The [Adoptee] and the Gratitude Narrative

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I will to continue to make this clear: this is my personal lived experience and my journey within these systems and families. I am not speaking for anyone or on behalf of anyone. Other people's stories are not mine to tell, and I am trying my best to honor that, and I hope you as readers honor that as well.

"You should be grateful".

"You are so lucky you were 'rescued'".

"Thank your parents, you owe your life to them".

"Appreciate your family - they adopted/fostered you when no one else would".

These are a few of the common, and dominant, narratives Adoptees and Fosters are told to internalize, and normalize as their truth.

Thanksgiving, and holidays in general, especially ones that center family and gratefulness, are very complicated for many Adoptees and Foster Care Alumni/Foster Youth. This holiday in particular emphasizes big displays of gratitude, the "picture perfect" family, and giving thanks.

For many Adoptees and Fosters, this is the time of year where we feel very pressured to talk about how grateful, thankful, adn appreciative we are. We have internal pressure from ourselves, because we do feel these things, and we also receive external pressure from strangers, neighbors, family members, church/religious institutions, schools, Hallmark movies, and basically from everywhere.

It's impossible to escape, because we feel and hear it within ourselves, and everywhere outside of ourselves during the holidays.

What is hard about this for Adoptees and Fosters is that there are 2 truths happening simultaneously, and they conflict, yet they are both true.

Yes, we feel grateful. Many Adoptees and Fosters have great family placement experiences and relationships with their adoptive and foster families. Yes, we do thank our adoptive and foster parents - we know they made a choice to have us in their lives. Yes, for some Adoptees and Fosters, we know we were in a bad situation and our adoption and/or foster placements created opportunity for us, whether it was more stability, safety, resources, or to have adults who would love and care for us. Some Adoptees and Fosters have these experiences.

But this is also true: alongside feeling gratitude and appreciation, we feel pain. We feel loss. We feel anger. We feel abandonment. We feel confused. We feel lost. We feel like we do not belong anywhere. We feel like we don't know who we really are.

Both things can be true at once.

The hard thing about Thanksgiving, is that second truth is often ignored, pushed down, or told to be quiet. If we voice any of these things, we are told that we are selfish, ungrateful, self-centered, and made to feel like bad people.

The pain, confusion, anger, etc., comes from the trauma we experienced of our relinquishment, no matter the circumstances. It comes from the years of unspoken or unacknowledged trauma of always knowing we are "different", that we are not really an "X" [insert your family's last name], because we were not born into this family. The anger comes from the years of having to push all these feelings and questions down, so that we don't appear "ungrateful" and "self-centered". The pressure to be the perfect kid to fit the narrative of the families we are placed into is intense. After a while, it can be too intense to keep holding in.

And, some Adoptees and Fosters, myself included, have bad family and home placements, experience abuse, and either rejection from the foster family and placed into multiple homes, or we experienced a broken adoption(s) and navigate life completely without a "family". Or, some are forced to stay in their bad situations, and are forced to be silent, and to simply survive until they are able to leave for good.

It's not great to think about this Adoptee and Foster experience. But it needs to be acknowledged and honored. For those who have this experience, the dominant narratives of gratefulness and saviorism feel like a huge slap in the face. We feel so lied to, so deceived. It's important to recognize the diversity and range of experiences for Adoptees and Fosters and know that they are not these happily-ever-after fairy tales.

Thanksgiving is also centered on “family” and “home” - these are very hard for many of us.

As mentioned, bad home placements, bad family experiences, broken adoptions, multiple placements, the idea of "home" and "family" is just an idea for us as kids. We don't know what home really feels like, we don't know what family really looks like. These things are not modeled for us, let alone a true presence in our lives.

There are so many movies that talk about that feeling of "home". Until 3 years ago when I became a mom, I did not know what that feeling truly felt like. I spend decades trying to create it, I chased it, and I tried to fake it. I never captured it. I always felt like that person looking into the warm homes of perfect families, never really being able to step into them and to be a part of it.

I spent a lot of holidays alone as a young adult, or working through them, or in homes that were not mine, with families who were not mine. They were so kind to me to welcome me in, but it was a sharp reminder of the family I did not belong to, would never belong to.

I met my wonderful partner and now husband 19 years ago. He's been with me for nearly every holiday season since, and I am grateful to have had him with me, and to have been invited for 15 years to his family's holiday celebrations. But they were never mine. They were never with a family that was mine. Yes, there was love, and warmth, and happy memories, but each time I celebrated with them, I was reminded a thousand times over that this family was not mine, and I was spending holidays with them because I had no other family in my life to call my own.

Each bite of food, each hug I observed or gave or received, each dish I washed, each gift, each person I would have to make small talk with, each custom and tradition I learned from them, literally each moment of the celebration and family time would remind me of the hard truth.

I did not have family.

This got a lot easier over the years. I left my "home" at 17, so I had a lot of practice shoving down these feelings, putting on my masks, playing the role of a happy person, and skillfully providing non-answers when people, who learned I was adopted, would say to me: "you're so lucky", "I hope you're grateful", "you need to thank your parents", and "imagine how bad your life would be if you hadn't been adopted".

I got really numb to these comments, and even more numb to the emptiness I felt, but tried to fill with all the holiday cheer and exuding gratitude that never was authentic to my story and my experience.

The narrative of “you should be grateful” is especially loud for us during this season of national gratitude. But it's very hard to feel gratitude for a family we never will have, and a home we did not belong in.

I think Thanksgiving is the holiday where I feel most like a fraud, where it is most obvious that I do not truly have a family to turn to, except for my own little and wonderful family that I am building now. Thanksgiving is a holiday where the cuts are very deep, but I used to stay silent, and nod and smile, and eat lots and lots of pie as a form of therapy.

Holidays are a wonderful thing. It's wonderful that we as a society, community, and individual families can come together and celebrate a shared love for each other and what we have. But when you do not have this to be able to celebrate, it's not wonderful.

Adoptees and Fosters:

You do not have to be grateful.

You do not have to give thanks.

You do not have to pretend.

You do not have to explain yourself.

Allies: Be Kind. Listen. Don’t Judge. And, maybe give us a hug this week.

What else can allies do? What else can Adoptees and Fosters do to support one another?

Allies, if you have power and influence to create change in your workplace or community - use it! Help build more inclusive policies or observations of these holidays that don't just center traditional nuclear family structures and experiences. Allies, if you are leaders, set the tone and help your teams/community understand that not everyone has happy times during the holidays, and create space to acknowledge and support those experiences too. One of the simplest things that helps us is to hear someone say that they recognize there are people with very hard experiences with families, and perhaps create a supportive space that is outside of the celebration space for people to be able to be in community, share, and support one another without having to feel "grateful". Create affinity groups, leave policies, or mental health benefits for people with this lived experience too. And, give permission to folx to not have to attend the office celebrations - those can be triggering and unpleasant for some people.

Adoptees and Fosters, support one another by recognizing and acknowledging the diversity within our community of our adoption and foster care experiences. Help build bridges to one another, and amplify and validate one another's voices. Create the spaces you yourself need, whether it's support groups, workshops, mental health resources, and I guarantee others will benefit from it too.

This Thanksgiving, I am very grateful, especially for my daughter, my partner, and my Adoptee and Foster community who are supporting me in building The Inclusion Initiative. I am grateful for the gift of life, and gift of opportunity to build something so meaningful for us ❤️.

I am not grateful to have been adopted in the way that I was, to have gone through a broken adoption, and to have been in foster care. I am not grateful for the horrible things I went through because of those systems of inequity and injustice that elevated institutions and parents as "saviors".

These two things are true and live in parallel together. I can be grateful for many things in my life, and I can not feel gratitude for certain things in my life that the world tells me I "should be grateful" for.

Please, this Thanksgiving, don't tell me to be grateful. I will convey that and feel that on my own terms, as it is my lived experience and I will honor it.

I am building The Inclusion Initiative where we are elevating the future of work for Adoptees of Color and Foster Care Alumni. Follow us and get involved our movement!