Adoptees: Call For Submissions!
Welcome to adoptēre, a brand new publication that seeks specifically to elevate and uplift the voices of adoptees in particular, and to discuss the realities of adoption with other involved parties.
First I’ll explain the name: adoptēre is Latin for “adoption”; meaning, the concept of adoption has been around at least since Roman times and… we’re still not getting it right. This ancient word specifically describes “taking in a child and raising him or her as one’s own.” I think it’s important to recognize the institution of adoption has existed basically as long as there’s been written history and yet not much about it has evolved or changed over those years, millenia even.
So let’s talk about it.
Adoption has historically been a “hush-hush” topic. If a teenager got pregnant, she was scuttled away to a maternity home or a relative for the length of the pregnancy, delivered, and the baby whisked off to another awaiting family, leaving the mother to return to her ‘normal’ life and presumably pretend nothing ever happened.
That a whole other human life did not just come from her and was immediately lost to her.
Likewise, that child is already beginning to form the Primal Wound from being separated from their mother. This is a real psychological phenomenon that has been studied and written about at length. We let dogs stay with their mother longer. Let that percolate.
For many of us, speaking out about our adoption brought a good amount of feedback, usually negative, and usually accompanied by the dreaded “G” word: grateful. Being told you should feel grateful for people who abused you, as if the hypothetical “other” (staying with your biological parents) would inevitably be worse, is an awful experience
I swallowed this delusion for many years until I found my biological family and discovered that they were poor and needed some help and resources, but my mother is a kind, gentle, caring soul. Maybe she needed some assistance raising her children, but living in a nation that would rather take a woman’s children than give her assistance to keep them is a super weird place to be, especially when a solid chunk of the population is constantly screaming about the “sanctity of life”.
That is my experience. I know my experience does not mirror everyone’s, although it’s becoming eerie how many similar stories I’m hearing in recent years as more and more adoptees speak out.
In that spirit, we are open to publishing all narrative, memoir, poetry, and nonfiction from adoptees, regardless of their experience, and we are also open to publishing input from adopters, attorneys, social workers, biological parents, and other “satellite” parties involved in adoption (that is, not the adoptee).
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