Adoption and the Dance of Anger
"You never apologize for anything! You think you know everything, and you never ask me what I think!"
And with that my twentysomething walks out the door. I don't follow her. I don't argue.
Days later, she stops by again. "I'm sorry," she says, sheepishly. "I don't know why I said those things. You have no problem apologizing, and you always ask me what I think."
I nod. I know what's going on. And it has nothing to do with me.
"How is the memoir going," I ask. And with that she starts to cry.
Twenty-three years ago, my husband and I adopted two (unrelated) little girls. The younger girl had been in an orphanage since birth. The elder had been placed there as a three-year-old following state dissolution of parental rights. That meant she remembered—and loved--her birth mother. And that made all the difference.
Now, this twenty-eight year old, slim, bright, and extraordinarily loving young woman has discovered that her birth mother is deceased. Old wounds have been torn open to bleed anew, memories rekindled. I know the words she hurled at me are actually meant for this shadow mother—her first lost love—who never asked her whether she wanted to be sent to an orphanage and who never apologized for sending her there. The five-year-old in her can't yell at this shadow mother, but I am close at hand and, from the perspective of that deep wound, complicit in the treachery and deception.
She shows me a chapter that she's just written from the viewpoint of the five-year-old we adopted. Her caregivers at the orphanage mentioned that she loved to "clean up" the playroom, and she continued to love to "clean up" her room after we'd adopted her. Always polite and charming, she was less prone to typical child temper tantrums than her sister. And now here, in the memoir, she explained the reason why.
She didn't understand why she had been placed in the orphanage, but she decided it must have been because she was bad. So she hatched a secret plan, one that she would tell no one. She would be the perfect, helpful child. The orphanage "mamas" would notice and tell her own mama what a good girl she was. And then her mama would come and take her back.
But best laid plans don't always play out the way you think they will, particularly when you are a young child without much power. Instead of her mama, my husband and I showed up. She didn't know what to make of my husband, but she like playing with me. She decided I was a very nice mama. But I wasn't her mama. And if I took her away, then how would her mama find her?
In contrast, our other daughter threw herself into our arms and announced she was ready to leave.
In the 1990's, no one knew much about attachment disorders, particularly reactive attachment disorder. We came to be intimately familiar with the syndrome. I wish we had had all of the information that is available today.
Like most others at the time (and today), my husband and I believed that attachment follows care—that children become attached to their parents because of the loving care they receive from them. We believed that children would not be strongly attached to abusive or negligent parents. Not even close. Adoption brought us up short and gave us a cold dose of reality: Don't ever underestimate the strength of the primary mother-infant bond.
Thousands of us adopted children in the 1990's and beyond, and those adoptees are now adults. A not insignificant percentage of them are now speaking out about what adoption felt like to them. Scroll through adoption sites and you will find adults who feel keenly that there is someone missing from their emotional lives. They suffer from depression and anger. They firmly believe that being "taken away from" or "given up by" their birth mothers is the problem, that adoption itself is necessarily a wounding experience.
Yes, they are missing something very crucial that was needed in childhood to make them whole: Emotional attachment to a primary caregiver. Without that, no human grows up emotionally healthy and whole.
The problem is this: What these wounded adoptees seem to have in common is that they steadfastly rejected their adoptive parents (particularly their adoptive mothers). Having had that primary bond broken, they quickly learned to keep an emotional wall up to protect themselves from experiencing that soul-murdering pain again. They pushed away anyone who tried to take the place of their first love. What they longed for was for their birth mothers to be "all better" and to be reunited with them. As adults, they believe they will only be whole if they can reconnect with their birth families, especially their birth mothers. Sometimes they do, and it solves the problem. But more often (as the scientific adoption literature shows) it just leads to more disappointment.
What these adults needed—in childhood—was assistance in learning to accept love again from another mother and father. As much as every fiber of their being rebelled against it, that is exactly what they needed. Because they and their adoptive parents probably didn't get that assistance, they now need to do that very difficult work as adults. It isn't easy.
Adults who grew up with birth parents who could not or would not bond with their children can also suffer this kind of painful longing, this feeling of intense loneliness, of being separate and apart from everyone, of never feeling "home".
Instead, these very angry adopted individuals grew up feeling that the adoptive mother was an unworthy stranger who usurped the role of mother. The problem never was the birth mother or the adoptive mother or the act of adoption itself. It was a broken primary bond that needed to be healed through acceptance and trust of a willing second mother.
I hold my daughter as she cries, doing my best to comfort her over this primal wound. I feel her relax as she once again allows herself to feel she belongs.
Denise Cummins
October 2, 2016
And with that my twentysomething walks out the door. I don't follow her. I don't argue.
Days later, she stops by again. "I'm sorry," she says, sheepishly. "I don't know why I said those things. You have no problem apologizing, and you always ask me what I think."
I nod. I know what's going on. And it has nothing to do with me.
"How is the memoir going," I ask. And with that she starts to cry.
Twenty-three years ago, my husband and I adopted two (unrelated) little girls. The younger girl had been in an orphanage since birth. The elder had been placed there as a three-year-old following state dissolution of parental rights. That meant she remembered—and loved--her birth mother. And that made all the difference.
Now, this twenty-eight year old, slim, bright, and extraordinarily loving young woman has discovered that her birth mother is deceased. Old wounds have been torn open to bleed anew, memories rekindled. I know the words she hurled at me are actually meant for this shadow mother—her first lost love—who never asked her whether she wanted to be sent to an orphanage and who never apologized for sending her there. The five-year-old in her can't yell at this shadow mother, but I am close at hand and, from the perspective of that deep wound, complicit in the treachery and deception.
She shows me a chapter that she's just written from the viewpoint of the five-year-old we adopted. Her caregivers at the orphanage mentioned that she loved to "clean up" the playroom, and she continued to love to "clean up" her room after we'd adopted her. Always polite and charming, she was less prone to typical child temper tantrums than her sister. And now here, in the memoir, she explained the reason why.
She didn't understand why she had been placed in the orphanage, but she decided it must have been because she was bad. So she hatched a secret plan, one that she would tell no one. She would be the perfect, helpful child. The orphanage "mamas" would notice and tell her own mama what a good girl she was. And then her mama would come and take her back.
But best laid plans don't always play out the way you think they will, particularly when you are a young child without much power. Instead of her mama, my husband and I showed up. She didn't know what to make of my husband, but she like playing with me. She decided I was a very nice mama. But I wasn't her mama. And if I took her away, then how would her mama find her?
In contrast, our other daughter threw herself into our arms and announced she was ready to leave.
In the 1990's, no one knew much about attachment disorders, particularly reactive attachment disorder. We came to be intimately familiar with the syndrome. I wish we had had all of the information that is available today.
Like most others at the time (and today), my husband and I believed that attachment follows care—that children become attached to their parents because of the loving care they receive from them. We believed that children would not be strongly attached to abusive or negligent parents. Not even close. Adoption brought us up short and gave us a cold dose of reality: Don't ever underestimate the strength of the primary mother-infant bond.
Thousands of us adopted children in the 1990's and beyond, and those adoptees are now adults. A not insignificant percentage of them are now speaking out about what adoption felt like to them. Scroll through adoption sites and you will find adults who feel keenly that there is someone missing from their emotional lives. They suffer from depression and anger. They firmly believe that being "taken away from" or "given up by" their birth mothers is the problem, that adoption itself is necessarily a wounding experience.
Yes, they are missing something very crucial that was needed in childhood to make them whole: Emotional attachment to a primary caregiver. Without that, no human grows up emotionally healthy and whole.
The problem is this: What these wounded adoptees seem to have in common is that they steadfastly rejected their adoptive parents (particularly their adoptive mothers). Having had that primary bond broken, they quickly learned to keep an emotional wall up to protect themselves from experiencing that soul-murdering pain again. They pushed away anyone who tried to take the place of their first love. What they longed for was for their birth mothers to be "all better" and to be reunited with them. As adults, they believe they will only be whole if they can reconnect with their birth families, especially their birth mothers. Sometimes they do, and it solves the problem. But more often (as the scientific adoption literature shows) it just leads to more disappointment.
What these adults needed—in childhood—was assistance in learning to accept love again from another mother and father. As much as every fiber of their being rebelled against it, that is exactly what they needed. Because they and their adoptive parents probably didn't get that assistance, they now need to do that very difficult work as adults. It isn't easy.
Adults who grew up with birth parents who could not or would not bond with their children can also suffer this kind of painful longing, this feeling of intense loneliness, of being separate and apart from everyone, of never feeling "home".
Instead, these very angry adopted individuals grew up feeling that the adoptive mother was an unworthy stranger who usurped the role of mother. The problem never was the birth mother or the adoptive mother or the act of adoption itself. It was a broken primary bond that needed to be healed through acceptance and trust of a willing second mother.
I hold my daughter as she cries, doing my best to comfort her over this primal wound. I feel her relax as she once again allows herself to feel she belongs.
Denise Cummins
October 2, 2016