- Share This Post
- 0
- submit
- 0
-
Sparkle (0)
Lectori Salutem! or L.S. (Greetings to the Reader!)
For those of you paying attention to last week’s blog, you will remember when I first let it slip that I was adopted in Alice, You’ve Really Stepped In It Now!!!!, I wrote, “I have an allegory to being born into religion and that complete acceptance, that blind faith, that so many in the religious community have.” I compared that fact of being brought up in a completely different, loving and wonderful family not genetically my own was akin to being raised Catholic, Islamic, or Jew. It was a fact I had accepted as the truth that the people who took me home from the hospital the day after I was born were my parents, the same way children born into one religion would almost always stay that religion their entire life, regardless of knowledge, life experience or morality.
As I would age from baby to toddler, the people I relied on became Mom and Dad, the center of my world and they raised me, no question about it, as they had chosen to be my parents. It was a story in our house of how special we were (I have a brother) that our parents had waited just for us to come along and when we did, they chose us out of all the other boys and girls to be our parents. They loved us before they even met us. I grew up always knowing I was adopted and always knowing who my mother and father were because I lived with them. It was not about biology as my parents showered me with all the love I could ever imagine and came to accept them as my true mother and father even as my life experiences caught up with childhood “religion” so to speak.
As I said I feel this is like a baby being born into the arms of a Catholic, Jew, Islam, etc. Why am I and other adoptees different than just being born, you ask? Because some people who are adopted just go through their whole lives rarely questioning the “what ifs”. What if I had been adopted by a different family with some unlucky stroke of the pen and ended up a pauper with an abusive father? What if the woman who gave birth to me, obviously for a some reason – be it financial hardship, a single parent overwhelmed and too young to start their life that way, or any multitude of other reasons, tried to keep me anyway and I grew up in the shadow of those difficulties? As you grow older the prospect of what if no one adopting you creeps into you head, just as everyone has their doubts or their days when faith abandons them.
Just as most adopted children who were brought into a good home and even those who weren't, ones better than any of the lives I could imagine without a mother or father, the “what ifs” were not thoughts that justcame and went with me, settling for just deep philosophical discussions within myself. I have to find some answers. The percentage of adoptive children seeking out their biological parents to an actual conclusion, that is more than just a fantasy or a feeble attempt, is very low. In fact, the number of adoptive adults that seek their biological parents to fruition under any condition has absolutely nothing to do with the type of home they were brought up in at all. Studies actually indicate that it is the same statistical correlation for curiosity in a control group as it is in an adoptive adult group that ends up finding their biological parents is the same. The curiosity factor is the motivation not the adoption process. The same thing that would cause children and young adults to start researching other religions and more information on their own that was not available coming from their church but from historians.
So, why bring all this up in the first place? To explore the issue of indoctrination of religion in homes just as new mothers and fathers indoctrinated their children when an alternate biological parent existed out in the world that might have answers to basic questions of lineage, genetic diseases, and the ability to see one’s own attributes or characteristics in another human being or more and they wanted that door to remain shut. It is not that questions do not arise as children are naturally curious and they will ask the darnest things. It is the answers that will steer them to a
