Wounds and investments

I have been involved in several discussions over the past week about whether infant adoptees are capable of knowing that they have lost their mothers after birth. These discussions pop up on a regular basis, usually because the naysayers get their knickers in a twist when we "woundies" [aka people who have found value in Nancy Verrier's book, "The Primal Wound"] say we believe in something that is devoid of scientific evidence (per the naysayers).

What I don't understand is why people are so invested in telling other people that what they feel is wrong. The naysayers allow us our feelings, supposedly, but they tell us we have misattributed those same feelings, as if we are completely unable to understand ourselves. Someone said in one of the arguments that she thinks "woundies" feel sad because we realized over time that we were adopted and lost our natural families, but that we erroneously attribute our sadness to the original loss. I would argue that for me, at least, there is a combination of both: an original loss, and experience over time.

I lost C on the day I was born. She never saw me or held me. There is a great deal of research that shows newborns are able to recognize the voices and smells of their mothers (and working in Labor and Delivery, as I do, we have protocols that take this information as a basis for keeping mothers and babies together, as much as possible). The naysayers believe that while neonates may recognize their mothers, it doesn't mean that the newborn actually prefers the mother. That recognizing smell and sound is instinctual, not emotional. I agree that there is not scientific research that proves an indelible tie between mother and infant, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I am also unwilling to say that the keeping mothers and infants together is important for everyone except adoptees.

I have been an highly anxious person as long as I can remember, and before I could put words to it. This is my lived experience. In the recent debates, someone not adopted came along and told me that he or she has been anxious as long as he/she can remember, but wasn't separated from his/her mother, so what I am saying is hogwash. My response was that he or she feels something similar to what I feel, but there is nothing to say that everyone who is anxious has the same root cause for the anxiety.

Or in another case, a psychologist said that the primal wound theory is detrimental to potential adoptive parents, who might feel inadequate or paralyzed when they realize that their adopted infant/child has felt a profound loss. That reading Nancy Verrier's book, "The Primal Wound," could cause post-adoption depression in adoptive parents, so adult adoptees need to stop talking about these false, unscientific wounds to protect future infant adoptees from depressed parents. WTF?

After so many days and months of this, I don't understand why so many people who are not adopted have such investment in telling adult adoptees that we're WRONG when we talk about what we feel, or how we feel it. It is just so odd. It's like they think we choose to feel sad. There is no choice. For some of us, it just is. I know what I feel and what I have felt my entire life, and to have someone suggest that they know better than I do is highly presumptuous.

I was talking to my friend Thomenon today about this, and how it has some parallels with the way queer people are treated by reactionary factions in the United States. That being gay is a "choice" and that if gay people would reexamine their lives, they would see their faulty thinking. He said that the "choice" issue is bogus: he would never have chosen to be gay, given the obstacles that society puts in the way of queer citizens. He feels that there is a biological component to being gay: he always knew he was gay. And that his life as a gay man has been shaped by his place in society at large and his position in queer culture. His experience as a gay man is thus both biological and cultural in its foundation.

It is a fact that adoptees belong to families other than those we grow up with. Our feelings about being adopted are not a "choice." Seriously, if it were, I would choose to be one of the joyous, cheerful, very happy adoptees who see nothing but goodness from here to the grave. That would be a much easier path, but it's never been who I am. Cultural expectations of adoptees to be grateful and happy, adoring of adoptive families and vilfiying of natural families are also problematic to me. There is a middle road in which I love my adoptive family, love my natural family, and have felt lifelong sadness about the loss of my mother and who I might have been. Sadness that cultural expectations led me to hide and subvert until it turned into crippling self-loathing and self-doubt. NOT an inability to form lasting, meaningful adult relationships, as the naysayers have written.

Now I speak out about how I feel, and I am told that I am "allowed" to be sad, but only within the parameters that others delineate. Boundaries that "science" has set up. I love science. It's great. But not when others use it as a bludgeon to push me back into compliant adoptee mode. "Science doesn't uphold what you say, so your feelings are 'probably' invalid unless you agree with us that you started to feel sad when you were three and realized that you were adopted and what that means."

Sorry, not playing. I am too old.

Vive la resistance!