What if There was a New Kind of Me Too Group for Offspring of Adopted People?
My head does not love to go down the road of, “What was it like for my daughter to be raised with someone who has CPTSD and an anxious-avoidant attachment style” because it feels like I’m banging said head against a wall.
If your mother is full of anxiety and has thoughts of unworthiness, a sense of not belonging, and a general sense that trouble is around the corner, is this not its own form of living with abandonment? When one child is separated from their mother, how many future generations are also then separated from their mothers?
I feel like my life’s work is to get my head as clear as possible and to believe in myself as much as humanly possible so that is the legacy I hand off when I die. It’s good work. It can look inconsequential from a consumerist point of view because living in service to the well-being of the Self and those in its orbit can look as “work avoidant” and “lazy”, when really it’s the polar opposite of both.
To be human is its own very real job. We are a nation for of storage units and a places called Good Will where people can dump off some of their excess and run back to Target to fill in the blanks. We are a nation that is currently stripping mothers of their children and children of their mothers as if we are taking ornaments off a Christmas tree.
These children are going to need so much love and care and understanding.
Do you see how I’m not talking about my daughter, how I steered down the road of other people? Partly it’s to honor her privacy, and partly it’s because focusing on someone close to you who may be suffering can be like trying to put two magnets together where the magnetic fields of like poles (north/north or south/south) repel each other. I think the feeling of too-muchness energetically may also be why society as a whole seems unable to empathize or understand adoptee trauma—the feelings overwhelm the other person’s systems and so they run to Target instead of letting the feelings of loss and grief move through their body. Do you see I’ve strayed from focusing on my daughter again?
What I want to say is I’m wondering if a space for offspring of adopted people (O.O.A.P) would have the same right-temperature-finally feeling that I’ve found for myself in adoptee-only spaces. I’m wondering if so much could go unsaid (your parent does that, too! you feel that, too!) because the O.O.A.P.s would energetically feel they had landed on a home planet.
What if there was a generalized need list put out by O.O.A.P.s so that parents, therapists, teachers, and other family members could refer to and address?
What also occurs to me is that if this group carries the name O.O. A.P, their identity, as with adopted people, has been replaced by the idea that they are the product of something that happened to them and not their own damn self.
If I knew then what I know now, when I was a woman giving birth to a child, I would have made my mental and physical health my top top top top priority because I was healthing for two. I was a planet that needed a network of support. I could have turned it into a game, into a passion project.
It’s never too late to start, right?
