The Archaic Shadow Of Secrecy

The closed, sealed adoption records of yesterday are much easier to pierce with today’s inexpensive DNA testing. Today’s story from Severance Magazine.

It begins this way – in 1967, I’d given birth to my first-born child in an unwed mothers maternity home in New Orleans, Louisiana. I had been a typical 17-year-old high school senior with plans for the future that evaporated overnight. In the sixties, it was considered close to criminal for a girl to become pregnant with no ring on her finger. The father of my child had joined the Army, preferring Vietnam to fatherhood. After my parents discovered my shameful secret, I was covertly hurried away and placed in an institution for five months. There, I was expected to relinquish my baby immediately after giving birth to closed adoption and I was repeatedly assured my child would have a better life without me. After his birth, I was allowed to hold my son three times. My heart was permanently damaged when I handed him over the final time. The home allowed one concession—I could give my baby a crib name. I named him Jamie.

In the Spring of 2016, this woman and her husband submitted DNA tests to Ancestry.com. By October 2016, a ‘Parent/Child Match’ message popped up on her iPhone, causing me to stop me in my tracks, as my knees gave out from under me. After 49 long years, Jamie had found her. Who was he? Where was he? Would he hate me? How would this affect my life? My family? His family? She had always dreamed of finding Jamie but never thought past that point.

She relates – that night I heard my son’s voice for the first time. The wonder I felt when he said, “I know your voice” transformed me. In minutes, the secret of my son changed from fear of anyone knowing about him to wanting to shout out to the world, “My son has found me!” She also learned she had three new grandchildren. Within four days, her son flew from Louisiana to California to meet her. She describes that first meeting as magical. She says, “My son was back in my life, and suddenly I was whole.”

Due to severe depression brought on by the COVID pandemic as a messy divorce, the loss of his job, and unhealthy isolation began to destroy him, she worried from a distance. In February 2021, they had what would be their last conversation. Before hanging up, her son said, “I love you, Mom. You’re the best thing that ever happened to me.” Two days later, the son she had mourned for 50 years, the son who had found her, left her again. He took his own life. Now she had lost him twice and this time was forever. Even so, she cherishes that phone call.

She ends her story with this – “I wish I could speak to all the birth mothers out there, who continue to carry the shame and guilt that society placed on us. For those who refuse to allow their relinquished child back into their lives. I want to say I know your fear. I know your uncertainty. I lived it and still live it. It is deep-seated in us, regardless of the circumstances that resulted in us leaving our children. Please know if you are brave enough to welcome that lost child into your life again, you may create a peace and a bond worth all the fear and guilt. There is nothing quite like reuniting a mother and her child, and you may be giving a gift of connection to that child and yourself, as it should have been all along.”

Michele Tafoya Pro-Choice Adoptive Mom

Michele Tafoya with son, Tyler and daughter, Olivia

Michele Tafoya was on the panel discussion for Real Time with Bill Maher last Friday night when she admitted to two details about herself. She is pro-Choice and she adopted her daughter from Columbia. She said she was grateful Olivia’s mother had not aborted her. The panel discussion on abortion was honest, diverse and varied, though remaining pro-Choice throughout.

Today, I learned that Michele and I share some things in common. We both discovered the female age factor while trying to conceive. Her husband, Mark Vandersall, is seven years younger. She says after the second miscarriage, “I remember apologizing to my husband, because I felt responsible. I’m seven years older than he is, so I felt like my age was a factor. And it was — the science will tell you. There are biological reasons for it, and it’s as simple as that.” I remember crying at my wedding site, regretting that my husband married such an old woman that when he wanted children, it was no longer possible for me.

At Michele’s suggestion, the couple pursued infertility treatment, and in vitro fertilization. Tafoya managed one good embryo during the first in vitro process. Incredibly, the embryo split and the couple was excited to be expecting identical twins. Then she lost the twins. The heartbreak was devastating for both her and her husband. So, in the spring of 2005, they began exploring donor eggs.

I have a friend in St Louis who had a similar experience as Tafoya of receiving the surprise news of a positive pregnancy after I sent her to see my own Gynecologist. I remember her having me rub her pregnant belly when I was trying to conceive our second son “for luck.” I guess it worked. Her son is right in the middle age between my two sons.

While in Hawaii on business, Michele felt overly exhausted. When she returned home to Minnesota from her trip, she took a pregnancy test. It was positive. Later that year, Tafoya and her husband welcomed a miracle, their baby boy. The pair decided they wanted to have more children and so adopted an infant girl from Colombia. This Mother’s Day her son is 16 and her daughter is 12.

Some Thoughts On Trauma

I came across a discussion about trauma yesterday. About a year ago, I had a 6 yr old molar tooth pulled. The dentist even gave me 6 mos to get used to the idea. 6 mos after that yanking out of my tooth, in a follow-up with my dentist, I admitted that it traumatized me. I quickly added that I knew he was a sensitive and caring person and that there was nothing he could have done to prevent my feeling traumatized. I said, since I have been learning about adoption related trauma as I have learned more about both of my parents as adoptees, I think I was just more aware of it.

I knew nothing about Doris Brothers at the time nor did I know about ACE scores. What I learned about her is that Doris Brothers urges a return to a trauma-centered psychoanalysis. Making use of relational systems theory, she shows that experiences of uncertainty are continually transformed by the regulatory processes of everyday life such as feeling, knowing, forming categories, making decisions, using language, creating narratives, sensing time, remembering, forgetting, and fantasizing. Insofar as trauma destroys the certainties that organize psychological life, it plunges our relational systems into chaos and sets the stage for the emergence of rigid, life-constricting relational patterns. These trauma-generated patterns, which often involve denial of sameness and difference, the creation of complexity-reducing dualities, and the transformation of certainty into certitude, figure prominently in virtually all of the complaints for which patients seek analytic treatment.

Below this is what I read yesterday, that struck me as relevant, though the discussion was not about adoption.

“Yesterday I read an interesting article by Doris Brothers about traumatic attachment, dissociation, and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Part of what she conveyed was the idea that in a traumatized system dissociation operates to reduce complexity, which serves a salutary function insofar as it functions to eliminate from consciousness that which interferes with the reestablishment of order and predictability in needed relationships.”

“Dissociation may be understood, in part, as a means of simplifying experience through a radical reduction of experiential complexity. . . . To experience such complexity might well heighten what is already a level of uncertainty about psychological survival that is close to unbearable. As complexity is dissociatively reduced, a traumatized person’s relational world comes to be ruled by simple, rigid SECs [systemically emergent certainties] [a concept similar to organizing principles] that are clung to with desperate ferocity.”

“In the absence of trauma, SECs are subject to change according to the shifting needs of the constituents of the systems in which they arise; they are, in other words, context sensitive. Trauma-generated SECs are strikingly different. Emerging within systems dominated by the desperate need to halt the spread of chaos and tormenting uncertainty, they tend to be impervious to the changing environment.”

Moreover, Brothers observes that “traumatic attachments tend to be rigid, constricted and highly resistant to change,” and that “the more trauma, the more risk of inflexibility.”

Brothers also observes that “attachment patterns that form in the context of unbearable experiences of existential uncertainty in one generation may influence the attachment patterns that emerge in the next,” and that “dualities and dichotomies” often characterize traumatized systems.

~ Doris Brothers Ph.D. (2014) Traumatic Attachments: Intergenerational Trauma, Dissociation, and the Analytic Relationship, International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology, 9:1, 3-15.

From the person raising the discussion – “All of which got me to thinking about those who promote dichotomous ideologies and Manichean worldviews. Ordinarily, I pull no punches when thinking or talking about these people (especially when they are jockeying for political positions that could affect my life and the lives of people I care about). But if I withdraw for a moment from the impulse to ridicule, I reflect that these may be people whose lives, whose organizing principles, are the product of trauma, maybe even trauma that didn’t happen to them directly, but to their parents. Seen in this light, the impoverished either/or thinking, the insufferably reductive and punitive moralities take on a different hue, that of involuntary affliction, sequelae of a prior generation’s trauma, and those saddled with such worldviews suddenly appear more understandable and less blameworthy.”

Manichaeism was a major religion founded in the 3rd century AD by the Parthian prophet Mani, in the Sasanian Empire. Manichaeism taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness. Clearly, humanity has not progressed very much in reality.

Many adoptees tell stories of a variety of degrees of abuse. An ACE score is a tally of different types of abuse, neglect, and other hallmarks of a rough childhood. According to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study, the rougher your childhood, the higher your score is likely to be and the higher your risk for later health problems.

Ukrainian Twins

Straight off – I am NOT a fan of surrogacy. There was a mom in my mom’s group who used a surrogate because she was actively undergoing treatment for cancer. I remember the two of us sharing that we were using reproductive assistance for our husbands. She did pass away about the time her boy/girl twins turned 2 years old. After years of trying, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law finally were successful in bringing a son into their lives.

My problem with surrogacy has arisen out of my gaining knowledge about the trauma of separating any baby from the mom in who’s womb the baby gestated. This is detailed in the book The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier. Even though my own family has depended upon medical technology to create our sons, I am at least grateful that in our own ignorance, we did one thing right – my sons both grew in my womb and nursed at my breast. I have been able to do something with them that I wasn’t even able to do for my biological, genetic daughter – be in the boy’s lives throughout their childhood.

The Russian war against Ukraine is heartbreaking and difficult to be a witness of. So, a feel good story coming out of that country is welcome. NPR did a follow-up to this story that had more than it’s share of bumps along the way. The genetic, biological father of these twins Alex Spektor was born in Ukraine, when it was part of the Soviet Union, and his family came to the US as Jewish refugees. From experience, I do believe that boys benefit from the genetic, biological mirror of being raised by their father.

The mother was a surrogate; and therefore, was never intended to parent these babies. His twins were born prematurely to the surrogate mother in Kyiv just as Russia began its war on Ukraine. In a dramatic mission called “Operation Gemini,” the babies and the surrogate were rescued from Ukraine in March. They dodged Russian artillery fire, drove through a snowstorm, and finally arrived at a Polish hospital where Alex met his boys for the first time.

For 2 months, the family was stuck in bureaucratic limbo in Poland. Alex’s wife, Irma had flown to Poland in early March, after the twins had been evacuated. She had stayed in Chicago to get the family’s legal paperwork in order. She arrived late at night and the next morning went straight to the hospital where her twins were. Alex and Irma have spent those 2 months fighting to take their twins home to Chicago.

The hospital said they needed to prove the twin’s paternity in order to discharge the kids. The American embassy said in order for them to get passports for the boys, the parents needed to bring their twins to Warsaw. Eventually officials needed to see the birth certificates and they were still in Ukraine. So, Alex crossed from the Polish city of Rzeszow back over the border to retrieve the documents from the Ukrainian city of Lviv.

Finally, the couple and their twins were able to fly home to Chicago. Alex now says his experience with his twins has made him feel closer to the place of his birth. Because of these experiences, friends of the couple in Chicago have created an organization known as the Ukraine TrustChain. They provide medical supplies, baby formula, food and other essentials to people in the war.

Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe’s mother went into a mental hospital and left her to orphanages and foster care. In My Story, Monroe wrote that she recalled seeing her mother “screaming and laughing” as she was forcibly taken to a State Hospital.

At age 11, Norma Jeane was declared a ward of the state. She lived in a total of 11 foster homes throughout her youth; when there was no foster home available, she sometimes ended up at the Hollygrove Orphanage in Los Angeles. As if moving from one foster home to another wasn’t difficult enough, Norma Jeane recalled being treated harshly in several of them. Even worse, she was abused including sexually in at least three of her foster care placements.

Here is one story from the Daily Mail, “The magic red sweater that turned ‘Norma Jeane, string bean’ into Marilyn Monroe” –

She told of being whipped by one foster mother for having touched ‘the bad part’ of her body. Another more serious incident occurred when she was eight. One evening a lodger she called Mr. Kimmel (Marilyn said later that this was not his real name) asked her to come into his room and locked the door behind her. He put his arms around her. She kicked and struggled. He did what he wanted, telling her to be a good girl. (In a later interview Marilyn stated that the abuse involved fondling). When he let her out, he handed her a coin and told her to buy herself an ice cream. She threw the coin in his face and ran to tell her foster mother what happened, but the woman wouldn’t listen.

“Shame on you,” her foster mother said. “Mr. Kimmel’s my star boarder.” Norma Jeane went to her room and cried all night. Marilyn said she felt dirty and took baths for days after it happened to feel clean. Such repeated attempts to feel clean through showers or baths are typical behavior for victims of assault. Marilyn also said she began to stutter after the incident and reverted to it at times of stress. When she told one interviewer about the abuse, she began stuttering. The evidence points to the fact that she was an abused child whose early sexualization led to her inappropriate behavior as an adult.

One of the reasons she chose to marry at 16 was simply to escape her foster care takers. She never knew who her father was. After getting married at 16, she later divorced and became a new persona. She went from Norma Jeane Baker to Marilyn Monroe in order to fit in, be accepted, and wanted…what she never wanted was to become a sex object.

Not many seem to have recognized that she was dealing with abandonment trauma her entire life. She overdosed at the age of 36. According to an article at a site called Vigilant Citizen, behind Monroe’s photogenic smile was a fragile individual who was exploited and subjected to mind control by powerful handlers. Through trauma and psychological programming, Monroe a became high-level puppet of society’s elite, even becoming JFK’s paramour.

One “conspiracy theory” asserts – “Some children live in foster homes, or with adopted parents, or in orphanages, or with caretakers and guardians. Because these children are at the mercy of the non-related adults, these types of children frequently are sold to become mind-controlled slaves of the intelligence agencies.” ~ Fritz Springmeier, The Illuminati Formula to Create a Mind Control Slave. Not saying that I believe conspiracy theories but often there are some facts that are foundational to them.

Industry insiders convinced Norma Jeane to undergo aesthetic surgery, to change her name to Marilyn Monroe and to change her hair color to platinum blonde. Monroe’s sensual, “dumb blond” persona allowed her to land roles in several movies, which began a clear culture shift in Hollywood.

A Pro-Adoption Supreme Court

Part of what drives the anti-abortion effort is that the supply of adoption available infants has dropped to almost nothing. Certainly, adoptee centric groups continue to counsel expectant mothers considering adoption to keep and raise their own children to save them from the trauma that separation from the mother who’s womb a baby grew in causes trauma that leads to a diverse variety of physical, mental and emotional effects.

Today, I discovered this person – The Adopted Chameleon. She writes, “Amy Coney Barrett has said she isn’t inclined to protect women’s rights because the baby can be put up for adoption. She has adopted children and knows nothing about adoption. She is clearly biased. John Roberts and Clarence Thomas have adopted children also. They are biased also.”

The Safe Haven Laws are often used to prove that a woman does not need to parent the baby she carries to term. What these people seem to conveniently ignore is the 9 months of a woman’s life that she must give up to gestate a baby. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood comes quickly to mind. Forced birth to supply the demand for babies by couple who are infertile or just can’t have enough children. There are truly gross examples of that kind of overconsumption of children – I’ve written about some of these in the past.

The Adopted Chameleon continues her thoughts with this – “These people are going to decide the fate of future mothers. They use their religion as the reason why abortion should be illegal. Abortion was never a sin in the Bible. The Bible talks about how to make a woman drink the bitter water if her husband thinks she was unfaithful. It never says its a sin. Abortion is used as a fear tactic in voting. People think they are saving babies but they are traumatizing mothers. Then if the mother relinquishes the baby, the baby is traumatized. The cruelty and ignorance of people is right in front of us. They show no remorse for separating families and taking rights away from babies that will be adults without rights. Adoption should be the last option. Adoption is trauma.”

A Christian mission is an organized effort to spread Christianity to new converts. Missions involve sending individuals and groups across boundaries, most commonly geographical boundaries, to carry on evangelism or other activities, such as educational or hospital work. The Pro-Life movement is actually a “mission” and it really matters not if the original parents are poor or of a different color than the hopeful adoptive parents – what matters is converting the heathens to the one true faith.

I woke up this morning to a husband who is worrying about what this contingent minority in our country will do next. Don’t believe this is all that they want. We are on the road to authoritarianism. Could they make these laws retroactive to punish anyone who ever had an abortion when it was legal ? Could they relegate anyone who has been donor conceived to a second class citizenship along with any person who is not the “right” color ? Though I will say that such things could occur, if the current path continues along the current trajectory, making laws retroactive against people who were acting under legal provisions at the time they did whatever will certainly be a dark day for freedom and will usher in a most draconian phase of life in these United States. So I will urge you to Vote Blue – Democrat in November and again in 2024 – if you value freedom at all.

Obedience, conformity, oneness and sameness over freedom and difference. These authoritarian inclined persons are unwilling to tolerate complexity, diversity and difference. Latent authoritarianism relates to a predisposition towards child-rearing values that exclude independence, curiosity and an ability to think through challenging subjects from one’s own points of view. It includes a concern with structuring society and social interactions that minimize any diversity of people, beliefs and behaviors. They favor disparaging, suppressing and punishing differences. ~ from Can It Happen Here ? page 182-183.

As Rebecca Solnit has written, “First they came for the reproductive rights (Roe v Wade, 1973) and it doesn’t matter if you don’t have a uterus in its ovulatory years, because then they want to come for the marriage rights of same-sex couples (Obergefell v Hodges, 2015), and then the rights of consenting adults of the same gender to have sex with each other (Lawrence v Texas, 2003), and then for the right to birth control (Griswold v Connecticut, 1965). It doesn’t really matter if they’re coming for you, because they’re coming for us. ‘Us’ these days means pretty much everyone who’s not a straight white Christian man with rightwing politics.”

Social Workers

Back in Georgia Tann’s reign in Tennessee, the role of a Social Worker was somewhat new but crucial to the completion of adoption efforts. Today, I came across this article – What Social Workers Need to Know When Working with Adoptive Families at a WordPress site titled Detached – Attachment – Adoption – Social Critique. The author writes – Though these workers were generally decent people with their hearts in the right place, I’ve been struck by how much even caring and well-meaning social workers can be unintentionally damaging.

This person goes on to say – It is a humbling experience to admit that you don’t have the capacity, whether financial, physical or emotional to handle a child without this support. And virtually no one appreciates having people outside their families making decisions for them, judging their parenting, and having control over their lives. Then adds, proceeding from the notion that social workers and others (probation officers, behavioral aids, etc.) are here to help us, why do we so often feel hurt, humiliated and misunderstood after interacting with them?

This particular essay was written by an adoptive parent. It involved traumatized adoptees. It should be a cautionary tale for any hopeful adoptive parent considering that pathway to parenting.

In searching for the image I share at the top of my own blog here (you can read the rest of the adoptive parent’s perspective at the link above), I found another article. “Is my position as a social worker compromised if I don’t agree with adoption?” with the subtitle – “A social worker reflects on their biases around adoption and the need for group decision-making in matters of separating children from families.” This appeared at a website called “Community Care.”

Any one who has read my blog for any length of time knows that I do not overall support adoption. Just saying. I know from things I have read written by foster parents and it appears true of some social workers that there are people who believe that being inside of a system is the way to reform it. I really cannot judge but from what I’ve read of some who have tried, it doesn’t actually prove out. Also just saying as a disclaimer.

The author of this point of view shares their qualifications – I have been responsible for recommending the interim removal of children from their birth families as well as placing children in the care of relatives under the auspices of special guardianship orders (SGOs). I consider myself to have a sound understanding of care proceedings but one area which leaves me feeling uncomfortable, anxious and unsure of myself as a social worker is adoption. Forced adoption can be seen as punitive. There is clear evidence that austerity (lack of financial supports for families) has added to the adversities faced by any family who’s children have been removed but who seek to have their own children returned to their care. From all that I have read the process can be daunting and the time frame too limited and therefore disallows the parents an ability to be successful.

You can read more in the link for that article above. I apologize for not providing more complete summarizations of the above information but I am short on time today. Read if you care to consider the perspectives.

Torn Apart by Dorothy Roberts

The horror stories regarding Child Protective Services (CPS) abound in my all things adoption group which includes former foster care youth. So when I read about Dorothy Roberts new book Torn Apart in Time magazine last night, I knew I would write about this for my blog today. Roberts believes that CPS needs to be abolished and she has found that it is shockingly easy for CPS to destroy poor, Black families. I would add ANY poor family. However, racial inequality and systemic racism are real.

Mother Jones has published an excerpt which begins with the story of a young mother who has health challenges, is married and has two young sons. Her family lives with her mother and everyone pitches in to care for the rambunctious little boys. The family was enjoying a picnic in a park in Aurora, Colorado.

When my own sons were very young, I lived in fear that some do-gooder would misunderstand some situation and report us. There is a Simpson’s episode where this happens to Bart, Lisa and Maggie and they are taken away and given to the Flanders family as temporary caregivers while Home and Marge struggle against the system. I would refer to that episode with my sons so that they would not exhibit some overly challenging behavior in public that would end with unintended consequences.

So it was that this woman’s 2 yr old ran after her cousin as she was leaving. The mother grabbed the 4 yr old and ran after her son. Before the mother could reach him, a woman who happened to be passing by had snatched the young boy by the arm, worried that he was wandering off. The mom could see the woman talking on her cell phone as she and her other son approached. When she caught up to them, only a minute later, she told the stranger holding her child, “Ma’am, that’s my son.” But the woman refused to let him go. She had called 911 to report that the boy was unattended.

Before the policeman who responded left, after the woman’s relatives gathered around to affirm that she actually was his mother, he gave her a ticket for child abuse and reckless endangerment. A month later, as the mom was cleaning up in the basement, her husband gone to work and her mother at a doctor’s appointment, the Social Services Department white caseworker accompanied by a Black female trainee, unexpectedly knocked on the front door, part of a surprise follow up from the citation issued.

The boys were in the front room, the 2 yr old still naked as he had just been bathed. When the mom did not immediately answer the door, the caseworker called for police assistance. Two male officers arrived first, soon followed by a female officer. The caseworker asserted the 2 yr old was neglected as he stood looking at them through the front window.

After the officers entered the house, without a warrant or permission, the mom became angry at the way she was being confronted so aggressively. She called her mother at the doctor’s office and asked, “Mom, can you get here, I got fucking social services and the goddamn police here, they’re really pissing me off.” Two of the officers then engaged the mom in an increasingly combative exchange.

The woman’s mother had arrived and had taken the boys to their bedroom, guarded by an officer who would not let the boy’s mom join them. One officer lunged at the mom and violently pushed her face down into a large beanbag on the living room floor. The female officer and a fifth officer now on the scene now assisting him, pinned her arms were yanked behind her back, cuffed her wrists and cuffed, restrained her head and shoulders. Two more officers arrived, bringing the total count to seven.

Then, they restrained the mom with a hobble—hand and ankle cuffs that shackled her wrists behind her back and chained them to her shackled legs and carried her off to a police car, her stomach and face toward the ground. She cried, “I can’t breathe,” and so, paramedics were called and her restraints loosened by order of a sergeant who had also now arrived.

The officer reports varied as to the condition of the house from “in fair condition with food” to “very dirty, with no food in the refrigerator, and very little food in the pantry.” On the advice of her public defender, the mom pleaded guilty (many legal cases today never reach court but end in plea deals) to child abuse and reckless endangerment to avoid prison and was ordered to take parenting classes and sentenced to one year of probation. Before the first incident in the park, the mom had never been in trouble with the law. Now she had a record as a child abuser. Her attorney was later able to obtain a monetary settlement from the police department for excessive use of force.

The mom was now ensnared in a giant state machine with the power to destroy her family. With the threat of child removal at its core, the child welfare system regulates a massive number of families. In 2019 alone, CPS agencies investigated the families of 3.5 million children, ultimately finding abuse or neglect only in one-fifth of cases, or for the families of 656,000 children. Yet the families of these children are put through an indefinite period of intensive scrutiny by CPS workers and judges who have the power to keep children apart from their parents for years or even to sever their family ties forever.

In the Time magazine article by Janell Ross, on the racial disparities in the child welfare system, interviewing Dorothy Roberts, she notes that more than half, 53%, of all Black children will experience a child-welfare investigation by the time they reach the age of 18, compared with less than a third of white children. However, white children from very impoverished areas, such as rural Appalachia, also experience extreme amounts of state involvement. Black children are more likely than white children to be taken from their families and put in foster care. They’re less likely to go on to college and more likely to end up in prison.

I completely agree with her – our society does not support families well enough. She notes income support, health care, affordable housing, an equal, high-quality education would keep most of these children out of foster care. She asks, why is child welfare’s response to the greater needs of Black children this very violent, traumatic approach of family separation ?

The facade of benevolence associated with Child Protective Services makes most Americans complacent about this colossal government apparatus that spends billions of dollars annually on surveilling families, breaking them apart, and thrusting children into a foster care system known to cause devastating harms. Dorothy Roberts notes – after 25 years of studying family separation as a legal scholar and author, I’m convinced that the mission of CPS agencies is not to care for children or protect their welfare. Rather, they respond inadequately and inhumanely to our society’s abysmal failures. Far from promoting the well-being of children, the state weaponizes children as a way to threaten families, to scapegoat parents for societal harms to their children, and to buttress the racist status quo.

Adoptee Jodie Sweetin

I will admit that I didn’t know who this woman was nor did I ever watch Full House. That said, today I learned that she was adopted and has now spoken out about her adoptive family. I read that Full House portrayed the perfect life, the perfect kids, as well as the most perfect parents one could hope for. Jodie Sweetin played the adorably sarcastic Stephanie Tanner on the much-beloved family sitcom. She also starred in some Hallmark movies. Years later, after Jodie was all grown up, she reprised her role on the Netflix revival series Fuller House.

At the time of Jodie’s birth, both of her biological parents were incarcerated. Her original mother was a struggling addict. Her father was killed in a prison riot before Jodie ever had the chance to meet him. Recently, she made an appearance on Olivia Jade’s ‘Conversations’ podcast and opened up a lot about her life. “My dad, Sam, my adopted dad, his ex-wife who he had three adult kids with when they adopted me, she was my biological father’s aunt,” Jodie explained.

Janice was his second wife and they were hoping to start a family but were having troubles with conception. Because of her original parents’ circumstances, Jodie was in dire need of a family and Sam and Janice wanted a child of their own and so, fates aligned and roughly one year later, the adoption was finalized.

The adoption began fostering feelings of hurt and rejection. In her younger years, she used to think “‘Oh, something was wrong with me.’ There’s this point in your life where you finally kind of realize what happened,” Sweetin said. “That it no longer becomes something about you, that it’s like, ‘Oh, I wasn’t wanted.’ ”

Intrafamily adoptions are incredibly common and even preferred. An intrafamily adoption is a specific type of adoption that allows a family member to adopt a child. This is a streamlined kind of adoption. “People don’t really talk about it, because I think there’s this weird sense of shame, if there’s an interfamily adoption,” Jodie said.

Having resolved some of her emotions around adoption, currently Sweetin says, “They actually made the healthiest decision for me by allowing me to be adopted by another family that could provide better.”

Not Reality, Scripted

There were a bunch of adoptee reunion programs on TV in the 1990s. I think seeing these really made my adoptee mom wish for a reunion of her own. It was not to be. Even as Tennessee was turning down her request for her adoption file, they broke her heart by telling her that her mother has died several years earlier.

As today’s story reveals, you really can’t believe what you see on these programs.

In early 2020 pre-COVID, I was contacted by a TV producer asking if I would be interested in being on a show. I won’t give the name, but it’s a show about finding lost family members. I immediately knew it was probably about my bio mom or dad.

I agreed, a little out of curiosity, but mostly because they offered me $4000 to be on the show and an all-expenses paid vacation to LA for filming.

Sure enough, it was my mother. She put forth this sob story. She was 15 (which I already knew) and that she felt like she had to give me up, in order to escape shame and disownment from friends and family. Also that her boyfriend pushed her to do it. She said, she always wanted to find me – blah blah blah. I felt completely awkward doing this around cameras.

I found out that ALL reality shows, even the feel-good ones, are SUPER scripted, and the producers kept trying to feed me lines to say, like “I’ve waited for this moment all my life.” At this time in my life, I really couldn’t care less about finding my biological family and had negative feelings about my firth mom, so I don’t think I played the “grateful daughter” role that they wanted. Anyways, the show ends and I go back to my life. I got my biological mom’s info and we text a few times a year.

I was just notified that the show will be airing in the summer, and I have had a lot of anxiety over it. I cannot shake the feeling that none of this was necessary and that it was all for show, and that my biological mom did this to give the world an emotional story to make herself feel better.

There was absolutely NO reason she needed to go on national television to find me. For one, I have researched, and closed adoption files can be accessed by the biological mother, if she goes through the proper steps. She could’ve found my adoptive parent’s information and gone from there. It’s also literally 2022 (actually it was 2020 at the time but still).

Everyone is taking Ancestry DNA tests. She could’ve spent 60 bucks to get a 23 and Me test and found out that I’m already in the data base. I just feel like she completely went to the extremes to do this and put our personal business out there for the world. What if I am portrayed as being an ungrateful bitch or something ?Or future employers search for my name and find the episode!!

One commenter noted – I hear you on the “reality” shows. I also did a pilot many years ago in which they wanted me to react a certain way, so did my daughter. Basically they’re all fake (not real at all). As for the biological mom, everyone is different in how they come to the decision, and what they do with it. She could’ve been looking for her 15 min of fame, or possibly she did feel so pressured and now finally felt like it was time to stand up to those who pressured her.

And yet another added – or she wanted the money.