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Reflections of an Adult Adoptee, Page 2

Losing Her Place

When she was 15, her father died of cancer. A year later, her mother died. Any sense of identity as part of an entity outside herself died also. And patterns developed as a child ran wild in her adolescence.

She had no sense of belonging.

If you have lived through something like this, either yourself or with someone close to you, then you know the destruction it causes. She hurt people around her when she betrayed their trust, caught them up in her all-consuming need for acceptance, for belonging, for being - yes, again - good enough. She hurt others and she destroyed herself.

Too dramatic?

At a time when she should have been developing interpersonal skills, developing close friendships, maturing in relationship, the only relationship she had was with herself. Constructing new "acceptable" identities is very time-consuming. She had little time for anything else. Oh, she interacted on a surface level with people every day, but when all she presented to the world was an agreeable, interesting shell with nothing to back it up, she could not participate in a real giving, sharing, loving relationship. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that her history is marked by a long series of broken relationships, of unkept promises and unmet obligations.

She did care about people in a general kind of way, but feelings like maternal instinct, friendship, and loyalty were anathema. She never knew how to put anyone ahead of herself. Her own survival was of paramount importance. Rarely did she take time to enjoy her very real and not inconsequential accomplishments and achievements. Rarely did she turn her energy and attention outward.

It continued into adulthood. If she wasn't good enough to be loved and wanted as a child, why on earth would she be good enough now? And if that sounds like adolescent thinking, that's just what it is. When her social and family connections disappeared with her parents' deaths, and nothing stepped in to replace them, she didn't go looking for help. She stuck to the only way she knew. And as a result, she did not mature in oh, so many ways.

The Turning Point

It wasn't until she was in her 40s that she began to understand that a life of broken relationships, alienation from her children, eating problems, and an almost physical inability to tell the truth when she saw that truth as a threat, were within her control. She could get help. Along with counseling, that help involved reaching out to help others.

She was living in Greece (she had lived there for 20+ years) and a friend asked her to talk to friends who had adopted a daughter and had the eternal questions about "when and how to tell." Starting from that first conversation, the outreach grew into a vocation and expanded into talking with families seeking to adopt, orphanages, expectant women, and other adult adoptees.

One of the greatest needs was outside resources: books, articles, magazines. Every time she came to the States on a visit, she would haunt book stores and libraries, second-hand book outlets, and magazine publishers. When the Internet became readily available, it was as though the skies had opened up. Program staff and members found Web sites, literary and scholarly articles, and best of all, they discovered that people were talking about adoption. Birth parents were talking. Adoptive parents were talking. Adoptees were talking. It was only natural that she would become an addict... an Internet addict. She began making enormous lists of resources; she would sit and download newsgroup postings to read later; she made notes of names, people, books, organizations. Within the scope of prevalent social customs, program personnel tried to incorporate as much of this as possible in working with their Greek and Eastern European friends, but it all had an enormous effect on her.

When the opportunity arose to continue that outreach on the Internet, she jumped at it. Talking to others and listening to their truths has been a big part of an ongoing process of learning and coping.

© Nancy S Ashe

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