This entry may reflect a little bit of bitterness as I reflect upon the vitriol dumped out on me on a regular basis, although usually only by one child at a time, and for that I should be grateful. It occurs to be though, that if I’ve sunk so low, that the thought of only one ingrate at a time is cheering, maybe I ought to get out more or something.

I read Claudia Jewett’s books, and many more, before I even started adopting, and I was MAPP trained, college educated to the post graduate level, and now that I think about it, that last year writing a PhD would have been a quiet year, instead I was tired of sitting and writing, I wanted to DO something…so I did. While working full-time in the school system, I adopted a sibling group of three girls from Honduras.

These were a fairly easy group of kids until they hit their twenties, then came the resentment, The Adoption Resentment, as they decided to pour out their anger on me based on the fact that I chose to adopt then, that their birth mother chose not to parent them. The truth is she wanted the children to go to America and we kept in touch over the years, me often sending money that was quite the sacrifice. I’ve put all three girls through college as well. But in their blind anger, they felt it was OK to lash out at me; to not speak to me, nor come to family events. An “I’ll teach YOU to dare to parent ME,” moment that lasted a long time.

Adopting siblings groups also offers another perspective on the us-against-the-world mentality and they’ll try and suck the non rebelling sibs into the vortex as well. I have a friend right now, with the oldest sibling away from the family, the remaining two teens are blaming the adoptive mom for all his bi-polar and FAS problems, never once considering the vast amount of alcohol the birth mom was documented as having imbibed during pregnancy, That’ll be our fault as well, adoptive parents are convenient targets, simply because we are there; we didn’t bail out like everyone else did.

Another friend, an adoptive mom of course, had her Vietnamese daughter leave and give birth to six children without ever allowing this woman, who’d raised her since she was a toddler, to participate as grandmother. The oldest grandbaby was 10 before the family sought counseling over unresolved anger and abandonment issues.

It’s difficult to reason with traumatized children, even after they become adults. If they don’t even like themselves, how can they understand an adoptive parent’s love for them?

My caseworker explained it to me very simply about 15 years ago. She stated flatly, “the children feel that if their birth mother didn’t love them, they must be unworthy of love, so how can they believe that a stranger would love them?

And I’ve learned many more of my children should have been in therapy. Just because they made excellent grades, didn’t preclude the fact that they were struggling emotionally over that simple issue. Just because I do have a huge majority of children who didn’t act out and have to be restrained by the police, didn’t mean they weren’t screaming on the inside for help in understanding their birth family situation.

With scars on their body, they’ll deny the birth parents abused them, rather they’ll then accuse us; the ones who are seeking help and resources for them. Sometimes this misplaced anger is hard to tolerate yet it is part of the process.

I can sit here now and look back with a different perspective at my grown daughters, who have certainly all now made me inordinately proud. We’ve had the usual marathon-lasting for decades-talk sessions amongst us, and they've shared their deepest feelings, they’ve healed a good bit overall, or at least learned how to live with that undeserved hurt that came from having their birth family ties severed.