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Some thoughts on anger

When I presented my paper on “Grief Associated with the Loss of Children to Adoption” recently at the Sixth Australian Adoption Conference in Brisbane, I mentioned a quotation from Kate Inglis’s book, “Living Mistakes, mothers who consented to adoption”. Ms Inglis said of the woman who has given up a child for adoption, “she may begin her pregnancy in anger and resentment and continue for years with a randomly placed rage”. When I presented my paper I talked about how I had related to this statement as soon as I read it, as I felt that it described my situation perfectly. Several people have approached me since then and asked my advice on how to deal with their anger and so I have decided to write this in the hope that it might be useful to some ARMS members.
We each have our own story and mine is probably similar to many. I spent my pregnancy being angry that I suddenly had this huge responsibility to deal with on my own. I was angry at all the people who turned their backs on me but I was also angry with all the people who thought they were being helpful because I knew that actually none of them could help me. Most of all I was angry on behalf of my child because he was not welcomed into the world with joy the way he should have been; and after my child was gone I was angry with myself for letting him go.
Over the years as I thought about him growing up, I was angry at his adoptive parents because they were sharing his childhood and his development and I was not. I was angry too that while many had encouraged me to give him up for adoption, now there were also many people making me feel ashamed of my decision. This anger built on to my previous anger; it didn’t replace it. Since I’ve met my son, I have to confess that there have been times when I have been angry with him for not being the person that I thought he would have been if he had stayed with me. When disclosing the fact of the loss of my child to family and friends, I have become angry with them when they didn’t understand my circumstances and judged me harshly. Since joining ARMS I have become angry on behalf of all the other women and their children who have suffered as my child and I have suffered.
That’s an awful lot of anger. It’s no wonder that I felt that I was carrying inside me a bubbling cauldron of rage. The important thing to realise is, that if you feel this way too, it’s not surprising and it’s nothing to apologise for. We have a lot to be angry about. It would be very strange if we didn’t feel this rage and it would be unhealthy for us to suppress it. We need to be careful, however, what we do with it.
We hope that our lost children will not be angry with us. We hope that they will understand why we felt that we had to let them go, that we didn’t know any better then. We hope that they will not blame us and want to punish us. I think that we should extend that same understanding to the people who were instrumental in arranging the adoptions of our children; the social workers, the parents, friends and family members, the church leaders and the adoptive parents of our children. If we didn’t know any better, how can we expect them to have known?
It’s natural for us to feel anger and it’s fine for us to express our anger in a safe environment like ARMS. It’s not fine, in my opinion, for us to direct our anger towards others, who were, like us, acting the way society expected them to act. We were all taken in by the myths that existed at the time; not only us but also our parents, our social workers and our children’s adoptive parents. We were duped into thinking that adoption would solve our problems and adoptive parents were duped into thinking that adoption would solve their problems. We were all victims.
Unfortunately some people are still locked into that outdated way of thinking and still think that adoption is the answer to society’s problems. A positive way to channel our rage is into educating those people. Before we can do that we have to educate ourselves. When we begin to understand why we behaved the way we did and why those other people behaved the way they did, we may find that our anger has already subsided to some degree. We may find that we have then a sense of energy rather than rage and a desire to spread enlightenment and teach the community about our experiences. If we can teach society that adoption does not solve problems, it creates them, perhaps we can be instrumental in ensuring that other women will not suffer as we have suffered and then our rage will have been used productively.

© Evelyn Robinson, August 1997

This article may be reprinted provided there is acknowledgement that it was first published in the newsletter of ARMS in South Australia.

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