Reunited Folks, do you wish that you had?

Question

been raised by your biological parent(s)?

If not, do you wish you'd had contact with them when you were a child?

If so, how are you handling that?

And if their lives were together enough that you think they would have made great parents, aren't you angry that they chose adoption?

Answer 1

I do not have a crystal ball nor do I own a time machine.

These questions have no signficance over who I am as a person unless I want to be stuck in a past I can not change.

What is the point of even worrying about these things?

I'm not angry.  I understand.  I make the best of it and move on.

I just feel fortunate that now I have more people in my life who love me and my children.

I just try to live in the now.

Answer 2

There was no reason for me to be separated from my natural mother.  None.

I wish to god I'd had contact with her as a child and hadn't had to grow up 'in the dark'

I'm handling it by attempting to enjoy the time I have left with my natural Mom after an arduous 20 year search (sealed records).  

Both my mothers (adoptive and natural) are trying to piece together what happened and figure out why, given that we all know each other, the powers that be won't give us our godforsaken records of our own lives.   The three of us are petitioning the court and lobbying for equal treatment under the law of all people to end the stigma and discrimination for good.

I'm not angry - my mother did not ever 'choose' adoption.  My  adoptive mother is horrified to discover the truth of what happened to my natural mother around the time of my birth.  They are both wonderful ladies and I refuse to choose between them; as your question implies adoptees must do.

Secret adoption sucks.  Truth and honesty are in the best interests of the adoptee

Answer 3

The question was respectful until you asked the last one (very condescending  and assuming). From what I've gathered from the stories here and certain events in history (even recently), there have been  many mothers that have either been forcefully separated from their children and others who were basically given no other choices. Please respect that these children are mourning their loss of mothers and that they have the right to feel what they feel.

Edit: What is not rational, is not being able to look at every side of a situation (reality dictates that things are multi sided).

Answer 4

Being raised by my first father would have been fine.  Being raised by my adoptive mother was fine, too.  I do wish that I'd had ongoing contact with my first father as a child.  He does, too, but it wasn't an option back then.

My first father and I, along with the entire extended family, share a great relationship.  We are close and enjoy being together again.  Unlike many of the people of my era, my first father actually did make the choice to relinquish.  I was 13 months old at the time, and there were some circumstances that occurred from which he did not feel he could adequately protect me.  I'm not angry with him for that.  He did what he thought was the safest thing for me at the time.  He is a good man.  

We both wish that adoption at that time hadn't meant that we had to spend so much time apart, with questions, however.  That part was entirely unnecessary, but it was how adoption was handled back then.

We both searched for each other, and reunited 7 years ago.   That's the part that really matters.  We are together now and enjoying it.

Answer 5

No

No

And interestingly enough I was one of 5 children my Bio parents had.  My older sibling and 3 younger all lived with my bio parents.  Only I was taken away as my bio parents couldn't get their acts together enough to satisfy a judge to get me back.  

Having said all of that I now have a college degree, a requirement in my adopted family who valued education, and a wonderful life.

The bio family on the other hand are a bunch of (no offense) white trash, uneducated, over procreating, welfare alcoholics who are useless members of society.  I am glad I am not associated with their filth.  And no I'm not angry...I'm grateful that I am better off than they are

Answer 6

Yes, I wish I had been raised by my natural mother.

There's not much I can do in handling it - it is what it is. We have a relationship and for that I am thankful.

Yes I am angry that she chose adoption - DUH. Who in their right mind would be happy about being relinquished if their mother was capable of raising them.  

Answer 7

Yes.

I'm not quite sure how I would have perceived things if my bio mother and father had been in my life when I was little.

You see... when I was little, my adoptive mom voiced my bio mother as also being my real mother (without using any suffixes). She would tell me that my bio mother loved me but just couldn't take care of me, and so that's what my adoptive mom was doing.

And the funny thing is... I did not believe her. I thought my bio mother had abandoned me. I thought, "Well since I'm told she loved me, and she's not here right NOW, she couldn't have loved me enough so why should I respect her?"

I am now an adult and I know the truth. She never abandoned me. She never stopped loving me.

As for your question, I find it somehow difficult to know *how* to "handle" coming to terms with what I know now. Simply because my bio mother lives 12 hours away across an ocean and does not speak any English. So you could say I'm rather screwed in that regard.

"But how do you communicate? Why would you even want to communicate with her? She didn't raise you!"

How do I communicate? I open up a dictionary or a textbook and I speak it as best I can into the microphone. That's how.

Why would I want to communicate with her? Because IN MY OPINION she is my mother. End of story. I have never said my adoptive parents were not real, either. Just that my biological mother is real as well.

Answer 8

I hate to intrude here, but this is one instance where I can confidently speak for my daughter.

We had a "semi" open adoption, her parents and I each knew pertinent details of the others life. I received a letter and pictures once a year (no intermediary). Later we exchanged email more frequently, but I had no direct contact with my daughter.

We reunited 2 years ago. Her parents were intending to kick her out, but had waited until we reunited, days after her 18th birthday. She was unprepared to live independently in anything resembling a safe manner, so we offered her a home with us. She lived with us for a year and a half.

We've come to understand that her home life was less than ideal, and her particular needs from adoption were ignored, denied and unmet.

In living with us she saw the kind of parents my husband and I were, the kind of home life she dreamed of. She formed a very strong bond to myself and my husband, as well as her siblings.

It threw us both for a bit of a loop, her because she never expected the fantasy family to be real. From my perspective I'd spent years researching adoption (we have been very successful as therapeutic foster parents) I'd heard time and again adoptees will say they wish they lived with their birth family, and it's not true, they are merely expressing a wish to be reaffirmed as a permanent part of the adoptive family. So I was wholly unprepared for my daughter to become increasingly insistent that she wished I had raised her, that some of the chaos that she's currently enduring would not have happened had she had a healthy childhood.

She is not dealing with this at all now. She very clearly has severe abandonment issues. She has pushed herself living with us in a way she has never done in any other relationship, working with a great therapist, having her first job, taking significant steps to becoming self-supporting. I really think (and her therapist has confirmed) that this is due to her fear of losing me, so she pushes herself hard to make me "love" her. She does at times lash out at me in anger she can't seem to repress, I'm pretty clear she's angry that I didn't raise her. So is her therapist. She still denies it. I'm sure it will take time for her to trust that I'm not going anywhere, that I made a commitment to her, and nothing can break it, not even her (deserved) anger. She has 18 years of loss to resolve before she can truly trust my word.

I try to do the best I can to simply weather the storms, continue to remind her that she is more powerful than she has given herself credit for, and turn the other cheek to the barbs when I can, while still using appropriate boundaries.

It's easy for me to do, since I know the me who placed her, myself an angry, powerless abused child. It's taken years of work and therapy and harsh self-examination to become the person she now sees. Placing her wasn't a whim, it was a necessity. In her clearer moments she gets that, but the heart still has a great deal of work to do. The only way she'll learn to trust my love for her is for it to endure over the long haul.... In that sense our experience as foster parents was great preparation. I've been down this road before.

I'd really like to thank those of you for sharing your feelings, because it's been the most disorienting part of this reunion. Everyone says she shouldn't feel that way. But she does. Knowing that it's more common than perhaps the adoption community cares to admit helps us in this journey at least. For that I owe a great debt to those of you here.