Adjustment

So many people out there are NOT bitter adoptees, but happy, grateful, well adjusted adults. I’m just sad that you will always make yourself a victim. Such a sad way to waste your time. —X/Twitter user RCTroutman8

Every adoptee who says “I have come out of the fog” means something different by it. What I mean is that I have left behind a conceptual universe of concepts, linkages of concepts, and readymade scripts defining, in a loose sense, the “meaning” of adoption. Having abandoned it so completely I sometimes fail to appreciate how bafflingly foreign my ideas about adoption must seem to many people who have lacked the means, motive, and opportunity to escape that universe.

RCTroutman8 enacts the core Gratitude Script of adoption:

-Grateful adoptees don’t complain about adoption;

-Well-adjusted adoptees are grateful;

-Grateful, well-adjusted adoptees aren’t bitter or claim victimhood.

I want to dwell a bit on the idea of “adjustment,” since it gets invoked so often that it constitutes part of the conceptual universe of adoption. I’ll start by doing something I usually ridicule: cite a definition. I found this in the American Psychological Association’s online dictionary:

A well-adjusted person is one who satisfies needs in a healthy, beneficial manner and demonstrates appropriate social and psychological responses to situations and demands.

Let’s take this for granted and consider the idea that a well-adjusted adoptee is grateful. What, according to this idea, are grateful supposed to be grateful for?

Let’s make a simplifying assumption: that we are considering “successful” adoptions, by which I mean adoptions that involve no abject failure resulting in “rehoming,” no extreme domestic instability, no violence or “significant” abuse in the adoptive family. I presume it is common ground that no one expects an adoptee who grew up under any of these circumstances to count themselves grateful for their adoptions. I count my own adoption as “successful,” under any reasonable understanding of that idea. I was subjected to what was then known as “corporal punishment” but which I now acknowledge was physical abuse; and I lived my teenage years with the instability of my adoptive parents’ separation and the decay of my adoptive mother’s mental health, culminating in her tragically early death. But I do not see these facts as undermining the “success” of my adoption, but rather as a reminder that adoption does not guarantee any particular form of improvement in a child’s domestic life.

What should a product of a “successful” adoption be grateful for? I have already hinted at an answer we should not give. We should not automatically assume that a “successful” adoption rescues an adoptee from drastically worse circumstances. In some ways the circumstances I was adopted into were an improvement on what I might have had in my birth mother’s family. For most of my childhood and adolescence, my adoptive parents enjoyed a degree of financial security, even affluence, I might not have had otherwise. On the other hand, I acknowledge now what I was afraid to admit then: my adoptive parents’ marriage was not only a failure but likely doomed from the start. I believe that my adoption was itself part of an effort less about rescuing a child than about rescuing that marriage. I wish my adoptive mother had been able—had had the independence, the support, and the mindset—to end the marriage and seek another partner rather than to try to compensate for her husband’s infertility through adoption.

Moreover, being out of the conceptual universe of adoption I see now that adoption into a family and community of strangers is, by its nature, already a change into circumstances that are in important ways worse: the loss of mirroring, the gaslighting of calling strangers kin and kin strangers, the emotional cruelty of demanding, explicitly or in subtle or even unconscious ways, that an adoptee not speak or act in ways that challenge the idea of remanufactured kinship. People adopted transracially and out of other countries have explored the profound (and to me unimaginable) losses that those displacements create. It may not be easy to compare the gains and losses of being adopted, but adoption always entails loss.

Knowing my birth mother’s family now, I find it possible to say that my adoption “rescued” me from what was then a terribly chaotic situation and landed me in relative stability. But time passes, fortunes change. Not only did no one at the time possess a window upon the future, but even now I doubt that anyone can “retrodict” how my life had unfolded had a way been found to keep me in my original family. “Adoption is rescue” is part of the conceptual universe, but in many cases that belief remains more or less an article of counterfactual faith.

If it isn’t clear that I have a “rescue” to be grateful for, what of the acknowledged fact that my adoption was successful? I was loved, deeply. (The damage done by that love is a topic I’m writing about elsewhere, and I won’t pursue it here.) My adoptive parents “were there for me.” I believe they both loved me unconditionally. I never felt less than fully in—if not of—my adoptive family. Should I be grateful for this?

There are two points I want to make. The first is that if I should be grateful to my adoptive parents for their love and acceptance and support, then this is simply one respect in which adoptive children do not differ from natal children, since everyone raised that way by their parents, adoptive or natal, presumably owes that gratitude—if they owe it at all.

But is it actually owed? I don’t think it is. Gratitude is freely given, not owed. The relationship between a parent and a child is one of stewardship and care, not domination or ownership. Children typically cannot choose to enter or leave a parental relationship. Parents have duties of stewardship and care. A parental relationship without unconditional love is a defective form of that relationship. It is morally strange to speak of someone owing gratitude for being raised (a relationship not freely entered or left) by people who, in raising them, are meeting their obligations.

Even in the “best” of adoptive relationships, then, I don’t think it is at all clear that adoptees, who might well feel and show gratitude to their adoptive families, owe that gratitude. So I don’t think that being “well-adjusted” requires gratitude. This leaves open a question: when adoptees “complain” about adoption, when they criticize it as a system, when they call for its reform or abolition, is that incompatible with feeling gratitude? Could the idea of gratitude function in this negative sense: that adoptees who attack the system they were thrust into cannot also feel grateful to those who, in adopting them, took advantage of it?

Again, I don’t think so. First, it’s an absurd moral logic to suppose that one person cannot feel a mixture of emotions, including both gratitude and anger, toward another. But also, criticizing adoption isn’t, wholly or primarily, about attacking the people who take advantage of adoption—although I do think that part of the damage done by the conceptual universe of adoption is that it enables and supports adoptive parents in a set of absurd fantasies about adoption-as-family-creation that does harm adoptees. Adoptive parents can, and an enlightened few do, step outside the conceptual universe and attack the nakedly predatory commercialism of the adoption industry, and the injustice of adoption law, and the marginalization of adoptee voices.

It’s clear, then, that the contrasting of “complaining about adoption” with “gratitude for being adopted” is part of an effort to depoliticize adoption—which is another part of the conceptual universe, and which is evident in the fact that pro-adoption policymaking and legislation, and lack of outcry over baby boxes, and stubborn opposition to ending the barbarism of sealed-records laws, are thoroughly cross-partisan.

Finally, we return to “adjustment.” If we can’t say with definiteness what an adoptee should be grateful for, can we say who is “ill-adjusted?” Is it the adoptee who feels however they might feel about their adoptive parents—probably a mixture that includes some measure of gratitude—and who acknowledges that a life of estrangement from their original families and communities and cultures, a life that began in crisis and is marked by secrecy and shame, embodies grief and loss and injustice? Or is it the person who remains so firmly stuck in adoption’s conceptual universe that they feel no shame in pulling the stereotypical abuser’s tactic of telling someone that they “should be grateful” for all of it?

I think this question has an easier answer.