Lifetime Healing’s prompt today for Adoption Awareness Month is “Excuses”. And boy, Adoptive parents, this one is for us. Please bear with me while I rant a bit. Because this has gone on long enough, and while I’m frustrated with these conversations, I will not stop having them because I will not stop advocating for better adoption education!
We need to STOP making excuses for not educating ourselves. We have a million excuses to stop listening to the voices of people who may embody our children as adults… “They’re too angry”, “I feel misunderstood.”, “Their solutions are unrealistic”, “That group is really negative”, “They don’t know how hard this is for ME”, “Well, so-and-so doesn’t feel that way, and they”re adopted!”. NONE of these things invalidates the feelings or experience of those speaking. Empathy means leaving your judgment and insecurity at the door. It means saying, “Thanks for sharing” instead of “BUT…”.
I get it, there are a million things to do, and this education is REALLY hard. But we need to make this a priority. We make a value choice about what we think is important with our actions. If we’ve chosen to step into this adoptive parent role, we MUST choose what it takes to do it well. STOP with the excuses. STOP making this about you. STOP finding time to do everything else but understand the perspective of people LIKE YOUR CHILD. Do you value learning how to parent your adoptee well? Then value and prioritize learning from adult adoptees!
I am so, so tired. Wading through trauma, daily tasks of parenting, work, volunteering, fighting for self-care and my own mental health. I hear you when you say you are busy and it’s hard to find time. Find little ways that you can interject great education into your life. Some of the ways that I get around all the reasons I don’t have time for education, are podcasts and audio books. I hear you when you say that you don’t have time to read or go to the class, or whatever it is, but we are all washing dishes, and driving to work and waiting for appointments, so try listening to all the things you need to learn while you are doing all the things you need to do! If you’re already scrolling social media, make sure that a good percentage of your twitter or insta feed is highlighting adult adoptees, former foster youth and birth families. And not just “happy” ones who agree with you on everything…. Take a break when it’s getting too heavy, then come back. Always come back. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times, YOUR KIDS ARE WORTH IT.
I am sharing a guest blog post over at “A Word With Liu Miao”, which is a blog by adult adoptee Liu Miao. It boils down to where I’m choosing to find my adoption education and how I’m choosing to let that inpact my family. You can find that post here. And I’d love it if you’d pop over to read my thoughts. But as I was reading it through again today, I realized a lot of it pertains to our excuses for not listening well to adult adoptees. If it’s not too tacky, I’m going to close with some of my words from over there as I talk about why our family chooses not to use the term “Gotcha Day”.
“I know there are adoptees who are not offended by this phrase just like there are people of every minority who still use older terms to refer to themselves. However, I believe this is a simple, easy change that I can make- even if not all adoptees are offended by it. In my mind, even if only a few people are offended by this phrase, it is worth it to me to find another…
If you are reading this and struggle with the change, or feel frustrated with keeping up with PC language. Here are a few questions: If your child likes this phrase, might it be because they’ve never been given an option to think of this day differently? If you use this phrase, is your tradition more important than adoptees who have been hurt by this language? Is there an area of your life where you have felt frustrated by someone refusing to acknowledge your pain because they have never experienced it?
As parents by adoption, let’s press into adoptee driven education. Let’s not be quick to dismiss their experiences. When they share their thoughts, they risk great criticism and rejection, so let’s not let their vulnerability be in vain.”
