So UM, what the hell have you been doing?

Wherein our interviewer asks UM a few questions…

Q:       So Um, tell us. What the hell have you been doing?

UM:   Clearly, not writing on this blog for one thing.

Q:       Why is that?

UM:   Good question. If you read my last posts, my Dad died . Actually, in the last year or so, my Dad, my uncle and two friends.

Q. Sorry to hear that. Is that the only reason?

UM. Well uh, I just felt tired. I just felt tired of the whole adoption thing. It seems to me sometimes that a competition is developing about who has been hurt the most by adoption. That makes me sad. You sometimes feel that there are so many forces at work your voice is like dropping a grain of sand in the ocean to try and stem the tide of misinformation. I think one of the saddest things about this is the fact that even though you may be part of the adoption triangle it is hard, maybe impossible, to walk in the other guy’s shoes. It makes me angry sometimes when adoptees start projecting stuff onto birth mothers.

I think maybe the deaths had something to do with it too. Too many people are burning daylight when they could have another person, who just happens to share their DNA and loves them, in their lives. Yet the thing that tore them apart in the first place continues to work its evil magic and keep them apart.

Q:        Don’t I remember you writing a post about getting tired?

UM:    Yes I did, the one about the geese flying in formation. About how the lead goose falls back to let someone else take the lead for a while. Maybe that’s what I’ve done. Not that I ever felt I was the lead. I am in awe sometimes of how often and how well other people write about adoption, birth moms and adoptees. How they keep fighting the fight. I am also in awe of the adoptive parents who get it and write about it. How wonderful it would be to be dealing with adoptive parents like them. There are some wonderful ones out here in the blogosphere.

Q:        Did you happen to catch “Find My Family” the other night?

UM:    Yes I did. I approached it with some trepidation but I was, for the most part, pleased with what I saw. I liked the name of the show for one thing. That’s pretty gutsy. I am sure the letters are pouring in to ABC saying how dare they call a birth family – family. In fact, I went on the ABC website just to see what people were saying. Most of the comments were pro from what I could see but there were a few – my child has a family or how dare you put this on TV and give my child ideas. Hmmmm. I saw the woman from the show on GMA this morning and I thought there was some reassuring back peddling going on. All that says to me is that even if the show isn’t perfect, those of us in favour of open records and raising awareness generally, not necessarily in that order, should write in and support it. I liked seeing a birth mother and father who accurately expressed what it feels like to have lost a child to adoption even though they went on to marry and have other kids. I liked what it showed about the adoptee and that the adoptive parents were welcoming. I thought meeting under the family tree was a little hokey but on the other hand they are re-enforcing the idea that this is your family. Not perfect but if ABC can withstand the pro-adoption backlash they are sure to get I think it will be a good thing. If it makes one adoptee not feel guilty for wanting to know – that is a great victory. If it makes one birth mother or birth father more convinced they have a right to know what happened to their child – that is wonderful. If it makes some adoptive parents accept that their child has two families – I’m all for that. Sure adoption reunions are complicated and don’t just involve running toward each other through a field of daisies – or up a tree to a hill. Sure they didn’t mention the fight for open records. And maybe doing all this in public isn’t ideal but I’d do it if I was hitting a brick wall and it was the only way to find my kid. It’s only the first show. I’m prepared to cut them a fair bit of slack.

Q:      Seems like you haven’t lost all your passion for the subject matter.

UM:   No I guess not. It’s hard to open the door just a little. Maybe that’s another reason.

Q:      Why don’t we wrap it up for now.

UM:   Can I just say one last thing?

Q:       Of Course.

UM:  Whenever I see a birth parent and a child hug each other for the first time I have the same reaction I do when I see a baby being born. Tears because it is so beautiful and wonderful. I will never ever forget the first time, my son, his father and I hugged each other.

Q:      Can we call to talk to you again?

UM : Absolutely. I appreciate you getting in touch with me.

UM’s Most Popular Post So Far

I thought it be interesting to see, since I hadn’t written for a while, which of my archived posts was getting the most on-going traffic since Unsigned Masterpiece began in July of 2008.

It is “Sorry for Any Inconvenience” posted October 20, 2008. Here it is:

Sorry for Any Inconveninece….

In my opinion, “Sorry for any inconvenience.” has to be one of the most insincere phrases in the English language, tossed off usually in a manner that leads you to believe the person, corporation, telephone company, cable provider or government service is anything but sorry.

In that vein here is an announcement from the government of my home province. For some reason, it makes me think about the CAS – that’s Children’s Aid Society – and asking them how they feel about issuing a few apologies.

Attorney General Chris Bentley says a proposed apology act for the province would help make the justice system more affordable and punctual.

The provincial government last week rolled out proposed legislation that would remove the risk of civil court liability for individuals and organizations that issue apologies.

The government said the new law would help victims’ recovery, improve accountability and transparency in the health-care sector, and aid the justice system by “fostering the resolution of civil disputes and shortening or avoiding litigation.”

Bentley said, “The goal of the legislation is to encourage sincere apologies — saying sorry for a mistake or wrongdoing is the right thing to do.”

So maybe I should call the CAS. Let’s see what would I ask them to apologize for. Maybe the fact that they knew at the time I had my son that there were no Catholic homes looking to adopt a child. Maybe for not telling me that they had a policy that said he could not be adopted by a family of another faith. And for not telling me that my son, therefore, would go straight to foster care. And that he sat for almost 10 months until finally a family showed up. Not the perfect family, just the first one.

Yes that might be a good place to start. They should apologize don’t you think.

After all, it’s not going to cost them anything.

Peace

UM

Nightmare on the 14th Floor

I read that Mahatma Gandhi said – Those with the greatest awareness have the greatest nightmares.

I have been dealing, over the last three days, with my father’s very serious medical issues.

On Monday morning, he had a fall caused, we suspected at the time, by a blackout of sorts. My mother was reporting him to be unresponsive to her on occasion. They don’t always seek medical help because they fear the consequences. Loss of their independence. However, my father is on dialysis and when he goes for treatment they assess him and if they have concerns about his health they will call an ambulance and send him to emerg. His face was badly bruised from the fall and his blood pressure was very low. He was very frail and weak.

Having a negative assessment by the dialysis clinic has repercussions because in the town where they live there is no in hospital dialysis and so if he ends up in the hospital he must go to a city about an hour away. It is very hard on everyone.

On Monday, this was the scenario that played out. He was not in good shape, the dialysis clinic called an ambulance and he was sent to the emerg. Things did not go well there. It was serious. At one point he had no pulse and the doctors were talking about do not recusitate orders. And he had to travel to the city to have dialysis.

During this time, both my father and my mother spoke of my son which they never do. My father to ask if I ever heard from him. My mother to say she would be dividing some money she had saved in her will between her four grandchildren. That would mean she was including my son.

Being there in the hospital with my dad, I kept thinking back to when I had my son and how I was driven to the hospital by my mother and left to go through two and a half days of labour by myself. About how when I came home from the hospital I broke down in tears on my father’s shoulder and he did not respond in any way, did not put his arm around me. Nothing.

But that was a long time ago and I tried to put it out of my mind as I advocated for my father during his hospital stay.

It turned out that the problem may have been a mal-functioning pacemaker and so my father, after another evaluation and a re-jigged pacemaker, is now permitted to go back to the dialysis in the town where he lives. The crisis has passed.*

Tonight my husband and I returned to our condo overlooking the lake. Both of us were exhausted and I fell asleep on the couch watching tv.

While I was sleeping, I dreamt that my daughter was in an orphanage and I had gone to rescue her. When I came into the room where she was with rows and rows of babies, she saw me and her face lit up and filled with hope and I could tell she knew I had come to get her. She was little, maybe 9 months or a year old. I signalled to her not to show that she recognized me so no one would suspect I had come to rescue her.

As I looked around I started to see how sick all the other children in the orphanage were. It was a horrible place. I became very worried about her, feeling that I could rescue her but even if I did she may not be alright because conditions in the orphanage so terrible.

And then I woke up.

I don’t think the dream was really about my daughter, I think it was about my son. How even finding him cannot undo the harm that his adoption experience has done – to him.

My husband asked me if there was anything wrong and I told him that I had had a nightmare. When I told him the details of my dream, he had a great look of concern on his face.

He is pretty savvy about the impact of adoption but I could see, having been through the journey of this week with me, and having heard about my dream, he understood it all in a new way.

Peace

UM

*The crisis passed only briefly because they called back the next day and said he has to travel to the city again.

Glacial Acres

Someone posted a list of 10 nominees for the Demons of Adoption Award 2008.

I didn’t quite understand all of them which is not to say I dispute the nominations, I just don’t know enough about them to put them forward.

However, here is my vote for Number One.

If there was an award for pro-adoption propaganda, I would nominate them for that too or how about the perpetuating the myths about adoption award or the … well you get the idea.

My Number One Nominee from their list:

The makers of Juno for helping to groom and brainwash a whole new generation of girls and young women to be walking incubators for the the adoption industry;

One of the things I always thought was odd about Juno was the name of the subdivision where the PAP’s lived. It was Glacial Acres or something like that. An out of character name given the rest of the film.

Peace

UM

From the moment of birth….a moment of truth

I was commenting on another blog the other day that I almost thought it funny that I was once an UNWED MOTHER!!!! The Victorian morality of it all. It’s so weird and, of course, so sad because that Victorian morality was responsible for a lot of harm in the world.

As an aside – Pejorative term that it was, it at least contained the word mother. As a second aside, it just occurred to me that If that UNWED MOTHER was writing this blog she would sign it with the same initials I do – UM.

How much I feel that unwed mother person was someone else. I don’t know where she came from. I guess she was what was left of me when I was beaten down, betrayed, abandoned and terrified.

I was one of the people who was never even allowed to see her baby. Why the heck I didn’t get up out of the bed, say “Fuck You!” to anybody who tried to stop me and go to see MY baby I don’t know. I know that’s what I would do today. To the point of being arrested if they tried to stop me.

It is only recently that I have found out what the theory behind the forbidding of any mother/child time together. I was told this was because it would help me, allow me to heal. You know, get on with my life. It was what was best.

This is from “Authoritative Knowledge and Single Women’s Unintentional Pregancies, Abortions, Adoption and Single Motherhood: Social Stigma and Structural Violence,” by Marcia A. Ellison, in “Medical Anthropology Quarterly“, 17(3), 2003, p.326.

“The Post-World War II Adoption Mandate — “From 1960-70, 27 percent of all births to married women between the ages of 15 and 29 were conceived premaritally. Yet the etiology of single, white, middle-class women’s conceptions had shifted again and were now perceived as symptoms of female neurosis (Solinger, 1982; Vincent, 1961). In keeping with this medical model, a single pregnant woman could obtain a therapeutic abortion if she could find a physician willing to diagnose her as psychologically unsound, or if her pregnancy could be diagnosed as life-threatening. However, the approval of a board of hospital physicians was necessary to obtain a therapeutic abortion and 53 percent of teaching hospitals and 40 percent of all U.S. Hospitals, and thus their boards, required that women accept simultaneous sterilization to prevent a future unplanned pregnancy (Solinger, 1998:24). … Given those constraints, the majority (85-95 percent) of single, white, middle-class women, who either could not or would not procure an illegal or therapeutic abortion, were encouraged, and at times coerced, to adopt-away their child (Edwards, 1993; McAdoo, 1992; Pannor et al, 1979; Solinger, 1992, 1993).

Maternity homes became institutions where neurotic pregnancies could be cured by separating single mothers from their children (Solinger, 1992). By the 1950s, attachment theory dictated that this separation occur as soon as possible after birth, to promote an infant’s ability to bond with its married adoptive parents (Berebitsky, 2000).”

You don’t have to have been in a home for unwed mothers to have had this experience.

Why does it always seem to come down to what works best for adoption?

Attachment disorder – indeed.

Peace

UM