On giving thanks and the g-word (gratitude)

Holidays aren’t easy for a lot of people, including me.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving (a white settler-colonial holiday if there ever was one). I’m in Mexico, so it was not a holiday.

Thanksgiving and then Christmas start feeling heavy when I’m inundated with not-very-subtle marketing about how I should be feeling gratitude for all kinds of things, but most importantly for family. Holidays that center on family and manufactured feelings of gratitude often end up making me feel resentful.

Many adopted people I know, self included, have complicated feelings about the concept of gratitude. Many people expect adopted people to feel grateful about being adopted. Lots of people assume that our adoptive parents are saviors for taking in unwanted children, an act seen as one of the highest expressions of altruism. We’re never allowed to forget that we’re indebted to them because they agreed to be our parents when no one else would have us. We should be grateful that they took us in and gave us better lives. They saved us from the horrors of growing up within our families of origin. We should be grateful to have been rescued and to have been given a “better” life. We start our tiny lives already in debt to our parents for the favor they granted us and without any way to repay it.

A lot of this standard narrative, by the way, isn’t always true. (Yes, strangers all over Twitter have shared with me anecdata to demonstrate to me that I’m wrong about everything I’ve ever said about adoption.) Not all adopted children were unwanted, despite learning those messages early. (I found out later in life that I had been a wanted child and nothing could have shocked me more after a lifetime of believing otherwise.) Not all adoptive parents adopted children because they genuinely wanted to give a child a home. (See people who adopted children to fix marriages or to try to heal infertility.) Adoptive parents aren’t saviors; they’re people. Families of origin aren’t inherently dysfunctional or abusive. A “better life” with adoptive family sometimes ends up being anything but better. Middle-class parents don’t necessarily make “better” parents because they have greater resources (as if a little bit of disposable income magically imbues people with superior parenting skills). Nonetheless, these cultural myths persist because the provide easy answers to moral questions about the practice of funneling children away from certain types of families and towards other ones that seem more socially acceptable.

The narrative of rescue and salvation not only oversimplifies adoption, but also sets up a lot of really strange emotional dynamics for adopted people. We don’t (generally) expect biological children to perform unending gratitude towards parents because their parents raised them. Adopted people often subconsciously become the caretakers of our parents’ feelings because we’re constantly repaying our supposed debt to our parents. When adopted children become responsible for their parents’ feelings, it becomes a role that’s difficult if not impossible to escape and limits options for making authentic and meaningful choices about how to respond to the fact of being adopted. I know so many adopted people who will not search for family of origin until their adoptive parents have died. “I can’t search until my parents have died,” one adopted person told me, “if they found out I was searching, it would just devastate them and I can’t do that.” And then of course, by the time adoptive parents die and adopted people no longer having to feel responsible for the feelings of grown adults, family of origin is usually dead too.

Internalizing explicit and implicit expectations of gratitude towards our parents also limits our own abilities to listen to our own feelings and thoughts about adoption. Our emotional range becomes limited to one socially acceptable feeling of gratitude. Every time someone asks me if I feel so grateful to be adopted, I have to stop and think about whether that person is a safe person with whom I can share my actual feelings. If they aren’t a safe person, I just smile and nod and try to change the subject. I know that if I stop performing gratitude, we’ll shortly be entering into a complicated conversation that I may or may not have the emotional spoons for at the moment. You can imagine that this same dynamic plays out for many adopted people, who have to gauge the cost of alienating others by failing to perform the gratitude we’re supposed to feel. (I suspect this is why many people have the impression that the adopted people in their lives are “grateful” or “fine with being adopted.” We’re taking care of your feelings too by denying or hiding our own actual feelings to make you feel okay.)

If you happen to be adopted and stop performing gratitude for your adoption for the benefit of others, people may label you as “ungrateful” as if this is the worst possible insult. (See also: “I’m sorry you had a bad experience,” and “You’re so angry!”) It says a lot that other people get angry at us when we stop performing gratitude. We’re not holding up our half of the life-long and legally binding bargain that we never actually agreed to as children. We’ve broken a taboo because we’ve made choices to listen to our own emotional experiences and dare to have actual feelings about a very major part of our lives. And our emotional experiences don’t always line up with social expectations about our lives. It’s hard to feel grateful for what we have when we’ve lost so much and those losses remain unacknowledged. I wonder how grateful I should be for the things I’ve lost through adoption.

Here’s what I’ve found. The less I perform adoption gratitude to make other people feel better, the more actual gratitude I can express for things in my life that I do actually feel grateful about.

And I’m grateful to have this space and your attention. Thanks for reading.