Blinders and Rose-colored Glasses

My colleagues recently interviewed guest April Dinwoodie, adopted person, former CEO of the Donaldson Adoption Institute, podcaster, and activist on our podcast, Adoption Matters. Real People. Real Life. Real Talk. They discussed many points including the metaphor of “blinders.” Their chat got me thinking.

Blinders

Our culture’s predominant perspective about adoption views it as totally benign, a win/win solution. This assessment creates huge blind spots. It yields little space for the realities of adoption. It ignores the profound grief, significant losses, and life long challenges experienced by adoptees and birth families—especially birth mothers.

Why do these blinders persist?

Beliefs hold until they are challenged, replaced or when we willingly relinquish the false comfort they provide. Until then, blinders serve a purpose.

Who benefits when we sugarcoat the painful aspects of adoption?

The message projected by the predominant cultural viewpoint is that everyone benefits. If we only look at the surface level and view birth parents, adoptees and adoptive parents in isolation, adoption can look like a winning solution. In fact, adoption is often described as the proverbial win/win.

Birth parents who cannot, or choose not to parent, find persons willing to parent their child(ren) in their stead. Folks seeking a child to adopt find a child in need of parents. The “parentless” child acquires parents. On the surface, this looks like an all around win, but…

Reality check for birth mothers

But this glib assessment disregards both the complexities and the realities of adoption. Adoption leaves no one unscathed.

Women who choose adoption for their children are changed by this decision—one that they make at a period of great stress and insufficient resources. They must live with the grief, losses, and fallout for the rest of their lives. Their role in their children’s lives will never again be the same. Their children will never be the same either.

Even in open adoptions the mother/child relationship will never be equivalent to the one they would have shared if adoption had not occurred. Their connection is forever altered. It is a weight they and their children will shoulder forever .

Reality check for adopted persons

An adopted child’s life is permanently realigned by adoption. This has significant lifelong consequences. They must figure out how to survive, grow, and thrive in a new family. That is no small thing. Unfortunately, adoptees often find it necessary to adjust themselves to fit into their new family. This frequently means compromising fundamental aspects of their personality, aptitudes and inclinations. They must also cope with the psychological and emotional after effects of adoption.

Reality check for adoptive parents

It is easy to think that all is roses and rainbows for adoptive parents. After all, adoption is their dream fulfilled. Yet, they too experience the sting of reality’s pricks. They must learn a new approach to parenting—one that recognizes the unique needs of an adopted person. And, they must figure out how to parent a child whose DNA, aptitudes, and talents may not quite meld with the patterns and expectations of the adoptive family.

They must grieve the loss of any biological connection to their child. Adoptive parents will find themselves experiencing this grief at different stages of life, for example, grief might strike when their children have children of their own, or when a best friend gets pregnant. Again and again, adoptive parents must acknowledge and process this very human yearning for a biological child.

Why is this so important? Addressing this recurring grief helps adoptive parents to be fully open to the child they have adopted into their families. And then—and this is critical—they must do the hard personal work of handling their own “stuff” each and every time new “stuff” arises. Plus, they must take it upon themselves to get the training, education and information that will prepare them to be the parents their children need them to be.

Rose-colored glasses

Stipulating that we recognize that adoption inherently creates challenges is not enough. It’s not a once-and-done kind of thing either. Parents must remain vigilant and intentional looking for ways that their child is expressing or demonstrating a need.

Otherwise, it is easy to use a “soft focus” lens that smooths out the wrinkles in the relationship without actually handling or resolving the issues. Such filters can also lull us into thinking that things are better than they actually are. Rosey lenses hide the hard stuff from easy view which makes it easy to overlook—or to ignore—leaving issues unaddressed, unresolved, and often exacerbated.

For adoptive parents this might show up as never mentioning birth parents to their child or of shutting down such conversation if their child raises it. The unspoken message is that birth parents are a taboo topic. This leaves the child frustrated, unsupported, and hurt. Being a loving parent to an adopted person means, acknowledging all of the hard stuff and handling it together with sensitivity and compassion for the sake of the child.

Extended Families sometimes choose blinders tool

There are many ways that extended families can use blinders to avoid having to deal with some of the uncomfortable realities adoption brings. A few that come to mind are:

Acting as if the child has no birth family
Making no effort to learn about or include aspects of the child’s heritage and culture
Passing on family heirlooms only to their biological grandchildren
Giving more expensive gifts to biological grandchildren
Including only biological grandchildren in group family portraits
displaying only biological grandchildren’s photos in their homes

It is easy to see how such imbalances can be hurtful and harmful to adopted children. It is vital that we adoptive parents address such inequities promptly. Resist the temptation to say nothing or to not want to make an issue of it because we do not want to rock the extended family boat or distress our own parents.

Adoptive parents must prioritize our children’s well being over the comfort and biases of our extended families.

Cultural Blinders persist

The dominant cultural paradigm still views adoption as totally benign. So, adoptive parents will often come up against the firmly held beliefs of people who subscribe to the Win/Win myth of adoption.

In the process of advocating for our children, it is important to educate people and help them see the damage done by hanging on to these cultural blinders. We can do it with conviction, confidence, and civility.

The Tri-spective view

Using a Tri-spective view helps us to see how interconnected birth parents, adoptees and adoptive parents actually are. Anything that impacts one person in the triad inevitably affects the others. An adoption decree severs the legal ties between birth parents and their child. However, it does not and can not sever the very real, permanent and significant bond that links adoptees and their biological parents biologically, emotionally, and intellectually.

Ideally adoptive parents and birth parents succeed in creating a relationship with one another that serves the best interest of the child that they all love. This takes hard work, intention, dedication, persistence, and courage. It’s not easy but it is possible. And, in the long run, the child benefits when the parents see one another as teammates working together for their child and not as rivals pitted against one another.

Questions to ponder

How have I continued to educate myself on the needs of adopted persons?
How do I advocate for the rights of adopted persons?
How am I handling my own struggles with the seven core issues of adoption so they don’t weigh on my children? (Those seven core issues of adoption are: loss, rejection, guilt and shame, identity, mastery and self-control, grief.)
How do I support the shared relationships that bind our family with our children’s birth family?