Learned about this book reading the December issue of New Mexico Magazine. When I read it is a riveting mystery underscoring the complexities around the adoption of Indigenous children by non-Indigenous parents – I had to know more !!
I found this at ReadingReality.net – LINK>Book Review. From that I had to google a definition for bilagáana. I learned that is an early Navajo term for white American male. My in-laws were fond of books by Tony Hillerman. He died in 2008. Anne is his daughter.
Joe Leaphorn, a retired Navajo Tribal Police detective, discovers that his client’s adoption was questionable, and her adoptive family not what they seem.
From the review – “Exploring the emotionally complex issues of adoption of Indigenous children by non-native parents, Anne Hillerman delivers another thought-provoking, gripping mystery that brings to life the vivid terrain of the American Southwest, its people, and the lore and traditions that make it distinct.”
I have mentioned CPS (Child Protective Services) frequently in this blog. They are part of the government that removes children from what are deemed unsafe environments. I have documented frequently that their actions are not always as sterling as most citizens might believe.
Today, it was suggested that I take a look at LINK>Dr Ross Greene who is a clinical psychologist. He has been working with children and families for over 30 years. His influential work is widely known throughout the world.
In the perspectives of Dr Greene, CPS stands for LINK>Collaborative & Proactive Solutions. Many adoptive parents find themselves dealing with a traumatized adoptee who exhibits challenging behaviors. This is probably one of the main reasons that hopeful adoptive parents prefer to adopt an infant who may present less already baked in behaviors.
Dr Greene choses not to emphasize the kids’ challenging behaviors – whether it’s whining, pouting, sulking, withdrawing, crying, screaming, swearing, hitting, spitting, biting, or worse. He prefers to look at how they’re expressing the fact that there are expectations they’re having difficulty meeting. In the CPS model, those unmet expectations are referred to as unsolved problems. The goal is to solve those problems, rather than trying to modify the child’s behavior by using rewards and punishments.
The goal in CPS is to foster a problem-solving, collaborative partnership between adults and kids by engaging kids in solving the problems that affect their lives. The CPS model is non-punitive and non-adversarial. This decreases the likelihood of conflict, enhances relationships and improves communication within the family.
The skills developed include empathy, appreciating how one’s behavior is affecting others, resolving disagreements in ways that do not involve conflict, taking another’s perspective, and honesty. His book LINK>Raising Human Beings details how to create a collaborative partnership with your child.
I saw a mention of this book and thought I’d look into it. At one time, I had hoped to publish a memoir about my own root journey due to having two adoptee parents. I don’t know if he self-funded his publication of this, many do. Self-funding is not my plan after hearing some friend’s own stories about their own attempts.
In a LINK>speech in Connecticut regarding SB 113, Stedfast said – The family of an adopted person feels the impact of “not knowing” just as strongly. Knowing there is information about me on file that I am not entitled to is not right in America. Also – We have missed many decades of time together that cannot be replaced. (blogger’s note – I can relate to all of that.)
Here is a LINK>to reviews for this book at Amazon. They are all generally good. Most focus on the music of that era. Stedfast was born in 1953, I was born in 1954. Music was a huge part of my growing up years (still is an important part of my life today) though I didn’t rub elbows with the more famous groups like he did. The closest I came was, for a time, hanging out with Ingrid Berry (daughter of Chuck) and the Joint Jumpers. Really I was there more to dance to the band’s music than hang out with her but she was with the band and kindly tolerated my presence.
I’ve not actually read this book but learned about it today. It comes highly recommended by many and who have actually read it and is rated right up there with The Primal Wound and Twenty Things Adopted Kids Wish Their Adoptive Parents Knew. Also Being Adopted: The Lifelong Search for Self. So, I thought I should share it. I was happy to see that the book also covers Third Party Reproduction (in fact the book includes donor insemination and surrogacy).
Originally published in the 1980s, it was ahead of it’s time. One adoptee says, it is something that I wish my adoptive parents had read. The new edition has been updated and was released in 2019. The seven core issues are loss, rejection, guilt and shame, grief, identity, intimacy, and mastery/control.
One person familiar with this book said it was “A classic and foundational to the way I think about these issues and the importance of reform in adoption practices.”
At Amazon it is said – “the first conceptual framework of its kind to offer a unifying lens that was inclusive of all individuals touched by the adoption experience.” It is further noted that – “Attachment and trauma are integrated with the Seven Core Issues model to address and normalize the additional tasks individuals and families will encounter.” The book also claims to access “a range of perspectives including: multi-racial, LGBTQ, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, African-American, International,” as well as those that cover openness, search and reunion.
Penny Callan Partridge, Co-founder in 1973 of the Adoption Forum of Philadelphia, wrote – “For decades, I have been responding to these ‘seven core issues’ as an adopted person, as a parent by adoption, as a poet. Now I imagine myself as a therapist trying to help someone in the adoption constellation. I would definitely want this book close at hand.”
Another, Keith Silverstein, a voice actor and adoption advocate, noted – “As an adopted person, I’m very familiar with the seven core issues, both comprehensively and experientially. Yet even with my prior knowledge, there was a deeper understanding to be attained through the pages of this book. Having had the pleasure to work with and consider both Sharon and Allison my friends, I’ve seen first hand the passion they have for adoption and helping children find permanence. Their collective expertise, contained here, is, in my opinion, the gold standard for understanding and working towards permanence in adoption.”
I learned about this book, when I saw a poem posted by the author, Diane McConnell. She gave permission to share the poem saying – “you can do that (share the poem). Please use my name as I’m the author. It is also a copyrighted part in my book, so there’s that. It’s called No Returns Without Original Receipt (image above).
At Amazon, she writes regarding the book – Renewed courage after learning the final piece of my true heritage has overcome my life-long fear of telling my story. Every adoptee has the right, and many the need, to discover her or his true history, ancestry and identity. Knowledge gives power and confidence. With our truths, we can recover and grow stronger.
blogger’s note – I understand. While not an adoptee, as the child of 2 adoptees who died knowing next to nothing about their origins, I had a NEED to know our family’s true history, our ancestry and recover my own genetic identity.
I saw this recommended in my all things adoption group – “For adoptive parents: my adopted daughter asked me to read this recently. It has been really helpful to me, but also to our relationship. It gives us a framework for talking about how she feels and what she needs from me. I’ve learned so much, but there’s still so much to learn.”
Found this review in an interesting place – LINK>”nightlight Christian Adoptions.” Not a place I would normally think to look for any adoption insights. The review says that the author is an adoptee herself as well as a speaker and adoption trainer. She has written a book specifically about what adopted kids wished their parents knew. This list will give you amazing insights – whether you are an adoptive parent, an adoptee, or are considering adoption … and these insights can also apply to kids in the foster care system and foster parents.
Here’s the list of the 20 things –
1. I suffered a profound loss before I was adopted. You are not responsible. 2. I need to be taught that I have special needs arising from adoption loss, of which I need not be ashamed. 3. If I don’t grieve my loss, my ability to receive love from you and others will be hindered. 4. My unresolved grief may surface in anger toward you. 5. I need your help in grieving my loss. Teach me how to get in touch with my feelings about my adoption and then validate them. 6. Just because I don’t talk about my birth family doesn’t mean I don’t think about them. 7. I want you to take the initiative in opening conversations about my birth family. 8. I need to know the truth about my conception, birth, and family history, no matter how painful the details may be. 9. I’m afraid I was “given away” by my birth mother because I was a bad baby. I need you to help me dump my toxic shame. 10. I am afraid you will abandon me. 11. I may appear more “whole” than I actually am. I need your help to uncover the parts of myself that I keep hidden so I can integrate all the elements of my identity. 12. I need to gain a sense of personal power. 13. Please don’t say that I look or act just like you. I need you to acknowledge and celebrate our differences. 14. Let me be my own person, but don’t let me cut myself off from you. 15. Please respect my privacy regarding my adoption. Don’t tell other people without my consent. 16. Birthdays may be difficult for me. 17. Not knowing my full medical history can be distressing for me. 18. I am afraid I will be too much for you to handle. 19. When I act out my fears in obnoxious ways, please hang in there with me and respond wisely. 20. Even if I decide to search for my birth family, I will always want you to be my parents.
Not everyone (especially adoptees) are fans – “Eldridge is not an ally of adopted people! On one of her disturbing Facebook pages, she regularly deletes comments by adoptees, and blocks them if they dare to point out the nonsense she’s been sharing. I can see why adoptive parents would like her content.
When I thought the book I’d write would be a memoir, I read Giving Up The Ghost by Hilary Mantel. I am reminded of that with her recent passing. It is the only book by her, and maybe not the best known, that I have read by that author. She was only a couple of years older than I am now.
The relevancy of acknowledging her passing now is that Mantel suffered from endometriosis, which went long undiagnosed and instead, her infertility was assumed to be caused by her suffering a bad case of female overambition. Infertility often leads to adoption. Mantel did not adopt but she did remain childless and channeled her creativity into 17 books including the one I read as well as Every Day Is Mother’s Day, Vacant Possession and Beyond Black. Her ghost was from an encounter in her youth as described in that book which I read.
In a 2003 New York Times review of the Mantel book I read – LINK> Unsuited to Everything By Inga Clendinnen – it is noted – One ordinary morning when she was seven, she encountered a terrifying something ”as high as a child of 2” manifesting in the rough grass beyond the new house. ”Within the space of a thought” it was inside her, ”a body inside my body,” and ”grace . . . runs out of my body like liquid from a corpse.” Mantel acknowledges that after this event, she was always more or less ”ashamed and afraid.”
The ghosts of the never born, those babies lost in miscarriage, or those that die in infancy often haunt women who have those experiences. It can even become an inherited trauma as in the story LINK> Mothering Ghost Babies by Kao Kalia Yang. Her grandmother lost a daughter at 7 months of age to a sudden unexplained death. Her own mother was silent in the wake of all the ghost babies she delivered into the world. Her mother had six miscarriages, all little boys, all formed enough so the adults could see that they were baby boys, but born far too small, and sometimes too blue, and other times too wet with blood to survive.
Similarly, Yang’s baby died inside of her at nineteen weeks. My own daughter lost her first conceived baby that way. Like my daughter, she had to deliver a dead baby into the world. She notes that she thought back to her grandmother’s story, and that she was her mother’s love of the babies whose share of love she had taken fully and gratefully. She says, My baby was more light than substance. He was silent, but he sang a song full of sorrow.
Sometimes, a woman must give up the “ghost” of the child she will never have. I do not believe adoption is the way to attempt to replace the child a woman would have had. It often fails the “replacement” child because they are not the child the woman really wanted. And the adoptee fails the adoptive mother’s expectations of what her child should be. Women like Hilary Mantel who simply accept remaining childless (even if it is not what they wanted) should be appreciated compassionately.
I am attracted to tragic birthmother stories. That is what I feel that both of my biological genetic grandmothers were. So last night we watched the movie Maudie. It is the story of the Nova Scotia woman, Maud Lewis, who’s folk art which sold for nominal prices during her life and has skyrocketed into value since her death. I am attracted the her famous painting of the white cat with the sad face.
In the Hollywood romanticized version of her story, her husband Everett Lewis was not a social person and is known to have been was born at the “Poor Farm” in Marshalltown, Digby County. In the movie, he frequents an orphanage. It is unclear whether his mother was a resident or an employee at the Poor Farm, and nothing is known of his father. The movie depicts Maud and Everette Lewis as two misfits who found each other and married.
When Everett wants to have sex with Maud, is ostensibly there as his housekeeper but in living with him, there is only one bed in the house – his bed. She confesses to him that she once ended up pregnant, had a severely malformed baby who died and was buried while she was asleep. Later in the movie, her Aunt Ida who had partially taken care of Maud before she went to work for Everett but didn’t want to die with regrets, confesses that the baby was perfectly normal but that Maud’s brother Charles sold her to a rich couple because he did not believe Maud was capable of caring for her.
Later, Everett tracks down Maud’s daughter and takes her to see the girl but Maud only secretly looks at her hidden next to their car, outside of her house and isn’t willing to go to the girl. One gets the sense that she may have felt the daughter would reject her for her deformities, caused by juvenile rheumatoid arthritis (which was not treatable in the time period she was growing up). And that could be the true version – which is sad and tragic enough.
There is some dispute about the movie version compared to the actual true story and that would not be surprising as movies are meant to entertain. Everett is said to have been much worse towards Maud than the movie depicts him as being. The author, Lance Woolaver, visited Maud’s famously hand-decorated with her paintings house as a child and has been fascinated by her story all his life. He wrote a heavily researched 500 page book – Maud Lewis The Heart on the Door.
The book is described as a full-length biography including detailed accounts of her disabilities, due to a childhood battle with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis that twisted her hands and joints. Despite this deepening and painful affliction, she completed and sold thousands of bright pictures and Christmas cards from her little one-room house. Throughout her marriage to the illiterate fish peddler, she suffered from poverty and loneliness, yet triumphed over all with her brilliant, colorful and happy paintings. Everett Lewis was murdered after Maud’s death in 1970, on New Year’s Day of 1979 for his lockbox filled with money from sales of Maud’s pictures.
This author’s perspective on the tragedy of Maud Lewis as a birthmother was that as a young woman in Yarmouth, Maud fell in love with Emery Allen. Woolaver believes he was the love of Maud’s life. However, after she became pregnant, Allen abandoned her. He also believes there was no reconciliation between Maud and her daughter. Whether Maud believed the lie initially told her or not, it is said that she rejected her daughter, Catherine, when she reached out to know her mother saying that her child had been a boy who was born dead. A subsequent attempt by the daughter to contact her mother by letter also failed to bring them back together.
Catherine Dowley was born August 13, 1928 in Nova Scotia. She was not aware that she had been named for her mother, Maud Catherine Dowley. Later in life she did know that Maud was her original mother and that Mamie Crosby was her adoptive mother. Catherine’s visits to connect with Maud in Marshalltown upset Mamie, who like many adoptive mothers felt that she had been a loving and good mother to Catherine.
Catherine (with glasses) with her adoptive mother, Mamie Porter.
Catherine married Paul Muise in 1949 in Yarmouth county and several years after their marriage, they moved to Ontario. They were the parents of about 4 children. Catherine died before Lance Woolaver’s book was released.
Everett was know locally as a dirty old man who would take advantage of young women for sex. Maud may have known there was that aspect to him and sought to protect her daughter from predation. Just questions without answers such as those I have in my own parents’ adoption stories. Those that know have died with the answers I will never have.
A friend commented on a music video I posted to Facebook inspired by today’s full moon, known as the Wolf Moon, this – Unfortunately, that song always reminds me of the woman who shot her kids to be with a married man. This song was said to be one of her favorites. Yikes !! Talk about unintended consequences . . .
It does appear that my friend was at least correct that a natural mother (not the first time as the news goes in general) shot her own children and then made up a story to cover for the deed – She claimed she was carjacked on a rural road near Springfield by a strange man who shot her and the children. Upon arrival at the hospital, the oldest child, Cheryl who was age 7, was already dead. The youngest, Danny age 3 was paralyzed from the waist down. The second child, Christie age 8 had suffered a disabling stroke. The mother had been shot in the left forearm.
In 1973, she had married a man she met in high school. Her first child was born in 1974. The next in 1976 and the youngest in 1979. However the couple divorced in 1980 because the husband suspected the youngest child was not his but the product of an extramarital affair of his wife’s. The prosecution argued that the mother had shot her children, so she could continue her affair with a married man who did not want children.
Sometimes, a parent really is not fit to raise their children. In prison, the woman was diagnosed with narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial personality disorders and labeled a “deviant sociopath”. And the judge intends that he dies not intend for the mother to ever be released from prison in her lifetime. The two surviving children went on to live with the lead prosecutor and his wife, who adopted them in 1986. Prior to her arrest, the mother became pregnant with a fourth child. She gave birth to a girl, who was seized by the State of Oregon and adopted. That girl has appeared on national television saying that she regards her mother as “a monster.”
It’s not hard for me to be drawn into any adoption story. As a writer, I am of course aware of William Faulkner. As a result of disappointment in the initial rejection of his work, he became indifferent to publishers and boldly wrote his next novel in a much more experimental style. In describing the writing process for that work, Faulkner would later say, “One day I seemed to shut the door between me and all publisher’s addresses and book lists. I said to myself, ‘Now I can write’.”
But really, this blog is not actually about Faulkner but about a related adoptee, John Murry. The name Murry actually runs down a long line of Faulkner’s. William Faulkner’s father’s and brother’s first names. John Murry had been adopted by his adoptive parents by an agreement made before his birth. His biological mother was a Cherokee schoolgirl and his adoptive parents thought they couldn’t have children. Also not unusual in cases of adoption, his adoptive mother gave birth to a son a year later, who John was raised with as a brother for a period of time. While growing up in Tupelo, Mississippi, John’s relationship with his parents was troubled (also not unusual for adoptees).
With the birth of their biological son of more importance to them, John was eventually sent away to be raised by his grandmother. She was a first cousin of William Faulkner, who considered her to be like a sister to him. John Murry’s grandparents were related to the Faulkners – on both sides. Mississippi is that kind of place, he says. Murry often refers to Faulkner’s book, The Sound and the Fury. He says that his adoptive parents hoped to model him after a character, Quentin Compson, who appears in that book. John feels more identified with Quentin’s brother, Benjy. Quentin had gone to Harvard University. John says his adoptive parents gave little thought to the fact that Quentin commits suicide in that book.
Faulkner died 15 years before John Murry was born. His grandmother and Faulkner had been inseparable, and his grandfather was a pallbearer at Faulkner’s funeral. When Murry was growing up, his beloved grandmother told him that, despite the lack of blood lineage, he was “obnoxious” and “more like Bill than any of us”. Obnoxious was the ultimate compliment, he says – it meant he challenged authority and called out can’t.
So the character Murry relates to, Benjy, is labelled an “idiot” in the novel. Today that character would have been diagnosed as autistic like Murry was at the age of 32 (confirming his own instincts about who he was most like). He struggles. At times he is in control of all the stuff going on in his head; other times, paralyzed by it. “I have an eidetic memory,” (More commonly called a photographic memory.) He says, “I can remember conversations verbatim. I can hear multiple conversations at once too.” He’s not boasting. Many of his memories torture him. “I don’t want to remember some of these things.”
Not wanting to remember is unsurprising because his childhood was violent. Murry is phenomenally well read, for which he is thankful for one thing: the shelf-full of books his lawyer father gave him. “I was 10 years old, and he puts books out there for me to read like The Communist Manifesto and the Autobiography of Malcolm X – books he didn’t agree with.” Although his parents were set on him going to Harvard, he had other ideas. He chose to play music and compose songs (another way of telling stories).
Murry spent three weeks of his childhood in a host family’s home with other dysfunctional children (who were also being treated at a fundamentalist Christian rehabilitation center). There, he had his first sexual experience, which was being repeatedly gang raped by three older boys. He says they discussed killing Murry in front of him. “I want people to know if something like that happens to you, that violence is not something you bring upon yourself, just as I didn’t bring it upon myself. I was the victim of it.” He blames a later heroin addiction that almost killed him to that time he spent in that Christian rehab as a youngster. “I think the thing that led to heroin was having to repeat again and again, ‘I am powerless over drugs and alcohol, and only Jesus Christ can save me from that’.”
Giving up drugs and leaving America in a move to Ireland changed everything for Murry. Albert Camus is quoted by Murry as saying, “The first thing a person has to do in life is to decide whether or not to take their own life and once they’ve done that they can choose to live. I don’t want to die – I know that now. I slowly realized my perspective on things has changed. I’ve changed.” I recently completed reading Camus’ book The Plague (I know, a perverse choice in a time of pandemic perhaps but actually enlightening as regards the behavior of people under such extreme circumstances which it seems changes little over time).
John Murry’s story is sadly typical of many adoptees who have a higher rate of suicide, dysfunctional relationships, drug use and are more likely to be victims of abuse.
Missing Mom 