#NAAM2018

National Adoption Awareness Month. Not National Adoption Month, the month to venerate adoption and lift up adopters, relinquishers, and agencies. No. It is National Adoption AWARENESS Month, the month for you to be aware of what adoption means, what it entails, how it feels, and what you've actually done if you've participated in it. Adoptees are taking the month that should have been ours to begin with.

So buckle up. It's about to get real in adoptionland. 

A National Celebration of Adoption is Offensive 

By doing so, you are spitting in the face of every person who suffered under an inappropriate adoption, and I daresay that's a silent majority. Most of us don't talk about the suffering inflicted on us by being adopted because of the way you spit on us. 

You gaslight us by claiming our "bad experience" has "poisoned [our] perspective", because you "know someone who's adopted,  and they're just fine". Or you tell us we "don't know how MY children feel about being adopted". You conveniently forget that A) you don't know how they feel either, and B) being adopted, we probably have a better idea than you do. There's also the standard, 2x2 gaslighting: trying to convince us that we're crazy, we don't understand, or we're "just angry/bitter/need therapy" (as though any of those isn't justified).

Knowing An Adoptee Doesn't Qualify You as an Expert

You don't want to hear it. You don't want to hear how being adopted sucks, how it violates our rights, how more often than not we aren't treated properly. I understand. I don't care, but I understand. It's unpleasant. It makes you feel bad. It hurts you. It challenges your needfully held beliefs. It makes you feel guilty because you see it in yourself.  

Here's the thing.  I'm not the only one who "had a bad experience" as you call it. There are hundreds. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands more. Adoptees who were promised a "better life", only to be abused, neglected, rehomed, starved, beaten, raped, or even murdered by their "parents".

You're OK with that. You don't mind that so many adoptees are horribly mistreated and brutalized by their "parents", because your sister's mechanic's uncle's wife adopted a girl, and she's "happy" to be adopted and "grateful" she was "saved". At least it looks that way on the outside. 

You Aren't Qualified to Make the Judgement Call

I'm not a Person Of Color. I'm in no position to make judgement calls for Persons Of Color, or to tell POCs how they should feel about or handle any issue affiliated with race (which means pretty much everything). I'm not qualified to speak to their experience as a marginalized party; not even qualified enough to quantify that experience as "good" or "bad".

You are not adopted. You are in no position to make judgement calls for adoptees,  or to tell adoptees how we should feel about or handle any issue affiliated with adoption (which means pretty much everything). You aren't qualified to speak to our experience as a marginalized party; not even qualified enough to quantify that experience as "good" or "bad".

Does that make it clear enough? Stay in your lane. 

National Adoption Awareness Month is for Adoptees. Period. 

Now is NOT the time to focus on relinquishers,  but the people they relinquished. Now is NOT the time to focus on adopters, but the people they adopted. The accolades, hero worship, backpatting, ego inflating, and good-guy badge polishing can take a back seat for a month. It spends the other eleven months in the driver's seat. 

For #NAAM2018, how about you do the right thing for a change? Sit down. Stop protesting. Sit with your discomfort. And LISTEN TO ADOPTEES.