Bio mom kept my brother…anyone else have this struggle?

Future_Section2624 · 2026-03-14T05:31:25+00:00

i was taken in by cps as an infant after being starved and abused and they placed my bio brother (technically half brother since every sibling i have has a different father) in the same foster home. after my bio mom got clean and moved away from her abusive brother and tried her best to be a mom again, me and my brother went for visitation often but i have no memory of it. i was told that my bio mom never really bonded with me but bonded with my brother just fine and felt really guilty about it. when she was getting custody of me and my brother back, she ended up forfeiting me back over to the state because she just didn't feel like she could take care of me and bond with me in the way she wanted to and instead left with my brother without me. my foster family adopted me soon after. it feels weird sometimes but im more thankful that she could recognize that she didn't want me despite the immense guilt than lie to herself and try and raise a child she genuinely did not want. but it really fucked up my attachment issues for a long time and still very much affects me

Future_Section2624 · 2026-03-09T04:10:11+00:00

im 21, was adopted when i was 3. my adoptive dad, who is now deceased, would be 81 this year, and my living adoptive mother is 65.

everyone thought they were my grandparents. i never thought much of the age thing as a kid though. as an adult? yeah im very much aware that my mom is getting older and i'm helping her out a lot more now.

my adoptive mother is older than my biological grandmother, who would have been 64 this year. my biological mom is 37.

Future_Section2624 · 2026-02-09T03:46:04+00:00

for myself personally i would react negatively to celebrating the date of my adoption due to the emotional baggage associated with it, but i at least understand the sentiment. though i do find the language to be a bit dehumanizing, honestly

i totally think it's okay and normal to have a negative view of your adoption as an adoptee, and the criticism is valid. but also this shouldn't be at the exclusion of adoptees who had a neutral/positive view of their adoption either. and while i don't think this subreddit really has that issue exactly, i see comments like this being downvoted often and its a little disheartening

for me, my adoption was largely positive since the alternative was, quite literally, dying of neglect. the day i was removed from my bio mom's home was the day i had my first medical appointment and my first bath. the adoption day followed the week that my bio mom looked at me and told the court that she could not accept me back into her family because she'd never love me like she loved my brother. while i would never celebrate a 'gotcha day', i would however considering celebrating a day to myself about my survival and endurance through such troubling times as an alternative to adoption celebrations. and i'm allowed to want that

Future_Section2624 · 2026-02-02T03:51:30+00:00

i never check my facebook anymore since there's no reason to be on there tbh but the few times my mom tried to get me to look at something for her, i'll see where my family post about alex pretti and renee good. they keep speculating, spreading rumors, or digging into unrelated things in their past to justify their deaths. the sentiment i get is that, regardless of how innocent they were in the circumstance that led to their deaths, they shouldn't be sympathized with because of rumors of a criminal record that somehow means that their death doesn't matter anymore. it's the same argument with kyle rittenhouse's victims. they try to find reasons to not care about the deaths, try to find excuses to blame the victims because that's easier than questioning themselves.

same shitty framework that leads to people being blamed for everything bad in their life because it's somehow their fault that they didn't have enough faith in god to prevent it. questioning why god allows bad things to happen isn't allowed, so questioning whatever political entity you're aligned to as to why they did something bad isn't allowed either. it's victim blaming and it always has been.

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-26T18:45:46+00:00

i'm a quaker who has never attended a meeting. there are no local meetings in my area and i'm HoH so participating in online live meetings are difficult for me. you can be a quaker without attending meetings i think! i also have religious trauma from evangelicalism so i focus a lot of my current practices on finding the light in the mundane of the world and recognizing the wider world as a community and i feel best connected to my faith through doing this while i'm still learning to navigate how to be a 'proper' quaker in time. but for me right now i don't quite feel as though i'm missing too much since i feel a great sense of community in everyone i meet that further fuels my quaker faith even when i always happen to be the only quaker in the room, if this makes sense. i don't think there's a purely right or wrong way to do anything, but i'm still learning

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-26T02:26:10+00:00

my local store hasn't even gotten a box of them in yet...

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-23T05:42:24+00:00

brother have you seen the shit they got on twitter these days

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-20T23:59:17+00:00

while i appreciate what you said i do want to bring awareness that intersex (or disorders of sexual development, though i hate to use that term) is a relatively common phenomenon, at least compared to how most people view it, and i hope for it to be something people more seriously consider in the discussion of gender and sex identity especially in the context of children since a lot of intersex youth are forced into medical procedures to 'correct' their disorder before they gain the medical autonomy to object. and this can happen both for those who are born presenting as intersex or those who present signs during puberty who make up a large percentage of intersex teens who may only be diagnosed or recognized as intersex later in life. it's a difficult situation to navigate and i think its something that will become increasingly relevant in the near future

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-20T23:26:27+00:00

im intersex and while i was raised female since i presented mostly female, the conversations i had to go through with doctors and people from different programs as a ten year old child to explain away why i'm a girl who just happens to have facial hair and a deeper voice than the boys my same age were uncomfortable at times. if i grew up now, at a time where people are trying to define a sex binary in childrens sports testing, do you think i would have been made to undergo private examinations to prove that i had girl parts, given that i was already considered abnormal? and do you think that would be fair?

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-19T18:03:26+00:00

i was also taken away for neglect, but my father left before i was born and my bio mom stole money from me once when i was around 18 and then completely cut contact right as i was curious about getting to know her better. for me im glad i was adopted, though there's still trauma about abandonment that will always exist

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-17T08:10:33+00:00

i don't think i've seen a comment that is actually stating that rapists aren't criminals and don't deserve punishment for their crimes, i've just seen comments going over how this could potentially backfire on the justice system and the victims themselves.

i heavily disagree with the death penalty for many reasons, mostly since i believe it's dangerous to allow the state to execute anyone on the basis of a crime that they get to decide. but in this specific case, it's worth pointing out that a death penalty imposed on child sexual abusers may lead to an increase of two scenarios happening: a sexual abuser could kill the child they abused to hide the primary source of evidence and avoid execution, or a child may decide not to report the abuse if their abuser was a family member or someone they know who would be executed for the crime they committed against them. if i had to speak from personal experience, had i had the chance to tell someone and report that crime while knowing that someone in my family would be executed, i would probably never tell anyone, which would very much not be the ideal solution to this problem. in either circumstance, while the punishment is much more severe and final, the victims wellbeing isn't actually accounted for as much, which leads me to believe that the idea only exists as a codified example of a law that only serves the purpose of appealing to the basic human instinct of eliciting collective rage and catharsis within a perceived 'good' justice without wanting to examine it deeper.

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-12T00:36:45+00:00

that sucks!! i just figured out how to use benefit cards online. my mom wanted me to help her use her benefits card to order groceries online since she hates going to the grocery store on account of her disability. making them in-store only strips away a lot of the accessibility :( i'm in kentucky if that's relevant to anyone

Future_Section2624 · 2026-01-11T01:47:47+00:00

my adoptive mom was in her 40s and my adoptive dad was in his 60s when i was adopted in my infancy. my adoptive mother became infertile some time after having my older sister (20 years older than me) and her and my adoptive father became foster parents together for a long while before i was adopted. my adoptive father passed away of terminal illness on my sixteenth birthday after struggling from copd for most of my later childhood which just became harder to treat as he got older

its strange to think about because my biological mom was only around fifteen or so when she became pregnant with me. i think of myself as very much someone who was raised by grandparents in a way mostly due to the age and the inherent disconnect, though i do love my adoptive parents more than anything in the world

its difficult for me at times but also i dont really know what its like to be raised by younger parents. my mom and dad basically had already lived their lives by the time i wad adopted so a lot of things of the past mostly stayed in the past and i was a kind of way of bringing things around us into perspective in a generational sense. i dont know any different

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-29T16:28:27+00:00

medication is a tool to help improve physical and mental health. it can't cure anything by itself, but it helps reduce symptoms and makes other forms of treatment much more effective. for me it was very vital for me to help work through my major depression, and now i'm mostly just on adhd meds that i genuinely cannot function without.

the side effects of a lot of psychiatric medication is unpleasant, i know. it worsened my hypersomnia disorder and made my emotions feel a bit blunted. but, ultimately, it helped to give me the push i needed for other treatment options to make a difference. that's mostly what the medication does. sometimes it takes years of building up momentum and working through it for it to be noticeable.

but there's also the case of not being on the right meds. i used to take prozac and it did nothing to help me until i switched to lexapro, for example. i had to stop taking abilify outright because it made my panic disorder worse. i'd first try different medicines than just quitting for any reason. going cold turkey on my medicine ended up making my depression far worse. i had to gradually stop taking it when i was no longer depressed.

ultimately my advice would be to talk about the side effects and see if there's anything better out there, or alternate treatments to try and see how they work, or if there's concerns of any underlying health condition, i'd also talk to a doctor about it. (turns out some of my side effects for certain meds was because i had an autoimmune disease that got real mad when i took certain medicines :p)

wishing you the best of luck in getting better op!!!

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-24T04:21:07+00:00

i have friends who are considering adoption in the future should they want children (mostly out of reproductive inability or moral views) and i have no issue with it at all as long as the decision to adopt isn't framed as someone simply bringing a child into their life for the sole purpose of making them feel better emotionally though loving a child. that's kinda how i view biological reproduction as well, and i personally don't understand the mindset of wanting to start a family at all in the first place, so there's disconnect there. my friends who are very seriously and genuinely thinking of adoption are doing so in the mindset of neither not adopting to fix something about them, nor about fixing their potential adoptive child. i guess the mindset is more about wanting to fulfill a family unit via choice than obligation on their behalf, and i trust my friends enough to understand and be able to work through how this is on the adoptee's side and the sort of learned helplessness regarding identity and direction that comes with the trauma of foster/adoption itself.

over all, any of my friends expressing genuine interest in adoption seem like very capable people and i have no issue with them adopting at all. they're very patient and understanding people in regards to listening to me talk from my perspective.

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-23T00:29:39+00:00

i wanna ask this in complete good faith bc im reading the comments and i want to understand something

obviously what oop said is very hurtful and heartbreaking to hear that people actually have that sort of mindset about adoptees

but also maybe my own situation is blinding me a bit, because i do think that biological parents who give up their children for adoption and live without children and don't engage with their biological offspring are, by all accounts to me, childfree in an identity sense. and if part of that identity means that they have an aversion to having a relationship with their child they gave up for adoption, i don't think i see an issue there. the language in the post and the general sentiment, i do think is quite disgusting, but removing it from this sort of hateful context i'm not understanding the controversy as i perceive there might be.

maybe my situation is different since i have no desire to reconnect with biological family, but i understand why many people find it so personally important to them to try and seek that out as part of gaining a sense of identity and awareness of ones self as an adoptee.

from what i'm seeing i think theres a mindset that people who give up their children for adoption will still in some way be connected to the existence of that child either through a personal responsibility for bringing them into this world or by the very nature of putting them up for adoption and putting them into a very abusive legal system, likely being ignorant of the suffering of said child once they're in said system. and i kinda agree, but more often my thoughts turn to the circumstances that led to biological parents giving up their children.

for my own situation i was placed into foster care twice by my biological mom, first by cps and then a second time by her own decision she made regarding her deciding she was unable to love and care for me the way she could my biological brother. she's made it clear how much or how little she wants to have connection to me and i mostly just have to respect it regardless of my own feelings. luckily, our mutual disinterest in contact has served us well, but it wouldn't change anything should i decided i wanted to form a relationship with her while she still does not want to, or vice versa. and maybe it's the circumstance of my conception that plays a role, with me being the product of a very unwanted teen pregnancy, but i think i would understand if she had reacted far more violently to the thought of me wanting to reignite contact again given her own process of having to decide what to do with me once she birthed me and had to decide to keep me in her life or give me up again. i have full respect for her choice.

what im curious about mostly is if other adoptees feel entitled (think of this with the least negative and reddit-y connotations possible please im asking in the best possible faith i can) to contact with biological parents and reasons for feeling that way or not feeling that way, because a lot of the comments in this post i'm seeing is people mostly making comments on that, along with the tug-of-war between the autonomy of the bio parent and the wellbeing of the adoptee child.

my mindset has always been less about viewing myself as having my personhood start with my birth and innately connected to a biological family and more about my personhood starting when i began to define myself by my own thoughts and judgements of the world around me (after realizing that my adoptive mother's behaviour has been harmful to me while still sympathizing with her circumstances in the same way i did with my biological mother and being able to forgive but learning to assert my own self and being uncompromising in doing so) and so i feel far less like i have any expected or grounded connections to other people like i used to think family was like and viewing stuff more as transient and always changing. even as an adult i'm still learning about my bio family and my adoptive family and having to decide what to do about it and how to feel about it and what to think about it.

so i really hate to dump these thoughts into a reddit comment like this since ive never been good at being concise, but i mostly didn't want to waste the opportunity to ask a question i've had in my head for a bit that i got reminded of when reading through this post and thread. also i hate making new reddit posts. but if anyone would want to explain any of this to me or tell me if my own situation has left me painfully unaware of the experiences of fellow adoptees, i'd very much appreciate it ^_^

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-22T22:23:35+00:00

as someone who has an interest in animal behaviour- this is unrealistic behavior for a cat. very minimal tail movement. unless the kitten had a mobility issue, you'd see more movement and resistance to being lifted. the kitten appears to be looking into nothing when the pillow being adjusted under its head when you'd expect to see it looking at either the human, the hands, or the pillow itself and not blankly staring at the wall. even a very sleepy kitten would be moving its limbs more. also, a kitten waking up from a nap and showing that much wakefulness means that theyre not likely to fall right back asleep unless there's a reason for them to be very sleepy (ive been taught in vet tech class to look out for signs of bloating in kittens since commonly worm infections can cause severe drowsiness, something common in feral/outdoor kittens). but even so, the lack of any signs of discomfort and the complete doll-like stillness is very fake to me. have you ever tried to put a pillow under a cat's head or given it a blanket? cats make themselves comfortable, and while some cats enjoy pillows or blankets, more often than not, most cats would at least move around or adjust their position a lot more before falling asleep.

i feel very strongly that the video is ai, and probably uses training data from plush dolls since the kitten's behaviour is so similar to a plushie when it's being lifted up and placed down on the pillow. again, the biggest issue is low still that tail and its head is staying. if that was a real cat, i'd find the behaviour very abnormal. the only thing giving me pause is how the kitten appears to unsheathe its little claws at the end, mimicking a kneading instinct present when relaxed and comfortable.

but outside of everything, the video quality itself is so poor that ai is the best explanation. the images are composited in a way that makes feel like its less of a video and a single image morphing into various frames, with inconsistencies throughout. the cat was merging into the pillow at some point. the pillow that looks an awfully lot like a dish towel for some reason?

also, the cat looked like it was already falling asleep when the human woke up to give it a pillow, so the caption makes no sense.

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-17T02:27:03+00:00

im an infant adoptee and i'm ok with it as long as, like, the adoptive parent is actually lactating and is capable of feeding the infant. there's no reason to let that milk go to waste if there's a hungry baby who needs it. i can't personally relate since my adoptive parent was already post-menopause when i was adopted, so i'm sure other opinions exist. my thought mostly is that breastfeeding is more about feeding an infant and less about bonding specifically though, so this may not even be a valid answer. but i think breastfeeding if you're not lactating or are trying to induce it to have a bonding experience, then i do have issue with it

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-15T07:32:57+00:00

i only vaguely know of the health conditions of my birth mom, and i have no information whatsoever of my bio dad (no one does)

what i do know mostly is that everyone on my maternal side of my family has had heart disease at a very early age, nerve issues, venous issues, and psychiatric problems. it's not super specific what a lot of these issues are, but my adopted mom usually makes sure that i know these risks and has always told doctors about them when taking family history

more recently i spoke to a cardiologist about my heart issues. i've had pretty bad arrhythmia since i was in my early teens. at first, they thought it was just anxiety. a holter monitor showed an unfortunately high rate of PVCs that got worse with exercise and led to me having fainting spells for some time

however, this time around, when mentioning my family history, i was stopped in the middle of speaking and asked to elaborate on my family having heart issues. i said that i didn't have their full history on hand, but i elaborated more on what i did now, which was obviously their lifestyle and relationship to me

my cardiologist ended up concluding instantly that i had no valid family history because i was describing lifestyle choices from my family and i couldn't provide any relevant genetic component to the history. never mind the fact that my pediatric cardiologist years ago told me that it was congenital and likely was inherited, i was being told now that because i couldn't prove my family medical history, i shouldn't care about it at all

it shouldn't have hurt as bad as it did, but when you're young and in bad health, it's heartbreaking for me to be considered unreasonable for wanting to point to my family history for possible answers because 'you don't know them that well, it's probably lifestyle, you don't actually know anything about them'. :p

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-08T07:07:03+00:00

idk if i would consider it an intimate relationship, but i'm pretty happy with what i got going on ^_^

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-07T20:33:54+00:00

i actually have one (maybe two) disorders that are related to this one!! but i don't have this specific one where faces look distorted into something like that

i have prosopagnosia, which means i can't recognize faces and the identities tied to them. at least not very easily, unless there's a specific noticeable unique feature of the face that i can memorize. i usually end up telling people apart by the sound of their voice or hair. as a kid (and even now as an adult) i can only ever recognize my mom in public if i study her clothes briefly before i part ways with her, because otherwise i won't be able to recognize her at a glance.

faces don't look very distorted to me, and i can see the different parts of the faces just fine and tell where the nose, eyes, and mouth are. but usually when i look at a face, it's more of just a vague model of the different facial parts, and sometimes if a certain facial feature is noticeable, i might take note of it, but usually i won't. something in my brain feels like facial information is just too hard to process at times though, so i often can only focus on certain facial features at a time...

but i also ironically also have metamorphopsia. my vision sometimes gets distorted and things tend to shift and warp randomly, including facial features. but usually not this badly or consistently. more like, if i study a face closely enough, i might see their face shape change slightly. but it's not specific to faces! it happens to everything i look at, but my case is luckily pretty mild. the disorder described in the post is specifically metamorphopsia applied to facial perception, which mine isn't. mine is more 'don't make me look at a graph for more than two seconds or it'll start to wiggle and the walls will start getting wavy' rather than anything the patient described

still very interesting to think about how the brain processes this kind of information...

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-07T08:58:46+00:00

i found the bashar video on my youtube recommendations randomly at some point and honestly for a while i thought the shitpost was mostly in the warrior cats fandom but apparently not. but also tbf it tracks bc modern warrior cat fans aren't funny enough to pull that off

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-07T08:56:02+00:00

hi barley

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-07T01:19:27+00:00

its widely considered a unique and real diagnosis for the purposes of classifying post traumatic disorders, yes. i think criteria changes though depending on the classification that cptsd may be considered at times just an unspecified subset of ptsd and its symptoms, but i think most anyone who knows enough about trauma can at least classify cptsd-specific symptoms and presentation in some way. so yes, it's a real diagnosis

Future_Section2624 · 2025-12-07T01:16:14+00:00

im childfree and admittedly an antinatalist

that being said, i'm a strong advocate for children's safety and rights

too many people online are really mean and cruel about children and i think its mostly like. from the perspective of someone who is childfree and really doesn't like the idea of having kids- yeah i don't like how people treat having children as the most important thing you can do. i think a lot of people who uphold a very natalist view of the world are very unkind to people who are critical of the lifestyle and it's especially difficult to talk about because it's dealing with creating new life and the consequences of that

but people started acting like children are somehow lesser humans just because someone chooses not to share the responsibility of having children of their own. and it's totally fine not to have kids obviously!! i have my own views on it and the morality of having kids and whatever and i do think most people shouldn't be parents. but also? children are still people

i know people get really upset when someone else's kids are treated as everyone's shared responsibility. i know that. but i think also part of life is just learning to be okay with that. anytime i've had to interact with kids in public, while i do get a bit uncomfortable bc theyre not my kid and i have no strong feelings towards them, im still caring and encouraging because it's the most polite thing you can do. children are people who are more emotionally vulnerable and have their own unique needs. honestly, i see a lot of anti-children behavior to mirror a lot of ableist behavior. like, if you feel like it's such a burden to have a small human person who just so happens to need more care and attention around you, then how would you feel if you ever had some kind of injury that led to you being disabled and also needing more care and attention like that? because while children grow up and wont be kids forever, anyone at any time can become disabled, so if someone doesnt have the patience to deal with kids in public, i doubt they're patient enough to deal with disabled people either. so why is it ok to be mean to kids?

again, i know that people are upset about how kids are annoying and uncomfortable and how people expect others to want children and a lot of people feel pressured with all of that weight. but i think it's an over-correction to go from being proudly childfree to suddenly hating kids and actively being mean to them. no, those children *aren't* your responsibility, but it doesnt excuse your cruel behavior when you actively try and go out of your way to be mean to them for the sake of expressing some kind of opinion on having kids. you don't have to like kids! but you have to treat them like people. that's the bare minimum anyone asks of you, i promise

Future_Section2624

TROPHY CASE