How does it feel to be adopted?
Illustration by Wool Rim Wyver
How does it feel to be adopted?
How does it feel to know that people expected you to speak Spanish as you said your first words?
How does it feel to be a kid of color growing up in an all white community?
How does it feel when the bullying that started in your childhood and because you were seen as different, follows you into adulthood?
How does it feel to find your voice way into your 30’s, to speak up, only to be met with skepticism and having to deal with an enormous amount of push back from strangers and the people you trusted?
What happens to a person who gets told that she should be grateful to be adopted, not aborted, not left at the orphanage, or forced to live on the streets with the only option to make a living as a prostitute or a drug dealer?
What does it do to a person's concept of self to hear she doesn’t belong because her external attributes differ from the looks of the general population in the land she now calls home?
A land where dark hair, brown eyes and the complexion of her skin is viewed as exotic at best, but mostly as something that is wrong or ugly?
What happens to a person who’s only representation of her own kind gets stereotyped, ridiculed, exotified, fetishized and/or infantilized.
What happens to a person if she’s not allowed to identify as either a citizen of her old OR new country, where she was born OR where she now lives?
When people tell her to go home to her own country, where is she supposed to go?
Imagine being ten and longing for your mother.
Imagine that the adoption agency denies you to ask questions before the age of 18 and to have your orphanage telling you that your information is already destroyed.
Imagine that you, in your 20’s, as a last resort, apply to enter a TV show that specializes in finding first parents of adoptees, only to have your dreams crushed by the tv people when they tell you that you don’t have enough information to be able to participate in the show.
And then, when you pass the age of 30, you finally find people who can help you, only it costs a fortune to use their services.
Imagine that your orphanage, after 6 months of silence, says that they don’t have any information to give you, but that the search organization you hired, easily obtains that very information you’ve been looking for in a short amount of time and that it is your orphanage that provides the answers.
Would you believe the information just happened to re-appear after ”being destroyed” or would you suspect foul play?
Would you believe that they were both in on it, the orphanage and the search organization, in order to make big money?
Would you feel okay if you had to pay XX.XXX USD for something that is supposed to be free?
Would you be okay to have had your basic human rights taken away from you?
How does it feel to only be able to find parts of your first family? And to realize that the time spent apart created a gap that can never fully be over bridged?
That all of you have lived with the trauma of separation and that that makes reunion difficult?
How does it feel to have to pay to get a DNA test, because deep down, you wonder if the people in front of you are who they say they are? Because now you know you can’t trust anyone or anything unless you have undeniable proof?
How does it feel to have to pay for several DNA tests - that lead you nowhere closer to your immediate family? Would your heart break if your family refused to take it?
How does it feel to have to engage yet another search organization in your quest to find missing family members?
Envision a reality where every bone in your body aches to find your father, but you have no funds to start another search.
Can you envision what it feels like to realize that the longer you wait, the longer the search takes, the chances to find your family alive decreases?
Can you envision searching for thirty years and when you find something you’re too late? That what you find is a headstone?
Look into the eyes of your newborn and imagine that someone stole her from you.
That happened to my mother.
That happens to a lot of mothers.
Imagine being an adult and having to face the hard facts, that you were not supposed to be adopted at all.
Imagine losing your name. The name you were so proud of once was never your true name. Not the one your mother gave you, but a fabrication made up by criminals, by traffickers.
Imagine finding discrepancy after discrepancy in your adoption file.
Imagine coming across the term ”Paper Orphan”, a term you never knew existed before, but it applies to you.
It’s true meaning being: a child made adoptable by erasing its true identity, replacing it with a false one. Stating the child as an orphan.
Did you know that UNICEF sees a child as an orphan, even if she has one living parent or living relatives who are willing and able to take care of her?
Did you know that there’s something called ”the orphan myth”? That there are not as many orphans out there at all and that most ”orphans” don’t need to be saved?
Not even all the real orphans need to be saved.
Did you know that the need for adoptable children increases when (white) people want to adopt. That baby sellers and orphan makers see an opportunity and take it.
What if you were never chosen, never special, just next in line?
What if you had to tell the parents you grew up with that their altruistic act of love turned them into a cog in a baby stealing machinery?
Adoption shouldn’t be seen as a cure to (white) people’s infertility.
How does it feel to be labeled angry, cynical, bitter and/or rude to both adoptive parents and other adoptees for speaking your truth?
What is wrong with being angry? Wouldn’t you be angry too if it happened to you?
How does it feel when others say you're in need of therapy as soon as you point out the negative aspects of adoption?
Why is it that stories about malpractices are seen as isolated occurrences?
How many ”isolated occurrences" has to be exposed for people to realize that this is something symptomatic for the adoption industry?
Why is it okay that money controls who gets to keep their children and who gets to buy them?
Adoption does nothing for our home countries but bleeds them dry of generations of hundreds of millions of children.
It’s nothing but cultural genocide.
Imagine what would happen if people who wanted to save children gave their money to our mothers so that they could keep us instead.
Imagine what would happen if people realized that the demand is higher than the supply of healthy babies and children.
Imagine if people joined forces to stop trafficking masked as adoption.
Imagine a world where the allies of adoptees would demand adoptee rights.
A world where people would put pressure on the governments in both the giving- and receiving countries to take responsibility for child laundering that has been going on for decades.
Get out of the fog.
Get mad.
Speak up.
Even in those "happy" adoptions things may surface.
So…
How does it feel to be adopted?
You tell me.
Johanna Lundqvist
26 June 2016
WELCOME TO ACÁ
Welcome to the Alianza of Colombian Adoptees (ACÁ) Blog, a space dedicated to amplifying the voices and experiences of Colombian adoptees.
