I have said that adopted people owe no one gratitude for their adoptions. I’m going to explain this thought by linking it to the idea in my previous post that adoption creates an absurd reality that resists our efforts to make sense of it. Jonathan Lear, whose work I cited in that post, is interested in the place of gratitude in ethical and social life. In “Gratitude and Meaning” he discusses Aristotle’s analysis of gratitude, which goes roughly like this. When you are grateful, you recognize that someone has performed a no-strings-attached act of kindness, with nothing further required from you in return. It is a genuine act of kindness (
"But on the other hand, we imagine adoptees to lie under certain special constraints for which there is no counterpart for non-adopted people."
The closest analogy to our constraint experienced by non-adoptees may be "blood is thicker than water". Which is not a demand for gratitude so much as a statement of being bounded by loyalty. Statements like that are often weaponized against non-adoptees by bio family who raised them, and bystanders, to produce compliance even in the face of toxic, harmful behavior by said relatives. Non-adoptees under the loyalty constraint will often push back with "but blood doesn't make you family".
So I think this leads to confusion and hostility toward the idea of us searching for our bio origins and connections. Like we're being, not just ungrateful, but also *disloyal* to the adoptive family that is seen as having rescued us from a bio family that must have been so unworthy of raising and/or so cruel to have abandoned us.
To that point, many of my most problematic interactions with non-adoptees have been with those who had bad upbringings in their bio families and grew up wishing they were adopted. It's frustrating and heartbreaking to know I'm dashing someone's childhood rescue fantasy with my account of being abused by my adopters, accompanied by the sinking realization that even if they accept the veracity of my account (and they don't always), they probably still believe I should be grateful to have been adopted. Which is where I think the reflexive "but not all" response I typically get originates.
IOW I may be (somewhat) relieved of the obligation to be grateful and loyal to my lousy adopters, but I still need be to the institution of adoption and adopters in general. And forever reminded that blood did not, in fact, make me family to my original one.
"But on the other hand, we imagine adoptees to lie under certain special constraints for which there is no counterpart for non-adopted people."
The closest analogy to our constraint experienced by non-adoptees may be "blood is thicker than water". Which is not a demand for gratitude so much as a statement of being bounded by loyalty. Statements like that are often weaponized against non-adoptees by bio family who raised them, and bystanders, to produce compliance even in the face of toxic, harmful behavior by said relatives. Non-adoptees under the loyalty constraint will often push back with "but blood doesn't make you family".
So I think this leads to confusion and hostility toward the idea of us searching for our bio origins and connections. Like we're being, not just ungrateful, but also *disloyal* to the adoptive family that is seen as having rescued us from a bio family that must have been so unworthy of raising and/or so cruel to have abandoned us.
To that point, many of my most problematic interactions with non-adoptees have been with those who had bad upbringings in their bio families and grew up wishing they were adopted. It's frustrating and heartbreaking to know I'm dashing someone's childhood rescue fantasy with my account of being abused by my adopters, accompanied by the sinking realization that even if they accept the veracity of my account (and they don't always), they probably still believe I should be grateful to have been adopted. Which is where I think the reflexive "but not all" response I typically get originates.
IOW I may be (somewhat) relieved of the obligation to be grateful and loyal to my lousy adopters, but I still need be to the institution of adoption and adopters in general. And forever reminded that blood did not, in fact, make me family to my original one.