Tag Archives: grief in adoption

Grandparents, Estrangement, Grief, Power, Control: All wrapped up together in adoption

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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?

An adult and a child are walking along the beach. The sky and beach look hazy.
Photo by Maureen McCauley ©

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.

José Montoya, actor, artist, and Colombian adoptee, on grief, loss, and adoption

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José Montoya–a Colombian adoptee born in Cali in 1979, adopted at 3 1/2 years old, raised in the Netherlands–is an actor and playwright. I highly recommend your taking the time to watch his play, “To Be or Never Been.” It is autobiographical. Both his acting and his story are powerful. He shares his memories of being in the Casita de Belen orphanage, of his travel to and childhood in a northern Netherlands village, and of his visits to Colombia in search of his family and himself.

The play is visceral, sparse, and riveting. The same can also be said of his incredibly powerful monologue, “Grieving from the perspective of an adoptee.”

Increasingly, and I am thankful for this, the role of grief is being accepted and acknowledged in the adoption community. In the maelstrom of possible emotions around trauma, loss, and love, grief is interwoven in all of it.

In both “To Be Or Never Been” and in “Grieving,” Montoya brings voice to the reality of grief in adoption viscerally and genuinely.

Grief is of course complex. JaeRan Kim, Ph.D., has written and spoken on ambiguous loss in adoption. “Ambiguous loss—a feeling of grief or distress combined with confusion about the lost person or relationship—is a normal aspect of adoption,” she says. Kim is a Korean adoptee, raised in the U.S., and a professor at the University of Washington-Tacoma.

I am currently working on certification in grief therapy for non-death losses through the Portland Institute for Loss and Transition. We think so often of grief as being the emotion following the death of a loved one, and of course it is. Non-death losses, such as adoption, can also evoke a grief response, one that can manifest in so many ways. Yes, there can be gains in adoption—and those are complex also. As an adoptive parent, I am constantly looking for better ways to understand adoption, especially through the voices and lived experience of adoptees.

Many adoptees use art as a way to share their understanding of the complexity of their stories. Montoya, for example, is also a visual artist. Inter Country Adoptee Voices has information on a variety of adoptee artists here.

C.S. Lewis said “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” Shakespeare suggests that we “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’er wrought heart and bids it break.” The Irish rock band U2’s song “Until the End of the World” says, “In my dream I was drowning my sorrow. But my sorrows they’d learned to swim.” The writer and novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells us “There is value in that Igbo way, that African way, of grappling with grief, the performative, expressive outward mourning, where you take every call and you tell and retell the story of what happened, where isolation is anathema.”

Speak (act, draw, paint, compose, write) your truth, even through the tears.