Memes #NAAM2019

I see dead people

Repost from 11/12/2010

By Trace Hentz (blog editor)

Well, actually I do not see dead people but I know people who are living like they are dead.

OK, imagine this.... You are a child and you disappear. Not only are you upset, your entire family is crazy with despair and your parents are distraught. They might go on television and beg the people who took you to please bring you back. Your mom and dad might even divorce since they cannot forget you and they can’t seem to heal since you are missing.

You (the child) on the other hand, might be too young to fight back, or even try and escape. But you want to.

That is child abduction and we all take this seriously in American and all over the world.

Now, change the word child to adoptee.

This life changing event: “adoption” does change you and your parents. America and the world do not think of adoption as abduction but I do. Why? It feels the same to the child. And to some mothers, it feels exactly like your child was abducted.

The trauma of being abducted or adopted is the same for the child. You are feeling you are not where you are supposed to be. Let’s not get into the medical terms but those words do exist in medical journals.

So, I ask you, when will people who adopt children begin to understand that adoptees have feelings they cannot describe or display? Some adopters I know have taken this very personally and have tried to make the child feel better and assure them they will meet their natural parents someday. I have friends who have adopted and some are remarkable in their sensitivity. Some of them advocate for open adoption, so their adopted child meets their parent on a regular basis, if at all possible.

So, if you are adoptive parents and reading this, I need you to do something TODAY. Forget that there are laws preventing disclosure when it’s a sealed adoption. I want you to request the adoption file – the legal proceedings. All of it! You signed the documents so you can request them.

OK, you did it. When your adopted child asks, I want you to tell them you have the name of their natural mother and that you will help her/him find their natural parent(s) when they turn 18. It depends on the child and when they ask. If they don’t ask, I want you to give them the file when they are 18 as a gift.

That is why I see dead people. If you are a mystery, it feels like you’re dead.

Adoption Myths, Adoption Records #flipthescript

By Trace (Lost Bird Adoptee)

NANCY VERRIER M.A., PSYCHOTHERAPIST
"The chosen child and the grateful child myths are two beliefs that die hard. Although made to feel as if it were the case, most adoptees do not feel chosen so much as they feel unchosen by their birth mothers. To be chosen by anyone else after that is anticlimactic. So far as being grateful, it is the adoptive parents who should be grateful. They are the ones pursuing the adoption. They are the ones who got what they wanted. No child would choose to be separated from his biological mother. That he may have to be separated from her is a different thing altogether. That is an intellectual, adult decision, not an emotional/sensual baby experience. Although grateful for many things his parents may have done for him, no child should be obligated to feel grateful for having a loving set of parents. That should be his right."
            That is an extract from Nancy Newton Verrier MA in her concluding chapter 2o called Adoption Myths, from her book called Coming Home To Self, published by Gateway in '03 and available on Amazon, much consulted and recommended by both adoptees and the ivf-made. 

So why is adoption records access important?

           

            It’s about identity! Adoptees grow up with questions about identity. Questions that affect their psycho-social development, sometimes in negative ways. Like all humans, adoptees seek to answer the questions “who am I?” and “why am I here?”

            Adoptees are legally prohibited from obtaining information that is critical to answering that question. But it is a necessary tool for most adoptees to answer those nagging questions about our origins. Knowing is better than not knowing. Knowing the truth is healing for most of us. But fear of discovery, not as you might imagine for parents who surrendered a child to adoption, but for adoption professionals who misrepresented the facts to vulnerable women or couples wishing to adopt, makes for a powerful motive to keep the truth hidden.

            When access to one’s original birth certificate (OBC) is forbidden, the only substitute is to search for one’s family of origin. 

If state officials are intent on protecting the identity of parents who were persuaded to relinquish a child to adoption the surest method is to provide answers to the questions asked.

            Many adoptees would be satisfied just to know the truth.  Contact is a different matter and no reasonable person on either point of the adoption triangle expects a relationship to automatically develop with strangers, even strangers who are biologically related. 

Adoptees, generally, are not seeking a family, but themselves.

Adoptees deported by US? Yes

By Kim Sung-soo
http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2012/03/137_106204.html

Until 2001, when Korean children were sent to the U.S. for overseas adoption, it was their adoptive parents’ responsibility to naturalize them as U.S. citizens.

In addition, adoption agencies both in Korea and the U.S. were responsible for post-adoption services that should monitor adoptees and their adoptive parents until the children are fully integrated into U.S. society. This is a key principle of overseas adoption.

However, the reality is not the same as the principle. The U.S. deports foreign adoptees aged 29 and older who haven’t been naturalized when they commit certain crimes. Washington must stop this practice immediately.

Unlike European governments, the U.S. government did not automatically grant citizenship to overseas adoptees until 2001. The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 came into force on Feb. 27, 2001, allowing all internationally adopted children under 18 on that date, and all those adopted in the future, to become U.S. citizens automatically. However, adoptees 18 or older on that date could not be covered by the act.

Many adoptees discovered, usually when applying for federal student loans or a passport, that they had never been naturalized by their foster parents. I know three Korean adoptees ― Monte, Tim, and Matthew ― who could not benefit from the act.

Monte was born in 1970 in Korea and was sent to the U.S. in 1978. Although he served in the U.S. military, he was deported to Korea in 2009. Monte claims that when he was arrested, he did not know that he had been set up by his truck driving partner to transport drugs. Like most other Korean adoptees sent to the U.S., Monte is culturally American and does not speak Korean.

Tim was born in Korea in 1974, and in 1977 he went to the U.S. as an adoptee. His adoptive parents cut their ties with him after he graduated from high school, so he left his home and wandered throughout the U.S. He became homeless and addicted to drugs for over 15 years. Ultimately he was arrested, imprisoned, and deported to Korea, where he became homeless again in April 2011. He has no trace of his birth family on his adoption records.

Matthew was born in Korea in 1978 and he went to the U.S. at the age of six months, but his parents did not naturalize him. He was not deported, but willingly returned to Korea in February 2011 to be close to his family and experience Korea as a young man.

When the Seoul government discovered that Matthew, technically an “overseas Korean citizen,” was back in the country, he received a compulsory enlistment notice from the Korean military. After a prolonged struggle over paperwork that reflected both his permanent residency in the U.S. and his Korean citizenship, Matthew was finally granted an exemption from military enlistment because he is also technically an “orphan.”

Matthew would like to have dual citizenship, just as other adoptees have that option. But because he received his Green Card only in the past few years, he would be in his 40s by the time he gains U.S. citizenship. In the interim, he would be required to live within the U.S. Meanwhile, adoptees with only U.S. citizenship may live in Korea indefinitely on an F-4 visa.

As the U.S. leads the world in terms of the numbers of children adopted from other countries, it should also lead the world in the humanitarian treatment of them. However, we are now seeing that adoptees from not just Korea, but many other countries, are being deported from the U.S. even on minor charges.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), amended and expanded by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) of 1996, non-citizens may apply for “waivers” to deportations, based on factors such as length of residency in the U.S. and potential hardship if deported.

However, no such exceptions are available to “aggravated felons.” Aggravated felonies include crimes such as drug trafficking, but may also include misdemeanor charges. For instance, the IIRAIRA expanded the INA so a person may be treated as an aggravated felon for committing a theft punishable by only one year in prison. This opens up the risk of adoptees to be deported for petty crimes such as shoplifting.

While recognizing that non-adopted people who immigrated as children are also subject to this law, I believe that the U.S. Congress, through passing the Child Citizenship Act of 2000, has already shown its belief that international adoptees should be automatic citizens.

I urge the U.S. government to correct defects in the U.S. legal system by quickly passing an amendment that would allow all overseas adoptees ― even adults like Tim, Matthew, and Monte ― to rightfully receive their U.S. citizenship. This would stop the deportations and also give the benefits and protection of citizenship to all law-abiding international adoptees.

Dr. Kim Sung-soo is the author of a biography of Korean Quaker Ham Sok-hon and executive director of Transparency International-Korea. Reach him at wadans@empas.com.

Coming Home to Self: Interview with Nancy Verrier

Read this interview with the brilliant author of "Primal Wound" Nancy Verrier. She writes about “The Three A’s” for adoptees which are awareness, authenticity, and accountability in her second book "Coming Home to Self."

Here is the link to the interview in Adoption Mosaic.

Verrier's work helped me so much as I was writing my adoptee memoir "One Small Sacrifice." Writers do read much more than they write! It seems I had to release myself out of a fog and find the light. All my issues as an adoptee had to be viewed and witnessed all over again, childhood to present, victim to survivor.

Verrier said in this recent interview," One of the things people need to recognize is that there is no biological mirroring for the adopted child. They don’t see physical and personality traits reflected in the relatives around them. (These are inherent genetic traits; they’re not things you just pick up from living around people.) People who are born into biological families and stay in them take biological mirroring for granted. But this isn’t present in an adoptive family. So the adoptee is always trying to figure out how to be in that family and the family is trying to figure out how to be around that child."

True words for the thousands of us adoptees who were transracially-adopted and assimilated via adoption..... Trace

Four Traumas

1st day of grade school

     More and more of this adoption reality is coming out on the internet, which means more and more adoptive parents and natural parents are in for a few more surprises. One study claims adoptees are more traumatized than a prisoner of war. We suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. A prisoner of war may escape or be released, but an adoptee will suffer its effects our entire life. There is no known cure for PTSD.

     Now I believe there are four distinct traumas in being an adoptee.

     They are: 1) in utero, when you hear what is happening to you or sense what is coming; 2) when you are delivered, abandoned, and handed to strangers; 3) later when you are told you are adopted and realize fully what being “adopted” means; and 4) when you realize you are different, from a different culture or country, and you can’t contact your family, or know them, or have the information you need to find them.

     It took me years to get this. There were more traumas, too – like when I’d fill out forms at the doctor’s office. I had no medical history. I had no idea if I was sitting next to someone who could be my biological brother, mother or father. To think I could marry my own relative and not even know it, that idea was horrifying.

     I could carry a gene that I pass down to my own children – but I wouldn’t know until it’s too late. My child could suffer since I didn’t know. If my birthparents were alcoholics, then I really shouldn’t drink. I could be pre-disposed to diabetes or heart disease or cancer or depression and not know this.

     My list went on and on.

     This is an excerpt from my book One Small Sacrifice. 

The Un-Adopted (another Russian orphan story)

In 2002 alone, U.S. families adopted over 20,000 children, from far-away places like China, Russia and Guatemala.

We rarely hear about adoptive parents who notice the signs of a mental disorder, despair or disease in their adopted child, then abandon the adoptee/orphan.  Abandon them? Un-Adopt them? Yes, this happens far more than we realize…

One mother in Texas blogged openly about her experience adopting a little girl from a Russian orphanage in 2005-2006. (She shall remain anonymous.)

How generous it was for her to open her heart and home to an orphan, we read. How expensive these international adoptions are, we read. When the child showed signs of distress and disrupted her home and biological children, we read her “Russian” child was “unadopted,” sent away to someone who could deal with her problems in Wisconsin.

This Texan had her illusions dashed about “saving this baby” and apparently had no idea about orphan trauma, though she read “everything” about raising children. Day after day, she blogged her difficulties - then once the girl “P” was gone, the blogging stopped. Apparently she went back to raising her biological sons.

This is an excerpt from her blog:

“I think being more informed about the probable emotional expectation possibilities for these children would have been all it took for me to know international adoption was not for us. So many professionals have NOW told me... despite any care she receives she will quite probably never be like your other children. The affects of institutional care on a baby is many times lifelong and you can never expect them to be like your other children. Why didn’t they tell me this BEFORE we adopted? I was searching for the kind of relationship I have with my boys, the kind my mom and I have. If I had known I could never even expect this child to feel close to me or identify with me, I feel I certainly would have never adopted.

"So, truth to be known- we should never have adopted any institutionalized child!

"My personal experience goes on to be complicated by a truly adored referral that we lost before we got to travel and perhaps, did not allow ourselves to grieve enough for. We traveled to meet a child who we found obviously had a major neurological problems and we had to turn down - in this country (this was traumatic and extremely hard to get through as well).

"Then the ridiculous circumstance of getting to spend one day with “P” before we made our decision and flew home to await our second trip.

"This was surely not the best way to decide on such a huge factor in your life yet we did. In order to adopt internationally YOU HAVE TO make rash decisions based on pictures and sketchy information. You have to give it to God and pray you are doing right. Didn’t you at some point too?

"Due to flight change unavailability, expenses, red tape, time factors, children waiting for us at home, orphanage visiting rules, and emotional upset, we made decisions we SHOULD NOT HAVE MADE. I DO accept responsibility for making a decision with all those factors in place but also point back to Russia’s laws on adoption and all the problematic Russian ways and secretiveness that are SO not helpful to the futures of these children or the people trying to make the best decisions for bringing them home into new families.

"As a mother I tried to base my decisions on emotional intuitiveness and gut feelings. In retrospect a more logical approach and lots of caution would have been more productive. I needed to feel right... but I mostly felt confused, afraid, lost.

"Then there was the “twinning.” Bringing home a child who was so close in age to my biological son was a HUGE folly. Again, this is mostly our fault of course. We, being bullet proof and invincible, thought we could make this work. We thought we would have it rough for a while but would pull through and live happily ever after. NOT SO. Throwing this on top of the attachment issues was just too much. We never even thought about our bio sons mental health... sure there would be some normal sibling rivalry, but what manifested was so magnified to the norm that we were shocked and scared out of our minds at the long term effects this would have on EVERYONE! Neither he, nor “P” could get the emotional support they needed because it was just too much for one Mom to be able to do. It was unfair and unhealthy for both children and “P” needed focus and diligent emotional support FULL TIME in light of her issues.

"Upon bringing “P” home, the problems continued as we found a huge deficit in the help and support we needed in our area. We found all the help we thought we had behind us turned into incompetent therapists not versed in RAD and doctors with little or no experience with post adoption issues, money-hungry therapists, and a lack of coverage for the issues “P” had from our insurance company, then perhaps the most damaging... we found RAD.

"So, obviously I have no crystal ball here but I think these bits of information, truths, and circumstantial situations and bad and hasty decisions might have created extra issues and a much different outcome for us.... They say hindsight is 20/20 but I am still putting the pieces together here. Here are some things I do believe hindered our success but perhaps there is far more I have not realized.... First, gain more perspective and educate yourselves. There is a list of disruption sites that may help many people to understand, avoid, and support this process when it is necessary. There are many common factors in an adoption that end people up in disruption. These factors should be on a neon sign at every agency!!!!”