NoIsNaAdBeMo 3

When I decided to do NoIsNaAdBeMo, I was hoping that it would open up a dialog instead of me just saying that I hate adoption all the time and people not knowing what to say all the time. I do encourage the asking of questions and I do encourage the leaving of comments because then I will use those notes as prompts. Like this one:

I don't want to belittle your pain at all, but I wouldn't be so sure that your life would be better if you lived with your birth parents. At least the people who adopted you wanted you. A lot of people's parents don't want them at all.

Here's a snapshot of my childhood:

1983: Adopted
1989-1990: Consistently molested by babysitter
1992-1997: Consistently molested/raped by older brother, some instances included beating me in to submission
2001-2003: Cutting and being generally miserable about life, hospitaled for depression in 2003
Winter 2004: Birthmother re-enters my life, shortly after, birthfather does too
Winter 2004-Spring 2005: Cutting resumes, alarming alcohol consumption commences, promiscuousness ensues

So, could my life have been better? Well, my childhood and early adulthood wouldn't be hard to top.

That said, I've never claimed that my life would have been better, at least, better in the sense of safer, more wholesome, smarter, more encouraging. I've spoken to Mary on several occasions and I've spoken to Joseph once. Both of them were sexually abused as children, and I see it as being pretty inevitable that I'd have been molested either way. I don't know how nurtuing a sixteen year old can be. I don't know how much support her family was willing to give.

And I'm not entirely sure that 'better' even matters so long as the life you're given isn't bad one. If your argument that better is better, then you should only have the very best of everything. You should have the best car, the best house, the best food, and the best clothing. So if you drive a Toyota and not a Mercedes, if you don't have a guest bedroom, if you don't shop at Whole Foods, and you feel uncomfortable at Saks and you say, "Well, that's the best I can do," the clearly, not having the best doesn't mean that you have the worst.

Now let's talk about 'better' in a different sense. No one can say for sure how well I would have been provided for materially or otherwise, but I know that, had I not been adopted, I'd have been raised with my mother. She was the one who created me and birthed me and gave me some of her DNA. YES that DOES matter. (If it doesn't matter, why do people spend so much time and money trying to have their own children?) I hate it when people say, "But the people who adopted you, they're your real parents. That's your real family." No, they're not. They are like imitation vanilla. It will work fine as a substitute, but everyone knows, especially you, that something's just off about it, and it's reiterated every time someone asks about your Irish name or why you don't look even remotely like your parents or why you're considerably taller than both of them.

So in the sense of genetic importance and poximity, yes, my life would have been better.

As for the people who adopted me 'wanting' me, that's simply not true. My parents didn't want me, my parents wanted a baby. My parents had lots of trouble conceiving, and in the few instances that they did, save for the conception of my younger brother, they ended in miscarriages. My parents desperately wanted their own child. It was only after several years of letdown that they settled for my brother and me. They felt that they were so entitled to having children, they just went out and stole bought some.

There was nothing about me specifically that they wanted. It wasn't my charming personality or my near-tragic intelligence level. It was simply that someone had something they didn't want, and my parents had a use for it. There is nothing selfless about adopting a child, and my parents aren't an exception to that rule. It's not charitable. It's not a beautiful thing. It's a very calculated, selfish, and deliberate thing, and everyone (except the child) involved in the transaction (currency is exchanged for commodity, it's a transaction) has only selfish motives. "I don't want this child." "I want a child." "I want money."

Someone put a price on me, and they put a price on my life, and it would seem that the price was worth more than the benefit of living the life I was supposed to live, and worth more than the desired comfort of death.