Adoptees can’t [and shouldn’t] be contained by the American Dream. We’re too human for that. The soil simply has too many threats, it’s too shallow, and too vulnerable to injustice.
To prospective adoptive parents, we’re not just another one of your Sunday school kids. As if one could gauge their “readiness for adoption” from the way they feel when they attend a missions training village or play with children on an overseas ministry trip.
Lest we risk becoming more of a roommate that needs to split the bill for the American Dream. You paid fees and rescued us. We then live as a trophy to validate the altruistic benevolence therein. Thus completing the contract according to your (and society’s) expectations about what “successful” adoption looks like.
“You were chosen,” but adoptees rarely choose. It’s a one-way slogan. It doesn’t have enough bandwidth to handle an adoptee’s “No, thanks.”
Too many adult adoptees have shared some version of, “My parents were trying to raise an American. Lol but I’m not an American.” [referencing their birth culture and assimilation into a predominately white, industrialized, independent, American culture]
Maybe on paper we are U.S. citizens*, but in our bodies, minds, and hearts we need to allow someone else to emerge from the constellation of custodies, residences, geographies and social relationships. It’s possible that we’re not “American,” and/or that eventually we’re not *your* American. Adoptive parents as the possessor; it’s too much. It limits us.
And that’s appropriate not only in the leave-and-cleave sense of the term but in the lifespan development of one’s inherent image-bearing expression of being part of the each-one-according-to-their-need act of interdependence for which we were all designed. Each. Each one. We can be. We can be independent. We can be independently connected. We don’t have to be exactly like the one’s who adopted us in order to maintain a sense of worth or value in the world.
*some; see Adoptee Citizenship Act
To prospective adoptive parents: you’re not adopting a roommate. And we didn’t sign a contract. So please make sure to work that out in your hearts before attempting to work us into what you’ve “always wanted and imagined for a family.”
Especially with international adoption, give space for children to decline the individualistic way of “western civilization.” The white picket fence and all the predictable, mechanic life stages that go along with it. Those aren’t wrong, of course. Just please don’t attribute judgment onto adoptees as if we failed some set of standards when we choose a different path, or struggle to navigate the path projected onto our psychological and social capacities.
The pressure to live comparatively with the whiteness next door is poisonous. Not only for the adoptee, but for caregivers as well. For the adoptee will be crushed by the incessant, legalistic competition. And the parents crushed by a constant fear of not living up to the golden calf of adoptive parenthood; along with their version of “successful” parenting in general. In worship like this, nobody wins.
When adoptees encounter tension in their life, it’s typically because something true is attempting to come alive in the midst of lies. The need for safety and connection will press through years of unaddressed trauma and marginalization; within the family and throughout the community. The need for protection and advocacy will break through the guise of colorblindness and neutrality. The human thirst for actual love collides with the arrogance of “aren’t we enough” and years of living under an adoptive parent’s fear of not measuring up to others’ conditions of worth. Too many adoptive parents have loved the American Dream more than the adopted child. But the American Dream does not love back. It can’t. Lies can’t love. That’s a major part of why “child welfare” as an institution has left so many families torn apart.
Therefore, if you’re an adoptee and you’ve felt cornered onto the set of an American Dream, what would it look like for you to walk off the stage? What’s at stake? Who’s keeping you there? What’s keeping you there? How does the show benefit from your appearance? How do you benefit from your appearance? Is there comfort in knowing you don’t have to live by such a standard? Is there a fear of not having such a standard from which to pull your sense of identity and value? What would it look like to try something new? Are there other characters in the narrative you feel tied to? Are there folks who’d support your “retirement”? Whatever the case, please feel free to sunset the role. Also please don’t feel you need to change anything; only the growing sense of personal responsibility as you walk deliberately in and through your lived experience.
I don’t think this generation needs the American Dream as much we need space to re-examine our potential. To believe America has so much more to offer its citizens, and the world. The more willing we are to take action to explore that together, the greater sense of meaning and promise we’d experience together especially for those who feel like they’ve outgrown the expectations that were placed on them as children navigating family separation and adoption.
Sometimes, the more we’re forced to play a role, the less we see ourselves in it. And the less human we feel playing it. And the less we are. This post is about helping fellow adoptees feel more human to the extent the narrative placed on you (and into which you were placed) left little room for you. And for aspects of truth and joy to arise through the womb-knit and wonderful specificities of your individual and relational nature.
The American Dream can’t contain us because we weren’t meant to live in falsehood. Here’s to pursuing a better truth in love, that many adoptees would be unyoked from the chains of fiction, and freed toward the kinds of possibilities promised through the Living Water that flows through all nations, tribes and people groups.
Cam Lee Small, MS, LPCC 