"She looks just like you!"

On the one hand, I'm kind of happy for the adoptee in this situation. Maybe when she looks at herself, she won't see someone foreign and strange.

Yet, it really just makes my nerves jangle discordantly to hear an adoptive mother crow about how someone told her that her ADOPTED daughter is "obviously hers." This smacks so much of the pretense. That underlying "this child was 'meant for me'," or the underlying attempt to lie to herself that the little girl she's raising is "as if her own."

But hey, maybe that sick feeling comes more from my position as firstmother than from my position as adoptee. Maybe other adoptees would be happy with this, what do I know?

I do have to say, though, it was hard for me not to respond to it on the board where I saw it, because it really filled me with an ugly feeling. I guess I've got some work to do there, with that discomfort with the whole idea of trying to make adoptees "as if born to [me]."

A deeper fear resides in me over that, though. If this woman is so eager to pretend that she and this little girl "look alike," how many warning signs will she ignore, and what expectations does she have for this little girl to show OTHER signs of being "hers"? Will she live her life as if that little girl didn't have to LOSE HER FAMILY in order to become "as if born to [her]"?

I am rambling, but there you have it. That statement, that crowing over how much someone else's progeny looked OBVIOUSLY HERS really brought up a LOT of ugly feelings in me. And I suspect that it came from both sides of me- adoptee and firstmother.