Perspectives

I love Facebook, and I love the fact that it feeds me some of the things that I actually do want to read, once I know they exist. An example of such can be seen in the link post made today by the BAAF page, in which they share the link to the Mirror’s article, It took me 70 years to find my real mum.

The article itself is a couple of months old, but it wasn’t something I’d read before, and is about the successful reunion between an adoptee who is almost 70, with her 95 year old mom. BAAF described it as “a heart-warming story to cheer you all up”, yet I found the story heart-wrenching and tragic, and it left me feeling deeply saddened for both mother and daughter.

I went away, and carried on doing the things that I usually do around the Internet, yet BAAF’s description of the story has been niggling away at me all day, and I eventually figured out why it was niggling me so much.

BAAF stands for “British Association for Adoption & Fostering”, and they are one of the central supports of the British adoption and fostering services today. This means that BAAF as an entity should both understand and comprehend what adoptees experience, yet their description of the story of these two women demonstrates that they have little-to-no real understanding or comprehension of just how traumatic the loss of adoption is for those that have to live through it – i.e. the adoptees and the biological families.

BAAFs description of the story of the 65 years of separation experienced by a mother and her daughter as something to be happy about shows that they can not possibly be doing what actually IS “for the best” of all those involved in the adoptions that they deal with, because they do not grasp the consequences faced by all of those involved.

BAAF needs to wake up and sniff the donkey shit.