Adoption and Velcro and Rehoming and The Ones Who Get Us by Katy Schultz

Yesterday I walked and walked and walked and walked with tears streaming down my face, pacing away the hurt heart I was feeling.  Trying to walk it away.  It didn't work so I tried to swim it away.  I went to the store and felt scattered and uneasy and picked up too many things without a cart or basket at Walmart.  I put them on the belt with my money and the belt moved and the belt ate up my 20 dollars.  I was defeated and scattered and confused so I went back out to the car and told my husband I was too embarrassed to tell the Walmart workers their belt ate my money and I couldn't buy my tampons.  He quietly parked, rescued my money and tampons, and gently placed the things I needed in my lap.  He's good like that.  He gets it.  When you're adopted you need people who get you.  Who can stick with you and to you, no matter what.  Even when you do stupid stuff.  

My heart was hurting for many reasons.  Mostly because humanity is hard and there is so much in the world right now that is downright ugly, scary and at the very least unfair. But one story in particular was weighing heavily and it was the boy who was adopted from China whose mama decided to “rehome” him.  Whose adoption was “disrupted” What awful terms.  “Gotcha day” (another horrific term) reversed.  Because he had many unforeseen special needs and couldn’t attach to his family and therefore was too much and needed more than they could give.  

Let me be clear.  I feel hurt for everyone involved.  The boy, his first family, the mama, the daddy, the siblings of his second family.  I feel for the third family who is now taking this boy on.  I feel hurt for the adoption community at large, because it affects us.  It affected me so badly I couldn’t access my executive function skills for a solid 24 hours and turned into a sobbing scattered mess who couldn’t buy tampons at Walmart.  When something reduces you to that, it's hard to speak out.  Because we get confused.  We get mad and hurt and want to cry and find someone to blame.  But what needs to happen the most is for everyone to show up and have a conversation about it.  So we can understand and learn and be seen and be heard and BE HUMAN.  Be humanized by it all. We need the adoption narrative to be real and honest.  We also need it to be sensitive, especially to the most vulnerable and underheard, and to be honest, sometimes the most muted party, the adoptees themselves.    Then maybe we can prevent, or at least reduce, just how many times a child and a family has to go through the devastating experience of another failed connection. 

The best way I can describe being adopted is feeling like a piece of old velcro with too much fuzz and old stray hairs stuck to it.  You try to stick to the other part of the velcro, making a firm connection but all the fuzz and stray hairs and gunk is in the way, so no matter how hard you press it together it never really closes.  The more times it sticks to something that is not it’s matching velcro, the more gunk that builds up.  It’s frustrating.  The thing is people don't usually keep old, gunky velcro.  The whole point of velcro is to stick.  So if velcro can’t stick, what good is it?  

See where the problem is with that?  People use velcro with the expectation that it will stick, so when it doesn't or it's too hard to use, you find something else that does work.  Like a zipper that naturally fits together and stays close and connected.  After all, would you go out into the world with pants that close with a zipper or with poorly velcro-ing velcro?  If you choose the velcro, are you willing to go out into the world and risk your pants falling down?

Adoption is kind of like that.  You have to be willing to choose the old velcro.  Not just choose it, but see the good in it.  You have to love old velcro.  You have to be willing to patiently and painstakingly pick the gunk out, over time.  It is not easy to remove velcro fuzz.  In the meantime, you have to be willing to be out in the world with your pants down, underwear exposed, vulnerable, and then on top of that be willing to get kicked in the nuts while cleaning aforementioned velcro fuzz.  This is not an easy thing to do.  Adoptive parents are superheroes because they have to choose this. 

 But if you choose this, we need you to really, really choose this.  

We need you to be all in.  We don’t expect you to be perfect.  We know that sometimes it doesn’t come as easy or as quick as maybe it does for biological children and their parents, who are wired to love each other just a bit easier, and believe me, we know it and it cuts at us, too, in ways that are different than you.   We need to learn with you.  We need you to honor our experience, too.  At times, and most times, honor it above your own.  We need you to be extremely mindful in sharing our stories without our consent or our voice, on social media to large audiences, especially for your personal gain or in today’s world, for your personal brand.  Most of all,  we need you to not give up, not ever.  

I talked about this with my mom.  It is slowly getting easier to have difficult adoptee conversations.  She said she heard once in a group she attended before my adoption a lady said, “You have to really know what you’re wishing for.”  My mom said “Even if you came from me, I wouldn’t know what I would get. That is the beauty of children.  And that is what I wished for.”  She was all in, no matter what.  

The truth is, we don’t know the whole story of this family.  It’s their story.  We only saw the mostly shiny moments.  We do know that they wished for a child with special needs and got one.  We do know that his story was shared to a very public audience, with sensationalized titles, without his consent, and for the family’s overall gain, including financial, at his expense.  And then somehow it was all too much, and Huxley disappeared.  And it hurts.  I respect that they protected Huxley’s more difficult moments and never publicly stated the, most likely,  intricate challenges in loving and parenting him, a child internationally adopted with trauma and special needs.  As an adopted person, I deeply appreciate that.  But, Huxley’s adoption story should have been his private story to begin with.   I don’t doubt this family loved this child.  I need to believe that they are deeply hurting too.  I also need to believe this WAS this mama’s way of not giving up on this little boy.  This was their best at this time.  This was their vulnerable moment in the world with velcro pants.  And they are getting kicked in the nuts.  I feel for them.  And I feel for Huxley too.  And this is my best at understanding it.  

 And I think we can all continue to do better.  

You can find Katy on Instagram at @katewritesup.