HAPPY ADOPTION DAY ?

I have just discovered to my amazement that some families actually send their adopted children Happy Adoption cards. And have celebrations on the day !

As an adult adoptee, I have to say that I find the idea distasteful and insensitive. Of course the adopters themselves have cause for celebration, because they have finally been given a child to love and care for. And little children will be delighted to have a celebration on their own special day.

But as these children grow up they may realize the implications of what they have been expected to take part in – a celebration on the very day they finally lost their mother, all their relatives, their home, perhaps the knowledge of their ethnic background, or even their own name.  [The right to retain one’s first name is contained in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.]

To get the balance right, we need to have ‘Goodbye Mummy’ cards as well as ‘Happy Adoption’ ones.

And perhaps ‘Goodbye to my friends in the orphanage’, ‘Goodbye, foster parents’, ‘Goodbye land of my birth’. For many children, adoption day brings the devastating loss of everything and everybody they have ever known.

A child, even from an unhappy or tortured past, should not be expected to demonstrate disloyalty to her or his background with a show of celebration. As one person put it ‘it is like being expected to dance on your mother’s grave’.

Deep down, adoption day for a child is a day of sadness, of remembrance, of mourning what could never be.