October 30 and Adoption -- Guest Blog Post by Pamela Roberts
I cannot celebrate dead adoptee day this year just as I could not celebrate it last year. I think you know what day I am referring to, the one that falls on October 30, #AdopteeRemembranceDay. The first time I saw the day announced, the image of a gravestone, my gravestone, came to mind and on it the neatly engraved words, Here Lies Adopted Pam.
October 30 is my birthday, a day I once equated with death, dying, and fading away. So you see, on my birthday, the last thing I need is to be reminded how easy it is for an adoptee to die.
I want to spoil the day with an angry incoherent rant about how choosing not a month, not a week, but one single day is just more of the ignorant, insensitive, bullshit adoptees do to one another.
Instead, I will attempt a respectful appeal to the woke among us to protect and support our own kind, and to our collective adoptee passion to endlessly educate.
We adoptees love stating our statistics, I do love a good statistic myself. We can all get rather impassioned when telling the Not-Adopted how our specific brand of attachment disrupting adverse childhood experiences #ACES, are a reason to take a hard second look at adoption and adoption practice. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise to adult adoptees to learn that, statistically, the average human is more likely to die on or near their birthday than to die on any other day of the year. Researchers call this phenomenon #TheBirthdayEffect. Theories about a variety of subgroups have inconclusively been tested in an effort to explain it. Adoptees, as far as I can see, are not yet among the tested subgroups. In the absence of that data, I suggest we approach naming any one day, for this purpose, with caution.
I know some dead adoptees, some personally, I would like to memorialize. I want to honor each one in a meaningful way because they are more than collateral damage in the war on abortion and infertility, I want to give them my best but not on October 30.
Those of us who died at the hands of our adoptive parents, and those of us who have taken our own lives, deserve so much more than 4 or 1440 minutes of my silence but not on October 30.
I don’t want to be silent; I want it known adoptees die because because of adoption and I want adoption to hang its head in shame. I want to take a death toll so we can shout it at law makers and adoption agencies and Christian churches with their do-good adoption ministries but not on October 30.
I have spent so much of my life feeling sick on October 30. As a child I typically had a fever and sore throat. As a young adult I spent the day pushing the people who love me away. I spent it searching for her. I once set it as a date to find her by, or quit searching forever, knowing full well I would not stop unless I was dead.
I found her with days to spare that year. I quit my job and stayed up nights to increase the available searching hours. I made myself weak and sleep deprived just so I could live. I found her just before sunrise on a beautiful midOctober morning. I found her and discovered she never forgot me. I learned that every year on October 30 she memorialized me in a sad private ceremony where she lit a candle and sang the Happy Birthday song just for me.
Since then I’ve been celebrating my birth, and my life, on October 30. Around my healed throat I clasp the pendent she gave me, two overlapping hearts to honor our once separated, but now mending, selves. Since that day I’ve been letting the people who love me near enough to celebrate me too.
On October 30 I will be showing up for me, and I will be showing up for cake, and I will be showing up for anyone who chooses to show up for me. If your birthday is on October 30; I will show up for you too. We can blow out candles representing each year of work it took to do more than survive.
October 30 is my day; I fought for it and I won’t let you have it. Remember me for that.
ps I am taking the week to grieve the untimely and unnecessary death of so many adoptees. I look good in yellow and I have enough of it in my closet to last seven days.
Pamela Roberts, LCSW is an adoptee living and thriving in Las Vegas Nevada. Pamela is a psychotherapist in private practice where she specializes in irreverence and adoption therapy. pamelarobertslcsw@gmail.com
