A friend reached out to tell me she thought I was brave for sharing my thoughts about a woman’s right to choose.

It is assumed that as an adoptee, I would be pro-life.  Over the years, countless have said to me, “aren’t you glad you weren’t aborted?”  I’ve never been quite sure how to respond to that one.  Sassier folks may have shot that question right back to the questioner, but I’ve sat there silent and stunned.

You see, I am not a “THING,” a “COMMODITY,” “SOLUTION TO PROBLEMS.”  I am a living breathing person whose biological parents could not keep her.  I was cut off from my biological family and while I was raised in a family that loved me, that doesn’t take away my genetic roots.  My boys were the first people I met who were biologically related to me.  Growing up, I sat there silent, while the rest of the family sat around talking about who looked like whom.  Occasionally a family member would say, “you look like us, even though you are not related to us.”   Unless you are adopted, you do not understand how it feels to have no one who looks or acts like you.  It’s as if you are living in a foreign country without access to the language – you are always slightly out of step.  Maybe that’s why I love traveling so much because it feels so comfortable to me.  Just because I was loved does not mean I didn’t experience pain or trauma growing up.

Please do not tell me I should be grateful.  My whole life I’ve had to tell the “I’m so lucky” story.  I had it down pat.  Am I though?  I’ll never really know. My story starts at three weeks old.  I don’t know my birth story or anything about the first three weeks of my life.  It’s why I always feel sad and uncomfortable around my birthday, which is a trait many of us adoptees seem to share.   I never realized this was missing until I had my own children.  They love to hear the stories about their birth – the moment I first laid eyes on them or the first time I felt them kick me while pregnant.   Adoptees carry around pain that society doesn’t want us to acknowledge, we are told to be grateful and be quiet.  We are silenced because to speak our pain makes us look disrespectful and unappreciative of our adoptive parents.  Even now, I’m worried about my parents’ feelings.  We carry around everyone’s baggage – our birth parents, our adoptive parents and our own. 

Do not get me wrong, I’m not sure my biological mother keeping me would have made my life better, it just would have been different.   But this is MY reality – I was conceived, I was given up for adoption and I was raised by another family.   I am not a political pawn, an answer to infertility or an unwanted pregnancy.  Adoption is not all good and it is not all bad.  Please stop making it so black and white.   

Adoption is not a solution to abortion.  Birth control, abstinence, mutual consent – THEY are solutions.

Thanks for holding space for me.  This is hard for me to share, but if I can’t speak my truth to friends, then how will anything change?