On Wanting to Impress My Parents
Over the past few days, I have enjoyed a correspondence with a delightful woman who learned about my adoption quest at a forum and then wrote to ask me to clarify something that I'd written about it. Yesterday, she sent an email that posed an arresting question.
All children want to impress their parents though, don't they? Do you think it's different for adoptees?
I can't speak about anybody else, but it was certainly different for me. I hadn't gotten very far with my reply before I saw that I was really writing an entry. Here it is.
Comments
Wonderful entry. As someone who was raised by people who were temperamentally unsuited to raise children, it rang a lot of bells. My brothers and I have all talked separately about our roles as disappointments to our parents in general and our mother in particular.
Posted by: Tony | March 8, 2007 09:06 AM
Fascinating topic. I sometimes wished(read in bold face and italics) I was adopted (who doesn't sometimes wish they were not related to their parents) but your post brings up an interesting point which my family has discussed of late.
My aunt (now deceased) seems to have had a child out of wedlock back in the 50's. She did not even tell her family, but "ran away" and came back less the child, without anyone being the wiser. We only found out recently (about two-three years ago) when her daughter/our cousin, contacted my mother through a private detective. We have all met her and have come to terms with what my favorite aunt (who I now realized, must have used me as a substitute, though I love her none the less for that) had to suffer all these years. My new cousin told us that her adoptive parents told her she was adopted, special, etc. when she was about five years old. My siblings and mother all feel that this is too young and makes a child more self-concious than children already are, given the pressures of school, etc. I know that no matter how much I wanted to kill my parents on occasion,(and I am sure they me) and how naturally distant my parents were emotionally, there was never a sense of our not being forever connected, for better or worse. I cannot imagine a relationship where, as a child, one feels that the boom may fall any minute and one might be "sent back" or otherwise disowned.
Does one continually test an adoptive parents love, as natural children often do or do adoptees walk on eggs? Do they distance themselves from their parents emotionally to prepare for the possibility of ultimate and permanent separation? I am sure there are as many answers as parents and children but it is a fascinating topic of relationship dynamics.
Posted by: LXIV | March 12, 2007 11:47 AM