Children who have been brought up away from psychopaths, pedophiles, addicts, and people who are seriously mentally ill have no imagination of what what their lives would have been had they not been adopted. The best thing an adoptive family can do is help them become aware of what being the abused child in one of those types of families is actually like. And there are enough walk-in-the-shoes books by abuse survivors that are accessible to young teenagers to safely and openly and collaboratively get this 101 by proxy.

Through the adoptive family sharing such autobiographical accounts together with the adopted teen they can ‘walk in the shoes’ a little… safely… collaboratively. This is win-win. It may broaden their awareness of the unglossed stories of at risk children. It may help them decide which kid they identify most with, which they are most grateful to have been. It may help open a dialogue between the adoptive child and adoptive parents without sneaking about to find their birth parents with no safety net. And if they are contacted by or make contact with the birth parents through things like Facebook, then they at leave now already have had an ‘education’ on the in depth dynamics of growing up in ‘those type of families’.

Identity is a hungry beast. In later adoptions a child would have experienced completely different histories, in effect had completely different life, been a completely different person to who they became or tried to become or acted as if they had become in the years following adoption into a safe and stable family. And those different histories, lives, personhoods, may never smoothly stitched together, so the threads of this patchwork can pull apart. Identity from one time and place weaves together with identity in the next time and place when the transition is in a relatively straight line or at least turns a gentle corner.

But saving a child from severe abuse or neglect usually is more like losing the line altogether, more like being airlifted from one line and started onto a new one that has no connection whatsoever to the original one. But for better or worse one’s identity to that point is still the product of that first place. In the next place one is not an empty vessel to be filled with a new identity. One is more like clay that is the product of where it came from but can become lovingly sculpted into another form.

I grew up with a mentally ill, alcoholic mother. I was in a program for at risk children from 6 months to two and a half years old and had lost five other much loved primary carers before the age of five. But I was not put into foster care, not adopted, and so I still grew up with my abuser in a highly endangering criminal environment.

I got myself a bed around the corner when I was 8 years old which lasted until I was 10 in a poor Italian family of 5 kids which was nothing at all like my own. I got an unofficial ‘foster mother’ and ‘foster sister’ from 13-15 when a girl from school took me home to her single mum in the housing commission flats. Again nothing like my own background or environment at all.

But though I had these two places of relative safety I continued to return at least a few times a week to the danger of my family home… to see if it had changed, to see my younger brother, or just because it was familiar, connected to who I was in all those years of survival, to the layout of the house, the decor, the objects…even if these were connected to trauma and abuse they were still familiar. Life wasn’t airlifting me to safety and stability but it was giving me such sharp corners I couldn’t stitch together who I had been and who I was being offered to become.

In my teens at the foster family I would go AWOL, spend the night sleeping rough when there was a warm bed, a meal waiting for me. But this ‘foster’ home was not the natural extension of what I’d come from, the streets were. I was out there because home was too dangerous to return to and the foster home was too ‘alien’… I couldn’t integrate it with who I already was. I was grateful for all I had there, I enjoyed being there, it was safe there, but all of this still messed with my head. I was sleeping rough because I was craving the continuity, even if that was just as dangerous, crazy and shitty as the home of my biological family I was avoiding.

Adoptive parents can talk to their teens about patchwork and stitching, about knowing who one is because one at least knows who one is not. Adopted kids are not like me. I only got glimpses into what it may have been like to have been adopted. And those rescued from backgrounds like mine, have only had glimpses of what its actually like not to have been rescued and having to rescue themselves. Nevertheless, we each have a right to look through those windows, to wonder, to ask the questions. But we should be well prepared for what we see through those windows.

Donna Williams, BA Hons, Dip Ed.
Author, artist,and presenter.
http://www.donnawilliams.net

I acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the Traditional Owners of this country throughout Australia, and their connection to land and community.