The God Complex

January 4, 2012 at 4:02 pm (Uncategorized)

You don’t have to delve into adoption-blogland too far to stumble across the “Gods Will” argument as some feel it pertains to adoption. This post is NOT about questioning those individual’s faith or arguing about the likelihood that God put one person’s child into another person’s uterus. If those are the kinds of debates you’re looking for, you’ll find tons of adoptee blogs that can voice those particular viewpoints far more eloquently than I can.

The theory goes as such – It is God’s Will that a specific couple adopt a specific child. He created the circumstances that will/would eventually lead to this event and it was all preplanned by the Creator.

What concerns me about this isn’t that God is being brought into it at all, though I know plenty of people feel that it’s a load of bull. What really concerns me is that the APs who use this logic aren’t leaving any room for disagreement within their own families… Families that were CREATED by adoption. The second they throw God’s Will into the argument, the only arguments against it are submerged in faith vs. non faith.

What happens if/when one day, your adopted child comes to you and says that they have negative feelings about adoption in general, even their own? Using God’s Will as an excuse for why your own child is so unhappy is pretty cruel. What recourse do you even have as an adoptive parent? Do you shake up the very faith that you have tried so hard to cultivate in them by telling them, straight up, that it was God’s Will they lose their family? Or do you use God as a way to guilt them into ignoring these feelings? Or do you allow your own faith in God’s Will to be shaken?

Honestly, it is one thing to use God’s Will as a defense on a blog. It is wholly another to use it as the only explanation when an actual child is trying to communicate with their parent. I’m concerned that so many of these God’s Will types wont be open to an honest dialog sans God if and when their own adopted child tries to open one up.

I’m sure I could have thrown out the “It was God’s Will for me to search for my f-family” when I did decide to search. But I was much more comfortable in opening an honest dialog with my APs about how I was feeling and how they were feeling without muddying up everything with faith vs. non faith vs. different faith in how God operates. In the end, we’re all a lot more comfortable with my reunion. Nobody feels threatened, there aren’t any guilt trips rolling around, and I’m fairly comfortable discussing both of my families with members of the other.

The biggest concern I have about the God’s Will logic is that it seems like a pretty effective smoke screen. If you’re a person who’s life is strongly based in Faith and God, that’s great. But to use God as a way to block out any logic that you simply don’t like is dangerous and ignorant. I’ll be honest – I am sick and tired of people using GOD as a method for invalidating my own experiences and feelings. When I talk about adoption reform or searching or reunion or the negative aspects of adoption, I feel like people are throwing God in my face as a way to tune out what I am actually saying.

I feel like they are doing this with a lot of the other more vocal adoptee-bloggers as well.

That’s just not right. It must really hurt to even consider that one day, your own child will feel like one of THEM some day. I get that. But listening to the voices of adult adoptees today could save you from the slap in the face that might come if your own adoptee feels the same way one day. Listening and communicating with individuals who are aware and have experienced the dark side of adoption is really the only way you’re ever going to be able to help your own child through it – or save them from some of the really bleak stuff that happens when your own parent refuses to even consider certain aspects.

Starting an open, honest dialog with these adult adoptees now could make it a lot easier to maintain an open, honest dialog with your own child as they grow up. Instead of using God to invalidate someone else’s experience, why not leave Him out of it until a broader, faith-based debate comes up? If someone is trying to share with you the fact that losing their identity has caused them pain, or not knowing that breast cancer ran in their biological family until it was too late is, quite literally, killing them, the last thing they want to hear is that it was “God’s Will.”

One last point I would like to make – When adult adoptees are discussing things like reforming the adoption industry to be in the best interests of the child, don’t throw God’s Will into it. Policies and laws change all the time. If we are trying to open up a conversation about adoption reform, using God as a way to ignore the discussion at hand is weak and cowardly. You might as well say that it’s God’s Will that the adoption industry continue to be a money-making business instead “in the best interests of the child.” As it stands right now, the adoption system is NOT in the best interests of the child and using God’s Will as a way to ignore that because you don’t like how it sounds isn’t helping adoptees, you OR your families.