The push for inter-country adoption by people like Deborra-Lee Furness, pictured, is misguided.
DIANNE DEMPSEY November 15, 2009
Photo: Danielle Smith
Maggie Millar has a problem with Deborra-Lee Furness' work. Supported by her movie star husband, Hugh Jackman, Furness has cranked up a campaign to open up overseas adoption for Australian couples. Part of this campaign has been creating National Adoption Awareness Week, which will be running this coming week.
Maggie Millar is an artist and an actor, too, though she never reached the heights of fame of Furness and Jackman. You might remember seeing her in Bellbird or Prisoner, or you might remember her in Neighbours as the Reverend Rosie Hoyland. Millar has also been a stalwart of Australian theatre and has been praised by critics as warm, lusty and downright brilliant.
One reason, perhaps, for the brilliance of her acting was that she had plenty of practice, even as a little girl. You see, Millar was adopted and she never quite got the knack of being part of her adoptive family. ''All of my relatives were like aliens to me; as I no doubt was to them,'' she says. After a troubled childhood, Millar found out at 17 that she was adopted.
It wasn't until many years later, when she read a book by Nancy Verrier, that she finally understood her anguish. Verrier is a US psychotherapist specialising in adoption issues. She is also an adoptive parent. Her first book, The Primal Wound, has been welcomed by adoptees worldwide as their bible.
According to Verrier, the infant and mother are still connected outside the womb - physiologically, psychologically and spiritually. The infant, she says, knows the mother's smell, voice, heartbeat, energy and skin. On adoption, the separation results in a terrible feeling of abandonment that is indelibly printed upon the unconscious mind of the child. The grief of separation is so profound that it causes a searing wound, a primal wound.
It is because of the fear of being abandoned again that adopted children often display two types of behaviour. They will either be provocative, rebellious and angry, or they will become withdrawn, compliant and forever on guard. Sometimes they will display a combination of both behaviours.
Millar says the pain of separation and the subsequent loss of identity is accentuated for inter-country adoptees. ''The statistics around these adoptees are only now coming to light and they are disturbing,'' she says. ''They have much higher rates of suicide and depression than children who are adopted within their own countries. Many of these adoptees go back to their country of origin but even there they do not feel at home, they are dispossessed, their identity stolen.''
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