Adoptee Remembrance Day

As I continue to find endless places to dawdle on my walk out of the fog, I have learned many things. The internet is a field of rabbit holes when it comes to finding information, stories and support for adoptees. There are more resources than I could have ever imagined. Connecting with stories written and words spoken by adoptees is intoxicating. I haven't even scratched the surface.

The adoptee community is vast and their voices are getting louder.
Even though I'm still the girl trying to fit in with a group of acquaintances by standing awkwardly on the outside of the circle, nursing a drink that I don't really like and nodding and laughing like I know exactly what is happening, I'm slowly gaining the courage to one day, maybe, join the conversation...without crying...probably. Conditions have never seemed more favorable.

Today is the inaugural, annual Adoptee Remembrance Day.
Pamela Karanova, founder of Adoptees Connect explains the purpose of this day as a reflection and public awareness of the adoptee experience. This includes awareness of crimes against adoptees by their parents, lack of citizenship resulting in deportation due to immigration errors by parents and agencies, publicly mourning adoptees lost by suicide and recognizing adoptee loss. (Learn more here and see the agenda here)

It is not a coincidence that this day falls right before the start of November...the month dedicated to adoption awareness. Just google "adoption awareness month". You'll find words like "celebration" and phrases like "awareness of the urgent need for adoptive families for children..."
The voices of adoptees are often left out completely in these November conversations. Before a celebration, adoptees must be heard.

I am an international, transracial adoptee in an interracial marriage, raising my own international, paternally transracial adoptee son and a biological son born via gestational carrier.  

I want to contribute to today's conversation with my witness of the incredible bond between mother and newborn child, something adoptees will forever be affected by losing. It's a bond I have never experienced with either of my children.

Thanks to infertility, I have had the unique experience to see the birth of my biological child in third person. 
What I mean to say is infertility is one of the cruelest cards an adoptee can be dealt and I am beyond thankful that after years of my personal IVF failure, I was gifted one, tiny person on this whole Earth to know, that I am literally related to thanks to our extraordinary gestational carrier (and Science).

After he was born and bundled up, he was put in my arms and I wept all the tears and gazed into his puffy, little face, too afraid to believe any of it. We spent the night in our own room and began the journey like any other parent in a hospital room...spending a sleepless night with our newborn. 
If anything was out of the ordinary, well, I wouldn't really know.

The next morning, our gestational carrier came in before she was discharged to hold him and say goodbye. When she held him and started talking, his whole head turned toward her. He was quiet and still, but incredibly alert with eyes wide open as he demonstrated unfailing recognition of the mother he had just spent the last 38+ weeks with. Her children joined us shortly after and he showed similar recognition to the voices he had been hearing in utero. 

Did my birth mother get to hold me? Even for one minute? Did I hear her voice?
Did my oldest son's birth mother hold him? Even for one minute? Did he hear her voice?

In The Primal Wound, Nancy Newton Verrier explains, in great detail, the profound connection between birth mother and child and the trauma that ensues when that connection is broken. She says that even a baby who has to be incubated or separated from their mother for a short time will feel trauma in loss of connection, even if the baby reunites with the original birth mother. 
Bonding between mother and child begins in utero. A newborn is not brand new in their experiences. 

As happy as I was to finally know a blood relative, I would be remiss if I didn't also acknowledge the continuation of accumulating loss. Our gestational carrier physically did the hard work of pregnancy and the emotional bonding, even with the knowledge that he was genetically our embryo. She left the hospital without the fruit of her work. I did none of the work, missing out on building the in utero bond with my son. It's a bond I will never know, no matter how much we are related. My son lost the bond with our gestational carrier.

This experience has given me so many questions about my and my oldest son's birth day. 

I've been to the place where the babies stay before being fostered out in Korea. They lay in in long rows, each baby separated by a partition. Volunteers hold and feed them throughout the day. We must have wondered where our mothers were, the women who carried us into the world? What must have been the circumstances our mothers relinquished us? It must have been so difficult. 

I never want to speak for other adoptees, but for me I can say that regardless of how or why it happened, the bond between my biological mother and me was broken. I learned early that I was lost. I learned that my needs may not be met immediately or consistently. I learned not to immediately trust a new bond. I learned I had to rely on myself.