I walk the fence at times, which is anathema to those on either side of the fence.
Adoptive parents hope for me to see adoption one way, while adult adoptees hope for me to see it another way. Adoptive parents hope for me to be "that" kind of adoptee, while adult adoptees expect me to be "this" kind of adoptee. And when I am neither fully, I find myself a loner once again. I find myself once again being expected to choose a side, to choose to whom I will be loyal. Being in between is considered unacceptable, inviable, limp.
There are those adoptive parents along with unidentified others to whom I am not grateful or happy enough. There are those adoptees and unidentified others to whom I am not angry or indignant enough. And still there are others who would say, why the heck do you care about what others think? If only what others think about us did not affect the way they treat us.
I am supposed to jump down from the fence to one side or the other. I am not permitted to climb back and forth, because those from either side would choose to believe that they are inevitably incompatible.
And it is this inherent human tendency to dichotomize, to separate, to compartmentalize that makes me both loathe and despair any attempt to synthesize what it is that I might think or believe or want regarding adoption.
I am angry, weary, frustrated at the ongoing misunderstandings, at the dissension, the politics, the cliques, the arguments, the sides.
Sometimes, I don't know what I think about what I feel or what to think about what I think or what to feel about what I think. I just know that there are times that I want to scream and tell all the different voices and opinions clambering for attention to be silent once and for all.
Sometimes, I just want to forget. Forget everything that I know about adoption.
Supposedly, hope awaits at the bottom of the box. Yet there are long moments when the bottom seems more an abyss to which there is no end and in which I will never glimpse nor reach that which I seek--
that is, if I ever come to understand what it is that I am seeking.
