This is very compelling, and as both an adoptive mother and a natural mother I relate to so much of what you say. I would like to say one thing though, and that's about why we choose to become parents. You seem to feel a bit guilty for wanting and enjoying your children, as if being a parent were somehow a selfish act. Well, it is. No one has a child biologically because they think it will be good for the child. A woman has a baby (under ideal circumstances) because she WANTS one. Dr. Barry Brazelton said the only reason to have a baby is because you can't stand not to. Having a baby is instinctual for most women; it defies logic and is simply deep desire, and there's nothing wrong with that. Nature intended it that way. I had four children, raised three, and my life would be empty without them. Of course, they're trouble, but as Zorba the Greek said, Sometimes you have to undo your belt and go out and look for trouble! Parenthood is a great risk and a great adventure, not for the faint of heart but worth every dirty diaper, screaming toddler, surly adolescent, and sleepless night. I would not be the person I am without my children, and I say that with humility and with pride. Adoptive parents have the same desire for parenthood as anyone else, but somehow nature throws them a curve ball. This is regrettable, tragic even, but it's no reason to take another mother's baby. I adopted a baby from Vietnam because I wanted to rescue a child from a war zone, not because I was infertile. I now realize I was also trying to replace the son I had lost to adoption a few years earlier. I thought I was saving a child, and I believe I did, but I now realize my motives were largely selfish. I was not acting out of deep, natural, instinctual desire but out of a sense of guilt and remorse. I wanted to feel good about myself, because I felt so bad about losing my first son. I wanted to help, nurture, and love a child, but my motives were more complicated than most. At no time did I ever get the counseling that would have helped me understand and come to terms with all that was going on inside me, and because I stumbled blindly a lot of damage was done. Everyone is screwed up in one way or another, but living with secrets and lies is a sure way to scramble your brains, whether you're a natural mother or an adoptee. All adoptees have the right to their own information and history. No one, not even a natural mother, has the right to deny them that.
My recent post It's complicated

OK. I'm going to say this. I'm an adoptive mother who relinquished a baby for adoption in 1968, then adopted a baby from Vietnam in 1974. I was, I hope, a good mother to my three raised children (I had two more bio. kids), and I was passionate about adopting a baby whose life chances seemed bleak at best. I wanted to live out my belief in racial equality, and I saw no better way of doing this than by adopting the half-black offspring of an American soldier, who may never have even known he had left a child behind. My intentions, I still believe, were impeccable. But there were so many red flags that our social workers should have paid attention to, the first being my unresolved grief at losing my first son. Yes, I admit it, I wanted to atone for what I had done, somehow balance the scales of the universe, do unto others what had been done unto me. At that point, I still believed that relinquishing my son was for the best, but I was in deep denial about my feelings, and a sensitive social worker should have pursued that. In addition, my husband was unemployed. He was an artist, but he didn't have a steady income. I was a teacher and the breadwinner for the family, which at that time included our three-year old son. The truth is, I was resentful at having to work full-time while my then-husband stayed home with our child. I wanted to be more involved in my child's day-to-day life, and my beginning teacher's salary was barely enough to support us. More red flags. No social worker (and we talked with several during the course of the adoption process) ever asked how our extended families felt about our adopting a transracial child, and I was glad no one did, because I knew we wouldn't have their support. Another red flag. In 1968 the propaganda about adoption was all positive. The word was that children were being rescued and given better lives in loving families. I was influenced by books like "They Came to Stay" by Marjorie Margolies. I was incredibly moved by accounts of Vietnamese orphans, and I believed that I had enough love to transform a child's life. I was 28 years old. I won't go into what the subsequent years were like for my family or my adopted son. Suffice it to say that everything we now know about the long-term effects of adoption, especially transracial adoption, has been born out in my own family. Whose fault is it? Does it matter now? It's like WW I. We can see in hindsight where things went wrong and where everything could have been different, but the damage was done. All we can do now is learn from it, bind up our wounds, and try to avoid future mistakes. I don't believe it was a mistake to adopt my son. He was loved, and he had a chance he wouldn't have had in Vietnam. But I cannot paint a rosy picture; I cannot absolve myself of responsibility, and I do not understand how conscientious social workers could have approved our family. Adoption as we know it is far more complex than the Lifetime Movie depictions and the assurances from adoptive parents that their children are happy. I wish I could believe that time have changed and we are not, as a society, as naive as we were forty years ago, but when I see pro-adoption blogs and blogs by natural mothers who still buy the notion that mothers can be replaced with little cost, I know that much still needs to be done to educate people about adoption truth--and its consequences.

This is so well said. There have been times when adoption has come up, and I've been silent too. Or not entirely open. (I'm both a natural mother of loss to adoption and an adoptive mother. To say I have lots of feelings about adoption is a huge understatement.) Once, at my grandson's preschool, I was sitting on the playground with an older gentleman (about my age, I guessed) I assumed was a little boy's grandfather.

"Is that your grandson?" I asked him.

"No," he replied. "He's my son. He's adopted." He went on to explain that he and his wife had married late and wanted a family, so they adopted this little boy. With a lump in my throat, I told him I'd given up a baby for adoption years ago. He seemed unruffled by that and said that he and his wife knew the "birth" mother, and it was all cool.

I know this man loved that child, but he has no clue about what he's done, and I didn't have the wherewithal to tell him. To this day, I wonder what I might have done differently, should have done differently.

Another mom at the same preschool had two little boys who were the spitting image of her, as well as of each other. She's a good Christian wife and mother, very devout, very sweet, and when she said she hoped to have a girl someday and if she and her husband didn't produce one of their own, they'd just adopt one. I just sat there, speechless. Another moment lost that could have been enlightening, but I lacked the nerve. Since finding my son four years ago, I have become much more open about telling my story and not worrying about what others may think. (What a liberation!) But when it comes to confronting someone face-to-face, not in a blog or FB post, I balk. I want to do better, be braver, but the last thing I want to do is hurt someone's feelings.

When I adopted my Vietnamese son over 40 years ago, when I'd (and my then husband) had him only a few months, an older friend said to him (he was under a year old), "Well, in 25 years you can tell it all to a psychiatrist." I was shocked and insulted. How dare he say such a thing?! Thing is, he spoke the truth.

I think it's important for older adoptive parents like me, who were acting out a kind of '70's liberal agenda, to own up to what we did. We didn't mean harm--far from it. I don't know if my son would have been better off without me. I'd hate to think that. But I feel I must be honest and not try to bury what I did under a load of rationalization. I love my son, and I regret the damage that was done to him, damage I had a part in. It is what it is, and we must all go forward as best we can, but it seems to me that at the very least we can try to be honest, beginning with ourselves.

I'm the white adoptive mother of a 41 yr. old Black-Vietnamese son who came to us when he was 9 mos. old. Three and a half years ago I found the son I had relinquished for adoption when he was 3 wks. old. I want to speak here to the issue of the transracial adoptee, not to speak for my son and others but to offer my perspective, developed over four decades, three of them in the South. Both of these men have taught me more about adoption and its effects in the last few years than the rest of my life put together, and the lessons have not been easy or comfortable. I admit that I was 90% wrong in adopting a foreign-born, mixed-race child. I'm guessing at the percentage, and I am not sorry that I had the chance to love this person and almost certainly give him a better chance at life than he would have had in the chaos that was the Vietnam he was born into. So that's a definite plus. But when I consider what he lost--family, language, culture, sense of belonging--I feel guilty for taking all that from him. And what did he get? A family that never understood him. I knew absolutely nothing about the long-term consequences of adoption. If I had, I would never have relinquished my first son. We ended up living in the southern U.S., where he had to try to fit in with two alien cultures. To his whites classmates, he was a black kid. To his black friends, he was something different, someone who "talked white," until he learned not to. He made the decision to join the black community, where he felt most comfortable, and I am glad he's found friends and family who look like him. I was one of three white people who attended one of his weddings, and I felt not unwelcome, far from it, but definitely alien. That's how my son felt every day of his life growing up in my home. When we adopted, I was aware that many Black social workers opposed transracial adoption. I thought they were being racist. I wanted an integrated America, and I thought mixing up skin colors within families was a way to achieve that. I was wrong. I confess I did very little to introduce my son to Black culture. His first years were spent in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Canada, and perhaps if we had stayed there, things would have gone differently. But he grew to manhood in the American South, and that meant trouble. For so long I held my son completely responsible for that trouble. Now that I know what lay behind his behavior, I am ashamed at how I responded to him. I have liberal views and consider myself a progressive, but I'm no radical activist. I simply wanted to live my beliefs as authentically as possible, and that meant loving a Black child as my own. I believed love was the answer, the only one needed. I was wrong. Love is a great deal, essential, but it can't do everything, and it is white arrogance that believes it can. In years past, I used to see multiracial families (obviously from adoption) and identify with them. "There's another family like mine. How nice," I'd think. Now I see adoptive families, transracial or not, and I see the loss, the heartache, the denial and struggle for normalcy, the good intentions, and the often disastrous outcomes. I love my son. I wish him only the best. But I know that I was never the one who could ensure that he would achieve HIS best. Oh, but there's are lots of happy families and successful adoptions, you say? True. Most people, most of the time, will gravitate toward happiness like a plant toward the light. The adoptee has to lean farther, reach higher to reach the sun. His energy goes into distorting himself in order to get what he needs. He may produce a blossom, but it's likely to be paler and smaller than had he been planted in his native soil.

"Happy" adoptees very often take issue with adoptees who express dissatisfaction and offer their positive experiences as proof that adoption is basically good. But happy stories do not cancel out troubled ones, and an adoptee doesn't have to have a "terrible upbringing" in order to have unresolved feelings about being adopted. I would say to you, Quintana, that I'm glad you had a happy upbringing, but "not all adoptees feel as you do." This isn't a debate. The proper response to someone sharing a story of pain and loss is not to say, Well, I don't feel that way, so there must be something wrong with you. Adoption is a wound that never heals, and I have no doubt whatsoever that someday you'll realize that. Look deep, and I'm sure you'll find a scar on your soul. (FYI, I am a mother of loss to adoption AND an adoptive mother, and I base my comments on what I've read and on what I've observed in my sons.)

I found the son I gave up for adoption in 1968 when he was 44--instant love, lots of turmoil, both of us working through a lot. After my first raised son was born, I decided to adopt a baby from Vietnam (with my then-husband). He is now 41. I also have a daughter who is 39. So, four children, three raised, one adopted and raised. I won't describe all the stages I've been through, but today I have a pretty long perspective on adoption, and I have to say, I hate it. That is my emotional response to a word that has come to be a trigger all by itself. I used to believe in adoption wholeheartedly; now I don't. I love my adopted son. He is mixed-race (half black), and growing up in the south (we moved here from Canada when he was five), he faced all the difficulties that adoptees AND minority kids face, and I was totally oblivious. He never told me about the bullying or his loneliness or his feeling of not belonging. I didn't understand why he got into so much trouble and committed crimes that landed him in jail. Now that I've read books and blogs by adoptees, I realize what I was blind to 30 years ago. And I am so sorry. I have no doubt that my son might well not have survived had he not been adopted, but that does not mean that he had a normal life. He had no black father to be a role model, no black community to identify with, no one who understood his energy and personality. I love him, but love isn't enough. A child needs biological roots. Without them, he's a cut flower that is bound to wilt, even when given plenty of water. Being a flower in a vase is better than being a bud thrown down in the road, and an adoptee will put out roots in that vase of water, but they won't be as vigorous as if he'd been left in his native soil. As adoptive parents, we do the best we can, but it is imperative that we recognize the truth about our children's real lives, not just the ones they show to us. I hope you've read Nancy Verrier's "Primal Wound." It's one of a handful of books that changed my life.

Obviously some of the commentators here who have been deleted are fighting to hold onto the denial they believe protects them. When you deny someone in pain simple understanding of that pain, I assume you must be in some pain yourself and are turning it against someone else, someone who doesn't deserve it. I am an adoptive parent. My adopted son is now an adult, and I wish I had read this while he was still growing up. I saw his pain as defiance and misbehavior and responded as if that was all it was. Only now am I learning from adoptees like the writer of this blog just how deep the pain of adoption goes. I'm also a mother of loss to adoption, probably one reason I later adopted myself, trying to balance some sort of moral scales in my own mind. It didn't. But if all I can do now is acknowledge what my son endured, and as a transracial adoptee continues to endure, and assure other adoptees that this adoptive mother at least understands, as well as anyone who isn't in your shoes can,then that is what I must do. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry for my part in adoption, for what my sons and the rest of my family have suffered, and for the millions of adoptees who are still told to shut up and be grateful.

Well said. As both a first mother and an adoptive mother, I resonate with you say.

This is so true. I'm a BSE "birth" mom. When my son was born, I was a college graduate with a teaching license from a good, middle-class family. My problem? I wasn't married. If I'd had one ounce of support from anyone anywhere, I would have been able to keep my son. Instead, I did what everyone around me wanted me to do--my parents, doctor, social worker, everyone. I had no options and felt wretched because of the hurt I caused my family. But guess what? I'm the one who's been hurting for 46 years.