The downside of my adoption has definitely been the unanswered questions lingering in my mind for years. The biggest one is still the unknown fact that I am clueless about what really happened to me in 1979'. Did my Indonesian mother want to give me a better life and purposely gave me up for adoption, or was there something else going on?
I must have been around 4-5 years when all this happened and still remember bits and pieces of my Indonesian mother. Most memories exist from images engraved in my mind and also a remembrance of certain feelings and situations. This is why I have always known that my mother loved and protected me for as long as she could. I have felt her warmth and strength to survive. Whenever there was food, she made sure to let me eat first.
While growing up it was hard to understand the reason why I had been adopted, since I had never felt a sense of hunger or neglect from my Indonesian mother. When she told me to go with this Chinese woman, I was convinced this was temporarily and was sure she would come back to pick me up. This conviction was so strong that it stayed with me for years, even after my arrival in the Netherlands.
After my first year, I accepted the situation that now I had two mothers, a Dutch and an Indonesian one that I grew to care about. I was convinced that I should save money, clothes and seeds for the garden to bring back to my Indonesian mother one day. Of course, I told my Dutch mother she would have to come along since I became quite attached to her. At that age, I had no understanding of the distance between Indonesia and the Netherlands. I was regularly homesick and thought I just needed to take the right bus to travel back to my country of birth. In Indonesia, I had travelled several times by bus with my mother and I thought I knew how to do this. I remember that I often thought of wanting to pack a suitcase so I was able to leave at all times. I can't recollect if I actually had packed one, but the idea appeared often in the back of my mind.
I never really understand why I was adopted. I would have understood when there were no parents or if I was not well-fed but this was never an issue and I have always known that I had a loving Indonesian mother. I was also never fully able to understand how I ended up in an orphanage. But for everyone else, it seemed completely clear and explained that my biological mother was not able to take care of me and the adoption was in my best interest. I'd like to call it "positive indoctrination". They all meant well, but was this the truth? Everyone was so convinced of the good intention behind my adoption that they all mimicked the same explanation over and over again. I started to believe it myself when I was but a small child and knew nothing of the world. The explanation seemed fair and who was I to doubt it?
When I became older I fully incorporated the idea that intercountry adoption was a great system to save children. But I remember the times when I told someone of my adoption that it often is followed by the reply: 'you must feel so fortunate and happy to be adopted. This always felt so strange to me. The feeling that when adopted you are obliged to be grateful has never made much sense to me. I have to be grateful because others are convinced this is the best thing that could ever happen to me and they can't imagine having a life outside their own environment? It emphasizes the idea that living in a country like Indonesia is inferior to living in the Netherlands. But is this true?
When I was a teenager I struggled with this idea. Was there really no chance for me to have survived in my country of birth? No doubt my Indonesian mother was in a bad situation with a small child and living on the streets but could this have been a temporary situation? I know she often found part-time work and did generate a bit of income. What would have been the difference with a struggling family in the Netherlands?
The Netherlands has a convenient social welfare system and takes care of the weakest in our society and although the system is not perfect, it does cover the basic needs. In a country like this, it often is easier to get educated and make a living, but it does not prevent that there is still a big group who are barely able to cover their basics. Social pressure, costs of living and debts are high and even with an education, there is no guarantee you'll make it. Life never brings a guarantee, it doesn't matter where you are in the world.
I also struggled with the idea that it is impossible to be happy while growing up poor. I can already hear people saying, that's easy for you to say because the average opinion is that in a country like the Netherlands you can't be poor. I agree to disagree, as I said there are many poor people in the Netherlands, although the standard of 'being poor' can be different in every country. This does not mean the struggle to survive is not there. A second argument is that there are many unhappy people in wealthy countries. Being rich or poor is not necessarily connected to happiness.
In my own defence, when I had a breakdown nothing made sense to me. I did not want to continue this way of living and fell numb. It became so bad that I did not want to take care of myself anymore and purposely isolated, so no one noticed. I got into debt and evicted and did not care at all. My saviour has always been that I am able to create meaningful friendships. It was my friends who were able to help me out of a dark hole and I'll always be in their debt. The road back was long and hard but I am happy to be in a situation where I am just satisfied. Financially not rich but able to take care of myself again.
Going back to my point, I have often thought of the idea of what if I was never adopted? Would this be such a bad thing, as everyone is telling me? I am aware that before my adoption I contracted typhoid. Would my Indonesian mother have been able to buy medicines or take me to the hospital? Maybe I would have died at an early stage of my life. Unfortunately, there is always a small devil popping up on my shoulder which says: what is the difference between all those other children dying? What is so important about you that you had to survive? It's all about life and death and although I feel everyone deserves a chance at life there is no guarantee. A child's death anywhere in the world is a difficult thing to accept but death is a part of life and I have accepted this.
I feel it is never fair to compare your adoption life with a worst-case scenario of your birth country. I always regret the 'what if' questions and feel these are useless. We can't judge the things we did not experience, so I took the liberty to accept my bumpy course of life.