What about your "real parents"?

I heard from a friend out of the blue last night.  I worked with him for a few years about ten years ago.  We were pretty close when we worked together but then I moved away from the area and as often happens with me, we lost touch.  We didn’t lose touch completely, but contact dropped off significantly and continued to decrease as time went by. I think I last talked to him, outside the occasional Facebook comment (because of course we are Facebook friends) about three years ago.   

I keep my postings on Facebook about my reunion with my natural family to a minimum.  My adoptive mother is also a “friend” on Facebook.  I have her blocked from seeing my posts unless I go in and change the settings for something specific I want her to see, but I don’t entirely trust it.  She claims to be supportive of the reunion but her actions don’t really back that up.  So, while I don’t have a problem with family commenting on my posts or commenting on theirs I don’t actually talk about adoption or related issues.  Anyway, my friend didn’t see my single post about the reunion its self so he didn’t know anything about it.

So, after we caught up for a little while I told him about my “big news”.  Really, this is the only “big news” I have had since my twins were born and I do like to talk about it.  Well, I like to talk about it on good days anyway.  As much as I like to talk about it I am generally very cautious about whom I talk about it with.  I figured my friend wouldn’t be a problem.  I suppose calling him a problem, even given his reaction, isn’t really fair to him, it is more of a commentary on how ingrained adoption propaganda is in our society.  When I got done with the short version of events the first thing he asked me is how my adoptive parents felt about it.  What I have gotten from people in the past, even if they eventually asked that question (and many did not) was some statements about how cool of a story it is or how happy they are for me.  This guy and I were close when we worked together, we actually did stuff together outside work and we shared a lot about ourselves with each other.  He has heard some of the stories of the things my adoptive parents, and especially my mother, did when I was growing up and since.  He knows, or at least knew, that I didn’t have a good relationship with them.  I remembered the relationships he had with his family so I expected him to remember mine, but perhaps I expected too much.

My friend has no connection to adoption in his life; he isn’t adopted, he doesn’t have any close friends that are adopted (other than me, not sure if I still count as close anymore, but I was), doesn’t have any close friends or family that are adoptive parents, etc.  All he has is the generally accepted narrative on adoption we have in our society.  If he had just made the one comment I wouldn’t be making this post.  However the more we talked about it the more comments he made.  He kept asking how my adoptive parents felt about it, if they were OK with it, and even said he felt sorry for them since they raised me and then all of a sudden this happened years later.  He was mildly supportive of me but I could tell his primary concern was for the feelings of my adoptive parents. 

I know my friend well enough to know he was purposefully trying to hurt my feelings or downplay the significance of my reunion.  I tried to explain it to him but I could tell it just wasn’t getting through.  He is apparently one of the many people that have been convinced by the adoption industry propaganda that adoption and adoptive parents are always good and anything that has the potential to disrupt them is bad.  I probably won’t hear from him again, outside of Facebook comments, for another three years so I didn’t pound my head into a brick wall for too long trying to change his mind.  However it really made me realize more than ever what sort of mentality those of us that want to change how adoption is handled are up against.  My friend is a smart guy but on this issue he didn’t even hear what I was saying.  What he believes was so ingrained in his mind that I might as well have been talking to myself. 

It is this sort of thinking that is going to keep the system the same and going to mean that more and more kids are going to have to go through some version of what I did.  I couldn’t be happier to be back with my natural family but I shouldn’t have been separated from them at all.  The emotional fallout from the separation is something that I have been living with (unwittingly) for years and have only recently started to deal with.  The pain and loss associated with that separation and the time and money required to come to terms with it is not something I would wish on anyone.  It needs to change.