I refused because I felt this was a responsibility they had voluntarily taken on when they adopted him. My parents became furious, calling me selfish and ungrateful. Then, while visiting their house for documents, I discovered a folder containing emails from families interested in adopting a teenage boy. On the cover, my mother had written, \u201cIf B. refuses.\u201d I realized that if I didn\u2019t agree to raise J., my parents were apparently considering giving him up for adoption again. That discovery left me devastated and confused because J. is still a child who deserves stability, regardless of the decisions the adults around him made.
\nNow my extended family is pressuring me, saying I\u2019m heartless for \u201cabandoning my brother\u201d and insisting that I should sacrifice my life to take responsibility for him. I don\u2019t want anything bad to happen to J., but I also don\u2019t feel the automatic maternal bond everyone expects from me. I was a teenager when the original decision was made, and my parents chose to adopt and raise him as their son. I\u2019m struggling with whether refusing to become his parent now makes me selfish, or whether I\u2019m simply refusing to take on a life-changing responsibility that I never freely chose in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I refused because I felt this was a responsibility they had voluntarily taken on when they adopted him. My parents became furious, calling me selfish and ungrateful…. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":31535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n