Adopt: Ask Our Expert: Marcy Axness

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As a respected authority on the social and psychological issues of adoption, MARCY AXNESS has spoken to audiences throughout North America and recently in New Zealand, and appears at several sites on the World Wide Web. Formerly an award-winning television news and documentary producer, Ms. Axness is also a writer whose work has appeared in several adoption and social work magazines, as well as popular magazines and major newspapers.

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IMPORTANT NOTICE

Teen Adoptee
I was a adopted when I was 7 months old from South Korea. My parents are white. Now I'm 15 years old, and everybody knows it's hard enough to find yourself when you're a teenager, but it's even harder being adopted. I love my parents, but is it so wrong to want to know who I look like?

Response from Marcy:
Dear Allison:
You're right--adolescence is a time of turmoil, of trying to sort out from amidst the tumult of raging hormones and societal/peer pressures who exactly it is you ARE. Most teens have the grounding experience of knowing that they have their mother's smile, their father's curly hair, their grandfather's spitfire temperment...and that gives them a certain sense of security, a firm foundation against which to rebel in that adolescent way that has earned teenagers a rotten reputation. Adoptees don't have quite the secure base against which they can feel safe rebelling; when you don't know where it is you ARE, it's hard to feel secure enough to flail about trying to find a new place to BE.

On top of all of the other challenges of being adopted, you have the added one of having lost an entire country and culture. I always encourage parents who are bringing to their home a child from another country, to bring as much as they can of that world home, to share with the child. A friend of mine just came back from China with a daughter, after pushing as hard as she could against the red tape to procure all of the documents she could about her daughter's 13-month history as possible. She wisely knows that this part of her story will be incredibly important to her daughter as she grows up. She also made audio tapes of the sounds of her daughter's birth city, brought back music, pictures of her daughter's "abandonment site" as they call it, and even two tattered, dirty sweaters, hand-knit for her daughter by her foster-mother.

My friend found that she was the exception among the American parents adopting babies in China. Most didn't want "those filthy papers" or anything else pertaining to their childrens' background; they were anxious to simply fly their "blank slate" baby out of that place and back home to nice clean America, where they had fashioned brand new lives for their brand new daughters.

Wise adoptive parents know that it is not wrong for their adoptive children to wonder where they came from. This goes for children adopted here in America, and perhaps even moreso for those adopted from abroad, who grow up looking at faces who are so very different, who may never feel a resonance with a culture that is so different from that into which he or she was born. There is something very powerful about collective and cultural consciousness, and I have heard about many inter-country adoptees who, upon returning to their native land, have felt a powerful sense of finally "being home".

I suggest that you tell your parents, from your heart, how you feel...that you'd like to maybe take a trip to Korea, to see your native land, to hear the sounds there, smell the smells there. Also, ROOTS & WINGS magazine--featured on this homepage--has frequent articles about culture camps and other ways in which adoptive parents can support their childrens' connection to their racial and cultural roots.

Also, there is a book by Peter Dodds called OUTER SEARCH/INNER JOURNEY, which you might find helpful to read, so you don't feel so strange with the feelings you have of wondering.

Good luck.
Marcy Axness

Question:
Wrote about beginning my search to you a couple of days ago, at that time I had not seen your questions and answers. I am very new at this internet stuff, so am learning by experience. I have a big knot in my stomach just reading all the questions and answers you have given to people. I guess it boils down to Ihave such bittersweet emotions. I am so eager to find my birthmother, but at the same time scared. Scared she won't want to hear from me, scared she might be dead and I have waited too long, all kinds of craziness and emotions. I was interested in one comment you wrote, do adoptees usually have an addictive behavior? working overtime, shopping binges, getting too involved in other peoples lives? I have marked your page as my favorite site to go to, so will probably read your updates daily. Thanks Marcy for your insight, and how you are helping us adoptees. This is a valuable counseling session. What books have you written? Please list them so I might purchase copies. God Bless You in your continued support to us adoptees.

Response from Marcy:
Thanks for your enthusiastic endorsement! Regarding the addictive behavior question... All kinds of -isms are ways for us not to feel our core feelings, to stay out of touch with what lies at the heart and soul of us. They keep us dead to our real experience, while substituting a kind of pseudo-experience of whatever it is we're doing--shopping, drinking, having sex, diving into the drama of someone else's life--to give us the illusion of feeling alive. This numbness is truly a depression of the most profound kind, a depression that is often disguised by a veneer of "participation" in life, what Clarissa Pinkola Estes dubbed "the grinning depression". So apt for us "good adoptees"--good at looking happy, at seeming involved, but all the while so very numb and disconnected.

But don't berate yourself...this is how we survived those very early feelings of annihilation, which is what the experience of being separated from one's mother at birth is like to a newborn. We zoned out, slept a lot, or maybe wailed a blue streak for awhile before "surrendering", giving up. At the heart of depression is the sense of hopelessness, a powerlessness over what happens to us. This is at the heart of the primal experience of the adoptee. It's why often the smallest everyday crisis can somehow feel like life and death. These primal issues keep getting triggered throughout our lives until we finally address them appropriately and begin to integrate the powerful feelings we had of being out of control, helpless, hopeless.

Good luck to you, Dana, and feel free to read as often as you like!

Good luck.
Marcy

Question about personality
All that I care to know is where my heritage comes from. I am very different from my adoptive parents, but I love them like I could love no other. However, I still fantisize about a celestial exsistance that explains all my personality traits. Can you help? My health has presented many challenges to me since I turned 23, I don't care why, I just want to know how to use the genetics to keep my from making the same mistakes my biological parents may have made. Please, tell me you can help!!

Response from Marcy:
Dear MJ:
I'm not sure what your question is... It sounds like you want your medical/ genetic background, but I can't tell if you want anything else, such as a meeting with any of your biological relatives. Perhaps this is the question that YOU need to explore within yourself. Of course it's natural to want to know the origins of the blood that courses through your veins, even moreso when you've had health problems. But I think it's also natural to want the chance to gaze into the eyes of the ones who brought us into existence...there's nothing more celestial or cosmic than that, in my humble opinion.

BTW, I don't think ANY single thing explains ALL our personality traits. We are a complex dance of nature, nurture, the position of the planets at our birth (maybe), the trials and joys we've had in other lives (perhaps) and the barometric pressure on any given day!

Good luck on distilling the questions you need to take the next step.

Good luck.
Marcy

*Notice
Questions and answers from this site are subject to future publication. In posting questions to this support forum, you are releasing what you write to be published without payment or credit. All material written by Ms. Axness is copyrighted, all rights reserved by her.

Also, I have a resource directory for various adoption support organizations, groups, networks, etc. If people want that kind of info., they might want to include the name of the nearest major city to where they live.