The concept of divide and rule may be a new and unfathomable
one for those involved in the adoption circles, but a concept
which may be at the core of our existence. It calls upon
us to examine one of the key elements at play in why we
live our lives the way we do, and challenges us to raise
our anger to new levels of awareness.
When we probe into our hearts, and start searching for
the answers to why life seems to have dealt us a cold cruel
hand, we catch ourselves in a sea of sinking emotions. Submerged
in loss and despair, adoptees and natural mothers become
united in their quest to regain this missing part of themselves
that seems so elusive and unreachable. Our vision is so
narrow during this phase of our lives, and naturally so.
We can only see the children or the parents we have lost.
We yearn for them to be in our lives again, and we feel
incomplete without them. We feel that we are dying with
this part of ourselves missing, and we begin to search for
something that can make us feel complete again.
The journey into our hitherto unfelt emotions is excruciating.
We allow the deepest, darkest corners of our subconscious
to make itself felt to us, and slowly we call the experience
of being separated from the human being who created us,
whom we created, back into our awareness. Tiptoeing through
the agony of the loss, the longing, comforting our wrenched
hearts, the miracle of personal healing commences. There
is no corner cutting in this journey. We can only choose
to walk forward and integrate the ugliness of some of the
truths into our psyches, or we can choose to ignore them
and play our part in nourishing society’s sickness.
We are confronted with ideas about ourselves, which we
know instinctively to be untrue. As adoptees, we are expected
to not know the difference between our natural and our adoptive
parents. If we challenge this idea, we are labelled crazy.
We do not have our intellect developed in any way to be
able to understand that we are suffering a trauma when we
are one day old. But our bodies are inextricably intertwined
with those of our mothers, we have lived inside this body
for forty weeks. This body is our world, and suddenly, the
world is no longer there. The mother who knows instinctively
when her child needs feeding because she is connected spiritually,
emotionally, physically, historically and genetically to
it, has suddenly disappeared. For forty weeks, the mother’s
body has been preparing itself to meet the needs of her
child. Her milk is ripe with the minerals and nutrients
that the tiny defenceless body so desperately craves, but
that tiny body has been ripped away from her. The mother-child
unit is one organism, in two parts, and both parts need
each other to feel alive. When this is destroyed, the loss
is imprinted into both mother and child on a cellular level.
The body knows. The organism is imprinted with loss, destruction,
anguish, despair and anxiety.
The ability of the human body to survive is incredible.
Despite these feelings in our deepest selves, we find a
way to move forwards and survive. But we have to shut ourselves
off from this pain in order to do this. It is not uncommon
for mothers to not remember the birthday of their child.
It is not uncommon for the adoptee to claim that the loss
of his natural parents is not an issue. Yet the loss, when
unacknowledged, will play itself out in other ways. And,
when we refuse to acknowledge this part of ourselves, we
play the game that keeps us disempowered.
When we refuse to speak up for ourselves, we allow ourselves
to be controlled. Waking up to the monstrosities of the
adoption experience also brings forth the question of who
allows this to happen in the first place, and why. Exploring
our hidden grief leads us to the hidden hand, which supplies
babies, for a sometimes extortionate fee, to people who
are able and willing to pay. People become rich, at the
expense of other people's misery, another game which happens
in all aspects of society. These people, the adoption brokers,
create the demand, supply the goods, and take the profit.
$1.4 billion were generated in the USA in 1999. 138,000
adoptions were reported, making an average of $10,145 being
paid for each child. The state also benefits, saving money
on the allowances it would otherwise have to pay out. Becoming
rich has become more important than nurturing humanity,
and exploring human potential.
What the state does not realise, perhaps, is that short
term gain is often long term loss. Or perhaps it realises
and doesn't care. The number of adoptees in the USA in prisons
and institutions is drastically out of proportion with the
percentage of non-adoptees. The pain and misery which has
festered inside of us since the day of our birth and separation
has discovered violence as its outlet. Consider that two
to three percent of the American population are adoptees.
According to Lori Carangelo in Statistics
of Adoption, 60-85% of internees at the Coldwater Canyon
Center for Personal Development Psychiatric Facility are
adoptees. 70% of internees at a Monroe, Washington psychiatric
clinic were adoptees. 40% of adoptees end up in schools
for disturbed children. The cost of treating the violent
or disturbed adoptee has by now far outweighed any tangible
financial saving to the state. And yet, we choose to ignore
the evidence. The world chooses to be blind and apathetic.
As long as adoption is promoted as loving and caring, and
society chooses to believe this, it will continue. As long
as adoptees and natural mothers, fathers and siblings, are
stuck in the belief that our healing depends on each other,
and that we have the right to be angry with each other,
making each other responsible for the pain we are feeling,
adoption will continue. The people whom it serves will be
allowed to continue playing the game as long as we all have
our head in the sand.
When we see that the real machinery in our society, the
people who make decisions about our lives without really
involving us in those decisions, are those who want to divide
us, in order to control us, so that they can profit
from us, we have already expanded our awareness to a point
where we can start to take the control back.
For the adoptee who is so submerged in grief and desperation,
we must open our awareness to the whole story. That means
seeing that we were not rejected by our mothers, we do not
have to walk through life wearing this heavy black cloak
of rejection and pity. We do not have to direct our anger
at our mothers when we change our reality about our story.
We can transform that anger, and use it to awaken other
people to their own life potential. We can expose the game,
and more importantly, we can stop playing it.
Once adoptees and natural families reunite, we can create
a positive force that cannot be touched by those who wish
to destroy us. This does not mean that we necessarily have
to reconnect with our own natural families, but that we
reconnect with the nature of those who begin to see the
truth, so that we move into a new family with the same intent,
that of healing and recovery. That of exposing the truth,
so that we are no longer victim to it, and that of living
the truth, so that we can alter the present course of destiny,
and create a world which is safer for all of us.
