Ana Cunningham
Ana Cunningham explains her feelings about being adopted and wants to clarify the meaning of family.
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I’m adopted. But when I tell people that I am, especially people my own age…I get the weirdest questions. “Does it make you sad you never knew your real family?”, “Do you cry at night thinking that your mother didn’t want you”
It always seemed to me they wanted to hear some tragic story about my life before I met them. There isn’t one.
Just the other day I was watching a fictional TV show, and this girl was talking about her mom having issues of feeling neglected because her mom was adopted. This made me think whoever wrote the show didn’t quite get what adoption was. But it also made me realize that people watching the show might think that being adopted naturally means you feel neglected, which is not true.
That’s not to say that some kids don’t have a tragic story behind their now happy lives. But if I had a heartbreaking story to tell I wouldn’t tell it so freely anyway. I feel funny sometimes thinking about how there are some people who were never taught that families with adopted children are just the same as families with biological children. And that’s a really hard concept for some people to grasp.
