Marketing Matters

We don’t watch commercial TV. I read about this in my all things adoption group the other day. Someone in my adoption group posted about this, so I went to the linked article. He wrote – My wife and I sometimes watch Shark Tank, and in one of the episodes, Barbara Corcoran mentions having an adopted daughter. I looked up more, and saw this article in INC, an excerpt –

“Attracting moms who wanted to give you their baby was exactly the same as writing a good real estate ad,” says Corcoran. “You needed a great top line, and my top line I used in every Pennysaver in the Catholic states was ‘I want your child to ski in the winter and spend summers at the beach.’ Sort of like the baby version of ‘views and lots of light,’ ” she says, laughing. “It’s all sales. I think I had 27 moms who wanted me to take their babies–and it’s not easy getting a baby in America.”

“You do what you gotta do,” says Corcoran. “It’s called sales.” Understandably, this does not sit well with adoptees. No one wants to think of anyone treating them like a marketable commodity.

It is rather well known at this time that there is only 1 “available for adoption” infant for every 40 couples wanting to adopt one. This is what drives all these Republican states to enact such strict abortion laws because as the Salvation Army told me when I was on my journey to discover my two adoptee parents’ original birth stories, after Roe v Wade, the Salvation Army had to close all of their homes for unwed mothers because they had none to serve.

It was not Corcoran’s ad writing skills that brought her 11 yr old daughter, Katie, to her. Corcoran’s adoption attorney called her one day and said she had found a birth mother who wanted to put her infant girl up for adoption–and needed an answer immediately. Corcoran said yes on the spot. “In the end, it was a relief to let it go. To let fate take charge,” she says. And this from a woman with a take-charge personality.

Much that she describes in this interview is familiar to me, as my husband and I have spent 30+ years in business together as entrepreneurs. It takes a high degrees of confidence and a tolerance for risk. For us, we have always had to know when to severely tighten our belts financially until things got better. So far, they always have. Though age is now weighing heavily on us, as my husband recently turned 70 and “technically” is retired from our business, which only means he is no longer taking a salary, not that he isn’t working all the time to bring some kind of income into our lives. We still have two dependents (one is almost 18 and the other is 21) and are not kicking either of our sons out of the house – these two houses on our farm are one each for each boy – rent free – as long as they want to live here. We really don’t mind. Who knows how long the 4 of us have together ? None of us is guaranteed a future regardless.

This how it was for my husband and I, we were forced into bootstrapping. It took us pretty far but we never really knew how to take that to the next step. “The best way to fund any company is bootstrapping. You spend your money smartly, because you don’t have enough. Every dime I had, I had to think about best use. It’s real money. It’s hard-earned money. It is born out of enormous hard work. That’s the kind of money you don’t lose so fast,” Barbara Corcoran says.

I Wish I Hadn’t

I wish, I wish, I wish…I wish I hadn’t adopted.

~ Donald Craig Peterson

Like a majority of families who’ve adopted children, I wasn’t mentally prepared for the surprises. You know, the chaos inside Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. The manipulation and triangulation inherent to attachment disorders. The invisible insanity associated with developmental trauma.

When the bad seemed destined to overshadow the good, I quietly questioned my decision – as well as my worth. It wasn’t exactly the wonderful life that I expected. What would have happened to your children if you hadn’t opened your home and your heart? If you hadn’t adopted? I’ve given that “what if” question serious thought more than once. The possibilities are dark – when envisioned through real stories of children that were never given a chance.

He goes on to detail what each of the 6 children he adopted would have experienced, at least as he imagines the not unbelievable outcomes for each because it is the fate and outcome for some children in the system. Clearly, he still believes in adoption. He admits – They were never perfect children and I was never the perfect parent. But together we meticulously and mindfully built a forever family in every sense of the word.

He writes – “My three youngest sons (22, 23 and 24) still feel safe after 20 years in my care and appreciate living under my roof. They desire independence yet aren’t ready to take on for the world. Someday perhaps.” And I am happy to read that his perspective on parenting is much like my husband’s and my own – we don’t care if our sons never leave their childhood home nor would we trap them here. We’ve said as much directly to them.

Donald Craig Peterson has stories to share about his successes as well as learning experiences in raising his six children to adulthood. It has been his goal to convey unconditional love throughout the years. He understands the ups and downs of learning challenges, special education, psychotropic medications, ADHD, Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, Bipolar Disorder, Reactive Attachment Disorder, sexual abuse, juvenile justice, residential placement and more. His blog is here: https://adoptingfaithafathersunconditionallove.org/.

Silenced Women

When I saw this graphic, it went straight to my heart like an arrow. My grandmothers, forced by circumstances to give up their first born, and in two cases only child (which includes a grandfather who never was given the benefit to know he had a son), to go on with their lives as though nothing happened.

I don’t think I’ll ever truly 100% get over it and I probably should not because adoption is still a thing that drives mothers and their babies apart. I now have an unflinching awareness of what it means to be adopted.

At almost 70 years old now, having to live through a full 6 decades before I knew the truths of my origins, I do fell as though I was born to re-connect the broken threads of my family’s beginnings, that I have somehow managed to fulfill my destiny in having been born at all.

In learning about my family’s ancestors, I also discovered what a miracle it was that in the mid-1950s, I was not given up for adoption, with my parents forced to suffer the same fate their own parents encountered. My teenage mother and my father only having just started on his university studies – both interrupted when I decided to take up residence in my mother’s womb.

My grandparents could not tell their own stories of loss that hurts for a lifetime because no one would have been sympathetic regarding their plight but for adult adoptees today, there is a growing awareness of the trauma and pain of being cut off from one’s roots and some are even choosing to attempt parenting when they had thought to give up their child and they are finding a lot of support in society all around them.

May the reform of attitudes continue to take over the dominant narrative that adoption saves babies and children from a worse fate.

It’s Complicated

I find myself in conversation with a diversity of people about a diversity of issues related to adoption and mother/child separations. I am always amazed at how many people have some such issue in their family and friend’s lives.

Even though I have had a radical change of heart about adoption due to learning about the wounds that causes, I also acknowledge that the issue is not simple but very complicated. There are times when children definitely need a safe and loving space to exist in. There are times, when knowing the circumstances, we can admit that adoption was better than the alternative.

But there always are alternatives and some are less damaging than others. Harder to arrive at is why people become wounded and messed up. Why they don’t do better. Why the children are often the ones to suffer the most.

Learning about all of the circumstances at play in my own family’s lives has given me an appreciation for the big picture and how things progress over time. I am in the midst of editing a new manuscript that I actually wrote the rough draft for six years ago and then events delayed my return to it.

At this point in the story, I am in heaven. And the topic of predestination and free will comes up between me and a trusted friend of the heart there. I think this perspective may be close to the truth of the matter and so, I share –

“Are you telling me that everything is preordained and that I had no choice in how my life unfolded?”

“Absolutely not. The nature of reality in this realm is that everything is adjusting instantaneously to every choice and circumstance that happens.”

What happens if different choices are made ?

“It would have all morphed and changed to suit new circumstances. In fact, there are layers upon layers of redundancies. There are trajectories and unfoldings that are the natural outcomes of current events and like your own micro circumstances it is all morphing and adjusting continuously. There are situations that, if they don’t occur, could delay your next lifetime. Other situations could speed up your return to Earth in another incarnation. We really don’t know the hour of our birth, just as we really don’t know the hour of our death; and yet, it is all completely natural.”

Though Life is so very complicated that any action we may take could be beneficial or detrimental regardless of the best of intentions, even knowing all that could possibly happen that we never considered, we act anyway – for not to act might bring some irreversible harm that could have been prevented.