Triggers

What triggers a reminder you’re adopted, or triggers deeper reflections of being adopted?

This question was posed to the readers on a blog I follow, (http://theadoptedones.wordpress.com). Within minutes of the post a flurry of responses lit up the site.

Topping the list of reactions was: heading to the doctor giving birth/becoming a parent, birthdays, holidays, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Other high vote getters on the ‘Trigger List” were family pictures which highlight that the adoptee doesn’t resemble anyone, or the conversational use of labels such as ‘half-sibling’, ‘half-brother/sister’.  One very honest individual professed that being adopted was always top of mind.

My response added to the mark others set:

“Triggers are everywhere and pop up at odd moments. Just last weekend, I visited my birth mom and the night before the visit I felt the pain of her many rejections, the adoption and the first denial of contact, and then I felt the joys of talking to her the first time, meeting her. Every time I’m with my half-brother or the siblings that I grew up with, I am triggered into remembering I’m adopted. When I look at my children and I see the smile I recognize in my brother, I’m triggered. I am not triggered anymore when I go to the doctor because I have my family health history. Glad that one got checked off the list.”

In thinking about triggers, I’ve come to several conclusions. Besides specific times of year that are intrinsically problematic for adoptees, like birthdays and holidays, the issue of adoption ebbs and flows.  Stage of life heightens ‘adoption anger’ or ‘adoption thought’. Early childhood, teenage years, early adulthood, active adulthood, and middle-aged are the obvious buckets in which to dump adoption angst in healthy doses.

When I was a teenager, I thought about adoption often as I struggled to assert my place in society, and to assimilate and differentiate myself within my adoptive family.  Finding my way through that was heightened and hindered by hormones and stressors like the death of a sibling, heading off to college, and deciding on a course of study. I thought about being adopted every night and often throughout the day depending on social conversation and my school subjects.

Early adulthood found me in college when I studied psychology. There wasn’t any class in which I was enrolled that I didn’t don the adoptive lens to evaluate the content. Following college, I recall that there was a lull in my concerns over being adopted.  I think I was too busy setting my career to worry about what I clearly could not change.

When I became a parent, anxieties over my missing genealogy ramped up.  Concern over birth family health history and how that affected my own health outlook and that of my progeny took center stage.  At this phase in my life, I battled to harness my ‘adoption rage’. Adoption gatekeepers locked me out of my adoption secrets until the laws in my state (Illinois) changed in 2011.  Adoption, my health issues, my right to information and accessing my ‘personal story’ (see ‘The Importance of Personal Story’ posted on 7/25) consumed and obsessed me as I entered middle age.

The outcome of this week’s debate about ‘triggers’ has left me confounded.  As a member of the middle-aged, one would think I’d have accepted my fate of being adopted, and that my ‘adoption thoughts’ could ably retire.  Not so! I’m active on adoptee blogs (see “My Favorite Blogs by Adoptees”) I pen my own blogs weekly, and I’m drafting my memoir about the search for my birth relatives.  I think, read and write about adoption every single day. There isn’t a news item that I am not evaluating for a slant or its worthiness to repost, offer comment, flag or forward to a fellow adoptee friend.  

For me, I’ve decided that being adopted, while my attitude about has softened over time, is who I am, what I’ve been called to champion, where I’ve found my purpose.

Daily life and its news events have become triggers of adoption for me.  While ‘adoption anger’ is no longer a debilitating factor in my existence,  ‘adoption thought’ prevails. Maybe the more we talk about the complicated facets of adoption openly and honestly, the more we can enlighten others.  Perhaps this dialogue will not only increase awareness, it will influence and invoke necessary adoption reform.