elephants{adoptee's} aint got no feelings; they're made of rubber!

So, I'm sitting around, minding my own buisness (still trying to stay warm/alive) - and yes. I'm watching Dumbo. (BECAUSE IT'S THE ONLY THING ON, OK?) And...I..started balling. Why on earth does Disney feel the need to do this!? First of all - those clowns are scary. And mean. And secondly? I seriously cannot take that scene where Dumbo's all sad and lonely, so the mouse brings him to visit his mom, who's chained up in a little cart, and she swings him in her arms and sings. Like, I literally melted off the couch.

And - obvs, I'm biased. But I wondered if anyone else ever made that connection to adoption? To how the mom is chained up, kept away from him...and how he's forced to keep performing in the (FREAKING SCARY) circus and go on like nothing was the matter. UGH. And when they have to part again - and he slids off her trunk and kind of just slumps away while she waves from behind her bars. It's so sad. I can't stop crying. Does this mean My fog is...clearing?

On "The Middle" - and how I'm stuck in it.

First, I would like to preface this post by saying that this has been the source of serious conflict within me for years. I am caught between two seriously conflicting views of which I feel that there is no right place for me to be.

On one hand, I am taught by my faith and my religion that abortion is wrong, a sin against God, and the destruction of a human life: murder. This would be easy enough for me to accept as truth and move on were I not adopted under the circumstances that I was. My first mother was fifteen years old when she gave birth to me. She chose not to abort - a decision which, if I were to place myself in her position, I could only hope I would make. But how can I know what I would choose to do? Fifteen is so young and my mother endured many complications due to her age. But she did it. She carried me to term and delivered me and placed me for adoption.

I am certainly not about to say that being adopted is easy. It isn't and it never has been. The separation of mother and child is horrific and ugly and painful. The wounds are deep and will never fully heal. The system of adoption is corrupt. It too is horrific and ugly and painful. And those who have been effected by adoption directly tend to take the position that no one should have to fall prey to that system - they tend to take the position that it is the mother's right to choose whether or not she maintain her pregnancy.

The issue I have with this - with both arguments - is that I am caught between both of these positions. I am adopted. I know the misery that an adopted child lives in, knowing that they are stranger in their own home, that they wake up every morning and ask God - or whatever being they believe in - why it had to be them. Why did my mother leave me? Why did my mother decide that she did not want to keep me? But simultaneously, how can I be expected to also feel that a mother should be able to choose to end her pregnancy? If my mother had decided that at fifteen years of age she simply could not give me the life she wanted me to have under her care, and that adoption was out of the question because of the magnitude of pain I would endure, where would that leave me? Where DOES that leave me?

Which position is the "right" one for me to take up? How can I be both anti-adoption and pro-life? How can ANY adoptee take either position? What is worse? Living as a stranger in a strange family that is not your own? Or not living at all?