A tattered, old gray bear lies face down on the concrete in front of a white house. Image by Trym Nilsen; free from unsplash.com

Letters From My Body Maybe I know a little something about diaspora. maybe… My cells been displaced from their motherland since I was the age of a thought. When I wick into the watery places, I extract genetic rain, Pour down on the parade of worship to the almighty adoption. Adoption, a love story. Adoptee, the savior. Or so we tell ourselves. Or so we tell our children to tell themselves, On nights they lie awake rubbing scars we call buttons. Button your lips child; Be grateful you were chosen, You were loved, You were saved. Cut the cord and move on. But I can’t live for Tomorrow, when my body is wired to yesterday. I pull a hair, or two, or thirty, I scream, and smash, and bang, and sob, And these letters from my body remember me, A language we’ve too expertly forgotten. Body talk. Pain-speak. The lament on a twitching vein marked enigma. Pop a pill and forget your mother tongue, We’ve tied our mothers tongues too long. Hail Mary, Full of grace, Were you too an unwed mother? What would they do if they had found out? Let her speak trauma, Let her speak. -Blake Gibbins

November is #NAAM (National Adoption Awareness Month), and it can be quite a trying time for the mental health of some adoptees, who watch the public’s unquestionable faith and loyalty to this industry spark many uncritical, sometimes ignorant, discussions without also inviting actual adoptees to speak. This #NAAM I’d like to ask all non-adopted persons to try and decentralize adoptive parents and agency professionals from the conversation; if just for one month. For one month, try to listen to adoptees only, and not just those whose stories make you the most comfortable. Try also to not only take away what you wanted or expected to hear. We need to be more critical than that.

Listen to the voices of those whose adoptive mothers were abusive; whose parents did not consent to having their child taken, as classist and racist entities deemed them unfit because of this or that minor infraction, or who only surrendered because of manipulation, coercion, and withholding of resources; those whose mothers were one of millions beaten, abused, and forced into losing their children between the 1940s and 70s. Listen to native adoptees who are telling us that the boarding schools never ended, but are now called adoption and foster care; genocide by any other name. Listen to transracial adoptees who would greatly appreciate it if we stopped watering down every discussion of adoption-related issues to race differentiation in adoptive families, without also addressing the racist institutions that stripped their first families of the privilege of even being called a family in the first place. Listen to those who permanently lost a family due to temporary experiences of poverty. Listen to international adoptees who need you to care as much about the deportation of adult adoptees as you do about “cute” videos of them when they’re minors; to those who are whistleblowing the international trafficking happening in the name of adoption. Listen to adoptees who have been on the brink of ending it all only to pull back out of guilt, because the thought of leaving this world betrayed their internalized role of emotional caregiver to families they’ve been forged into. Listen to the adoptee who tells you they have no care in the matter, but watch as their lips down the tenth drink of the evening because they’re terrified of their relationships or experiences abandoning them. Listen to those who say adoption saved them from multiple failed placements, but for whom no one questions why a system allowed multiple failed placements. Listen to newborn adoptees who, despite our best intentions for a clean slate, are haunted by memories of someone they’ve never met, and who suffer broken nervous systems in silence because they don’t believe they’ve earned a right to cry over any actual loss. Listen to those who predicate every single thing they have to say about adoption with “I’m grateful.”

We do not owe you or anyone else our gratitude, and frankly, it’s none of your business. To say as much is no erasure of trauma, for which there is no child separation without. I will no longer bend to make others comfortable and satisfied, and I invite other adoptees to do the same. The person who needs you the most is you my love; so stop worrying that being honest might hurt everyone else’s feelings, and instead start honoring your own. Liberate that story because you deserve freedom, and because it quite literally may be the thing which saves your, or someone else’s, life.

This month I am not interested in everyone’s acknowledgement of a “well-adjusted” adoptee they may know, as though it were sound evidence that adoption had a success rate, and were not, in fact, some band-aid covering up deeply entrenched human rights violations and social injustices. Also, because external appearance was never an accurate representation of internal mental health; if you were a better friend you’d know that. Try not to silence adoptees by minimizing their stories to an abnormal “personal bad experience,” or just “being negative.” That’s what we call gaslighting and abuse. If an adoptee you know has chosen to disclose sides of adoption that differ from what you’re used to hearing, then please be tender. They’re likely entrusting you with matters they’re not comfortable sharing with even their closest family.

There is so much that the public does not understand about why adoption and foster care exist; the profiteering, the roots in eugenics, and the colonizing forces that not only green-light toxic saviourism, but have deprived us of the memory of our animal bodies and what they most need to survive. This #NAAM, I encourage you to do simple google searches with keywords like critical, adoptee, and justice; to swim in the voices of adoptee authors, bloggers, artists, and psychologists. Do your research. Don’t buy into the one-sided story of adoption. And, of course, listen with the intent to actually listen; you might just learn something.