we all had trauma. 

Because the trauma wasn't enough to disillusion myself from the institution of adoption. It took learning about the systemic causes of adoption, about Georgia Tann and the multi-billion dollar for-profit adoption industry, learning that adoption in America is basically human trafficking. It took learning that the foster system targets poor and marginalized people to feed their children into the system, learning that most adoptions and TPRs are due to poverty and not abuse. It took learning that adoptees are over-represented statistically in suicide, filicide, child abuse, prisons, houselessness, and even serial killers. It took learning that it's all capitalism and the system is designed to exploit vulnerable people so that their babies and children can be trafficked to the white, wealthy, and Christian. 

The trauma was personal, but it took the political to see how I was marginalized when I didn't even know it and to pull me into the light and radicalize me into fighting for the rights of all adoptees and fight for family preservation and fight for a society that prevents family separation and adoption. 

The FOG, for me, was very little about the trauma (though that was certainly part of it), but almost all about our oppression. 

So where I am personally today? 

• Still working on healing my trauma every day
• Still hate being adopted and sometimes it feels like I'll wake up and it was all a bad dream
• Still do not forgive those who have caused me trauma, but I accept it happened and cannot change it and must live with it, like a chronic illness 
• Still cultivating and maintaining strong relationships with the family and friends who I know love and support me and am trying to believe they won't abandon me
• Still exhausted from fighting but still tenacious and proud of that tenacity
• Still ache for my first mother and I doubt that ache will ever leave me
• Still angry at my birth father for everything he did to me and my mother 
• Will always hate the adoption industry and everyone who profits off the selling of children

They bought a baby