November...Adoption Month

So apparently November is the "official" month for adoption. As an adoptee, I feel sheepish for not knowing this fact until stumbling across my church's bulletin announcement concerning a speaker's testimony concerning adoption. From there, I began to see commercials on television announcing the need of families and homes for children. This is where I'm starting to see a grey area.

I understand the need for great homes for waiting children. I believe adoption is a great gift for both parent and child. At the same time, my adult adoptee cynicism is coming out, claws not retracted. My biggest problem with the commercial? The commercial discusses states, "Did you know that many adopted children went on to become entrepreneurs, actors, even president of the United States?" Yes, this is true. However, this approach is extremely degrading in that it tries to argue the "usefulness" of adopted children... almost as if to say, "Hey! Adopt a kid... he's useful...he has as much potential as the next kid." The adoptee, as with any other individual has as much promise as any other human...the idea of promoting a subject as useful means rendering it useless at one point in time. The problem isn't the promotion of productivity of an adoptee body, but that it would be a subject of contention in the first place...as if the orphan child was a burden in the mind of the audience at the beginning. This reveals the adoptee body as a second class citizen who must prove his worthiness within society. Why should an adoptee be lesser than any other person? Does this mean an adoptee must achieve a higher greatness than the average person to become a productive member of society? Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but at the same time, I believe I have a point.

I've met many adoptees who have discussed a childhood in which they believed they had to act a certain way and achieve certain things for fear of "being returned." The idea is that their belonging, for some reason, did not feel entirely genuine. Though the family may have done everything in its power to show the adoptee belonged, the outside culture revealed a sense of outsider, a void of kinship that would allow for the adoptee to be "returned" to his original place of rejection and alienation. Though I have not felt this within family, I have certainly felt this in other areas of my life. Recently, I realize that I have been driven to overachieve for fear of being "found out" and being "put back" rather than be taken seriously. This fear-driven action caused me much suffering. I can only imagine the pain my fellow adoptees endured while trying to be the perfect child for fear of being "returned" since by cultural/blood standards did not fully belong to the family.

Though the commercial attempts to show the positive aspects of adoption by revealing how many families have been established through this type of kinship, it does irreparable damage as well. The implication of adoptees going on to successful lives also invokes the "shared understanding" of the viewers/audience, and dare I say writers of the commercial, is that of adoptees being useless members of society.

I do understand that adoption something most people forget or do not realize how amazing an option of family building it can be; however, there is something to be said for the way we attempt to relate this idea to the general populace. Why not let the adoptees speak for themselves? I am amazed to see how few organizations utilize the adoptee voice when promoting adoption. Is this because we still view the once orphan as a forever child? Why are our voices as adoptees not being heard?