My feelings regarding my first mom - ICAV

Have you ever tried to go back (in your thoughts) and listen to yourself, to what you really felt growing up as an adoptee?

When I try to go back in time like that, I realise I have so many feelings and thoughts I never dared to express. I still carry those feelings inside of me.

As a transracial, intercountry adoptee growing up in Sweden during 1970-1980, I feel that I was part of an experiment. Children from countries all over the world were placed in Swedish families and we were supposed to be like a “clean slate”, as if our life stories started at the airport in Sweden.

My background was never a secret and I was allowed to read my documents from Chile. But I never felt that I could talk about my feelings and thoughts about my first mom. I held so much inside and was never asked to express anything regarding my feelings or thoughts. I couldn’t understand why I was in Sweden, why I wasn’t with my mom and my people in Chile. I felt so unwanted and not loved.

I wrote a letter to my mom as if I was 7 years old. I don’t know why I did it, but I wrote the letter in Spanish.

I was recommended to write the letter using my left hand, although I’m right-handed.

POSTED ONAPRIL 12, 2023

Let’s talk about Illegal and Illicit Intercountry Adoptions

There’s a resounding silence around the world from the majority of adoptive parents when adult intercountry adoptees start to talk about whether our adoptions are illegal or illicit. Why is that? Let’s begin the conversation and unpack it a little.

As an intercountry adoptee, I was purchased through illicit and illegal means and it has taken me years to come to terms with what this means and how I view my adoption. I’m not alone in this journey and because of what I hear and see amongst my community of adoptees, I believe it’s really important for adoptive parents to grapple with what they’ve participated in. This system of child trafficking in intercountry adoption is widespread! It’s not just a Guatemalan, Vietnamese, Sri Lankan or Russian issue – it impacts every country we are adopted to and from, beginning back in the 1950s enmasse, through to current day adoptions. The 1993 Hague Convention came about because of the vast number of illegal and illicit adoptions. The Hague could possibly blind adoptive parents into believing their adoptions cannot be illegal or illicit because they went through the “approved” process and authority. But while a Hague adoption is less likely than a pre-Hague private or expatriate adoption to have illegal and illicit practices within, it is no guarantee because the Hague lacks mechanisms to enforce and safeguard against child trafficking.

To date, most adoptive countries have also not curbed or stopped private and expatriate adoptions that bypass the Hague processes. This means illegal and illicit adoptions are very much still possible and facilitated through a country’s immigration pathways and usually the only role an adoptive country will play in these adoptions, is to assess visa eligibility. This remains a huge failing of adoptive countries who assume a birth country has all the checks and balances in place to prevent illegal and illicit practices within private and expatriate adoptions.

If you aren’t grappling with what you’ve participated in as an adoptive parent, you can be sure your adoptees are, at some point in their lives. More so these days, as the world around us changes and country after country (Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, France) eventually investigates and recognises the wrongs done historically in intercountry adoption. Germany, Denmark and Australia are countries where adoptees are currently pushing for their governments to investigate. Support comes from the UN who last year, issued their joint statement on illegal intercountry adoptions.

It’s important we have these discussions and be truthful with adoptees about illegal and illicit practices that are our adoptions. In ICAV, we grapple with the reality, especially when it comes to searching for our origins and finding out the truth. Here’s a webinar I co-facilitated two years ago on this topic. As you’ll see from the webinar, we are all impacted by these practices – adoptees, adoptive parents, and our original families.

When I first started ICAV in 1998, I didn’t want to discuss the darker sides of adoption. I blindly mimicked what I’d heard – being grateful for my life in Australia and thankful that my life was so much better than if I’d remained in Vietnam. It’s taken me years to educate myself, listening to fellow adoptees around the world who are impacted and advocating for our rights and for the dark side of adoption to be dealt with. I’ve finally come to understand deeply what the adoption industry is and how it operates.

My adoptive parents couldn’t deal with my questions or comments about being paid for in France, or the questions I had about the Vietnamese lawyer who facilitated my adoption. They jumped to his defence. But there is no evidence I am an orphan and my 40+ years of searching for the truth highlights how illegal my adoption is, to date: no relinquishment document, no birth certificate, no adoption papers from the Vietnam side, only a few personal letters written from lawyer to adoptive family and an exchange of money to a French bank account, then the Victorian adoption authority processed my adoption 16 years after I entered Australia with parents who were questionably “assessed and approved”.

I’m a parent of teenaged children and I know what it’s like to have those tough discussions on topics we aren’t comfortable with. I’m sure many adoptive parents must feel doubts and possibly a sense of guilt looking back in hindsight, for not looking into things more, pushing away doubts about the process, the costs, the facilitators, in their zeal to become a parent at all costs. If you feel guilt or remorse as an adoptive parent, at least you’re being honest about the reality of intercountry adoption. Honesty is a good place to start. What’s worse for adoptees is when our parents deny and defend their actions despite data that indicates there were plenty of signals of illicit practices from that country or facilitator. Being honest will help your adoptee start to trust you can take responsibility for your actions and not pass the buck to the “other” stakeholders who also contribute to trafficking practices.

The difficult part for us all, is that there are rarely any supports or education on this topic from those facilitating adoption or supporting it – either as pre or post adoption organisations. Even less support exists for those who KNOW it was illegal or illicit adoption and no-one guides us as to what we can do about it except our own peer communities. This needs to change! It should not be the responsibility of the impacted community to provide the industry and authorities with education and resources on what it means to be a victim of the process and how to support us.

At ICAV, we have been attempting to fill this gap because the industry continues to fail us in this way. Here is our global paper we compiled of our responses we’d like from governments and authorities. I hope those who feel guilt or remorse will turn that feeling into an action to demand better supports and legislation for impacted people and speaking up to hold governments and agencies accountable. That is how you’ll help us in my humble opinion. The fact that so many parents who participated in trafficking practices are silent is only damning your adoptee to have to fight the system by themselves.

Thankfully, the work I was involved in, to represent adoptees in the Hague Working Group on Preventing and Addressing Illicit Practices in Intercountry Adoption, has concluded with a published toolkit in which Central Authorities are now provided a template for how they could respond to queries from victims of illegal and illicit adoptions. Sadly, this toolkit, like the 1993 Hague Convention is not enforceable and so, it requires those of us who are impacted to spend much time and energy pushing governments and authorities to respond to us in an appropriate manner.

If you are an Australian and you’d like to support us in our push for an investigation by an independent body into Australia’s history of intercountry adoptions, you can participate in our survey as an adoptee or as an adoptive parent. We aim to gather high level data showing the human rights abuse patterns throughout the birth countries and the ongoing lack of adequate responses from the Australian government and authorities. Prior to this, we created a letter with signatures from the community which was sent to every Australian Central Authority, every Minister responsible for Adoption at both State and Federal level, and to our Prime Minister and State Premiers.

For the benefit of many, I felt it important to provide an easy to read document on what an illicit and illegal intercountry adoption is. My heartfelt thanks to Prof David Smolin who did the lion share of creating this easy to read document. I’m honoured to know some incredible adoptive parents like David who spend their lives advocating and working with us to change this global system.

POSTED ONAPRIL 7, 2023

AntiRacism Online Workshops for Transracial Adoptees and Parents

Last year, I ran a webinar on the experiences intercountry and transracial adoptees have with racism to help raise awareness and give voice to these common experiences as a community. To further address the lack of resources to our community in this area, I have utilised the funding via the Relationships Australia Small Grants & Bursaries program to hire Hue, a lived experience company who specialises in anti-racism workshops. Together, Hue and ICAV are offering a much needed space (separately for transracial adoptees; and another for adoptive parents), to discuss, raise awareness, and process some of these issues involved in race, racism, and intercountry / transracial adoption.

Our workshops are free and will be provided as a three part series, as an anti-racism program tailored specifically to Australian intercountry and transracial adoptees, and their parents. Adoptees and parents from other countries are welcome to join, understanding that the program is being delivered from an Australian perspective (but still relevant to other countries) and in an Australian timezone. Each workshop is capped at 35 to ensure maximum benefit for participants.

Both programs in their first workshop will cover an introduction to race and racism, developing our understanding and critical thinking around systemic racism and injustice. The second workshop will explore whiteness or white dominant culture, and the ways that our attitudes, and ways of life are impacted by these cultural systems, particularly in an intercountry adoption context. Adoptees will finish with a program that explores ways of unlearning and challenging the harmful beliefs that we internalise in a white dominant culture, tools for collective liberation and solidarity, and tools for self and community care. Adoptive parents will complete their series with a workshop on allyship, developing skills for challenging racism when they see it, and supporting their adoptive children through their experiences.

Here is some information about Hue and its facilitator, Elsa, whom I have worked with to tailor these workshops to suit our community experience:

Hue is a racial and social justice organisation founded by two women of colour that delivers a range of training programs that are accessible, engaging and strengths based. Their workshops are facilitated by people with lived experience to provide participatory and nuanced learning experiences for all knowledge levels. They also provide ongoing support and consultation to organisations looking to implement meaningful change into their policies, processes and work culture.

Elsa (she/her) is a queer, Jewish and Chinese woman of colour. She is an educator, facilitator, organiser and performer. She is the co-founder of Hue, an antiracism & social justice organisation that provides training and consulting to organisations. Previously she was the Director of Training at Democracy in Colour and served two terms on the board and QTIBIPOC board committee of Switchboard Victoria. She has a background in Social Work and Psychology, and wrote her honours thesis on how multiracial people from multiple minority heritages engage with their ethnic identities. In 2020 she was awarded one of Out for Australia’s 30 under 30, for LGBTQIA+ role models and leaders and in 2022 she was a semifinalist for the 7NEWS Young Achievers Awards for Community Service and Social Impact. She is passionate about platforming lived experience, building community power, and healing in the process.

The key dates of the workshops for adoptees are: 21 May, 4 June, 18 June starting at 1pm AEST. Each workshop runs for 3.5 hours with breaks in between. Input and participation is encouraged via small group breakouts. This is not a sit and listen workshop but if that’s what you feel comfortable doing, then that’s ok too.

If you would like to RSVP as an intercountry / transracial adoptee to participate in our workshop for adoptees only, please click on the yellow RSVP image:

The key dates of the workshops for adoptive parents are: 23 July, 6 August, 20 August starting at 1pm AEST. Each workshop runs for 3.5 hours with breaks in between. Input and participation is encouraged via small group breakouts. This is not a sit and listen workshop but if that’s what you feel comfortable doing, then that’s ok too.

If you would like to RSVP as an adoptive parent to participate in our workshop for adoptive parents only, please click on the blue RSVP image:

Huge thanks to the Australian Federal Government, DSS for making this possible via the funding through Relationships Australia ICAFSS, Small Grants and Bursaries program.

POSTED ONAPRIL 3, 2023

Dear Mum and Dad

by Jen Etherington, born as a First Nations Canadian and adopted into an Australian family

Dear mum and dad,

It’s been 34 years since you left this planet

????. How I wished all my life that I could have met you. I am not sure when the last time you ever got to see me was. I’m sure you didn’t think it was the last time you’d ever get to see me though. I know you guys knew where I ended up. I know dad knew my dad who adopted me.

Kerry and Steve (mum and dad) are two of the most amazing humans you could ever meet. They are, I believe like yourselves, loved by pretty much everyone they meet. I got a little brother from Kerry and Steve when I was three years old. His name is Josh and we got along so well when we were kids. We had very few fights. I like to think it’s a great combo of our personalities as well as being raised right by Kerry and Steve.

You’ll be happy to know I had an amazing childhood. When I was 7, we got another little brother named Brody. BroBro and I were more alike because we are both more social and extrovert. Josh, Brody and I got along very well. Kerry and Steve raised us with great values. We were raised and moved close to the Theravada meditation centre on the east coast of Australia. I met some wonder children there who I consider cousins. I figured if I was adopted I was allowed to adopt my own family too.

I had a few difficulties in childhood including merciless bullying for racism as well as objectification. It was always by a kid named “Johnno” regardless of where I went

????. I was lucky to have strong friends around me to help me not let it destroy my personality.

We grew up having almost every holiday with the whole family because it was important to them to have a lot of family time. We went on wonderful holidays camping, staying at beachside caravan parks, went to milestone expos like expo 88 with family and stayed in a lovely house. We did get to Canada for many holidays because Steve’s mum lived in Victoria. I know Kerry’s dream for me was to meet you when I was ready. I know she was heartbroken when she heard the news you died. I was confused. I knew I was adopted all along because I looked different to Kerry, Steve, Josh and Brody. When I was asked if I wanted to go to your funeral I was 9 years old and not sure how to process it and now regret I didn’t get there.

I had a pretty good school experience aside from bullying and sexual abuse. I am told I am smart like dad. I rarely put effort in to using the intelligence. I’m not sure if it’s self preservation to not stand out any more than I do.

There was a third person who raised me and she was amazing. She was my Aunty, Nanette. I loved her so much and she was an incredible person. Even before caller ID on phones I always knew when she was calling. Nanette also gave me away at my wedding. My wedding was 20 years ago two days ago. The man I married was not a nice person. I had a lot of abuse from him. We luckily separated 10 years after we met. I didn’t have children and I had therapy for 12 months on that. I struggled to be ok with if I ever had children. I can’t imagine what it was like for you to lose me and I was so worried I’d relive that experience and what it was like for you.

I’m not sure where my empathy comes from but it’s a blessing and a curse. I did have two miscarriages and only the second one I heard the heartbeat. This is a photo of me yesterday at work. They had harmony day and they put up our totem.

I have so much I wanted to ask you and tell you. I love you mum and dad. I have a wonderful family now – my mum and dad (Kerry and Steve), my brothers , my nieces and nephews and my partner James. My Aunty sadly passed away but I’m so grateful I got time with her.

Read Jen’s previous blog: Money never makes up for what I’ve lost as a First Nations Canadian

Resource

First Nations in Canada

Over 200 stolen First Nations children found in Canadian unmarked grave

The Stolen Generations – Canada and Australia: the legacy of assimilation

POSTED ONMARCH 23, 2023

Searching in Intercountry Adoption by Adoptee Experts

On April 23, ICAV will be providing a webinar on some of the complex issues involved in searching in various birth countries, but with specific knowledge of Colombia, Ethiopia, Haiti, Greece, Korea, and Sri Lanka.

Our webinar will be unique in that we are not only bringing our lived experience as individuals, but also presenting as a global resource, highlighting the adoptee led organisations who provide a formal search and support services. Our panelists hold the dual role of knowing intuitively how complex searching is as individuals having done their own searching and also having decades of experience in providing formal search and support services to the community.

ICAV knows intuitively what the latest research (p231) conducted within the Korean adoptee community shows – i.e.,, that intercountry adoptees find their peers and adoptee led organisations to be the most helpful in their searches. There’s nothing better than those who live it knowing intuitively how to best provide the services we need as a community.

If you’d like to be part of our audience, click here to RSVP.

Our 8 panelists are:

Marcia Engel

Marcia is the creator and operator of Plan Angel, a nonprofit human rights foundation currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her organization has a powerful mission: helping Colombian families find their children who were lost to child trafficking and adoption.

For fifteen years now, Plan Angel has grown a strong community with over 1,000 families in Colombia. The foundation helps these families search for their missing adopted children all over the world, hoping to one day reconnect them with each other. Marcia and her foundation have reunited hundreds of families and continue to support them after their reunion.

Linda Carol Forrest Trotter

Linda is a Greek-born adoptee, adopted by American parents and found her biological family in Greece five and a half years ago. She is the founder and president of The Eftychia Project, a nonprofit organization that assists and supports, free of charge, Greek-born adoptees searching for their roots and Greek families searching for their children lost to adoption.

In addition to its Search and Reunion program, the Eftychia Project, in collaboration with the MyHeritage DNA company, distributes DNA kits for free to adoptees and Greek families. To date, The Eftychia Project has facilitated the reconnections of 19 adoptees with their Greek families.

The Eftychia Project also actively advocates on behalf of all Greek-born adoptees with the Greek government for their birth and identity rights, including transparency about their adoptions, unfettered access to their birth, orphanage and adoption records, and the restoration of their Greek citizenship.

Kayla Curtis

Kayla is born in South Korea and adopted to South Australia. Kayla has been searching for her Korean birth family for over twenty years. She returned to Korea to do ‘on the ground’ searching using posters, newspapers, local police, and adoptee search organisations. In the absence of having a reunion with birth family, she has built a meaningful relationship with her birth country and Korean culture and proudly identifies as Korean-Australian.

In her professional life, Kayla works as a Senior Counsellor for the Intercountry Adoptee and Family Support Service (ICAFSS) at Relationships Australia.

Kayla is a qualified Therapeutic Life Story Worker and has a Master’s in Social Work as well as extensive experience working in the area of adoption both in government and non-government, providing counselling, education and training, community development and post adoption support. In this role, Kayla supports intercountry adoptees with searching and navigating this uncertain and complex process between countries, as well as offering therapeutic support to adoptees, on this journey.

Jonas Désir

Jonas

Jonas is a Haitian adoptee raised in Australia who has spent many years assisting his fellow Haitian adoptees to search for their families in Haiti. He was adopted from Haiti at 6 years old and eventually was able to find his mother in Haiti. Today he is happily married with children and works a lot to help mentor other younger adoptees and help adoptive families.

Benoît Vermeerbergen

Benoît was born in Villers-Semeuse, France under “Sous X”. This means that his parents and especially his mother did not want to be known or found. His birth certificate literally only shows X’s as parents’ names. Growing up Benoît had a lot of questions trying to understand all of this. After his studies, he purposely began working for the ‘Population Services’ in the hope of discovering more information about his birth mother.

During this process and the years that followed, Benoît helped so many other people in their search (for example, trying to find their biological birth parents), that he made genealogical research his main source of income. It has always been and will always be his greatest passion in life!

Genealogy and adoption therefore are his field of specialisation. In the past couple of years he has also started working in the field of ‘DNA’. In 2019, he found his biological mother through this method. Today, he cooperates with a lot of genealogical and adoption related authorities and helps to invent and build many adoption related platforms. Although Belgium is his home country, he also has experience in doing research abroad, i.e. Australia, Mexico, and The Netherlands.

Rebecca Payot

Rebecca is the founder of the association Racines Naissent des Ailes and co-founder of Emmaye Adoptee’s Family Reunion. Adopted in Ethiopia at the age of 5, Rebecca is a graduate in early childhood psychology specialising in adolescents in identity crisis. She has worked for 20 years in international adoption in France as a consultant and speaker on quest of origins. She is the author of her first book entitled “The Quest of Origins, a Miracle Remedy for the ills of the adopted?”

Hilbrand Westra

Hilbrand is a Korean adoptee raised in the Netherlands and has the longest track record, working with and for adoptees in the Netherlands since 1989. Internationally, his name is well known and disputed at the same time by the first generation of intercountry adoptees because he dared to oppose the Disney fairytale of adoption. He is also the first adoptee in the world to receive an official Royal decoration by the King of the Netherlands in 2015 and is Knighted in the Order of Orange Nassau for outstanding work for adoptees and in the field of adoption.

In daily life, Hilbrand runs his own school in systemic work and is a renowned teacher and trainer nationally and his work has sparked great interest in the UK. He spends time bridging the work in this field between the Netherlands and the UK. Hilbrand is a confidant and executive coach for leaders and directors in the Netherlands and also works partly with the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science.

Celin Fässler

Celin is adopted from Sri Lanka to Switzerland and is the Communications Manager and Board Member at Back to the Roots. Back to the Roots is a Swiss NGO founded in 2018 by Sri Lankan adoptees. Its main goal is to raise awareness of the complex search for origins and to support adoptees in their searching process. Since May 2022, Back to the Roots has been funded by the Swiss government and the regional districts in order to provide professional support to adoptees from Sri Lanka to Switzerland.

Sarah Ramani Ineichen

Sarah is adopted from Sri Lankan to Switzerland and is the President of Back to the Roots and may present jointly with Celin in this webinar.

The webinar will be recorded and made available at ICAVs website.

If you have questions you’d like to see addressed in our webinar, please add your comments to this blog or contact us.

Huge thanks to the Australian Government, DSS for funding this event via our Relationships Australia, Small Grants & Bursaries program.

POSTED ONMARCH 14, 2023

Dear Korea, About Mia*

*Name has been changed to protect identity

by kim thompson / ??? born in South Korea, adopted to the USA, Co-Founder of The Universal Asian

This article was written for Finding the Truth of 372 Overseas Adoptees from Korea published in Korean

Artwork: Gone But Not Forgotten by Amelia Reimer

Dear Korea,

I want to tell you all about my friend Mia, but I am limited in how I can tell you her story as she is no longer here and cannot give consent to my re-telling of what is hers and hers alone.

And so, Korea, I will tell you about my experience and observations of her and of our friendship.

Mia was a fellow adoptee and my friend. We met in your city of Seoul around 2013 or 2014. I was in my fifth year of living there. Mia was, as is the case for many adoptees in Seoul, trying to learn your language and doing various freelance jobs related to writing and teaching English, as well as working as a journalist for publications in the country she had been adopted to and raised in. She was an immensely talented writer and photographer.

Mia was quirky. For example, she loved marshmallows more than any child or adult I have ever met. She loved them to the point of ecstasy–we used to laugh at how deliriously happy it made her to roast a marshmallow on a rotating spit over hot coals where we’d previously been cooking our ??? (lamb skewers). Mia was her own unique self. When it came to your food and cafes, Mia loved everything about you, but the fact that you could get marshmallows from ??? made her love you even more, even if they weren’t (according to her) quite the same as she could get in the country where she’d been raised. She laughingly said it made her life with you that much easier.

Mia was funny, kind, thoughtful, and incredibly generous both with her time and money. She once hunted down and gifted my then-partner and myself with two specialty sakés from Yoshida Brewery because we had told her how much we loved the documentary The Birth of Saké. She cared deeply for others, freely and easily expressed gratitude, and was just an all-around fun person to hang out with. She had a laugh that I can still easily recall.

Mia loved the band ?(Nell) and used to, needlessly, thank me constantly for “introducing” them to her. “They’re sooooooo good~~~” she’d earnestly exclaim when talking about an album of theirs she’d been listening to on repeat. She was an intelligent, articulate, and creative mind who had a delightful hunger for life, art, travel, new experiences, and good food… and marshmallows.

Mia also had a very deep awareness and understanding of her mental health struggles and was as proactive as one could be about working to be healthy. She sought out the professional help she needed. She used her very real diagnosed depression as a positive in that she allowed it to make her an even more empathetic being, which was so evidenced in her professional career as a journalist and how she conducted her personal relationships. Mia had lived through traumas and tragedies that are all too common for adoptees and had profound sorrows and losses.

Korea, I am writing to tell you that Mia was such a good friend to many, including myself. She was genuinely interested in and curious about the lives of those around her. When one was with Mia, one felt seen, heard, loved, and cared for.

Four years have passed since she took her life, and I still and shall always love and miss her.

Something else I can tell you, Korea, with as much certainty as possible, is that if the adoption agency through whom she was exported from knew of her suicide they would quickly blame her adopters, her circumstances, her environment, her traumas, her mental health, and Mia herself. They would never think to own their responsibility in being the root cause for all of the “reasons” for why she felt she could no longer stay in her life or this world.

Korea, chances are, the agency would tell you that while it’s an unfortunate reality that “every so often” “bad” adopters manage to get through their system–that it’s a “rarity.” They would dig their heels in, feigning willful ignorance and dismissal over the well-researched and known statistic that adoptees are four times more likely to attempt or commit suicide than non-adoptees. They would tell you that they are not to be held accountable for Mia’s mental health, and that she should have gotten the help she needed. They would say that what happened to her is too bad, and I do not doubt that they would mean it, but they would in the same breath tell you that none of this is their fault.

And yet, Korea, it was the agency that placed Mia in the family she was raised in via a system that has been empowered and enabled on both societal and governmental levels to prioritize and value financial gain over keeping children with their ummas and appas. Mia’s physical and emotional safety and support she needed were not prioritized, nor were they valued.

The responsibility for her mental and physical wellness was placed directly onto her shoulders. The responsibility for her surviving her childhood; learning how to thrive; and later, as an adult, trying to adapt to life in Korea; to explore and embrace her cultural and racial identity; to try and learn the language; and to search or not to search for her first family were also all placed directly onto her shoulders. Mia’s birthright to family, culture, and identity had been sold right from under her without her consent when she was a baby, and she was then left to pay the price for someone else’s immense financial profit.

Dear Korea, I want… I need you to know that Mia, like so many adoptees including me, had to constantly navigate statements from the agency, adopters, and non-adoptees like: “You sound so bitter and angry. You should be more grateful.” “Your life is so much better than if you’d grown up an orphan in South Korea.” “You don’t know how poor South Korea was.” “You’re so lucky to have been raised in the West. Your life is so much better.”

I need you to know… to feel… to somehow understand that no matter how emotionally or mentally strong or proactive we as adoptees are in advocating for ourselves, no matter how “perfect” some of our adoptive parents might be, these kinds of statements, which embody attitudes and perceptions of denial, dismissal, and diminishing, take a toll on our mental health. They are forms of what is now known as “gas lighting.” They can cause us to question our sanity, goodness, love, gratitude, self, and sense of worth. They make us feel like we really might be ungrateful, unloving human beings who should be good with not knowing our parents, our ancestral roots, language, or culture because: “We got to grow up in the ‘rich’ West.” These are things that no adoptee I have ever known, myself included, is truly equipped to handle, and yet the responsibility to do so, is always on us.

I think about how all of this must have worn Mia down. I think about how even though she knew on an intellectual level that her traumas were never her fault, she bore the emotional toll.

Dear Korea, when Mia took her life, your citizens did not wail aloud in the streets wearing black and white. The adoption agencies operating on your soil that to this day export children to the West for financial profit did not fall to their knees asking the gods and Mia’s soul for forgiveness.

The ones who were wailing, the ones left falling to their knees under the gut-wrenching sorrow and ache of Mia’s suicide were and remain the same ones who also live as survivors of adoption–us adoptees. You see, when any one of our 200,000 is lost to suicide or addiction or abuse, the loss is deep and the loss is a collective and a permanent one. Four years later, and I still feel the absence of her presence not just in my life, but also in this world.

I am writing you Korea, because it is imperative that you always remember that Mia’s decision to end her life was not her fault. Yes, she made that choice at the very end, but in so many ways that choice had been made for her the day her agency got their hands on her and sold and sent her away from your shores to her adopters.

Yes, it’s true that chances are, Mia would have always struggled with aspects of her mental health even if she’d been able to grow up in the family and place that was rightfully hers. But, I am also confident in saying that her taking her life in her late 30s most likely would not have happened because she would not have had any of the traumas inflicted by coerced abandonment and adoption to carry in her heart that was too big and beautiful for this world.

When Mia died, not only did I lose a dear friend, we the collective of adoptees lost yet another of ours, and whether one can or wants to see this or not–you, my beloved South Korea, you lost a great woman, a great creative mind, a great friend, a great daughter, a great sister, a great aunt, a great partner, a great heart, and a great Korean who had all the potential to significantly contribute to the richness of your literature, arts, and culture.

But more than anything dearest Korea, when Mia lost her life to the wounds and traumas of adoption inflicted on her by her agency, you lost one of your children.

Resources

Intercountry Adoption and Suicide: A Scoping Review

International Conference for Verifying and Guaranteeing the Human Rights of Overseas Korean Adoptees (English – Korean translation, Research Overview of the largest study done on Korean intercountry adoptees)

Intercountry Adoptee Memorials

Research on Adoptees and Suicide

Adoptees and Suicide Risk

R U OK Day? – It’s time to talk about adoptees and attempted suicide

POSTED ONMARCH 9, 2023

Adoptee Grief and Zen Meditation

In Indianapolis, I recently started practicing Zen meditation with a sangha in the lineage of Mahayana Buddhism from the Kwan Um school of Zen, started by Zen Master Seung Sahn. I started my studies with sitting with a community of practitioners at the Indianapolis Zen Center. Practices consist of sitting and walking meditation, listening to Zen dharma readings and participating in light-hearted dharma discussions in the waiting room.

What has been a game changer in meditation practice has been meditating with my eyes open. I decided to try and have been struck by its functions and usefulness. I’m fully alert rather than traversing in various sleeping, subtle stages of meditation that I usually find inner peace with. I’m awake in the mindfulness I gain with my eyes closed, and what advances my meditations, is that I develop a mindfulness in my waking life instantly rather than closing my eyes, doing all this work in the dark, and later integrating it with the world.

What’s come up since my recent move in this new city is the living grief that I’m immersed in when I close my eyes. I feel it as a ferocious, all-consuming ocean in my mediations. And from it, there is a heaviness in my mind. And I look through that heaviness like fog or dirt on a window. But it does clear, which I’ve achieved in split seconds of temporary clarity. And then I feel exact vividness in the present moment, and I have no mind at all. I’m just awake in the room I’m sitting in.

During a Zen retreat I had yesterday, I was able to have an Interview with a teacher. I brought up my grief in mediation and my experience when it clears.

“Where does it go?” The teacher asked.

“It disappears,” I said.

“Then you have a choice,” he said, smiling.

I described the grief and the heaviness, the way it can pull at me and makes me sleepy, and how the feelings of sadness and this heaviness can obscure my clarity, seeking Zen advisement on meditating with these difficult sensations revolving almost like a circle. I described that I have a strong attachment to it, that I might have been making it even bigger by focusing on it in my mediations throughout the years, unknowingly concentrating my mind in it and feeding it, but now see how it lingers in me with eyes open, and I can only imagine how it could also influence my waking life unconsciously. So, I was troubled because all of this is like taking on my lifelong karma as an adoptee, which the teacher knows a little about thankfully.

“Learn from it,” he said, “And when I experienced it, I would thank it. I thanked it for the lesson.” He described his own life experiences in grief, mentioned a book titled, How to Be Friends With Your Demons, and said it did go away for him.

I felt a sudden burst of hope in this conversation.

“So I can try appreciating its presence and continue with practicing,” I confirm to him.

“You have to feel it,” the teacher said to me towards the end of my Zen interview. “You have to own it.” I stared at him, now understanding that there is a way to practice Zen even with grief. And that there is a way to own it and to not let it have control over my life.

In my new apartment in Indianapolis, I’m seeing the grief in my life as it is today and the heaviness that it creates, with eyes open, and I’m journaling about what it teaches me. I’m asking critical questions in myself from what I observe even though it’s hard. Instead of focusing entirely on my grief, I’m giving space to thank it and appreciate its presence in my life and waking world, and all that it teaches me. From my experience with grief, it’s a wounded, intoxicating companion to me especially with the death of my Filipino American brother last year. But I also realized that I am not abandoning my grief by appreciating it and connecting it back to the love inside me.

Read Desiree’s previous blog: Moving on in a new city

Resources

Trauma in adoption resources

Your grief is your gift

POSTED ONMARCH 5, 2023

Learning to Grieve as a Child

by Paul Brian Tovey, a UK domestic adoptee and talented artist, adoptee advocate, creator of the 2022 Global Anon Adoptee Survey

I was filling in the shades of another line picture yesterday of the “Dogpache” dancing with two Dogohawks and later noticed inflammation coming through my body and arms …

I do several iterations of images and they often yield a deep trek of Adoptee feelings .. In my case a core trauma is being child abused and used after Adoption ..

Slowly the trek of images echoes my feelings and also shows new angles and prisms which I use to resolve pain .. In my type of therapy I can do at anytime I please now, as I am retired, I am trained to allow the feelings to be what they want to become .

So my arms went up in the air and into claws and then pictures of my birth mother came into my mind ..I felt like a child scratching her face. And I did that in my “image-spheres” and into the airs .. I am quite rationally, crazy, and it’s all fine.. I have a well developed creative mind ..

Birth mom left me at 3 and that core area is surrounded by later misuse of my body .. She knew the person she left me with as far back as 1940 when Birth mom was aged 7 ..Anyway, I felt the pained feelings, but another prism returned of a stuck mouth .. Muffled languages. Stay safe … SAY NOTHING……Pressure to speak though ..

Finally the pain burst out of the howl-mouth-child-hole of me into resolving cries which were like a ghost child howling for mommy … It’s just another prism in the massive fragmentation field of early childhood mending for me .. How does it mend ? By being and becoming itself ..By finally allowing being, to be inside being as itself .. To grieve as that child part … It is truth delayed for sure but able to be therapeutically re-experienced…..

Does it hurt ? When it’s in the stages of inflammations yes … You bet, because the body is hiding an old “lie” of the early mind which nonetheless tried to protect me from the horror..I don’t need protecting now (poor auto-brain) in fact I need to be all of me .. Held as me by me .. That’s all ..

Now I am finally old enough to be young again and feel things from the various pasts of me because I have a brain developed that can hold everything ..It’s a slow road back to feeling-connection and that form of internal integrity. I note though it’s necessary to let out the grief of: “Who should have been there and was not” …

That’s the point in reducing the unmet need (for mommy) into resolvable grief and crying …”Mommmmeeeeeee”… “HOwlllll”.. I’ve been on a slow road to acceptance of what happened, but what happened was over many pain distorted years .. It’s why I still befriend monsters in Art and make them cry and landscapes howl too ..

OWWWWWLLLL OWWWWOOOOOO …. I love howls they free my early primal soul that was chained to dissociative emotional prisons..I have learned to grieve as a child who was stopped from grieving…. I am here in myself … I have arrived .. I am home in my skin better and it is sad in a more positive way simply because tragedy is ..

POSTED ONMARCH 2, 2023

New Goals as an Adoptee in a New City

Greetings! I made it to Indianapolis, Indiana. To recap: In my recent ICAV blogs, I was blogging from Oahu, which has been my home for half a decade. After my fellow Filipino American brother, a previous Honolulu resident, unexpectedly passed away last year, my life changed for me. And after that summer, I knew I had finished my time in Hawaii. All in all, I was ready to settle down. It was time to grow roots of my own as an adoptee.

After a lot of research and recommendations, I chose Indianapolis because of its affordable cost of living. This city was in the Midwest and I missed the Midwest since I grew up in Wisconsin. I missed the trees of the Midwest, and the four seasons, especially after living in Arizona and Hawaii most of my life.

To transition to the mainland, I moved from Hawaii to Southern Arizona to be near my adoptive family so that I could make visits with my grandparents. For one, rough school semester, I substitute taught, made visits to Phoenix and experienced my grandmother’s passing. After this loss, I gained more clarity on relocating to Indianapolis. Offhandedly, I secured a few part-time teaching gigs in the city. I found and contacted a Zen Center for residing in and practicing Zen downtown. It was the last days of my lease when I started driving to Indiana. Because somehow by then, I was able to secure a full-time job at the Indianapolis Public Library.

Taking a leap of faith, I drove with all of my possessions packed into my new Kia Soul. After living at the Indianapolis Zen Center for a week and starting my Zen studies, I found a cute apartment a few miles away in a quaint, walkable area called Broad Ripple, and made a permanent move. Old trees surrounded my patio. I furnished my place with enough furniture for one and settled in with Pualani, my cat that I brought from Hawaii. After a few more days, I brought in tropical plants. I re-started my junk journaling and letter-making, bought food from local Farmers Markets, and even started making friends with the Filipino and Asian adoptee community here.

My Goals For Next Year in Indianapolis: I hope to purchase a small, basic house where I can have a wood stove. I want to be able to burn wood and make fires everyday for myself. I envision having a small dog so that Pualani will have company. In this small house, I’ll have mostly re-used furniture and plants. I will be forever solo, just working full-time until I retire. I will have vacations where I can travel and teach English in other countries. I will take pictures and maybe publish my visual journals one day, from the collaging that I’ve been doing therapeutically. And lead a simple, peaceful life.

Wish me luck! And please follow my life journeys, meditations, mixed media and letter making at http://www.instagram.com/starwoodletters.

POSTED ONFEBRUARY 23, 2023

UK Intercountry Adoptees Webinar

On 30 January 2023, a small group of intercountry adoptees in the UK participated in a webinar panel event to share their thoughts and experiences with adoptive parent organisation, AdoptionUK.

In this webinar you’ll meet Sarah Hilder adopted from Sri Lanka, Joshua Aspden adopted from Ecuador, Emma Estrella adopted from Brazil, Meredith Armstrong adopted from China, and Claire Martin adopted from Hong Kong. Together we answer some questions that adoptive parents at AdoptionUK ask.

Watch the webinar and below is a timecode, key messages and relevant resources.

Webinar Timecode

00:20 Intro from AdoptionUK

01:03 Intro from Lynelle from ICAV

02:44 Sarah Hilder

03:35 Claire Martin

05:34 Meredith Armstrong

07:39 Emma Estrela

09:39 Joshua Aspden

12:17 How to protect myself from scammers while searching for family – Lynelle

17:23 Tips for approaching life story work – Meredith

20:54 Do you feel life would have been better if you’d been adopted by a family in your birth country?

21:27 Joshua

24:56 Emma

28:00 What would we want adoptive parents know when starting out on an intercountry adoption?

28:24 Claire

32:25 Meredith

35:12 Sarah

38:24 Emma

40:24 Joshua

43:34 Lynelle

45:30 What connects you most to your heritage?

45:45 Sarah

48:23 Claire

49:30 Joshua

51:07 Planning on visiting foster family, any tips or hints to manage the big emotions that will come up for adoptee?

51:30 Meredith

52:24 Emma

54:25 Lynelle

56:24 Jo ending and thanks

Summary of Webinar Key Messages

Click here for a pdf document

Relevant Resources

Can we ignore or deny that racism exists for adoptees of colour?

Connecting with people of colour is not automatic for transracial adoptees

Race resources for adoptive parents

Culture resources for adoptive parents

Global list of post adoption support specific to intercountry adoptees

The importance of pre and post adoption support

Search and reunion resources

Thoughts for adoptive parents

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