Adoptee Abandonment Issues

I’ve always told people that being adopted didn’t have any effect on me, or at least any negative effect on me.  Over the years I heard various theories about the impact the loss of the mother has on an infant, but I always dismissed them without much thought or any research.  Since the reunion with my mom I have done a lot of research into the subject of adoption as a whole and part of that has been on the impact of adoption on adoptees.  I was shocked, and more than a little dismayed, to find that the lion’s share of the issues I have been dealing with since adolescence are all extremely common in adoptees.  Does that prove a connection?  No, of course it doesn’t.  However, the suggestion of a correlation is very strong. 

I've always had abandonment issues.  I never recognized them as having any potential relationship with my being adopted, but the more research I have done on the subject the more I have discovered that abandonment issues are just one of the many classic problems adopted people have.  I have always had issues maintaining relationships with people, particularly women.  I never associated that with anything I was really doing wrong, other than making bad choices about the women I included in my life.  I finally figured out that I was setting impossible standards for any relationship with a woman, whether it was romantic or a friendship.  I was extremely needy, constantly needing to be reassured of my value and my place in her life.  In the case of romantic relationships I needed to spend every possible free moment with her.  In the event she wanted to do something without me I would always assume the worst, that the relationship was about to end.  I would almost always bring about the end of the relationship that I most feared by pushing too hard.  Usually she would get frustrated with me for not being able to give her space when she needed some and being too needy.  Needy men are not appealing.  Sometimes I would abruptly end a relationship, usually when I figured out she couldn’t provide what I needed, and often without much of an explanation.  I wasn’t trying to be mean; I couldn’t explain what I didn’t understand.  All I knew for sure was what I was looking for wasn’t there; I couldn’t say what I was looking for because I didn’t know.

It does make a fair amount of sense.  Traditionally the first thing we do with a new born baby it hand him to his mother.  In my case, and the case of many adopted children my age that simply wasn't done.  Many children around my age who were adopted were never held by their natural mothers, some were not even seen.  Infants know their mothers, it stands to reason that they know something is wrong when their mother is not present and never appears.  When I was released from the hospital I went into foster care for three months.  Presumably I would have started to bond with my foster mother during that time (I was in the same foster home the entire time).  It wouldn't have been the same as with my natural mother, but it would have been an improvement over the hospital where a different person was caring for me every shift.  Then at three and a half months I was pulled away from my foster mother and given to new and unknown people again.  These people, of course, turned out to be my adoptive parents.  Things went reasonably well there during my childhood, but as an infant I had no way to know that. 

I always felt a little out of place with my adoptive parents and the little bit of extended family we had, but other than that, it was pretty good until I got to 12 or 13.  Then I was suddenly abandoned by my adoptive mother and replaced with dogs.  She was still physically there of course, but emotionally she was completely unavailable to me.  There were many examples provided to me over the next seven or eight years of how the dogs were more important than me.  It started when she hired a dog psychologist to make a house call and explain to us why our new puppy was “acting out”.  I was required to sit in on this hour long expensive bullshit session.  Apparently my mother needed this woman to tell her that puppies misbehave and then give her all sorts of advice (which she didn’t follow) on what to do to improve the “acting out”.  It seems the dog had “abandonment issues”.  That makes sense, she was snatched from her mother also, and I guess she could have joined my club.  Of course no one knew I had abandonment issues, including me, at the time.  The other two that stand out the most are the trip my parents took over Christmas when I was 17 and left me behind so I could take care of the dogs that were too good to put in a kennel (which they could easily afford).  Yep, alone on Christmas because someone had to watch the dogs, I knew where I fell on the scale of importance.  Two years later I was unceremoniously left behind, again to take care of the dogs, when my grandmother died and my parents went to the funeral out of state. My mother didn't even ask me if I wanted to go, nor was she gentle at all breaking the news to me about my grandmother's death.  She told me very abruptly, and in front of a friend when we walked in from some outing or another on a Sunday afternoon, and then told me I was staying home to take care of the dogs.  This grandmother was my father's mother, she didn't even like the woman, and she could have stayed home, taken care of the dogs, and allowed me to go to the funeral, or again, kenneled the dogs.  My grandmother was also the only grandparent that I had any relationship with, two of them having predeceased my birth, and the third died when I was four.  It was very clear to me, yet again, that my mother was way more concerned about the happiness of her dogs than she was about my feelings about my grandmother’s death.

So, to recap: I lost my natural mother without ever even meeting her right after birth, I lost my foster mother at 3 ½ months, at 12 or 13 my adoptive mother while still physically present emotionally abandoned me, and at 19 my grandmother died and I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral to say goodbye to her, leaving another abrupt hole where a mother figure had been.  Is it any real wonder I have had a hard time maintaining relationships with women as an adolescent and adult?  Even after all that I would be hard pressed to accept it had anything to do with my adoption if it wasn’t a pattern shared by so many other adoptees. 

I can see this same pattern emerging in my relationship with my sisters.  Luckily I am aware of my issues now, but it’s still a battle I have to fight with myself.  One of my sisters and I started emailing back and forth very shortly after my mom and I got contact information for each other, less than a week after.  For months it was every day, sometimes more than once a day.  Every time I hear from her it brightens my day.  However, six months in I am not really the “new long lost brother” anymore.  She has a life, work, a family, kids that have all sorts of activities that take up a lot of time.  I understand that and I was expecting the emails to eventually slow down.  Now I tend to hear from her once or twice a week.  That is pretty reasonable; a normal person would be fine with it.  Unfortunately I am not a normal person.  In my screwed up brain the reduction in contact means one thing, she is trying to get rid of me by easing me out of her life.  It is a constant battle for me not to send her multiple text messages and emails every day I don’t hear from her trying to prompt a response.  Doing that might, over time, bring about exactly what I am afraid is happening now.  It isn’t happening of course, she is my sister, and she isn’t going anywhere unless I push her away.  On the off chance she ever reads this I think I should say here that this stuff is all my screwed up brain, she isn’t doing anything wrong, unreasonable, uncaring, etc.  She is actually one of the biggest reasons I felt comfortable with the whole process of meeting everyone.  She is a great person and a great sister; she just has the misfortune of having an older brother with some gummed up circuits in his brain. 

I have the same basic issue with my other sister.  We don’t have contact as often, but the contact we have is often a lot more in depth; less frequent long emails instead of more frequent short emails.  She has a lot going on in her life this month and it is extremely unfair of me to expect anything of her right now.  I should be offering support, not looking for it (and I have offered it).  Here again, logically I know that but it hasn’t stopped the alarm in the back of my head “defcon 1 we are being phased out, repeat defcon 1”.  Again, in the event she ever reads this, it is all my issue, she has been nothing but caring and accepting of me and I couldn’t ask for a better sister.  It’s my gummed up wiring that is the issue here, not anything she has done or anything she could have done differently. 

I suspect I would have these exact same feelings about my mom, but I hear from her every day, often multiple times over the course of the day.  The alarms never have time to get going.  I don’t hear from my brothers often, but I don’t have these issues in my relationships with men, so there is no issue with that.  Sure, I’d like to hear from them more often just because they are my brothers and I want to know what is going on with them, but no alarms sound warning me I am being abandoned if I don’t.

I’m a very logical and analytical person in general.  I can look at a lot of the issues I have and a lot of the things that upset me or make me angry about my adoption or my situation growing up and explain why it isn’t logical to be upset or angry about them.  I can’t stop feeling the way I feel though, even when I know some of those feelings don’t make sense.  I also can’t stop that alarm braying in my head, even when I know it is flying under a false flag.  Sometimes I feel like I’m two different people, one an adult that understands why things are the way they are and even agrees that the decisions made were probably the best available at the time.  The other is a little boy that just wants his mother (or any suitable female substitute) and will do anything to never let her go.  That braying alarm does sound an awful lot like a crying baby sometimes. 

Is this all because I’m adopted?  I don’t know.  I’m no expert on such things and I doubt it will ever be possible to say for sure, not being able to truly know what the minds of infants are capable of retaining.  It does seem distinctly possible, or perhaps even probable.  I suppose that will have to be good enough, at least for now.