#bastardplanet

But at any rate, I was googling books about adoption for kids and, as I suspected, most of what I was finding looked pretty trite. But in all fairness I didnt have any books like that growing up so that might be my own lacking experience speaking.

In one of the less trite looking book descriptions it read, "why children are given up for adoption" and I had a pretty visceral reaction to the expression "given up".

I'd love to collectively brainstorm some better everyday ways to describe the transfer of the child between their birth and adoptive parents that doesn't smack of failure and shame.

I'll start by saying that recently I though to myself: wouldn't it be nice if adoption resembled marriage more than it did divorce?

In that spirit, my first suggestion is "Let's normalize describing birth and adoptive parents as sharing their child" instead of giving them away or giving them up.

I will freely grant that this is still a euphemism and so paints a rosier picture of adoption than I know my bastard planet community tends to view things and so I look forward to hearing your feelings, thoughts, and suggestions of your own.

But it is a more hopeful euphemism that suggests a collaborative, instead of a competitive, approach to parenting adoptees.

Words like this do matter and I think replacing some of this expressions could make a difference for the assumptions people bring to adoptees experiences.

In 1989, after the Soviet Union eased its grip, Eastern Europeans did away with their communist regimes. After mainly peaceful revolutions elsewhere, things turned sour in Romania, where dictator Nicolae Ceausescu met a bloody end and the poverty he had left behind was exposed.

A documentary for ABC's 20/20 revealed to shocked Americans the squalor of Romanian orphanages where babies, neglected and sometimes left naked, were nearly starving to death. Offers to adopt them flooded in and many children were spirited away with scant control by a barely functioning state.

Many of these children were not orphans at all. Ceausescu, wanting a bigger population, had banned abortion and contraceptives. But many Romanians were too poor to raise the children he demanded, and abandoned them en masse to orphanages.

Some also ended up being adopted straight from poor parents who, often for payment, parted with children they could not afford to raise. Many came from the country's largest and poorest minority, the Roma.

No figures exist for adoptions that took place during those chaotic years; records start in 1993. The Romanian National Authority for the Protection of Children's Rights and Adoption says that from then until 2005, some 16,000 children were adopted overseas, mainly in the United States and the European Union.

Bucharest banned international adoptions in 2001 under pressure from the EU which criticised "rampant corruption" in the process which was often run by local doctors and lawyers without official oversight and with money changing hands.

The singular, unavoidable truth about adoption is that it requires the undoing of one family so that another one can come into being... By ignoring the complex reality of adoption, we are also corroborating a sentimental narrative that drives a billion-dollar, for-profit adoption industry whose sole purpose has been successfully shifted in modern history from finding homes for children who legitimately need them, to supplying hopeful prospective parents with kids to call their own[...]

Inside the fairy tale, we don’t have to think about the darkness, the underbelly, or the unspeakable grief lying just below the surface of a child who has been severed from their home and family of origin. We don’t have to think about the countless pregnant people in the United States and across the globe who have been tricked, bribed, forced, and coerced into relinquishing their children or whose children are kidnapped and sold to agencies or intermediaries who stand to profit from their adoptions. Inside the fairy tale, we don’t have to think about all the first mothers and first families who would choose to keep their children or whose children might not have been unnecessarily or unjustly taken from them if they had access to the right kinds of support. The kinds of support that could be provided countless times over, both in the US and abroad, with the money currently invested in keeping the for-profit adoption industry and the child welfare industry in business.

I’m adopted. This isn’t a very big confession if you saw me and my family, the 6ft black girl with her white 5ft even mother and sisters and her white 6ft father. From early on it was easy to see, one of these things aren’t like the others one of these things just isn’t the same. I’m 20 now and I’m curious.

I’m full of fire as hot as the sun in my belly, my heart beats along to drums from an ancestral land I’ve never seen, ive barely learned about and I don’t know how it applies to me. I am lost and I do not know where my home is.

My veins are full of glaciers, I imagine they’re a lot like the cold villages and homes that my adopted ancestors resides in, that I’ve been taught about and can name. That have been my protectors since I was born and before I opened my eyes to see that I am different, that I cannot blend into the snow.

See, I cannot learn about the open void of Africa until I learn the labyrinth of African America. So, I observe, I question, I remain hidden. The Oreo among blackberries.

Halloo! Yes OK! I’m not sure how to start a follow train but

if you are a transracial adoptee please reblog this post with a comment??

Intraracial and nonadoptees are welcome to reblog this as well so this train can be signal boosted