we will update as we publish at AMERICAN INDIAN ADOPTEES WEBSITE - some issues with blogger are preventing this

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

Romanticizing Adoption and Reunion: The Modern Day Fairy Tale that Actually Isn't

LINK: Lost Daughters: Romanticizing Adoption and Reunion: The Modern Day Fairy Tale that Actually Isn't

People watch our stories and tell us, You are so lucky you’re adopted...You are so blessed to be reunited...You get the best of both worlds...You have a beautiful story...You must feel so loved...You can be whole now...You have found peace...


Stop. Please. Just stop.


Stop telling us how we are supposed to feel. Stop twisting our stories to be pleasing to you. Stop euphemizing our very real pain, our irretrievable losses, our irreconcilable dissonance.


Our stories are not a Hallmark card. Our stories are not fairy tales. Our very real, raw lives are not for you to box up in a nice, clean package.


After reunion, life gets all the more complicated. Reunion is only the beginning. It is not the end. Challenges we never anticipated overtake us. Emotions we never knew we could feel engulf us. Confusion that we thought had been tamed begins to flail and kick so hard it knocks us
unconscious.


Even in the most “ideal” of circumstances, reunion precipitates complex pain and new grief. It surfaces emotions that can swallow you up until you see nothing but darkness.


Reunion does not bring closure.
...
Our stories are our lives. 

And they belong--not to you to judge and to scrutinize--but they belong to us. 
And to us alone.

(link is at top of post) please share this! ...Trace

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