I have tried. I really have! I sat down every day last week (well, except for the day that my computer was on strike once again) and started to write on various topics that seem to be of concern for adoptees and the parents who are raising them. What has happened every time, though, is that I end up at a wall.

What wall, you may ask? The wall where I realize that everything I am writing that was either an issue for me or for fellow adoptees or adoptive parents attached to my Velcro, or or or … without exception, each and every issue that I was trying to relate to adoption I could also relate to families that were brought together by biology. I could also trace each issue to multiple root possibilities. Often, adoption was the least likely cause when I really thought each point through.

Yes, of course, in the minutiae of details, the “adoption” bit comes up, but how many of the things parents are concerned about and adult adoptees complain about are really because one is adopted?

Communication problems between children and their parents?

Adolescents resenting their parents for everything from rules to never being home to always being home to not providing brand-name clothes to not “understanding” them?

Convoluted families with more than one set of parents and blurred lines of who is what for whom?

Feelings of insecurity, not “belonging” one way or another, fear of abandonment, rejection or being left alone?

Difficulty in committing to relationships?


Is there anyone out there that doesn’t know children or adults who were not adopted but have all or some of these very normal American Family Issues? I know many more people who are not adopted than I do those who are adopted and they (the non-adoptees) all have or have had these issues in their lives regardless of their apparently “ideal” status of biologically being a part of their family.

Of course, the adoptees I know (including myself) are all in the same boat with them. Isn’t that nice? ANYONE can be angry and isolated in their teens, lost and searching in their 20’s and even, if they so aspire (or maybe even if they don’t aspire) become neurotic and insecure by their 30’s and more bitter than bitter by their 40s just in time for a mid-life crisis… with or without genetic ties to your family!

There’s a boon for uniting humanity, for world peace if I ever heard one.

[Continued …]