Adoption Blogging – It gets complicated

I have, despite my seeming protestations to the contrary on Twitter, been putting off writing somewhat deliberately. Not that I’m particularly convinced I have my writing head back on now, but I need to get a post out about the dangers of blogging for the adoptee, ’cause without it, I’m pretty sure I’m not gonna be able to write another damn thing.

Which reads far more dramatic than intended.

So, these dangers then? Well they’re probably not just limited to adoptee bloggers, to tell the truth. They’re the usual issues of how much of our personal life do we put into our blogging life? However, the adoptee blogger hasn’t just got the usual amount of family members to navigate, but can have double the amount. Being an adoptee in reunion means that not only do I have to balance protecting my afam from any potential fallout my online activities might have, but I also need to add in balancing both mat and pat bfams too. This gets even more precarious when so many in the families are also online residents. How much do you say? How do you phrase what you say? Admittedly, this should also be general thoughts when blogging even anonymously, as care is needed to cater to ones audience, but for the adoptee trying to navigate the waters of reunion, the results can be catastrophic on a deeply personal level.

Yet if I don’t reveal these issues – issues that are a direct result of my adoptee status – then who will? Certainly the likes of BAAF and Pact and Adoption UK don’t care about the issues faced by adoptees who are beyond their sell by date, as evidenced by their blocking of me across a wide range of mass social media for raising such problems. Sir Martin Narey, thankfully, has showed far more fortitude in putting up with me (potentially helped by the limited amount of characters I have available to whine at him in one go with :p), yet squares my blog away firmly in the realm of a bad/rare/unusual experience. I’m not having a bad/rare/unusual experience though. I’m having a perfectly normal reunion, to go along with my perfectly normal adoption. Not a bit of it has been in any way exceptional to any Rules(tm) I’ve encountered. My story echoes many of those found in the blogroll listed at the side, yet TPTB still think adoption is a panacea. While I don’t think my voice alone will be enough to engender the changes needed to the current adoption system in the UK (nor even anywhere else in the world, for that matter </optimist@heart>), I hope that being one of the collective voices helps us get heard eventually.

So I wind up having to share details of how my reunion is going, because if I don’t, I can’t write on reunion without missing massive chunks out. Yet how much do I say? How much do I reveal? More to the point, how do I reveal? After all, this is the Internet, and it’s par for the course to link to things that are being used as an example, but to do so links these people that I’m discussing to me in ways that they may not want linking. So where is the line drawn? How do I avoid over-stepping it so much that I don’t bring my own reunion crumbling down in flames of hatred – or do I even try to avoid it? Do I instead stick to skinning away to the bare bones of an issue in order that I can both clearly explain that which is a problematic area, hoping that others find the knowledge helpful, even though it may cost me dearly to share that knowledge?

A precarious path to tread, exacerbated by the fact that BECAUSE I have been “blessed” by “the joy of adoption”, I barely know these people, and so barely know what their reaction to such postings are likely to be. Yet until I meet them more and interact with them more, I won’t be able to learn how much is enough, nor how much is too much, until I go there and make the post that either does or doesn’t result in recriminations – and even then I may not know as they may not encounter the post for some time. This is why it’s taking me so much effort to write. Trying to get a post out and written is no longer just a battle to get my head working enough to write in the first place, but there’s also this minefield of potential future trauma and angst to navigate, too.