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Abuse Case File

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Submitted by synobia on Tue, 06/07/2011 - 12:23
synobia
July 29, 1976 (according to adoption file)
Wonju, South Korea
December 1976
Oklahoma
adopters

As a toddler, I was diagnosed with ADHD and given Ritalin, which made me catatonic. After taking me to another doctor, my adopters learned that I was actually a precocious child who was desperately bored. It was recommended that I be placed in a school for gifted kids, but my adopters declined to do so. My female adopter revealed to me that she just wanted me to be "hers." She was also an animal hoader who kept cats, dogs, guinea pigs, and a pig inside the house as well as a hoader of objects that overwhelmed the 1-story ranch style house in which I grew up. The pet dander, excrement, and dust was suffocating and made it hard to breathe. I was often sick. My female adopter also told me that I was mixed-race: the child of a prostitute and a soldier. If I had stayed in Korea, then I too would've become a prositute. My male adopter beat me with belts, paddles, and his hands. I was raped when I was 16 years old, and my adopters didn't believe me and thought I was only trying to get attention. This situation drove me to a suicide attempt. I left this house at the age of 17 to go to college. (I studied hard throughout this abuse in order to escape my adopters and the racist town where I grew up.)

Your Message
About Abuse: 

I was the child that my adopters couldn't physically create. Yet 7 months later, their bio child was born. They decided to keep me.

The abuse that I sustained throughout my childhood emerged because I wasn't the child that my adopters chose. They couldn't understand why, despite how they raised me, I was different, and so they felt a combination of revulsion and desire toward me.

To heal, I've had to unlearn much of the abuse's wounding and to emancipate myself from my adopters. I've broken off all contact.

On the outside, I look like an "adoption success story" -- accomplished, professional, etc. -- but on the inside I am a survivor who struggles sometimes to feel safe and who is still deeply scarred from my adopters' "good intentions."

About adoption: 

Adoption is abuse. It does not address the socio-economic problems that have made the child vulnerable in the first place, and in fact, it entrenches them even further by victimizing mothers in the belief that middle-class heteronormative families can cure social ills. It is a form of race and class-based eugencis targeting poor/brown/single women for the elevation of white middle-class married women.

In 1976, my white adopters took out loans to pay almost $1,000 to purchase my body. White privilege trumps class.

I am against adoption. If you have a lot of love to give to the world's children, then urge communities and governments to address the structural violence that separates families. Adoption is a corrupt business seeking to perpetuate itself, and it's the children who suffer and who can't speak out.

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