Submitted by kimette on Sun, 09/28/2008 - 15:42
I often heard people saying they don't understand how someone can adopt a child to abuse it.
Is it possible that I was adopted to be abused? No, the answer is definitely no. I don't believe that my adopters (or abusers) adopted me to abuse me. I'm sure that my A-mother adopted me because she wanted to become a mother and there was no other way to become one except through adoption. I'm also sure that my A-father adopted me because he wanted to build a family with his second wife and there was no other way to build one except through adoption. I also believe that in general, normal people don't adopt to abuse a child.
To justify their assumption that "abuse has nothing to do with adoption", people (usually non adoptees or "happy" adoptees ) will say that abuse also happens in non adopted family. I'm sure that my A-parents didn't adopt me to abuse me but I don't accept when people say that abuse has nothing to do with adoption.
In my experiences, adoption had played a leading role in the abuses. My Afather used it to "prepare" me by scaring me. To do this, he talked to me about "Center for Youth in Canada versus orphanages in Korea". I was scared to end up in a center for youth because when my parents were not with me, I was always a subject of teasing, mockery and racism. When I started "behaving badly" in reaction to the abuses, my parents blamed my past in Korea, they blamed my korean father abandoning me and the death of my korean mother.
He only stopped abusing me after I lost weight. Then he started to rent videos. I saw him taking a video in the porn-section but he denied. He said: "It's not pornography. It belongs to a series of videos. There is a history and suspense...It's a love story." One night that I couldn't fall asleep, I went to watch TV with him. I came in the middle of the "love story". There was a geisha saying that she was raped and she liked it so much that she decided to become a geisha. While she was talking about her story, the film was showing the rape. The following images were focus on the genitals. I went back to my room without saying a word. I coudln't stop asking myself: "Did daddy stop touching me because I lost my Asian look or because I became anorexic?" No matter the answer, I felt responsible for not becoming "white" sooner or for being fat.
Two years later, while my parents and I were in the car, we heard at the radio that an actor married his A-daugther. I didn't pay much attention to it but my father did. He said (in front of my mother) that he could marry me when mom will die. He said " people will be outraged at first but when they will know that you are only my A-daughter, they will not see any problem."
Until then, I only wanted to believe that adoption had nothing to do with the abuse because I needed to belive they loved me as their real child and because I needed the sense of permanence that I lost. That day, I understood that he abused me because I was only his adopted daughter, not more than an asian girl with the slant eyes like a geisha.
My answer is still no. He didn't adopted me to abuse me but, he abused me because I was only his adoptive daughter. And he didn't abuse his five other children because they were his biological children.
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A New Pemise to consider
...I am enlightened by your story. As a foster ...well now Adult not child, I have often tried to consider perspective of my adoptive family and I am convinced that my adoptive mother was inherently evil but I relate to your conderation of your father to my adoptive siblings. My siblings, like 99.9% humans were not at all inherently evil. Their abused because...it could. I was a somewhat secondary human in their family- thus the dumping ground for all perverse exploration. I was definately considered sub-human relative to the biological children.
I have an odd, but clear memory of my actually beloved adoptive older sister, Michelle using me in power exploration. She was curling my hair, front-face standing in front of my kneeling forward facing body. It is funny the details, events I recall almost reflexively but have difficulty recall ngt he dirtier events... Anyway, Michelle was a pretty- eighties teenager with long-brown hair that she often flattened under a blue motorcycle helmet. So Michelle, wearing the Blue Motorcylce helmet-stood over me and wiped her dripping nose with her free index finger and then cleared the snot from her finger via my forehead, in the sign of the cross as if to bless. Odd, I realize- I distinctly recall the immediate exchange of flickering eye between us. I believe, this was as if her first realization of potential unyieding power over another human- and this became my realization of a new fear that she would burn me with the curling iron next. She never did burn me...with the curling iron. I realize all sibling use each other to learn ones place in this world, but for adoptive children the power differential is inherent and beckens perverse abuse.
Maybe adoption simmers, then boils an innate tendency of humans to view non-self as less than-
I am not a minority, but always have been naturally drawn to frienships/kinships with minorities which is odd since I am from the deep South. I am a Bostonian now, but I digress. I wonder if such kinship stems from a feeling of connectedness due to the premise (or the premise that I understood) from your writing...that is an adoptive family's consideration of foster children as sud-standard... and I fyrther extrapolate this to a societal (esp the society in which I was reared) consideration of minorities as sub-standard - thus my kinship tendencies- I ponder...