Context is everything

[7rin]

Love is not a pie
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 2012

Tweaked

Context is everything

"Adoption is the right choice for some people. It isn't all evil."

Taken by itself, the above statement is one with which I do not disagree. I understand that each adoptive situation has its own unique set of circumstances, and in some of those circumstances adoption may be the best available option, though not necessarily a painless one.

So why was I triggered when I read the statement earlier this morning? Why did feelings ranging from anger to despondency flush through my body?

I was tweaked because the statement appeared as an anonymous comment at the end of a long blog post in which a mother who relinquished wrote of her person experience of pain and trauma resulting from adoption. In that context, it was hard for me to interpret the statement as anything but a dismissal—as one more case of a message falling on deaf ears. "Did he/she even read the post?" I thought.

Sadly, such dismissal is depressingly familiar to me. I am weary—oh so weary—of people telling adoptees and original parents what our feeling about adoption should be, shutting their ears to our descriptions of our actual experiences.

Read the rest of the post over at Love is not a pie.

Adoptee Apparel :p

[7rin]

My own lovingly designed t.shirts for adoptees with style, and available at the Post-Adoption Charity CafePress store. :)

The first image I created was the lovely nRFU that points out we're not Rainbow Farting Unicorns...


...which was created after yet another day of bouncing my head off a brick wall trying to educate people as to the HORRORS of adoption - even in a "good" or "successful" adoption (however you want to define those terms :p).

There's only, currently, two images available (not least because I am so inartistic that I have trouble drawing stick peeps!) in the Post Adoption Charity store, the second of which shares with the world the absolute TRUTH about why adoption hurts so damn much. To the point that I think if we could shift paradigms and remove the expectation of gratitude - there'd be a lot less screwed up adoptees. Thus, the t.shirt I spend the vast amount of my waking time wearing is the Adoption Loss quote...


"Adoption Loss is the only trauma in the world where the victims are expected by the whole of society to be grateful"
- The Reverend Keith C. Griffith, MBE

Feel free to purchase, and any money made on the store is staying there until I can get the head space to get Post-Adoption Charity (completely and utterly still in its infancy) up and running properly.

See also: http://www.cafepress.com/7rindom :}