Can I just say for the record, I am so so glad I did so much research before we adopted L? I am.
As hard as digging into all the not-so-fun stuff like race, culture and adoption ethics was, thank goodness I don’t have to look at that stuff for the first time now that I am swept into the cyclone of emotions from L’s adoption. In the course of my day (wiping her giggling mouth, laying next to her in bed, kissing her fingers), thoughts of her adoption and her losses are never far away.
And how can I look at her without thinking of her parents and what they lost by not knowing her?
I don’t think a single day has gone by when I didn’t think of them at least five times. At least five times a day, I wonder: What do they look like? Where do they live? Does L have an older sister? What are their lives like? Will L ever get to know the truth about how her story started? Do they miss her?
Today, there was a story in the news that was like a kick in the gut. This story was on the tale of another recent story about forced late-term abortions in the same province.
There are just so many people in China who are suffering because of the one child policy. Are L’s parents among them? I have to guess that they probably are, though there is no way to know for sure.
Given the one child policy, it is difficult to imagine that there are many abandonments that occur without some sort of coersion (be it direct or indirect) from the laws, family planning officials, relatives, employers, etc.
Coersion is bad. No way around it. It is awful to feel like you have to give up your child. But in a sad way, it is my biggest hope that they were able to survey their circumstances as much as possible given the political climate in China and make the choice to abandon L.
It is my worst fear that they weren’t given the choice, that L was taken by a family planning official (or someone else) against their will. It happens, hopefully it is infrequent, but certainly sometimes this is how a child ends up in an orphanage. (I can’t find the article I read a few months back about a teenage Chinese adoptee who found her birth family and this was the story of how she was taken.).
Tonight as I was rocking L to sleep, I kept wondering what we would do if we found that out.
Would we give her back? Pay the family’s one child policy violations fine, finance her education and leave her in China?
Just the thought makes me ill.
But then, if someone stole my children from me and gave them to a new family, obviously I would want them returned. I wouldn’t care how much more money or opportunities the new family had. I wouldn’t care what some stupid legal piece of paper said. I would want my babies.
God, I just hope they had a choice.
I know what you mean and it worries the crap out of me. Our daughter was abandoned and they guessed her birthdate which was almost 3 months earlier. So who knows how close they were but she was clearly with her birthfamily for a while. So why??? Like you, I just hope they were trying to find someone who could care for her, or she was a twin maybe..and NOT that a relative or someone else finally said “enough” and took her w/o her birthparents consent.
Soooo sad….
Our girls were one day old. And very carefully placed in a very busy and at the same time protected spot early in the morning. I am telling myself that the mother most likely waited on the other side of the street until they were found. And I start crying even thinking about how she must have felt at that moment.
I want this to be the Chinese version of an “adoption plan”, and I think I have good reasons to believe that that’s the case. And still, even thinking about the alternatives makes me sick.
To Laura: I so hope that you are wrong and that she wasn’t a twin. If I look at my girls, the thought of them being split up breaks my heart.
this morning a paper here ran a story on a child adopted from India 6 years ago who was adopted through a normal agency but turned out to be taken against her parents will. They found her and want her back.. So incredibly stomachturning sad for everyone involved.. (here is holland by the way..)
We adopted our daughter 3 years ago. She is from the same province as L, and I have been having similar thoughts about the notion of choice, etc. in the wake of this article. There were also implications from the 2005 Hunan smuggling scandal in this other province. I literally threw up after I read about that. It is bad enough that her parents felt compelled by circumstance; the idea that they might have been tricked, attacked, or outright robbed of their child–by government officials or smugglers–is horrifying to me.
Also, my heart goes out to the people in this province who were already so poor, being driven to the utter limit and beyond in terms of attacks on personal safety, financial oppression, and horrid violations of physical integrity. I fear it will only get a lot worse before it even starts to get better.
I’m curious, what is the policy for twins in China? I’m ignorant on a lot of this one child policy stuff. That just seems incredibly unfair that there wouldn’t be an exception made for twins? Since I have twins, I guess I’m sensitive to this issue. And forced abortions!?!? Shudder. That is one of the reasons I am prochoice. It seems like if the government can force you not to have an abortion, that is not so far away from forcing you to have abortions. I can’t imagine how horrible that would be.
Like Siobhan, when the news of the Hunan smuggling erupted, I was horrified. (I was equally furious that there was so much silence about it on the Big Lists when it happened–Oh, no, don’t talk about it! China may *STOP* adoptions if we make them mad!) And hearing all these stories about my daugher’s province, and learning more about family dynamics in China, makes me wonder…what if…
At this point, however, she’s been with us for 4.5 years now, and knowing how abandonment is part of her psyche so much that it has caused her (and us) a certain amount of real emotional dififculty, I don’t think I could force myself to make her have yet another abandonment if we knew who her birthparents were. If someone had shown up on our doorstep in that first year or two…or in our email box…but now? When her greatest fear is that we should turn our backs on her, or leave her alone? My heart breaks.
Everyday. I wasn’t prepared for that. I think about my daughter and everything you’ve mentioned in various ways everyday for over 3 years.
Sometimes those thoughts just creep up on me for no reason and then serve to haunt me for hours at a time. Then I look them in the eyes and see their homeland, that they really are more than just part of our lives in our house in our city. It can be very daunting. I too so hope they had a choice…a hard choice but a choice nonetheless.
The thoughts and feelings you write about in this entry I have too – more often than not. But, I’ve given up sharing my feelings with family members/friends because they pooh-pooh everything. They just don’t get it.
Like others who have posted..well, I guess I will say that as much as I read, thought, and worked through much of my emotions before we met S, I never bargained for the day to day ups and downs of worrying and wondering about her birth family. I so, so hope that they had a choice.