National Adoption Month

Today is the beginning of National Adoption Month. The day to celebrate adoption everywhere!

Unless, of course, you are adopted. Then it's a bit more complicated than that.

Adoption, for me, sets up a great deal of cognitive dissonance. I love my adoptive parents. They did a good job raising me. (At least, they didn't do any worse by me than they did for their biological children.)

And yet I can't help but wonder what my life would have been if I had been raised by my birth mother.

Does that make me disloyal? I can't have it both ways. I can't have been raised by both sets of parents. But that's what it feels like I want. I don't know how to make sense of this sometimes.

I am who I am because of my past. All of my past. The good the bad. The adoption. My adoptive parents' divorce. The problems with my peers. The fun I had. All of that leads up to the person I am today. If I change any of it, I cease to exist. So I can't really want it to be different. And yet I do sometimes. I suppose that's true about a lot of things, not just the adoption. But adoption brings all of this into sharp relief for me.

It's all very confusing. I'd feel a whole lot better about National Adoption Month if people were more honest about the complexity of adoption and how it affects the adoptees. Until that happens, I just can't feel good about a month that celebrates all of this.