"So what was it like growing up adopted?"

A few weeks ago, my sister (both biological and adoptive, a story for another time) called from California where she’s doing her master’s degree and told me about how she went out to dinner with a friend and two friends of that friend. She had never met these two friends of the friend before, and apparently, when they heard she was adopted, the first question out of one of their mouths was, “So what was it like growing up adopted?”

It amazes me how many times she and/or I have been asked that question and/or told, “Oh, I know someone like that.” From near-strangers, no less.

To be honest, I’m sure some of it has to do with honest to goodness ignorance. Adoption is way more on the radar than it used to be, but for some people, it’s still a foreign concept.

A lot of it, though, seems to grow out of this perception of adoptees as inherently odd, damaged, and/or troubled. And I can point the finger of blame towards a lot of places, the most obvious being the media. Movies about disturbed orphans wreaking havoc on their adoptive families or articles in the paper that point out this sociopath or that murderer is adopted. It’s intensely hypocritical if you think about it, because those same media outlets that don’t think twice about reinforcing the stereotypes of adoptees as damaged goods go all out to portray adoption as a lifesaving force when something like the earthquake in Haiti happens.

But to be perfectly blunt, I feel like I need to point some of the blame at adoptees themselves (ourselves). While I agree that being adopted adds an extra layer of development into the already-complex quagmire of trying to figure out where we all fit into the world, I don’t agree that it makes us that much more troubled or uncertain than the average person. At the extreme end of the spectrum, I think some people use it as an excuse to shift blame away from themselves, to avoid having to take responsibility for their actions. But even towards the middle of the curve, I feel like there is a tendency, at least recently, for adoptees to assume that role as the victim and to accept the idea that they’ve been traumatized and will spend their entire lives grieving for a birth family that they may never have known.

I don’t think we do ourselves any favors by stepping into that victim role, by buying into the belief that we are inherently troubled and need help just because we’re adopted. Yes, being adopted brings with it a set of emotions that can be difficult to articulate and difficult to deal with as we grow up, but then does anyone have it really easy growing up?

For those who were adopted at an older age, it is a very different story. Children who have memories of their birth families and/or their birth countries will grieve, because they have lost.

But for those of us who were adopted as infants, I don’t believe we’ve been traumatized. I do not believe it. We deal with things like racism and not fitting in and wondering about our birth families, but a Black child born to Black parents deals with racism, the girl in the wheelchair doesn’t fit in either, and the boy whose father walked out on the family when he was two years old wonders about him all the time.

It’s important that adoption be recognized as an imperfect process, as one that retains echoes of colonialism and tacitly condones things like the preference for boys over girls in China or the denial of benefits to children of single mothers in Korea. It’s important that people acknowledge adoptees’ experiences as real and valid and perhaps even as testaments to the imperfection of the system.

But I think it’s also important that the trials and troubles not be overstated, neither by adoption professionals and adoptive parents, nor adoptees themselves. If all the institution and the media hear is how troubled and damaged and unstable we are, how can we blame them when they turn around and portray us as such?