Community- Alone at the Party

My Dad (adoptive Dad) organized the mail on the dining room table. Twice a year there would appear letters from the Children's Home of Pittsburgh, the adoption agency that handled my adoption. One of the letters would include a return envelope. I somehow understood that the envelope was to be returned with a check in it. I imagined the check to be a thank-you present, or an obligation, to the Children's Home for the Home’s bringing me to my adoptive family. The check showed the Home how good my parents were and how well they were taking care of me.

If the letter wasn't the thank-you letter, it was the Invitation. Each year the Home hosted a party for the adoptive families who were created thanks to the Home. Both my brother and I hated going. My brother remembers being encouraged with the enticement of cookies and crackers. We didn't want any cookies and crackers. I remember throwing up on my dresses on the car rides there. Mom always planned ahead and brought an extra for me to change in to.

The party seemed to me to be full of strange and odd beings. The other kids looked normal, but I thought they couldn't be, given that they were adopted like me, and, like me, they were given away by birthparents who did not want them. I definitely wasn’t normal. How could they be? But the reason the other children seemed so strange was that I could see anything “wrong” with them. And I couldn’t see whether they were as uncomfortable, and upset, as I was to be at the Party.

I was at the party to do a job. The job was to show the Ladies who worked at the Home what a good job my parents were doing and to show them how happy I was but I couldn’t imagine that’s what they were seeing. At the Parties I was nothing less than agonized until the moment we stepped out the front door into the cold winter air and started the drive back home. On that hour-long drive I comforted myself with the thought that I was as far as I could possibly be from the next year's Party at the Children's Home of Pittsburgh.

Why was the Party so miserable for me? I've heard that many kids enjoyed that one time of year when they were "around other kids like them." I think I was so pained about the party because all the year through our family pretended as if our family were, let's say, just like families created by Nature rather than arranged by an agency. I worked very hard to believe this fantasy, this falsehood. In the process, I struggled with a lot of pain all on my own; there was a Birthmother out there somewhere who didn't keep me. I didn't know why, and no one could- or would- tell me. Maybe if I convinced myself that none of this mattered, then it wouldn't be real and it wouldn't hurt.

Then once a year came the Party. My adoptive status was to be celebrated? How could it be? It was like celebrating everything that was "wrong" with me, that went unacknowledged and even denied in my household the rest of year through. What in the world was there to celebrate? Perhaps those whose adoptive status was not a taboo subject in their homes found camaraderie at the Party. It was a place where they felt not-alone. Or maybe they were bolder people than I who reveled in a once-a-year coming-out party that acknowledged their adoptions. Everyone is different. I just know that the Party was for me, rather than a festivity, an anxiety attack.

So much has changed for me since then. I talk online about adoption experience, hoping to help others do the same. It took a lot of hard work to get here, learning to take the risk of expressing myself and learning to trust my instinct that being adopted is a different life experience than that of being a birth-child. I’ve learned that my pain has been a real and legitimate experience.

Have you ever been in a situation where you were clearly acknowledged to be an adoptee amongst adoptees (or another adoptee)? Think back to the first time you experienced it. What was it like for you?