Making Lemonade

So the worst has already happened and circumstances, situations, etc have separated a mother and her child. Now what ?

Family reunification recognizes a shared genetic connection and shared family history.

Though I spent over 60 years in total ignorance of my family’s true origins and heritage, learning about it now has made all of the difference in my sense of wholeness.

It may be that some children will be better supported by “substitute” parents than their original parents are able to accomplish. I will not deny that. But for, I would not even exist. That is a fact I can’t get around and so even though I’ve become very informed about the effects and impacts of adoption on any adoptee, I still know that it is the reality within my family and the outcomes have thankfully been good for each of those children who ended up with adoptive parents.

I now have aunts and cousins who share that genetic connection with me. While I can’t ever know the family history first hand, these have been able to share with me details of family characteristics over time. It is better than having nothing.

Forbidden Words

One can be human and do really bad/evil things. This is a sad truth of reality and society. There is a sickness in men, sadly. It is as old as humankind and it takes what it wants whether the object of its passion is willing or not. We give that behavior names, rape, incest.

It becomes complicated when that bad behavior results in the conception of a child. In abortion language there is often an exception for this situation that allows a women to take away the physical memory embodied as a fetus and go on with her life. Of course, she will never forget regardless.

Some of these “results” end up being adopted. Some adoptees have such an unfortunate experience that they wish they had been aborted but not all adoptees feel that way. In fact, there is no one size fits all when it comes to adoption experiences.

Perpetrators are real people with real problems who do something that healthy people cannot justify. They may have stressors in their life. These may cause them to act out in inappropriate and inexcusable ways. Pretending that men who commit rape are born broken and inhuman takes away the responsibility they should still bear for their actions.

Anyone conceived in rape or incest must embrace their own inherent self-worth and insist upon their human rights. Know this – what any ancestor did whenever they did that whether it is directly related to a subsequent person or not – this is not who we are individually.

At one time, such an event would have labeled the result a bad seed with flawed genes. While it is true, we inherit much from our genetic foundation, we also have the free will to make of our own selves what we will.

The #MeToo movement is an effort to bring sexual violence out into the light of awareness so that we can begin to understand how such things happen and why such behavior is wrong and how all of us can do better.

This is not a blog for or against abortion. It is a plea to give all people, including adoptees regardless of their origin story, human rights – dignity, heritage, truth.

Always A Child

My Mom After Adoption

Children grow up into adults. That is their only real occupation through almost 20 years of life. Some children have to grow up early. My mom gave birth to me at the age of 16. I married at the age of 18 and had my first child at 19.

When I look at my 18 year old son, I can’t imagine him married with a child. He is intelligent and has an abundance of common sense but as his mother, he is still a bit of a child to me, though the maturing is obviously taking hold and he spends much of his daily waking life doing men’s work with his dad on our farm.

There is a subset of humanity that is never allowed to grow up – adoptees. Certainly, they pile on the years and mature, just like any other human being but society and governmental agencies treat them as though they were still a child.

Why do I say this ? Because they are denied rights that any other citizen takes for granted. When their adoption is decreed by a court of law, their identity is stolen away from them. Often, their name is changed and their original birth certificate is amended to make it appear that their adoptive parents actually gave birth to them. Sometimes, even the place where they were born is changed.

Then, when they become an adult at 18 or 21 years of age and because they know they were adopted (or for some who were never told the truth and take a DNA test and receive the unpleasant and sudden surprise that they do not derive their origins from the people they believed were the source), when they attempt to learn the truth of their identity, origins and heritage – they are denied the very normal and simple human right of knowing who they really are.

It is time for the LIES to end and for ALL states in this country (United States of America) to open their files to the adults who were once a child that was adopted by strangers to raise as their own.

Human Dignity

It has been amazing for me to learn how adoptees are treated as somehow LESS THAN other citizens in this country.

It isn’t a wonder to me that adult adoptees simply want self-determination and autonomy. They yearn for a respectful and inclusive definition of family – where their inclusively defined (original and adoptive) family is seen as a strength rather than
a weakness. It isn’t too much to ask that they be allowed transparency and truth.

Policies related to adopted person should be based on evidence and best practices that are healthy for adult adoptees and respectful of their human rights. They wish to be treated with dignity and as having human worth.

How is it that adoptees never have a say within the adoption system ? That they are not considered the “owners” of their own birth experience.

A child’s human rights include –
the preservation of their biological family whenever possible, information related to their heritage and identifying family information that will provide accurate medical health histories.

At a minimum, there should be unrestricted adult adoptee access to their own original birth certificates.

It is mystifying to me that there is such a lack of support for an adoptee to make sense of their personal diversity. I believe that is because in a predominantly non-adopted society, people simply don’t understand how it feels, how vexing this hidden and/or false identity is for a mature person.

My mom was offered the most minimal non-identifying information from her adoption file, often referred to as the “censored records”. It was of no practical use to her and why is it that the powers that be do not honor a citizen’s right to information that is personally their own ?

Just recently the state of New York finally decided to do what is just and fair by adult adoptees. Too many states continue to hide behind bureaucratic policies that I judge to be no more than bureaucratic laziness.

Preserving Stuff For The Future

My husband has a rare surname and before we had our oldest son the details of his family tree began to be filled in and he was able to trace his family back to the 1400s. I was a bit envious of that because I didn’t know my own. His mother took an interest in her husband’s grandmother receiving a gravestone because she was unmarked in a pauper’s grave. The result includes an oval image of her and a listing of genealogy. Our oldest son in named after her husband.

I suppose I value family heritage so much because my own was a black hole, a void, beyond my parents who were both adopted. After I was certain who all four of my original grandparents actually were, I wrote a family saga following their stories down to my parents and through a brief summary of my self and my sisters’ lives and children. Someday, I’ll complete honest family trees for myself on Ancestry.

My mom did some pretty complete family trees at Ancestry from the adoptive grandparents lines but she had to quit because it just wasn’t real to her. Ancestry is about DNA and our family does not have those families DNA. It once took several messages from me to finally convince a woman there that I wasn’t related to her, that yes he was my dad but no we were not related. He was adopted. I want to set the record straight in my lifetime.

When I wrote up and printed 10 copies of that family saga, I was in effect saying – “This is who I was, please remember me and know I loved you enough even before you were born to want this information accessible to you.” There is information about the ancestor’s family lines, important places and events as well as old family photos I have obtained from genetic cousins. I didn’t want our family history lost again, if I should pass away soon.

When we discover an honest connection to a genetic relation, like I found with my Aunt Deborah who died young, it is an exciting moment – or how my paternal grandfather loved the sea and fishing, just like my Pisces born dad who took his first breath at Ocean Beach CA and loved all those things too.

For much of an adult adoptees’ life, questions such as those posed to my parents about their own birth or earliest moments on Earth, can only be answered with “I don’t know, I’m adopted.” Before I knew anything, that is what I answered when medical history questions asked about my grandparents. “We don’t know, we were both adopted.” is how my mom answered me, when I asked what our heritage was – from what countries did our family descend ?

For most people, asking questions about appearance related to heredity or about various skills or interests are simply casual and thoughtless conversation starters but to an adoptee, each question of that sort is a reminder of what they don’t know about their own self.

An adoptee doesn’t know if something about their own self was learned from their adoptive parents, inherited from their original parents or is unique to them somehow – there is a huge chunk of information missing from the equation – if their adoption was closed and they have not yet reunited with original family.

Ancestry

Julie Sue Dittmer Hart
born as Frances Irene Moore

My mom had her DNA tested at Ancestry. I know what she was trying to do, she was hoping to uncover someone she was actually genetically related to. I had mine tested too and over the last year plus it has paid off for me in my search for genetic relatives.

My mom diligently tried to create family trees based on my adoptive grandparents. She admitted to me before she died that she just had to stop. It wasn’t “real” to her. I understand.

A little over a year ago, a writer’s guild friend quizzed me. If the adoptive family is a good one (and both of my parents were thus blessed), why does it matter ? And I explained to her the loss of heritage and knowing who and from where one’s roots are sourced. She understood and continues to encourage me to get my book finished (and yes, I am working on one).

So it happened in the last week or so, my mom turned up on a family tree at Ancestry that made absolutely no sense to me. So I reached out to the person responsible for it. Just last night she cleared up the mystery and the connection for me – the “relationship” is with my dad’s adoptive mom.

Yet, what she wrote to me in conclusion (“Therefore I would be related to you. Unless you are adopted.”) had me opening up to her in reply. “BOTH of my parents were adopted. So in truth, you are NOT related to my dad either nor would I be” related to you.

It DOES matter. I now know I have more than a bit of Scottish and Irish in me, quite a bit of Danish, a smidgen of Neanderthal and Ashkenazi Jew and though it is true that DNA testing (including at 23 and Me) has informed me about all of that, the VALUE goes beyond all that. It is that when I match a genetic relative who would not know me from Adam, I have credibility now.

Denying Reality

Our family had a very personal experience this week related to DNA that I won’t really go into with specifics here.

My point being that because of inexpensive DNA testing and the matching sites such as Ancestry or 23 and Me, pretending something that isn’t true is really a short sighted decision.

Because of my parents adoptions and this journey of discovery I have been upon, I have read more than one book about people who got unexpected and life-shattering discoveries when they had their DNA tested. Some of these persons had been adopted, one was believed to be the child who had been stolen from the hospital shortly after birth but was actually a child abandoned on a sidewalk. Another one had believed in a strong Jewish heritage from her father and discovered with feelings of betrayal that she was conceived by donor sperm.

Honesty is the best policy even when being honest is somewhat painful. That was something I learned from my own parents as a child.

I am also grateful for that inexpensive DNA testing. As I have uncovered genetic relatives who never knew about me or I them because both of my parents were adopted – our shared genetic heritage convinces them I am actually “who” I say I am.

It is a brave new world thanks to technology and families now can be created where they were impossible before. For that, I will always be grateful.

Identity

We recently watched a Star Trek – The Next Generation episode titled “Family”. True I had seen it before but not when adoption was such a dominating concept in my imagination. Immediately, I thought – Worf was adopted. Of course, in this case it is obvious – Worf is Klingon and these “parents” are clearly Earth born humans. It is also obvious from their loving expressions that he matters deeply to them as a “son”.

My topic today began with reading an article in the February 2019 Science of Mind magazine titled “Real Radical Inclusion” by Rev Masando Hiraoka, who is Japanese-American according to his own revelation.

He writes – “In oneness, we do not lose our identity, we gain it back. We are given the beauty that we were born with and are able to see it again. There is an embrace that happens – not just an acceptance, but a full-on bear hug for ourselves, our skin, our heritage, our style, our height, our gender expression, our sexuality, our religion, our bodies, our abilities – our unique personhood in the world. We come to include it all. That’s radical inclusion.”

In finally discovering my original grandparents, I say that I am now whole +, because that personhood includes the adoptive parents for both of my parents, who I knew as childhood grandparents (and of course, the aunts, uncles and cousins I gained that way).

Not knowing our ancestry, robbed my family of some part of our identity. And while it wasn’t obvious to other people, it was felt by me, my entire life, until I was able to set it right again. Now when I think of grandparents – there are the “childhood” grandparents and there are the grandparents I now know my genetics came from.