On gratitude

The only time in my entire life that I was ever told I should be grateful for being adopted, it was my ultra conservative, Roman Catholic, staunchly pro-life aunt who was telling me so, and she didn't so much tell me as much as imply. I think she said something like, "Your parents did such a good thing by adopting you."

My parents themselves never said any such thing, never even implied that I owed them anything for having been adopted by them. At times in my adolescent years and even up through college, I think I imagined those kinds of sentiments into being, tried to find instances of such implications in my parents' past actions. Being resentful of one's parents is hardly an unusual thing, and that was the way my stereotypical teenage angst manifested itself.

But my aunt's comment ultimately just made me angry at her. Not at the institution of adoption.

I think gratitude is a sentiment that gets grossly misrepresented when it comes to adoption. If an adoptive parent expresses gratitude for his or her child, they are seen as objectifying their child. If they express gratitude towards the birth mother for making a tough decision, they're disrespecting birth mothers who didn't have a choice. And god forbid if an adoptee herself is grateful for the life she's lived. The poor thing must be brainwashed beyond belief to actually believe that her life with her adoptive family might possibly be better than the life her birth family could have given her.

I'm not saying that such sentiments are wrong, just that they're one sided. Certainly some parents who say they're grateful for their adopted child see the child as property, or a package of goods. And some who are grateful for the birth mother giving up her child don't have great respect for birth mothers. I still bristle a little when I hear prospective or waiting adoptive parents say how grateful they are to the birth mother because to my ears, it sounds a little bit like they're saying, "I'm grateful there's poverty in the world," or "I'm grateful female babies in China are still killed," or "I'm grateful the earthquake happened in Haiti and orphaned so many children."

But to assume that all adoptive parents think like this is, in a word, offensive. Adoptive parents are parents, period. They're no better and no worse than other parents. If a mother gives birth to a child and says, "I'm so grateful for this child," is she objectifying her child too? Just because parents become parents by adopting, doesn't make it less okay for them to express the sentiments of parents.

And why shouldn't adoptees be grateful? Why shouldn't all people be grateful? Maybe we as a society have just gotten into such a rut of finding everything that's wrong with our lives that we can't pick out the good things hiding in the midst. No one told me to be grateful, I decided to be grateful on my own terms. After living in China without central heating or reliable hot water or the ability to access uncensored information, I came back to the States grateful to have those things again. After spending a year in Taiwan, I came home grateful that I had been turned down for all the other scholarships and fellowships I'd applied for and ended up in Taiwan instead.

After a semester being treated like trash in Spain, I came home grateful beyond belief that I am an American citizen.

I'm not grateful because I think my parents "rescued" me or anything. I'm grateful because I have a good life, because I was able to get an education, because I'm healthy. To not be grateful for these things, when so much of the world has none of them would be, quite frankly, ignorant and offensive.