Should I Tell ?

Not saying my image is “the” necklace but it is a lovely tradition to share.

Today’s story (not my own) –

My cousin was adopted out during the Baby Scoop Era and my family is Catholic. She’s 15 yrs older than me and she found us when I was a tween (so like 30 yrs ago). She was very close to her adoptive dad, but not as much with her adoptive mother. They’ve both passed now, and she is close now with us, her birth family including her birth Mom.

So my question is… my Grandma got all her female grandchildren a necklace for our parents to give us at high school graduation. We have a “cousins chat group” which she is in, and I recently posted a pic of the necklace and included her saying that I found one online and I’d love to send her one too because Grandma would want her to have it. She seemed really thankful and said she loved it.

So here’s the thing – my Aunt (her birth Mom, who may have already told her this) told me not too long ago that my Grandma forbid my Aunt to hold her as a newborn and refused to hold her herself, as she knew if they did they’d never be able to let her go. Do I tell her this?? Or is this really overstepping, and just let her enjoy her “cousin necklace”? I just love her so much and want her to know how much her natural family loves her, especially now that her adoptive family is gone.

An adoptee answers – I would not tell her that, it can only bring hurt.

Another agrees but with exceptions – I wouldn’t voluntarily tell her that. But if she asks difficult questions or wants to have all info, even hard to hear info revealed to her, tell her the truth, every time.

An adult adoptee elaborates – I don’t think it’s necessary to say at all, personally, but also it seems completely unrelated to this specific context of giving her the necklace. Like, if the point is to bring her in and include her in a family tradition, why turn around and also tell her “btw granny said/did some awful things when you were born. but she’d want you to have this!” ? It just seems like it would negate the sentiment of the gift – you’d be including her and also othering her at the same time.

Then, there was this sad story – My grandma loves to bring up the fact that my mom dropped me off when I was 2 days old and that my father left the state because “he would’ve killed you, if he stuck around”. There really is no reason to share that information with me. I know about my trauma and have a lot of specific events and memories. Adding more just doesn’t….make sense. Seems like adding salt to the wound.

More from another adoptee – My siblings and cousins know a lot more about my family situation than I do as it’s their lived experience. My cousin and I, in particular, have an extremely close relationship and I believe her when she tells me stories about our family. That said, she does not tell me things that would be personally hurtful to me that she may have overheard. We had this discussion and she asked me, “Do you want to know EVERYTHING?” So I got the watered down version sans quotes. I do know it was my grandmother who insisted I be relinquished. I know how she treated my mother when she was pregnant with me and afterwards. I really don’t need to know more than that.

Personally, I would not share that with her UNLESS she were to ask you, “Do you know if my mother and grandmother ever held me?” And then I would HEAVILY stress that the reason they didn’t was because they loved her so much and knew they would never be able to let her go. Please let her enjoy the cousin necklace and THANK YOU for getting her her own cousin necklace and including her in the group chat.

So many have similar experiences, like this one – My grandparents refused to see me and my mother did not hold me, but she would come look at me. My grandparents couldn’t bring themselves to look at me because I would be real. If I was real then they couldn’t give me away. It is really a conversation that needs to be had between her and her mother. It’s not really a conversation that anyone else can accurately translate.

J.A.M.E.S. Inc

Today, I learned about J.A.M.E.S. Inc. The letters stand for Just About Mothers Excelling in School. They are a Tulsa-based nonprofit in Oklahoma.

Their mission is to lead expecting and parenting adolescents to self sufficiency. From the beginning, the agency has served male and female prospective young parents. 70 % of their clients are Black, while the others are white, Native American or Hispanic. The assistance J.A.M.E.S. Inc offers varies with their client’s need.

Three events in executive director Alisa Bell’s journey led to her starting and leading the organization. The first was a decision to embrace single motherhood. Bell welcomed her first child, daughter, Latoya, at 15. She was then a student at Tulsa’s Margaret Hudson School that provided education, counseling and healthcare of school-age mothers and child care for their infants. LINK>It was announced in 2017 that the school would close due to financial problems stemming from the loss of state and Tulsa Area United Way funding. For 50 years, they had helped teenage mothers stay in school and raise their kids.

In the course of juggling baby formula, diapers and classes at school, the shortcomings of her children’s father became more apparent to Alisa. “He was on drugs all the time,” Bell recalls. “And the mental health challenges and dysfunction of his family stunned me.” So, she fled their household. At 19, Bell was a single mom of two (her son, James Deandre King, had been born four years after her daughter).

“For pregnant and parenting teens without support, this means when school isn’t convenient or isn’t engaging, they quit. I did not want to be that person,” she said. When she was 23 and James was 5, Bell enrolled at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah. The sentiment about young mothers was “if we can just get them through high school, that’s the best we can do,” she recalls. “So, I went to college and saw opportunities on the campus that nobody was telling people about.”

“My original thought was to develop a program to give scholarships to young mothers,” Bell said. In her first year of operation, she gave away one scholarship and focused on raising more money. But in the second year, there were no scholarship applicants. At that stage, she realized that giving grants was only part of the solution for young mothers. They also severely needed mentoring and education about the options available to them, and why they were worth pursuing.

In May 1998, to distance James from the challenges faced in high school, Bell sought the assistance of his paternal grandparents, where he lived briefly. While there, James and his cousin, Darell Steven King, who were both 14 years old, were involved in an altercation that escalated to a handgun being used. Darell fired several shots, one of which struck James in the head and he was now dead.

The following year, she entered graduate school. In a grant writing class, she had an assignment to come up with a plan for a nonprofit. “Out of nowhere, I wrote down the name of an organization: Just About Mothers Excelling in School. (J.A.M.E.S., Inc.),” Bell recalls. “From that day to this day, I have been trying to give James’ life.”

The organization was established in 2006 to encourage and support higher educational aspirations among expecting and parenting teens and adolescents (up to age 24). An early parent herself, Ms. Bell recognized that completion of secondary education alone was unlikely to be enough to provide young parents with the opportunities they desired for themselves and their children. That’s why J.A.M.E.S., Inc. does more. Mental health is a major factor for young parents and families. The focus of the organization expanded in 2014 to provide mental health services, including case management, to its client population. They also include a young parent advisory board.

You can read more about Alisa Bell’s life and efforts here >LINK.

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.