Dan Rather Reports: Adoption or Abduction!

UM

Dan Rather will be reporting on adoption practices in the 60′s.

Slowly it is all starting to come out in Canada and the U.S.

What happened to many of us and our children wasn’t right.

There have been some articles in Canada.  Most recently in the National Post .

When will other Canadian media start looking into these

claims?

Where is W5 or The Fifth Estate?

Here’s the Dan Rather Reports trailer.

UM

E is for ebook

NaBloPoMo Blog#432 Day 18

adoption, reunion, rEform, reality**

Today E is for ebook.

Author Denise Roessle has written a book, Second Chance Mother, about her experience as a mother who relinquished a child to adoption and then met him twenty-six years later.  It has been published as an ebook and is available as of today.

Writing about the experience of adoption is always a tricky thing but I believe telling these stories is important.  The stories set out the reality of adoption for many mothers and children.  That promises made were not kept.  That children were not delivered into loving homes in some circumstances and that the sacrifice that was made in some ways seems to have been made for naught.

Here is an excerpt:

I pushed back the grief until I was as anesthetized as the day I had given birth. I imagined myself becoming stronger when in truth I had merely become more comfortable with the numbness.

I might as well have been dead. Except I wasn’t. The proof came in a phone call on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon, almost twenty-six years after I had relinquished what turned out to be my only child.

On the website, the publisher describes the book and the journey that followed:

It’s a BIG boy,” she announced to her family and friends, setting free her twenty-six-year secret. But Joshua was not a boy. He was a grown man, with a history that fell far short of what she had envisioned for him when she’d been assured he would be “better off” without her. His adoptive parents had essentially given up on him at age thirteen, sending him away with only an eighth-grade education. He drifted through a series of institutions and group homes, and ultimately onto the New York City streets, where he fell into drugs and crime.

I hope you will check it out.

Peace

UM

** For new readers, I am working through the letters in these words as my writing prompts during NaBloPoMo 2011.

R is for the Right to…

NaBloPoMo Blog#432 Day 17

adoption, reunion, Reform, reality**

I’m back but before I start, I want to thank Suz Bednarz of WritingMyWrongs for guest non-blogging/posting yesterday.  Great post!

Now back to our words.  We are on the first letter of word three.

R is for the Right to…

The first time I heard the words I was at theatre festival meet and greet.  A play that I wrote had been accepted for production and the playwrights, directors and producers were introducing their work to the other participants.  One of the directors got  my attention when she got up and said “This play is about who has the right to raise a child.”

To me, that was self-evident.  The only people with the “right” to raise any child are its parents.  In some cases, sadly, these rights are terminated and someone else may become involved.  In the case of adoption, the mother signs something to say she is relinquishing her rights.  To me, parents rights came first, end of discussion.

The play was a two hander:  An infertile woman and a somewhat clued-out child/woman who was pregnant.  The play was about who was better for this unborn child.  It’s own slightly clued-out child/woman mother or the extremely accomplished (slightly high-strung) infertile woman.

Poor C-O’d child/woman!  The deck was really stacked against her.   She was young, she was poor, she came from a troubled family.  I think she’d even dropped out of school. She road her bike aimlessly in circles on the stage.  An outward manifestation, no doubt, of her general aimlessness.  She hadn’t really thought too much about what she was going to do with this baby once it arrived.  SHS infertile woman, on the other hand, had had the nursery planned and the furniture bought for years.

I mean really. Whose side would you be on?

When I tell people my adoption story many people say I should write a book.  I’ve never done that.  I don’t think a book with a neon MESSAGE! MESSAGE! sign all over it is a very good book.  And I think it would be hard to write any other kind.  You have to be very careful to make your point without having the reader feel they have been beaten over the head with a polo mallet.  (Okay – I see all you people out there rubbing your heads right now where the polo mallet hit you but it’s NaBloPoMo!  It’s Take Back Adoptember!  Cut me some slack.)

I have only officially written a fiction piece about adoption once.   I was sitting at my second home.  I had just bought some new sheets for the bedroom and as I frequently do I bought an extra sheet to have some matching material – in this case to make a bed skirt.   As I was dismantling the sheet I came across the tag.  Any of you who are familiar with HomeSense know the tag said “Made in China”.

Sitting there ripping the sheet apart, I started to think about the woman who worked in the factory in China where the sheets were made.  And I thought about China’s one child policy and how the person who made the sheets and I just might have something, one really big thing, in common.  We had both lost children to adoption.

And so I wrote ta story called “Made in China  – The World is Red.  I don’t think it was preachy.  At least I hope it wasn’t preachy.  It just kind of flowed out of me.   I’ve learned to trust that.  I entered it in a contest and it won second prize.  When I went to collect the prize (money) one of the judges told me he expected to meet a Chinese lady.  I was flattered.

But back to the play.  It was preachy.  It was written in such a way that no one was supposed to leave the theatre thinking that child would be better off with child/woman than infertile woman.

Some people believe the test for adoption should be “the best interests of the child”.  Not everyone agrees.  Here is what one judge said:

If … the best interests of the child is to be the determining factor in child custody cases … persons seeking babies to adopt might profitably frequent grocery stores and snatch babies from carts when the parent is looking the other way.  Then, if custody proceedings can be delayed long enough, they can assert that they have a nicer home, a superior education, a better job or whatever, and that the best interests of the child are with the baby snatchers. Children of parents living in public housing or other conditions deemed less affluent and children of single parents might be considered particularly fair game.”

Justice James Heiple,  Illinois Supreme Court,  The “Baby Richard” case.

It’s interesting when people start dressing things up in a mantle of rights.  Sometimes, they start to believe their own publicity.  Sometimes they start to think of the world in terms of how hard done by they are because their “right” is being hampered.  Sometimes a want gets so big that it wants to turn itself into a right.

Because the play was always on right after mine, I spent a lot of time in the green room talking to the two actors involved.  I liked them.  I thought, within the limits of the material, they did a good job.

I’ll never forget them.  Those two actors performing that play were, in a very big way, responsible for one aspect of my waking  up about adoption and the forces that were and are at work.

Peace

UM

** For new readers, I am working through the letters in these words as my writing prompts during NaBloPoMo 2011.

I is for I am. Therefore, I am.

NaBloPoMo Blog#432 Day 7

adoptIon, reunion, reform, reality*

There is a famous animation school at Sheridan College in Ontario. One of the driving forces behind the animation program died not too long ago.

I happened to come across his obituary in the paper. I don’t read the obits very often but every time I do there seems to be a life that touches me.

I liked what I read about this man, how many of his former students are “major players” in the field of animation. A former Sheridan animation student was nominated for an Academy Award for Bolt. He is the seventh Sheridan alumnus to receive an Academy Award nomination. A real accomplishment.  Definitely something to be proud of.   When you create something, it lives on in the world.  I’ve always thought that writing a book or producing a work of art is the closest a man will ever come to understanding what it’s like to have a baby.

There was a poem as part of the obituary.   It made me think of adoption.  I considered modifying it a bit  but I think the poet, Mary Frye, deserves my posting of the original.

Here it is:

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep

I am a thousand winds that blow

I am the diamond glint on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning hush
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight
I am the soft starlight of night

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there, I do not sleep
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there, I did not die.

Despite what adoption tries to do, motherhood does not die.  Our love for our children, now grown adults, is always there whether our children, their adoptive parents, our own families or the rest of the world chooses to acknowledge it or not.

I am a thousand winds that blow

Peace

UM

* For new readers, I am working through the letters in these words as my writing prompts during NaBloPoMo.

D is for Demonstrate

NaBloPoMo Blog#432 Day 3

aDoption, reunion, reform, reality

The Nablopomo Prompt for today is: If you knew that whatever you ate next would be your last meal, what would you want it to be? 

I can’t work that in here but I did do a post once along the same lines. It was entitled Last Suppers.

Here’s the link: http://wp.me/pgdfz-c1

TODAY: D is for Demonstrate       http://www.nablopomo.com

Describe someone as a demonstrator and people picture a group, marching, signs. Do you have to march and carry a sign to be a demonstrator? No you don’t.

One thing I have learned about, dare I say it, consciousness raising and adoption is that for many of us it can be a very gradual process.  For some what seems like a very small and private act may be their first demonstration.

Walking into a support group and admitting for the first time in public that our lives have been hurt by adoption is a demonstration.

Believing you have the right to know your family of origin or your son or your daughter and acting on it is a demonstration.

Setting out to educate the public about the impact of adoption for mothers and children is a demonstration.

Writing a letter to an elected representative is a demonstration.

For many of us mothers and adoptees it takes us a bit of time to figure out what our position is.   Just what it is we want to demonstrate about?  What the problem is and what we want to do about it.

I learned a new word this week. Someone in my writing group used the word hegemony in a story that we are critiquing.

Although I have heard the word before I confess I wasn’t completely sure what it meant. So I looked it up. Hegemony is the dominance or leadership of one social group or (nation) over others;

For a very long time the public perception of adoption has been controlled by those who benefit from it the most: adoption agencies and adoptive parents.  You might say that the dominance of this group has caused the rest of us some pain.

We don’t want this to continue. We don’t want it to happen to any one else.

So, one way or another, we demonstrate.

Peace

3 down: 27 to go.

UM