Today I found these words that seemed to fit that theme...as well as a more recently one discussed here about what we wish we had been told.
Over and over again adoptive families talk about the joys of being a family. So why talk about grief? Because that’s where adoption has its beginning.
The pain is always just below the surface. When talking about the experiences that led to his need for adoptive parents, one boy told his caseworker, “It’s like a bruise that I don’t think about most of the time. Then something bumps it, and it hurts again.”
When a child gets his permanent family, he has already lived the loss of loved ones. It doesn’t matter whether that love was imperfect or harmful. He has lost years of learning, loving and growing.
Innocence and the chance to just be a kid is often the casualties of this hurt.
These words are on a blog post entitled "Does it Have to Hurt" at Adoption Lives Transformed. It continues:
When we care about the child, we are confronted with the devastating consequences of his losses. We wish we could have protected him from the experiences that left him scarred and frightened. And we get angry....I have often dscribed the pain of my loss as a chronic pin that flres up at times ans soemtimes goes into remission of sorts. The auhtor of this blog post quotes an adoptee who descibes his loss and ensuring pain as being: “like a bruise that I don’t think about most of the time. Then something bumps it, and it hurts again.”
And what about the pain of the birth family? Parents completely lose their relationships with their child, the opportunity to be a parent and their places in the social order of the community. Grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts lose a member of their family.
I was most impressed with the authors take on anger - a subject and emotion which never leaves me entirely. I am grateful for her very enlightening, "aha" words that feel so very right deep down in my core, at the very root of the hurt:
When we love, we care enough to get angry.
2 comments:
"When we love, we care enough to get angry".
I don't relate to that quote; it seems more like an excuse. Linking love and anger that way sounds too much like what an abuser would say. "Caring enough" is not often what motivates anger, which is more commonly linked to not caring or attempting to control. But if it works for you, fine.
I see your point how it could be misused by an abuser - anything could.
To me it meant that I loved my daughter - and all of my kids so much - that anyone who messes with one of them gets my lifetime anger.
I saw the quote in context of the full blog post and felt the pain this mother was coming from who seemed to be a fosterer or an adoptive mom of foster kids and she felt THEIR pain.
It hit me in that spirit and I did not seek darker, more negative interpretations.
For me it also meant that I care enough about ALL kids and ll moms who lose their kids unnecessarily because of lack of support.
I care so very much about the ISSUE that it has always angered me that children get abused in adoptive homes etc. That's what triggered my first book and still fuels my anger.
So, yes...for me CARING about the issues, about the underdog is at the root of my anger. People using people instead of caring for an about them angers me.
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