Adoption and Class: Personal Reflections
Jul. 8th, 2010 09:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
map_of_the_world(this is a rewriten post, that I tidied up and made more coherent)
I read the first essay: A Question of Class in Dorothy Allisons Skin about five times and every single time I read it I cried. it bought home some sharp hard truths about the fact that my adoptive parents have no idea who their children are or where they come from.
I am not middle class, I have never been middle class but I was colonised by the middle class, I was taught that I was middle class, that my people were middle class, that I was exactly the same as all the other middle class kids around me. i have had advantages by being adopted into the middle class, but not as many as you would think, I still spent my early twenties crazy, broke and homeless i still don't really get the rules of middle class behaviour and sensibilities and I still fuck up royally all the time.
I grew up in a really affluent town in the south of England amongst good schools and university educated adults, but that's not who I am, that's not where I come from. I wasn't even born in to the working class, I come from the underclass, the chaotic poor who have given up, who have no where left to turn.
Nobody ever made connections or taught me to make connections between poverty, lack of education, mental heath issues and having all your children taken into care. I was taught that poverty was a personal failing. My adoptive mother would often scream at me or one of my brothers "Do you want to end up living in a council house?" as if that's the worse thing that could possibly happen, as if my people, my blood line for generations back hadn't lived in council houses.
And there were things we were expected to know, things good, well behaved, well bought up middle class kids knew, that we couldn't possibly have known, the three times table, the fact you don't talk about money, the words to silent night, as if I hadn't spent the first six years of my life in the east end of London not being fed or educated properly
Allison writes:
And I understand that, my father was an alcoholic, him and and my brothers father ended up in prison, my other siblings fathers disappeared, half my sisters got pregnant as teenagers and all that goes back generation after generation, nobody was educated and if they worked they did mind numbing soul destroying jobs. And so many of them died young or disappeared
I grew up in a world where girls of the class I was born into are seen as slutty, promiscuous, are more likely to be teenage mothers, and boys of the class I was born into were expected to be vandals, layabouts, criminals. so we were policed heavily, I was screamed at for being cheap, provocative, obscene, flirtatious, and my brothers were regularly forced to watch a video that talked about how bad prison was, because despite all that babbling about nurture over nature my adoptive parents and their educated middle class friends still believed that the bad blood had a chance of winning through.
My mother, the woman who gave birth to me, got pregnant with my sister at 15 and in the environment I grew up in that was seen as a personal failure too, there was no understanding, no critique of the fact that there are clear understandable reasons why women of her social class who lived with intergenerational poverty, mental health issues and lack of education would get pregnant very young
and now I have this whole web of class issues that can't be untangled, there is so much dissonance in the way I relate to class. I am ashamed that I come from generations of poverty, embarrassed that my sister cant behave more middle class like in front of my adoptive parents, and angry that I got told for such a long time that where i come from was defective, wrong, and I should automatically be able to become middle class despite the experience of my formative years,
I read the first essay: A Question of Class in Dorothy Allisons Skin about five times and every single time I read it I cried. it bought home some sharp hard truths about the fact that my adoptive parents have no idea who their children are or where they come from.
I am not middle class, I have never been middle class but I was colonised by the middle class, I was taught that I was middle class, that my people were middle class, that I was exactly the same as all the other middle class kids around me. i have had advantages by being adopted into the middle class, but not as many as you would think, I still spent my early twenties crazy, broke and homeless i still don't really get the rules of middle class behaviour and sensibilities and I still fuck up royally all the time.
I grew up in a really affluent town in the south of England amongst good schools and university educated adults, but that's not who I am, that's not where I come from. I wasn't even born in to the working class, I come from the underclass, the chaotic poor who have given up, who have no where left to turn.
Nobody ever made connections or taught me to make connections between poverty, lack of education, mental heath issues and having all your children taken into care. I was taught that poverty was a personal failing. My adoptive mother would often scream at me or one of my brothers "Do you want to end up living in a council house?" as if that's the worse thing that could possibly happen, as if my people, my blood line for generations back hadn't lived in council houses.
And there were things we were expected to know, things good, well behaved, well bought up middle class kids knew, that we couldn't possibly have known, the three times table, the fact you don't talk about money, the words to silent night, as if I hadn't spent the first six years of my life in the east end of London not being fed or educated properly
Allison writes:
I understood that we were the bad poor: men who drank and couldn't keep a job; women, invariably pregnant before marriage, who quickly became worn, fat, and old from working too many hours and bearing too many children; and children with runny noses, watery eyes, and the wrong attitudes. My cousins quit school, stole cars, used drugs, and took dead-end jobs pumping gas or waiting tables. We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful. We knew ourselves despised. My family was ashamed of being poor, of feeling hopeless. What was there to work for, to save money for, to fight for or struggle against? We had generations before us to teach us that nothing ever changed, and that those who did try to escape failed.
And I understand that, my father was an alcoholic, him and and my brothers father ended up in prison, my other siblings fathers disappeared, half my sisters got pregnant as teenagers and all that goes back generation after generation, nobody was educated and if they worked they did mind numbing soul destroying jobs. And so many of them died young or disappeared
I grew up in a world where girls of the class I was born into are seen as slutty, promiscuous, are more likely to be teenage mothers, and boys of the class I was born into were expected to be vandals, layabouts, criminals. so we were policed heavily, I was screamed at for being cheap, provocative, obscene, flirtatious, and my brothers were regularly forced to watch a video that talked about how bad prison was, because despite all that babbling about nurture over nature my adoptive parents and their educated middle class friends still believed that the bad blood had a chance of winning through.
My mother, the woman who gave birth to me, got pregnant with my sister at 15 and in the environment I grew up in that was seen as a personal failure too, there was no understanding, no critique of the fact that there are clear understandable reasons why women of her social class who lived with intergenerational poverty, mental health issues and lack of education would get pregnant very young
and now I have this whole web of class issues that can't be untangled, there is so much dissonance in the way I relate to class. I am ashamed that I come from generations of poverty, embarrassed that my sister cant behave more middle class like in front of my adoptive parents, and angry that I got told for such a long time that where i come from was defective, wrong, and I should automatically be able to become middle class despite the experience of my formative years,
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no subject
Date: 2010-07-18 03:34 pm (UTC)Many of the assumptions about adoption are inherently damaging, such as the assumption that an adoptive parent is 'mum', that a child will be able to go from one class background to another without it damaging their identity in some way - after all, we accept that even moving around a lot as a child can be damaging! - and probably the most important, that an adoptee should be happy and grateful that their adoptive parents 'saved' them from an abusive background, when in fact a child is more likely to believe that they were taken from the most important adults in their life as a child.
Your confusion of adoption and fostering is probably a key issue here, as adoption is the legal framework in which the annihilation of a child's previous family and life takes place. Fostering, on the other hand, while problematic in itself, at least says 'we recognise you come from somewhere else, but we are taking care of you in this new part of your life'.
When you look at the statistics of which children are taken away for neglect or abuse, it becomes very obvious that poverty and race is a massive cause. Teenage mothers, drug-abuse, alcoholism, etc etc. are the types of neglect most often picked up on, whereas an apparently happy middle-class family can have all kinds of sexual abuse going on without anyone noticing.
Transnational adoption, meanwhile, is almost always a poverty stricken or colonised countries children being adopted to a rich, white country - e.g. korean children going to Australia, or Chinese children going to America. If these countries are such terrible places to live in, that we are justified in taking away their children to give them 'a better life' then we seriously need to address the problems that country suffers. If we are adopting some chinese children, but then causing others to work in sweatshop factories in order to buy our clothes at Primark, are we not being hypocritical to the extreme?
Women who are infertile are not automatically excluded from taking part in children's upbringing. Lots of parents struggle with raising kids by themselves, and taking on some of that burden is healthy and useful. But taking kids away from one parent in order to make-up for another woman's grief is just horrible. Why does your grief enable you to cause trauma to another mother, and to her child? It is sad and unfair, yes, but you don't take legs from one person to help another person to walk.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 01:32 am (UTC)I think this is what I have not really ... encountered before. My Auntie and uncle didn't behave like that, didn't enter into the adoption with these attitudes, my granny and grandpa and mum and other Auntie never once presumed my cousins should be ... well, anything. In fact when my younger cousin started developing a mental illness my aunt did a huge amount more research into the effects of adoption on children to see if there was anything there that might help her.
So please understand, although I have seen attitudes like this in the media - usually about US adoptions - I haven't ever met people who experienced this directly. I take pretty much everything I read or see in the media with a grain of salt.
When you look at the statistics of which children are taken away for neglect or abuse, it becomes very obvious that poverty and race is a massive cause...whereas an apparently happy middle-class family can have all kinds of sexual abuse going on without anyone noticing
Hell yeah, it is an exercise in cynicism whether you are of a poor, non-white background or a white middle-class background. I have witnessed 3 yrs of "Intervention" into indigenous Australians in the Northern Territory, where they were essentially invaded all over again and taken into state care - the whole lot of them! because of the little children apparently all being sexually abused and it was a national crisis. Apparently.
And people like me (a LOT of people) were going "Well if the sexual abuse of aboriginal kids is a national crisis, it is also EVERY part of Australian community.
When lo and behold it is now revealed their rates of sexual abuse are no higher than the rest of the community.
Yeah, an exercise in cynisism. (it was a last-ditch attempt by the then Howard govt to retain office at the election a few months after the Intervention began.)
I do get this. I just never realised the level of hypocrasy. I could have told you Madonna was a little hypocritical shit for adopting that african child, but ... it is like an industry in the US, but upon investigation by my friend, it certainly doesn't seem that way in Australia.
And here, again, if for a moment my friend - or my auntie for that matter, ever had a hint that was what they would be doing, they simply wouldn't have done/consider doing it. No. Just no way. I don't think in my cousin's case that is what happened. I don't know if that is what would happen were my friend to adopt.
I am reading about a part of the world and humanity I just didn't know about before. And I am having trouble coming to terms with this. I dare say if I can come to terms (such as it is) my own father could do the things he did to me, I can come to terms with this new understanding. But it is taking some time and thought. And learning.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 07:30 pm (UTC)I was on the fence regarding adoption at first, it is difficult to reconcile pro-adoption attitudes that are taken at face-value, especially when biological parent abuse obviously does happen (I would hate for you to feel that your experience was being trivilised somehow) and it may well be that Australian adoption is a lot different and more positive - although I still think transnational adoption is a hugely problematic area, no matter how positive the adoption process.
But I'm not the person to speak for adoptees, and I think Jake is the starting point but once you start to read more accounts and analysis you realise this does go far beyond one person's experience, and is a massive class/race colonisation - even when individual adoptive parents are honestly feeling like they are doing the right thing, and love their adopted children unconditionally.