Blog Spotlight: The Declassified Adoptee

Hi, Everyone:
I recently found this excellent blog, The Declassified Adoptee, written by a woman who has had similar experiences as an adult adoptee as I have had. What I find especially exciting and compelling about her blog is that she writes eloquently about many of the same feelings that I try to write about, and she writes about them with real aplomb. Like me, she has found her birth family and has a good relationship with them and with her adoptive family, but she still feels a sense of loss about being adopted and a sense of injustice about the way that adoptees are regarded in this country. Check. Her. Out.

Silence.

I stopped blogging when my dad--I call Superbob--was admitted into the hospital. He's been there for five weeks now, getting a stem cell transplant for lymphoma. It appears that all my blogging energy has been siphoned off to the silent, private vigil I'm holding for him inside my mind. I have lit a candle there, and it takes a lot to keep it burning; I find myself withdrawing from most of the aspects of my life that are not utterly necessary--social engagements, planning my family's summer activities, because I just want to spend time thinking about my dad, who lies in a hospital bed three thousand miles away, vomiting and trying to generate a new immune system. Maybe I'm trying to generate one for him.

Or maybe I'm just perpetuating the poison of closed adoption: to hide your wounds and scars and march forward.

When I tell people my dad is sick, they ask, "Which Dad?" Since I'm adopted, I have two dads. This question always throws me, because my instinct is to answer, "My real dad: the one who raised me."

"I'll Stand by You" (?)

Did anyone watch "Glee" last night? In this latest episode, Finn, a high school football player whose cheerleader girlfriend is pregnant and has decided to make an adoption plan, admits to a friend that he's really sad that he'll never get to know his unborn daughter (the baby's actually another man's child, but he doesn't know that yet, so disregard that fact for now), and will never get to tell her he loves her. He also mourns the fact that she'll never know that he loved her and wondered about her and wanted to know her. The scene comes to a climax with him singing The Pretenders song, "I'll Stand by You" to a video of a sonogram of the baby that's playing on his computer.

"Glee" is a silly show. It's a sit-com with some musical theatre thrown in. I like it, sure, but it's pretty fluffy.

But.

But I have to say, watching Finn sing longingly to a little pulsing sonogrammed image of what he thinks is his unborn daughter about how much he cares for her, how he wants to support her throughout her life both caught me off guard and choked me up.

So many of us who were adopted under the closed adoption system fantasize about having been wanted and thought about and cared for in this way, and so many of us never get to know if it happened. The not knowing hardens us, leads us to think we weren't wanted, weren't ever cared for, weren't longed for or pined over. Maybe it's just a fantasy, like the musical theatre sequences in "Glee." But maybe, just maybe, somebody really wanted to "stand by" us, but just couldn't.

Your thoughts?