setting fires to our insides for fun

“Are you happy you were adopted?”  This is without a doubt the most frequently asked question of me.  It comes in many shapes and forms, but always, they’re digging for this seemingly simple kernel of information, as if everything else I have ever said or felt is made irrelevant by the answer.

“Yeah, but imagine where you’d be if you were never adopted.”

“But think of what your life might be like if you had stayed with Her.”

“But you love your adoptive family, don’t you?”

“Would you rather have been aborted?”

First of all, rude.  Secondly, my answer is a hard truth no one actually wants to hear.  Adoption is the worst-best thing that’s ever happened to me.  And I would rather be dead than adopted.

“But imagine where you’d be if you were never adopted.”  I imagine where I would be if I had never been adopted almost every day.  I imagine waking up in the same house as my Mother, getting out of bed and going into the kitchen where my Mother sits with her coffee and cigarette.  I imagine breathing in her smell - smoke and leather and faint traces of perfume and hairspray - and not having to dwell on it, not having to force myself to pause and memorize it, because I live with it.  That smell will come home after work, the same as the day before, and the same as the day to come.  

“But think of what your life might be like if you had stayed with Her.”  Maybe I wouldn’t have had the opportunities in education that I did with my adoptive family if I had stayed with Her.  Maybe I would have chosen a different career.  Maybe I would have become a mother myself.  But maybe not.  

The point is, asking me to imagine ‘where I would be’ if I had not been placed for adoption is pointless - and insulting.  As if I hadn’t thought to imagine it before.  As if my every empty thought is not instantly filled with Her.

“But you love your adoptive family, don’t you?”  I do.  But I could have just as easily never met them, never known them, and never loved them.  I love my friends - but had our paths not crossed, I could have just as easily never known them, never loved them.  Had I never been adopted, I might not have known them.  So it is not a matter of choosing to love one over the other.  They never would have existed to me.

“Would you rather have been aborted?”  Again, first of all, rude.  Actually, I’ll skip the ‘rude’ and jump straight to a big ‘fuck you’.  I’ve been asked this more times than I care to admit - most often by ‘friends’.  

Existing in the ‘Christian Community’ as an adoptee is a special kind of hell.  I am expected to be grateful.  I am expected to see and accept and be thankful for ‘the bigger picture’.  I am expected to celebrate when church families come home from their missions with someone else’s baby in tow, rescued from some poverty-stricken, war-torn country.  I am expected to smile through baby dedications, to offer myself as a shining beacon - a poster child for the successful outcome of adoption.  God bless us, everyone.

In reality, I struggle daily to reconcile my faith and what I know with what I feel adoption has done in me and to me, and feeling like a victim of God’s plan.  The hard truth, and the hard answer that no one actually wants to hear - despite asking this disgusting question - is that I would rather be dead.  I would rather have been aborted than have to live on this carousel.  A constant circle of questioning and anger and acceptance and peace, over and over and over again.  I would rather be dead than to know the sick knots in my stomach every time someone excitedly announces that So-and-So adopted a baby and asks me how wonderful that is, and aren’t I so grateful that I was, too.  I would rather be dead than have to hold back tears every time I overhear a conversation about deciding whether or not it’s time to tell their child that they’re adopted.  I would rather be dead than know what I know.  

And I would rather be dead than have to answer these questions.