Common Ground in Adoption Land

By Sara Easterly, Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, and Lori Holden

If you’ve ever spent time in what is known as “Adoption Land”—various communities that exist to support people with emotions and struggles particular to adoptees, first/birth parents, and adoptive parents—you’ve likely noticed an array of fiercely held perspectives on adoption.

While Adoption Land helps normalize and heal, there can be a danger in looking at adoption dogmatically or in an echo chamber.

Adoptive parents who sing the praises of adoption tend to lead the narrative that’s most familiar in mainstream culture: adoption is a beautiful thing, children are gifts, adoptive parents are selfless, orphans and unwanted children abound, and the best way to help them is through adoption.

This perspective, which elevates adoptive parents to saint-like status, misses the profound nuances of adoption and excludes important perspectives from other key players—adoptees and first/birth families (for simplicity, from here on referenced as birth families)—whose voices are critical to serving the adoption community.

Adult adoptees who speak out often focus on the trauma of adoption. Losing a mother is one of the greatest separations imaginable, and yet adoptee mother loss is often diminished, ignored, or equated with other kinds of losses. Adoptee pain is not the happy “positive” story of adoption that mainstream culture usually takes interest in, but it is scientifically proven: from the moment of relinquishment, adoptee brains are wired to protect from further loss. This can manifest as people-pleasing, perfectionism, anxiety, aggression, depression, addiction, suicidal ideation, or other self-harm. These are critical, life-saving dynamics to shed light upon, and it’s important that adoptees continue to speak up about the effects of attachment loss.

But while unpacking the emotional turmoil that goes hand-in-hand with adoption, adoptees can get stuck in darkness and hopelessness. It’s easy to lose the “forest for the trees,” straying into the “Trauma Olympics,” or forgetting about the plasticity of the human brain and our enormous capacity for resilience. What’s more, over time adoptees may disengage with, or even block, adoptive parents, together with a large swath of society, after becoming fatigued or retraumatized by constant microaggressions, gaslighting, and flawed information. But engage they must—especially if they feel a calling to support other generations of adoptees and work toward industry reform.

Birth parents’ voices are still desperately needed in Adoption Land. When birth parents remain silent, adoptees miss out on their perspectives, which can serve as a balm for the scars of relinquishment. Also, when birth parents remain quiet, adoptive parents may be prone to carry on as if first bonds don’t matter (out of sight/out of mind), when those first roots are deeply significant to most, if not all, adoptees and must be honored for everyone’s emotional health.

That said, it’s no secret that there’s a power dynamic that contributes to shaming and silencing birth parents. Adoptive parents, because they, unlike the birth parents, are actually parenting the children, naturally are in a superior position. Birth parents, observing from the shadows, are typically waiting for the moment they can join in. Some birth parents, so engulfed by the shame of their placement, are nowhere to be found. Entombed by the layers of their trauma and feelings of unworthiness, speaking out could be the last thing on their minds. Additionally, speaking out means talking about the present time as well as the past. An open adoption arrangement can be greatly affected by what birth parents choose to say. The consequences for speaking out could be dramatic: the difference between seeing your child or not, in visits or even just pictures.

This is why it’s important for birth parents to feel an invitation to enter Adoption Land—both from its participants and generally from adoptive parents—and why that invitation must be shame-free and punishment-free.

Working Together for True Change

Change happens when people work together. Although progress has been made, a greater evolution is still needed for the betterment of the 100 million families affected by adoption. We all benefit when we empathize with others and are willing to look within for what we can do.

Toward that goal, three women living in adoption share three different perspectives on working with others from within the adoption constellation. We’ll start with the adopted person for two reasons: first, this is the person in the “triad” who had no voice or choice in their relinquishment and adoption, and second, adoption practices are supposed to be about the “best interests of child”—a child who may at first seem readily adaptable, but grows to have her own independent views and voice.

Sara Easterly, Adult Adoptee

I recently met another mom, and as we talked, she learned that I was an author and adoptee. She asked about my memoir (Searching for Mom), and within minutes the conversation turned to her friends who were adoptive parents and might want to read my book. I nodded, momentarily basking in flattery … though it was rather short-lived. In the same breath, this mom started telling me about how awful these adopted children of her friends were: out-of-control, acting up, wreaking havoc on their families, and destroying their adoptive parents’ marriages.

I confess that I made an immediate, judgmental assessment of the adoptive parents without knowing them or understanding the situations further. Inside, I felt pretty irked by the double-standard: how culture loves to pretend adoption is about saving needy, powerless children, but when adoption gets hard or doesn’t add up to beautiful, it becomes about blaming the kids—no longer seen as needy and powerless. Instead, it’s their parents who are victims, overlooking the fact that they chose adoption and have benefitted from it too.

Thankfully, this mom was a long-winded talker, which gave me time for a lot of deep breaths that stopped me from speaking out of my anger. As she continued, I remembered the cultural lack of awareness when it comes to human attachment dynamics and how losses manifest, particularly for adoptees. Most people don’t even consider that adoption is rooted in loss.

I also thought about how hard parenting is when our children don’t behave as we’ve hoped and when we feel like we are failing them. As a mom, I’m aware that parenting has its pain points. I reflected on how difficult it is to admit that what we’re doing as parents isn’t working, and how much easier it is to blame our children and circumstances, rather than face ourselves or a situation we’ve had a hand in—a defense mechanism employed to protect us from pain. As an adoptee, too, I know about defense mechanisms. Noticing all of these commonalities was my path toward empathy for these adoptive parents and out of the “othering” line of thinking that could have propelled me to defend, attack, or shut down. I thought of my adoptive mom and what she might have said to her closest friends. I know I wasn’t always easy to parent either.

My adoption took place before there was much awareness or sharing of the effects of relinquishment. My parents, like so many others, were instructed to take me home and pretend as if my adoption made no difference in my life. With this as an unspoken rule, I grew up playing the same pretending game … but the long-term result was that I became an enigma to my parents. From most outward appearances, I seemed to be thriving. But my parents had no idea of the incredible grief, secret mother-fantasies, and flight from vulnerable feelings that boiled inside of me. My growth, as well as a deep attachment to my adoptive parents, was hindered by a lack of unity and information-sharing between all parties. How I wish my parents had had access to adult adoptees when I was a child and had been open to hearing perspectives from birth parents too! It may not have made parenting me a cakewalk, but I’m certain more awareness would have gone a long way for us all.

I don’t want to see other adoptees and families (both adoptive and birth families) getting unnecessarily stuck too. That’s why I continue to write and speak about my experiences now. It’s also why I listen—even when it’s hard, like it was when this mom shared about her friends’ adopted children. It can take effort, but it helps to see their perspectives as a gift. For one thing, their sharing helps me, as an adoptee advocate, see where more progress is needed. There’s a personal benefit too: an opportunity to continue my healing journey, with a less-personal window into parents’ struggles and needs. Similarly, by being in community with adoptive and birth parents, I know I am offering a gift: helping them understand the often-misunderstood hearts of adoptees.

Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard, Birth Mom

Birth parents who speak about their adoption experiences are more often birth mothers than birth fathers. From this perspective, birth moms who speak out typically fall into one of two groups.

First are those who speak from the traumatizing circumstances surrounding their placement that has left an open wound. The circumstances that have deeply affected them could have been any number of events, but most often they have either been forced or coerced to place their children or they have heavy regret about their decisions. In more recent times, many birth moms are speaking out because promises that were made to uphold an open adoption were broken.

Second are the birth mothers who are relatively fresh out of their placements and aim to testify about their experience for inspirational purposes. They typically tell their stories while parroting the extremely positive rhetoric taught to them from whomever facilitated their adoption. Most often, these are women whose adoptions were open to some degree. Perhaps they are looking for some sort of redeeming value in what was an almost unbearably painful chapter in their lives. This may explain why some become adoption cheerleaders early in their post-placement journeys.

Each group of birth moms is aware of the other; they often find themselves in stark opposition one another, clinging to their rigid perspectives of how adoption has affected their lives. Both groups have more in common than they know, even in their different experiences, levels of openness, and trauma sources. It’s highly likely that both groups were told a sugar-sweet tale of how the adoption process would be. Some adoption professionals stash away critical information that would be useful to educate birth mothers on the after-effects of placing their children for adoption. This decision by adoption professionals—to conceal from birth mothers the inevitable mental and emotional outcomes of adoption—is likely made from fear of “negatively” influencing their adoption decisions, thus causing the professionals to lose thousands of dollars, damage their reputations, and erode the trust of their client: the prospective adoptive parents.

It’s no surprise that when a baby leaves the arms of one of these birth moms, all of the rah-rah rhetoric that has set the birth mom upon a high heroic pedestal vanishes and leaves her to fall a long way back down to earth. The fall from adoption glory is a hard one. I, myself, have experienced the terror of the plunge. It was as though I walked out of the hospital and into a sea of “tell us your inspiring story of redemption!” Redemption? What do I need to be redeemed of? The pressure of turning our stories of relinquishment into a flowery fairy tale is an extension of the shame placed upon single pregnant women. It took me some time to confront my faulty ideals of adoption, but with each milestone of understanding, I chipped away at the conflict within myself and parted ways with the shame surrounding my adoption and pregnancy. More important, this prepares me to one day have real and honest answers to the questions my child will ask. My imperfections and those in my story are not to be hidden away or crafted into a phony fable; facing the ugly head-on is healing in the long run.

I speak up to demystify the less familiar and often unavailable birth mom perspective. To keep our voices clear and audible, we must continuously protect our paper from presumptive pens. Every time we disappoint society’s craving for a fairy-tale ending, we dismantle the shame and free other birth mothers from the captivity of a dishonest narrative. Through listening to each other and speaking in truth, we can remove the barricades to deeper relationships with our children.

Lori Holden, Adoptive Mom

Many (not all) adoptive parents come to domestic infant adoption after enduring the indignities and grief of infertility. Like fertility treatments, the process to adopt can be invasive, uncertain, and fraught with emotion. By the time new parents finally bring home a baby, it’s no wonder they might end up thinking the whole process was “worth it,” “meant to be,” and that all their troubles are behind them. That neither they, nor their beloved babies, will ever need to worry about anything adoption-related again.

It’s a short leap to “adoption is wonderful. Just look at us as proof!”

I’m not just speaking about others. That was me. I joined the ranks of insufferable new adoptive parents back in my early days of adopting my daughter and my son. In the time before social media, when parents gathered in online bulletin boards and forums, I went in proclaiming my amazing! experience! as the truth of everyone in adoption. After all, I felt it so fully it must be The Truth!

It didn’t take long to find out just how wrong I was.

I got called out on a forum for my exuberance and audacity—rightly so. Though it hurt, I began to listen—especially to adult adoptees and birth moms who explained to me situations similar to those Sara and Kelsey have shared here. I began to understand the complexities and nuances of adoption. I began to gain a wider array of perspectives that helped me become a more attuned and empathetic mom to my children. I am grateful for the adoptees, birth parents, and other adoptive parents who have helped me to see beyond the “adoption is wonderful” narrative.

Listening to, much less engaging with, people who are less-than-positive about adoption can seem scary. You’re positive, they’re negative. What could a Negative Nancy possibly have to say worth listening to? Turns out, a lot, if we listen from a place of openness. When we can actually understand practices that have harmed the Saras and the Kelseys (and even the Loris) of Adoption Land, we can then make different and better decisions. For example, once I began hearing the common lament from adoptees that splitting their loyalty between their adoptive parents and birth parents was painful for them, I began embracing a Both/And heart set, which replaced the prevailing Either/Or mindset. My daughter and son are better off for that.

What a fortunate time to be in, to have access to varied voices through the Internet. Instead of shying away from possible conflict, we should be taking advantage of these spaces that enable us to grow beyond our comfort zones.

Yet I also want to caution that there can be too much of a good thing. You can collect all of the insight from all of the voices and still not know what to do with it—much of it may even be conflicting. In addition to listening outside you, I also encourage you to listen within, to discern what is true for you and your situation. Find a balance between letting in other voices and tuning in to your own. In this way, you can cultivate confidence in how you approach adoption both in your own life and with others online. But not just confidence; confidence with compassion.

Leaps and Strides

It’s almost funny to consider how we, as a culture, took a leap to the “adoption is beautiful” fairytale when in reality it’s built on a foundation of loss, pain, and heartache. Perhaps this is a reflection of society as a whole, showing its fear of the dark and our existential human longing for an easy, breezy, happy ending.

Ironically, we can only make strides toward a satisfying ending when we embrace the full, real, messy aspects of adoption too. When we make proper room for all that is hard, there’s more space for the light. There can certainly be a lot of light in adoption—of course! But Adoption Land has historically spent decades tucking away the darker, harder parts, and it’s time to acknowledge that it’s complicated and look beyond our perspectives.

Perhaps this is the challenge for each group in Adoption Land: to recognize that each of us is carrying pain. The adoptee has the pain of separation. Birth parents have the pain of relinquishment and shame. Adoptive parents have the pain of insecurity and sometimes grief from previous losses. Seeing each other’s pain is what gives us empathy for one another.

With empathy as the baseline, the second challenge is to listen to each other. Listening to others’ perspectives can be hard and may sometimes seem like a tall order. Until we feel solid in our own beliefs, we might find others’ views threatening or stifling. But once we find our confidence, listening is where significant growth can unfold. If we listen only to voices that come from our perspectives in the triad, or to people with whom we already agree, we won’t discover information that may help us become better versions of ourselves. We can get stuck. Being open to others’ perspectives not only can help us make better decisions at the personal level, but can also improve Adoption Land by advocating for practices and policies that more effectively serve us all.

Sara Easterly is an award-winning author of books and essays. Her spiritual memoir, Searching for Mom, won a Gold Medal in the 2020 Illumination Book Awards, among many other awards and honors. Easterly’s adoption-focused articles and essays have been published by Psychology Today, Dear Adoption, Feminine Collective, Godspace, Her View From Home, and Severance Magazine, to name a few. Follow her on Facebook, on Twitter @saraeasterly, and on Instagram @saraeasterlyauthor.

Kelsey Vander Vliet Ranyard is the director of advocacy and policy at AdoptMatch. She’s a birth mother who is passionate about greatly raising the standards in adoption to better serve the children, mothers, and families affected by family separation. Ranyard has worked at various agencies and law firms in the adoption field and can often be found fervently and frequently begging the question, “How do we fix this?” She is also a co-host of the birth mom podcast,Twisted Sisterhood. Follow her on Instagram @fromanothamotha.

Lori Holden writes at LavenderLuz.com and hosts the podcast Adoption: The Long View. She’s the author of The Open-Hearted Way to Open Adoption: Helping Your Child Grow Up Whole, written with her daughter’s birth mom and acclaimed by people in all parts of the adoption constellation. She has keynoted and presented at adoption conferences around the US, and her work has appeared in magazines such as Parenting and Adoptive Families. Follow her on Facebook, on Instagram @Lavluz, and Twitter @Lavluz.

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