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Another set of circumstances under which I have heard fellow adoptees say that they hate being adopted is when their parents weren’t honest about how they came into the family. People in this situation have told me they feel betrayed, that their entire lives were a lie. I completely understand their anger, frustration and incredible confusion.

Especially in cases where the adoptee who was deceived had had a good life for the most part, was it the fact that they were adopted that had them incredibly angry or the fact that they had been deceived and disrespected by their parents? Does the new information make their parents any less their parents? I don’t think so. It does indicate some things about their parents’ characters, however.

I have heard tell of adoptees that grew up in families of a different race (especially international adoptees) being completely against adoption and furious because they feel they have no connection to their cultural background and/or birth country. This makes me wonder: would an international adoptee feel better about leaving a culture they have no recollection of having lived in behind if the people causing them to leave it behind were of the same race?

Many adoptees angry for this reason are frustrated that they don’t speak the native language of their birth parents. When they visit the country of their birth, they are exasperated to find that not only can’t they communicate, they have nothing in common with people there, are not accepted and don’t “fit in.”

Interestingly, I have not heard or read many instances of these adoptees being angry about being raised in the States once they have seen the situation in which they most probably would have been growing up had they remained with their birth parents, been put in an orphanage or abandoned completely in their birth countries. So again, I wonder if it is really the fact of their adoption that they rail against, or is it just easier to blame adoption and, sometimes, adoptive parents, rather than to just sit down and learn the language, learn about the culture and try to visit and/or live in the country of their birth parents in order to get that sense of what is what.

Here’s a bit of irony: many first generation Americans, the children of immigrants, are resentful and embarrassed by their parents’ continual use of their native language and attempts to instill cultural norms that seem to set them apart from “normal” Americans. The grass is always greener? Uh-huh. Sure is.


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