Adult Adoptee Movement
Male adoptees living in the UK, and perhaps living with mental health issues, often put a brave face on things to stay strong and not show the cracks in our minds on the outside. We drink with the lads, we put up shelves, we are the strong ones, and we are the ones people lean on for support, we are not about to start asking for support ourselves for god’s sake, right?!
But there is a price for this help. Always a price. And that price is having your life put on show, having your complex, raw, unprocessed emotions filmed, Davina leaning in.
I can go back to the first house I was taken to when I was adopted, not far from where I now live. The house I grew up in is in the village where I still live today. This is part of my jigsaw.
Let’s remember that we were children but children grow up into adults and those adults want answers as to who they are and where they came from. Coram IAC owes it to us and our next generation. We are not ornaments or souvenirs, we are people with a past history and an origin story that belongs to us.
We need the apology, we need the recognition, we need the acknowledgment that what was done to us was so wrong and we need help: we need help to heal, we need help to get our voices heard and we need the government to take accountability and to recognise the role they played
Freddie’s inability to communicate her true feelings echoes that of us all. We are silenced, unable to articulate the trauma that lives in our bodies. We as intercountry adoptees are made to feel grateful for being saved from a culture that is deemed inferior to western society. However, those same western societies see us as different. This is the paradox of being an intercountry adoptee. We don’t belong to either society and never will.
15th to 21st May is Mental Health Awareness Week 2023. This year the theme is Anxiety. And for us adoptees? Are we more prone to anxiety? I would say possibly, yes. We confront issues that the general population do not – we are faced with issues of identity, loss of genetic mirroring, our ancestry, our […]
Beautiful reading from Maggie Lyng on Mother’s Day from the perspective as an adoptee. This is published in the loss section of A Page from my Life Thank you Maggie!
Every year, I struggled with this Day. Nobody knew. Not one person. Not a teacher, nor my parents, nor my extended family, nor my friends.
Recently Colin Kaepernick has spoken about his experiences growing up as an adoptee of colour. The thing which distinguishes his and so many other adoptions is that his adopters are white. The sad fact is that there are a disproportionate number of children of colour in the system and available for adoption. Take a look […]