And they need to be carefully pulled apart, though there is plenty of intersection. I compared it today to the tentacles of an octopus or 10.

I just posted the note below on my Grandparents and Adoption Substack. I invite you to read my posts on that page, and to share your thoughts.

Here is the note:

I’ve been ruminating a lot recently about grief and estrangement, and how they are entwined in adoption. I’ve also been thinking about the roles of power and control, and how they figure in both adoption and estrangement. I have seen how all this can play out with grandparents. 

There are estranged adoptees who prevent their adoptive parents from seeing the grandkids. 

There are grandparents who played a commanding role in forcing their pregnant daughters to place the child for adoption, thus often estranging their grandchild/the adoptee from their family of origin forever, subject to laws and DNA testing. The Baby Scoop Era saw that play out many times.

There are grandparents who treat their adopted grandkids differently from their biological ones.

And there are so many things left unsaid and unknown, that can haunt folks in the adoption community for a lifetime. Who held power? What was questioned about that power, and by whom? What narratives are we to construct to better understand the power, the control, and the grief?

Adoption has its fair share of intergenerational trauma, all rolled up with grief, power, and control, sometimes resulting in quiet or overt estrangement. It’s a lot of tangled and delicate threads. I am especially interested in the role grief plays, as I think we don’t always shine the needed light on it. Ambiguous grief is real, and is a huge part of both adoption and estrangement.

Jeannette Walls, in the Glass Castle, wrote that “One of the hardest things you will ever have to do, my dear, is grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.”

So true.