QFT

Harriet at the Fugitivus blog is an angry and profane person whose rants can be hard for me to read sometimes (that her homepage photo is of her flipping off the camera tells you much about her and her attitude). But she says some things about adoption that ring very true to me, and I'm going to quote them here both to share them and to archive them for myself.

From a post called Adoption Sometimes Gets All Fucked-Up 101:

Everything About Adoption Hurts.

This is not to say that everything about adoption is wrong, but everything about adoption is painful. For our modern, legal concept of adoption to exist, families must be broken. Adoption is not, and can never be, a best-case scenario. It relies upon the worst-case scenario having already come to fruition. From there, you're working with what is instead of what should be. That should be will never go away. For the entire lifetime of everybody involved in adoption, that should be exists, and it hurts. What is can still turn out to be wonderful, beautiful, incredible, but what is will never be what should be.

And from Another Thing about Adoption, especially where she quotes an adoptive mom saying something that I have often thought and not put into words nearly so well:

The thing is, adopting a child means accepting a new burden into your life, but that burden is more than the child. Adoptive parents must accept ethical burdens as well. Adoptive parents must accept that by adopting their child, they are likely contributing to the same system that damaged their child. And there's just no way around it. A TRA [trans-racial adoptive] mother I worked with once put it this way: to become the parent your child deserves, you have to come to realize that in the world you want to raise your child in, and the world you must now work to create, you would never have been their parent.