Life has been tough lately. I hadn’t been to church in a while due to some of the difficult things I have been going through (my adopted mom’s cancer and rapidly declining health, a frustrating year of my own health issues and trying to get to the root cause of the problem, wounds from relationships). Sometimes you just need to back away from life for a while. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past nine months: re-evaluating life and relationships, focusing on my own self-care for a change, contemplating the future and who and what should remain and who and what should be discarded. But this Saturday night I felt the need to go to church. They were starting a new series on brokenness (a topic fitting my current situation), and it would be easy to sneak in the back of this mega church in my home town and sit alone. The large crowd lessened the chances of me running into familiar faces and meant I didn’t have to put my mask on and pretend everything was ok when it’s not right now. It was an opportunity to sit in my brokenness and nurse my wounded soul.
Needless to say it didn’t help when I walked in and there in the lobby was a large display for National Adoption Month with all sorts of adoption propaganda.
Adoption was the last thing on my mind that night. It was the last thing I wanted to think about. I was there to nurse other wounds. Instead I was blindsided by adoption and caught unaware. I was triggered.
They say we adoptees are stuck in the past and just need to get over our adoptions. They say it was in the past and we need to focus on the future. The thing is, even when we try, that isn’t always possible. Adoption is everywhere. On TV, in movies, books, scrolling through Facebook and seeing a GoFundMe for adoption, attending a function and hearing about somebody who just adopted or wants to adopt.
Sometimes even church isn’t a safe haven. In fact it can be very difficult to be an adoptee and a Christian in the pro-adoption Christian Church.
About six months prior I attended a service at a different church. We were in the middle of worship that was especially moving and beautiful that day. You could feel the presence of the holy spirit flowing so strongly that it almost brought me to tears. Then another song began. I had never heard this particular song before. It was about being adopted by God. I stopped singing and stood there frozen. At one point they paused during the song and stopped singing, but the music continued to play. This particular church has an awesome worship leader. She began to talk about how we are God’s adopted children. She began to shout we’re adopted, praise God, we’re adopted. The congregation began to join in with shouts of we’re adopted, praise God, we’re adopted. I stood there fighting back tears. If I hadn’t been attending with a friend that day I would have bolted out the door.
Father forgive them for they know not what they do!
Being a Christian adoptee is really hard sometimes, but the triggers aren’t just in church.
I’m not much of a TV watcher, but sometimes I like to pick a show on Netflix just to put on my pj’s, veg out, and escape from the world for a while watching a marathon of some show. At times like this adoption is the last thing on my mind and the last thing I want to think about. On two separate occasions recently I began watching shows not knowing ahead of time they contained plot lines of unplanned pregnancy, the abortion option, and adoption. One particular show had both this plot line and another plot line of an adoptee growing up in the home of a family from a different race who was dealing with issues of transracial adoption, whether or not to reunite with his birthmother, and then the unfolding reunion. That was a double whammy show!
A few months ago a movie came out called Faith of Our Fathers which was about two young men whose lives intersected because their fathers were in Vietnam together. The son’s journeyed back together to learn about the fathers they never knew. The previews looked really good. I’m sure it was a great movie. My friend wanted me to go see the movie with her, and I kept making excuses. One night we were together trying to decide what we wanted to do when she mentioned that the movie was still playing and would not be on much longer. I was trapped. I was out of excuses. I was trying to avoid the subject of why I could not go to this movie. My friend knew my adoption story. She knew my birthfather had been killed in Vietnam. Yet she didn’t make the connection that this particular movie would be triggering for me. I finally told my friend the truth, why this particular movie would be triggering to me and why I couldn’t go see it. I was annoyed that I had to explain to such a close friend. She didn’t understand. She stood there with the deer-in-the-headlight look on her face and quickly changed the subject. If and when I ever watch this movie it will have to be in the privacy of my own home….alone…with a large box of tissues and Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey ice cream.
The subject of adoption in relationships can also be triggering and unexpected. I became good friends with an adopted mom who had two boys that she adopted from foster care when they were very young. They were biological brothers. They had both been in an abusive situation with the birthmother, were removed from the home, and then spent time in foster care. She was a social worker with DFS and came across their case through her work. She and her husband decided to adopt the boys. They had all the best intentions, but the boys were severely traumatized and had many issues growing up. My friend says her boys had radical attachment disorder (RAD). Both boys had to be removed from the home before reaching the age of 18. They were both considered failed adoptions. My friend talked about RAD a lot. She had a group of RAD adopted parents that she was friends with. This complicated our friendship because we had totally different views and opinions about adoption. There is great debate in adoptee circles as to whether RAD is really a true diagnosis or just a complete misunderstanding of the trauma adoptees have experienced. There is trauma involved in every adoption, even a newborn adoption within a few days of birth. The level of trauma just varies. Adoptees get angry about their trauma being labeled, minimized, and turned around to be OUR fault. Needless to say my relationship with this friend was very triggering.
I could describe endless situations where I have been going through life minding my own business with adoption that last thing on my mind only to be blindsided by the topic. My adoption is the deepest rawest wound of my life. I have worked hard over the years to achieve a degree of healing and wholeness, but I have also learned it is a wound that will never fully heal. Maybe a better explanation would be that my adoption is more like a cancer that sometimes goes into remission but inevitably comes back again with a never ending cycle of remission and return.
Sometimes I go along through life just fine. Sometimes the wound gets triggered and begins to ooze and bleed for a while. The key is in knowing how to treat the triggered wound. This is a learning process that takes time, but as I go through the stages of healing my adoption wounds and trauma, the recovery time from triggers gets to be less and less.
Do I acknowledge when I am triggered to the people present when the trigger occurs? Rarely! Adoption is something that I am used to dealing with alone. It’s something I have always kept close to my heart and carefully guarded. It was always something very private about my life. Now that I have gone public with my story and become outspoken about the topic of adoption, I still rarely mention the triggers. Why? Because of the example of the movie and the experience with one of my closest friends. Because I know even the people closest to me in life can’t truly understand.
But I know you do, and so I speak and talk about it here.
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