A huge chunk of humanity has been raised by one or more biological parent, for better or for worse. Others who were relocated elsewhere at birth, have thrived in the environment of a loving and secure family. However, some young lives have endured unbearable conditions, from which they could neither escape, improve or fathom under their own steam. While Hollywood celebrities beyond the natural age of procreation take custody of adopted children in distant lands, it is all too naïve to assume that adoption can necessarily replace the role of a natural mother.
I grew up in abject, emotional misery as an adoptee, with a «mother» whose motivation for adoption seems debatable and mystifying. From my earliest recollections, I was treated like a misfit and I was made to feel like an outcast, akin to a factory reject. To exacerbate the situation, there was brother John, adopted nearly three years prior to me and with whom she had long since bonded. He was her pride and joy. Strangely enough, I never felt any resentment towards him, as he sailed through life with the best of everything, while I struggled through each day trying to evade her malicious antagonism towards me. The more I tried to win her affection, the more she enjoyed intimidating me. She subjected me to continual conditioning in a rigorous atmosphere of fear and punishment.
In the initial years of life, no one took much notice of me, and I never expected anything more as I had never known any different. As the years advanced, I became ever more aware of her toxic attitude towards me. It seemed to be a sport to obstruct any progress on my part. Weighed down with domestic tasks, deliberately preventing me studying and a blatant refusal to allow me any further education, I left school with no prospects at all. Forced to take a menial job to «pay her back» I had no resources with which to break out of the bondage, until I came of age at 21. As I then left home and faced the world, I am sure there was no one less equipped to deal with life, than I was. No qualifications, no social skills, no self-confidence, no money at all and feeling very insecure. It was frightening!
There are casualties of adoption and I still bear the aching scars of the darker side of this process. Abstract, incalculable damage in inescapable surroundings during the first two formative decades of life can become a permanent hurdle.
This series of accounts will illuminate the way a growing mind can be habituated into an unspeakable compromise in its thwarted efforts to integrate and survive in a hostile environment. The essence of this predicament, is the fact that the adoptee is the only soul who was allowed no choices and could not change the course of life.
And bond is the magic word – not bondage.
Photo: pixelio.de / Rike