Reunions; Searching to be Found
A lack of support of children adopted from Romania before, during and after their search journey can end in a traumatic process of confronting the truth for some adoptees.
As if it wasn’t difficult enough to come to terms with being abandoned by biological parents in the first place, a search and reunion journey brings them face to face with another truth; the biological parents and siblings may now have a sense of entitlement to the adoptees Western wealth.
Our adoptees are searching for something that can only be found within themselves and should not identify as victims of historical events which led them to being abandoned.
My adopted Romanian daughter, now twenty-five, whom I adopted from an orphanage when she was a baby, has this to say, ”Why would you go searching for someone who isn’t searching for you?” The word ” search” implies that you are searching for something or someone that is lost and expecting to be found. As a teenager, she was given the opportunity, through a film company making a documentary, to go to Romania and search for her birth mother. She turned it down saying, ” I am not going to go just so that they can have a story.” For this, I am grateful. At the time, I was struggling with personal health and financial issues and dealing with difficult parenting issues. A trip to Romania on top of all that and I doubt wether or not I would have been able to cope.
History repeats itself and once again, adoption has become an event in Romania where money changes hands and third parties benefit. It was illegal back then but the government couldn’t stop the corruption so they had to stop International adoptions. If it were illegal now, just as it was illegal back then for biological parents and third parties to be the recipients of gifts and money during a reunion, would birth-parents, with their sense of entitlement to the adoptees Western wealth, still want to pursue a reunion in the hope of ongoing financial support? Would it not be far better for the adoptee to give a donation to their favourite charity in order to support the hard working people dedicated to end the cycle of poverty in Romania?
The U.S Department of Health and Human Services; Child Welfare Information Gateway has many excellent articles of a generic nature, including this one; ” Searching For Birth Parents”.
s (https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/adoption/search/childsearch/).
Professor Victor Groza-
”There should be professional services in place to prepare adoptees and birth parents for a search, to support them during the process, and to help them after a search is completed–whether or not it is successful. Our practice model in the US is that search is a normal part of development for some adoptees. Females tend to want to search more than males and not all adoptees search. For those who do, there needs to be extensive support. That includes letting them know that in the eyes of their poor families, they are seen as wealthy. The birth family may feel entitled to the adoptee and for the adoptee to support them, even if they abandoned her or him. That is why search should not be undertaken lightly. Here is the link to the Adoption Network-Cleveland’s website about search (http://www.adoptionnetwork.org/) ; they have a protocol they follow for search and reunion.”
I wish it wasn’t so, but we live in a world of duality. A world where extremes of poverty live side by side with extremes of wealth.
