Reunion - The Truth
Other adoptees feel they "only want to ask a few questions" regarding life-long curiosities grab health info and bounce out, whereas some adoptees will hold off and play the "I don't want to hurt my adoptive parents by searching" card. And, unforuntately a portion of other adoptees are in full blown denial regarding making contact. If you are here reading this at this time I'm assuming you are one of the above described adoptees, other than the denial adoptee, looking to gain some truthful insight as to what you might find once you open that door. What is on the other side of that once elusive door of your biological history?
The truth is much simpler than you may think. Although the answer may appear to be simple what you will discover is far more complex. To begin with, understand at least this much, making contact is not the finish line, it's not like finally finding your school professor's answer sheet to the final exam. Although a significant journey has ended, in truth the ride is about to begin. Once you make contact that's what it is, a ride. The story of the beginning part of your life, and growing up in a parallel universe is about to unfold before you. Whether making contact for you means grabbing info from your bio-mother and bouncing out, or you want to jump completely in with your entire biological family, the other element you need to understand is that your biological mother has her own unique and very dynamic experience regarding your adoption.
The truth is, once you, the adoptee, establish contact, the long ago time period and atmosphere of when you were an infant when you were placed for adoption (20, 30, 40 or more years ago), rushes back to our mothers like standing by a train track with the speed and intensity as Amtrak rushes by. Most mothers will be ecstatic to finally hear from their child, howerver, tied to their child (you) is the experience of the father, her boyfriend, or a guy she hooked up with who, for whatever reason, completely faded out of the picture for any number of reasons. Or, the guilt of not having family support to be able to raise you. Or the lies, manipulation, and propaganda shoved in her face of how her child deserves to be raised by both a mother and father during the baby scoop era. Or the deep shame of being single and pregnant out of wedlock. Whatever her experience beheld, tied to it could be loss, hurt, guilt, regret, and shame to name some of what rushes back when she hears your voice on the end of the phone say hello for the first time, or when she reads your email via Facebook, or the letter sent via snail mail for the first time ever.
For a more thorough look at the social climate of the baby scoop era, which still continues today, but the time period was from the WW II era through the 1970s, visit the Library for Ann Fessler's book, The Girls Who Went Away and the Media & Stuff page for a clip of, A Girl Like Her.
Prior to reunion adoptees typically have some sort of notion as to why they would like to connect with biological family, primarily their biological mother. A number of adoptees are all in from the beginning, meaning they want to know every relative under the sun.
A Network for Adoptees
Being adopted, for many adoptees, meant we had to tip-toe around our parent's feelings and therefore our natural desire to know always took the back seat to how everyone else felt. "Everyone else" typically included siblings, relatives, our closest friends and even complete strangers. For many adoptees during our life we seemingly always had to justify to others about having the desire to know more about our biological heritage. It seems every time we turn around and share a thought on the topic of adoption some non-adoptee has an opinion about the topic that we are experts on, like any non-adoptee knows the first thing about what it truly means to be adopted...
On the same note, I have observed with regularity the systematic inquiry of a non-adopted person asking with bulging curiosity if I have ever searched or want to search for my "real" family, and after a short response, almost 100% of the time their follow-up question is, "How do your adoptive parents feel about it?"
I don't have to tell an adoptee how many levels of wrong to have to experience this manner of questioning, beginning with the term "real parents" to, why do adoptees always have to put others ahead of us regarding our information, our history, our identity that's been kept out of our reach for decades?
Which brings me back around to my main point. This is the advantage of RIARG, a resource group that allows adoptees to come together and be ourselves with nothing to justify. Hanging out with adoptees there is zero obligation to explain yourself regarding being adopted. Zero. That's because we are all adopted. We all know how the above feels and so so so much more.
Whether you wish to call it fate or life circumstances which brought you to be adopted, the way I view it is that we are all in the same ocean of adoption together, however, we all have our unique individual experience. We also have had to live our life to this point being constantly shut down by society in general regarding our perspective on our experience of adoption. So why continue it by yourself? Why not jump on the RIARG ship of adoptees and cruise through your journey with others who are, for the most part, in the same boat? Besides, its not like anyone is gonna wake up tomorrow and not be adopted..
Subsequently, we didn't enjoy the comfort to freely inquire about our pre-adoption life via our adoptive parents or to learn much concrete informaiton regarding our natural curiosities about being adopted.