Best Christmas Present (All Sales Final)
What happens when the novelty of a human child “gift” wears off?
We hear about “adopted” Christmas puppies being returned to shelters when they lose their festive novelty. Ducklings are abandoned in parks to be picked off by predators or starve when Easter enthusiasts underestimate their needs. What happens when the novelty of a human child “gift” wears off? You think you want it, that extension of yourself to feel complete. But what happens when it gets too old to be dressed like a doll and controlled and photographed without consent? Or starts expressing different values, sharing its truth or otherwise failing to align with your vision of the perfect “gift” of a child?
Dec. 21st is my “Gotcha Day”. I appreciate that my adoptive parents emphasized my summertime birthday over the winter day they took me home crying from the courthouse. My mom usually acknowledged the day around Christmas saying, “You were the best Christmas present” with an odd grimace. Back then, adoption wasn’t the instagrammable prayer-hands-emoji spectacle that it is today. My parents weren’t anxiously waiting to adopt me with a little sign to pose with. They’d had a healthy biological “rainbow” son after a tragic stillbirth compelled them to apply for adoption. They needed a therapist, not an adoption caseworker.
After 10 years of silence, the adoption agency called them out of the blue, seizing an opportunity to sell me to unprepared strangers rather than contact my birth father’s family. When I reconnected with my foster parents as a teenager, they said the agency urged them to keep me, but they wanted to focus on their other kids. At first, my adoptive parents tried to make me feel like they’d chosen me, but realistically, they’d just moved into a house big enough for them and their son. They were K-12 teachers, and the guilt of NOT taking me would have weighed on them as their prosperity was built on educating children. They were also both chronically ill. As they imagined a future with only one child coping with two disabled parents, they thought having a backup kid and giving me a home would be a symbiotic win-win. I can see how everyone involved thought that was reasonable. Problematically, they failed to involve my birth father. They accommodated me, but were unprepared for the reality of raising a stranger’s child. The agency sold them a fairy tale that became a horror story.
“At first, my adoptive parents tried to make me feel like they’d chosen me, but realistically, they’d just moved into a house big enough for them and their son.”
They brought me home a few days before Christmas. They blamed my tears on the sun’s glare in my eyes, but it was the Winter Solstice in a foggy delta valley and I was in the back seat. Is it possible that I was scared and confused, in a car with strange adults and a strange 7 year-old boy looming over me? I’d been taken from the people I’d been with for 5 months. Don’t babies cry for their mothers? Isn’t that a thing? Even if I’d transferred my maternal attachment to the foster mother, she was gone too. Thinking of my distress would have been a Christmas baby gift buzz kill.
“You were the best Christmas present”. Seems nice, right? But no matter how they spoke about my adoption, it always reminded me that I wasn’t theirs. If you said, “You were the best present” to a biological child born around Christmas, they’d imagine themselves as a newborn in the hospital surrounded by adoring family pointing out genetic physical resemblances “Dad’s eyes! Mom’s nose!” and being nursed by the mother who birthed them. But no one in that household was present at my birth.
“You were the best Christmas present”. Seems nice, right? But no matter how they spoke about my adoption, it always reminded me that I wasn’t theirs.”
When I pictured the proceedings, I imagined being taken away from the foster home that was probably decorated for Christmas and then plonked in a courtroom in a baby carrier, awaiting retrieval. I guess the adoption agency’s logic was: Why give me back to my father’s huge family of respectable medical, educational and military professionals (including himself) for free? They could just ghost that family and collect a fee from strangers. The transaction and the timing makes me feel like a bargain bin biracial on a retail table of garish green and red miscellany with a big red sticker indicating, “Just get it out of the store!”
My adoption papers are peppered with the word “pray”. My adoptive parents “pray” they are granted adoption. Their son “prays” that I become his sister. What on earth is the word “pray” doing in a court document regarding a child’s welfare? Have they not seen the atrocities against children that God has greenlit throughout human history? My parents stopped going to church when I was 7. The only time I saw them doing anything like praying at home was saying grace around a large bird carcass every November.
My mom stopped saying “You were the best Christmas present” by the time I was 13. At that point, the reality of raising someone else’s kid with different neurological wiring kicked in. My “other” wiring had been reacting to a world constantly reminding me that I was not with my biological relatives. My nervous system mapped my panicked and pained reactions to the explosive rage of emotionally dysregulated parents. They were quick to medicate me for my depression and panic attacks, but sought no therapy or parenting education for themselves. They had their own untreated trauma from a stillborn child and many other family tragedies, illnesses and scandals. They fled from their family to start fresh on the opposite coast. In doing so, they cut me off from their family support network and homestead when I was already cut off from my biological family.
“My mom stopped saying “You were the best Christmas present” by the time I was 13. At that point, the reality of raising someone else’s kid with different neurological wiring kicked in.”
My adoptive family stopped treating me like a gift and more like trash. They could no longer pretend I belonged to them. I was taller, darker, introspective and artistic, strumming my brother’s old guitar in my room between psych ward visits. My adoptive mother slammed her bedroom door as I walked past. She’d leave if I entered a room. As a tween crying in the backseat of the car like I did at 5 months old, they no longer spoke to me in soothing, welcoming voices. They now hissed, “Just ignore her” “Crying is just what she does” “If she gets hungry enough, she’ll eat”. Talking about me like I wasn’t there was a favorite tactic. When I was 17, my adoptive mother snapped and said, “GO FIND YOUR BIRTHMOTHER AND SHE CAN DEAL WITH YOU!” Sorry, but her trash is your gift.
The agency that put us in this situation should have been checking on us at least yearly. They should have had a crisis management protocol to intervene for us. There should have been someplace for me to go besides the psych ward when my “forever family” and I needed a break from each other. There was an obvious solution that was not provided as an option: just call my birth father. He would have brought me home to his parents and aunts and uncles in a heartbeat. Now that I’ve found him, he and his family have let me know that they wanted me all along, but they had been erased from my life and documents.
“There should have been someplace for me to go besides the psych ward when my “forever family” and I needed a break from each other.”
The adoptee community is all too aware of Facebook pages for rehoming adopted children. A segment on 60 Minutes Australia from 2016 (Trigger Warning: Rehoming) documented an American adoptee re-homing fashion show with kids strutting their stuff while prospective parents coo and capture them on camera phones. It also featured a story of adoptees being handed over to a pair of pedophiles who shopped for kids in a re-homing chat group. They were eventually jailed. How many more child gifts will be discarded or regifted before adoption practices are reformed?
On my 21st “Gotcha Day”, I was in treatment at Stanford’s medical psychiatric unit for acute malnourishment and depression. I didn’t feel like a gift to anyone. These parents who’d envisioned and invested in a well rounded, multitalented wonderkid spent a dismal Christmas with me under fluorescent lights, pushing me in a wheelchair and watching me slurp nutrition shakes in a hospital bed. It didn’t matter what a gift I had been or what gifts they gave me. That wasn’t what I needed. I needed connection to my roots and a sense of self that we didn’t have access to. I was broken in a way that neither they nor any therapist had the tools to fix.
“It didn’t matter what a gift I had been or what gifts they gave me. That wasn’t what I needed. I needed connection to my roots and a sense of self that we didn’t have access to. ”
My adoptive family and I mended our estrangement, but I will never have a partner or family of my own because I’ll never believe anyone who says they’ll love me “forever”. My experience of love is that it is extremely conditional. Fail to meet expectations, love is revoked. I won’t risk the mutual disappointment of a struggling child and disillusioned parents. I’ll never risk making a child feel the way the adults in my world made me feel, invalidated and defective. I don’t want to find myself failing to bond with a child as my birth, foster, and adoptive mothers did. I couldn't live with myself.
My adoptive parents had the receipts, carbon copies and prayer-filled documents insisting that they were the right people to raise this gift, then they had buyer’s remorse for a defective purchase. I have those paper promises now that they have passed away, but I have no “forever family” to spend holidays or any days with. I’ll spend forever just trying to repair their “best Christmas present”.
