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Before we
begin, please list your most favorite in each of the five categories. Write your choices down. |
Your most favorite: Taste
Your most favorite: Smell
Your most favorite: Place
Your most favorite: Person
|
Your most favorite: Sound
Your most favorite: Taste Your most favorite: Smell Your most favorite: Place Your most favorite: Person |
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| Although difficult, choose among your favorites, discarding the one you will miss least.. Continue discarding until all of your favorites are gone. | Take careful note of how it feels to imagine losing all of your most favorites, including your most favorite person. |
A child's favorites are perhaps
easier to recognize, but please consider the favorites of babies and the
very real losses they experience duering the hand-off at adoption.
| Baby's most favorite Sound | The regular in and out of my mother's breathing and the dependable rhythm of her heart beat. But mostly the sound of her voice |
| Baby's most favorite Taste | My mother's milk, created exclusively for me. And the taste of her skin, her breast. It is all one. |
| Baby's most favorite Smell | The scent of my mother's skin as I bury my face in her neck. It is basic and right. It is where I belong |
| Baby's most favorite Place | Cradled in my mother's arms,, next to the sounds and smells and tastes that I have experienced since my conception. This is my home. |
| Baby's most favorite Person | My mother is my universe. She is a part of me, just as I am a part of her. No one can replace her. If I am separated from her, I will long for her my entire life. |
Adoptees, regardless of their age, whether they are newborn or older, domestically adopted or foreign, give up all of their favorite things when they are adopted.
The loss begins with their name. They lose all information about themselves and their origins. They lose their identity.
They lose it all. They lose the smells and tastes and sounds and places and people with whom they are familiar... all of their favorites. Everything they have ever known is gone and changed forever.
Their greatest loss, which you surely understand, is the loss of their favorite person. Mommy! They lose their most favorite person irrevocably.
If there must be a separation of mother of child, if there is no other way, by recognizing an adoptee's loss, we can endeavor to ease the pain by maintaining as much of his or her previous life as possible. With empathy we can make their transition more humane.
("A mother's losses are the flip
side of the adoptee's losses. Just as big, just as important, just
as irrevocable, just as painful, just as sad.", Joe Soll
)
| This is my effort to help make adoption, when it is necessary, more humane. I dedicate this to all the adoptees in my life. This work was inspired by Ken Watson, Ph.D. Darlene Gerow |