Yesterday’s Rant

The rant I didn’t share yesterday but don’t take that or my image above to mean I didn’t and still don’t agree 100% with her perspective. From one all things adoption group – which has really been informative for me since 2017, when I first learned the truths of my own parents’ adoptions.

This group has helped dozens of moms get their babies back from hopeful adoptive parents. Most are simple revocations. Far too many have led to long drawn out court battles across state lines. Thankfully, we have generous members who have allowed us to help moms and dads fight.

These cases are agony for parents and babies. I never feel sympathy for the hopeful adoptive parents AKA as kidnappers for several reasons. One, they knew the risks going in. Two, they shouldn’t be so damn happy to take a baby out of their desperate parents’ arms. I’m not putting parents on a pedestal but I know the desperation that leads to relinquishing in the first place. Third, they ignore revocations and fight like hell to keep baby. We’ve helped five dads whose babies were placed for adoption without their consent.

I’m not the parent in any of these cases but during an ongoing “case” it consumes my thoughts. I wonder how hopeful adoptive parents can be so selfish. I wonder how some of them are so wealthy but use their wealth to fight to keep someone else’s child. So many in the cases we have helped with have been in financial positions to do so much good in the world but they are doing damage.

I struggle with understanding such selfishness. It crosses into evil. Yet, if cases like these hit the press, it’s the hopeful adoptive parents with all the sympathy. Natural parents are villains and not even because they signed in the first place, but because they are poor.

I can’t fathom how you look at someone during the lowest point in their life, when they feel desperate enough to give away their own child and take said child vs offering to help.

We look at every single profile when we receive join requests. I struggle with the constant “hoping to adopt” and GoFundMe’s posts asking for money to adopt. Yet, this group has existed for 9 years and those same people won’t buy a pacifier off a baby registry or donate a $1. WTF is a $1?

I believe in being a good human and baby buying isn’t it. Lusting after a baby isn’t it either.

Happy Endings

Christopher Emanuel, a Black father from South Carolina whose daughter was adopted without him knowing, has finally gained full custody after an intense court battle. Since then, he has also founded an organization called the Sky Is The Limit Foundation to help other fathers who are going through the same ordeal.

In 2014, Emanuel said his girlfriend, who is white and whose family did not approve of their relationship, placed their newborn daughter Skylar for adoption without his permission. “I was lost, man, I was hurt, I was confused because I wanted to insure that I could be there for my child,” he said.

Since Emanuel knew that his girlfriend was pregnant, he listed himself on February 4, 2014 on the Responsible Fatherhood Registry, a South Carolina database for those who fathered a child but were not married. With that effort, he was supposed to be notified if the child was put up for adoption. But when a family filed a motion to adopt Skylar on February 19, 2014, Emanuel wasn’t informed.

The adoptive family, who were from San Diego, were able to adopt Skylar even though they’re from another state due to a South Carolina law that allows out-of-state adoptions under special circumstances, including when a child is biracial. Emanuel endured a lengthy court to dispute the adoption. He said at some point, he even considered just adopting his own daughter back as he almost lost hope he would see her again.

After a year, a judge sided with Emanuel as court records clearly showed his paternal rights were terminated without his permission. He was then granted sole custody of his daughter.

Emanuel’s non-profit organization empowers, educates, and promotes responsible fatherhood through seminars and one-on-one counseling. The range of services provided includes parental development, character development, legal guidance, and registry assistance for adoption. Through the responses from social media, it has become very obvious that there is a need in our communities for such a service. The positive results from such father-to-child connection and proper parenting are a reduction in teen pregnancies, fewer behavioral problems, and continuation of schooling at the high school level.

The Battle Unwed Fathers Face

It’s not unusual for me to be short on time – especially when I have to go out and do the weekly grocery shopping. However, this is an important story. I am aware of other “unwed” fathers who have fought successfully to retrieve their children from adoptive parents. It is a lengthy battle and expensive. I don’t know if racial bias in our justice system is a factor in this case but I wouldn’t be at all surprised, if it was.

You an read the complete story at this LINK>Tampa father fights for daughter after she was given up for adoption without his permission. Some excerpts and details. His daughter, the baby he loved from the day she was born, is now five years old. “I’m her father. Her real father. I’m not trying to adopt her. I’m her father,” Ulysess Carwise said.

Carwise is fighting for his daughter after an adoption agency took her two days after she was born without his knowledge or consent. His case reveals the battle unwed fathers can face over parental rights, who determines what’s best for a child, and the Florida laws that allow this to happen.

The adoption agency, Bethany Christian Services, and prospective adoptive parents referred to only as Katrina and William Doe in court records, took Carwise to court in Orange County to terminate his parental rights, arguing he had abandoned his daughter because he did not financially support her while she was not in his custody. Carwise’s rights were not terminated. But his daughter stayed with Katrina and Willian while they filed an appeal. As months turned into years, his little girl has grown more attached to the only family and home she has known. “Now she thinks they are her parents,” Carwise said of the prospective adoptive parents.

The prospective adoptive parents then filed a new lawsuit in Hillsborough County this year, another petition to terminate his parental rights. “It’s just getting difficult. Ok? It’s getting real hard,” Carwise said, overwhelmed with emotion. “That’s the first time it hit me hard. I’ve been like fighting these people, fighting these people.” One of his younger sisters, Rosalyn Green, has stood beside her brother as he fights for his daughter. “It’s a huge eye-opener,” she said. “That the law would allow these people to literally, legally, take someone else’s child.” Carwise plans to live in Green’s house when he gets custody of his daughter. “He has the support that he needs to take care of this child,” Green said. That includes the support of his 26-year-old daughter, who he raised as a single father.

The Goldfinch

Patterns speak to human beings. Watching the movie, The Goldfinch, built around a real painting by a Dutch artist who tragically lost his life at the age of 32 in an explosion in Delft in 1654, sent me on a journey through my own relationship with this bird and it connects to both my mom’s adoptive mother and my in-laws and this bird. Our Goldfinches are much more brightly colored than the one in this painting.

I didn’t know what those yellow blobs on the bushes were until my grandmother visited me and drew my attention to them. She had stayed the week hosted by my in-laws which provided her with more comfortable accommodations than I could. I was driving her to visit her friends in Joplin but we had stopped in Branson and she wanted to buy my in-laws a thank you gift. She selected a pair of Goldfinches and said they reminded her of the two lovebirds. She had seen expressions of love between my two in-law’s during her week stay. Interestingly, though I was already married to my husband, she bought a single Goldfinch to give to me. Strange that I do not at this moment know where my own is.

And so last night I was reflecting on why my grandmother only gave me a single bird but my in-laws a pair. It was as if she was giving them her seal of approval for in essence “adopting” me into their family. My in-laws, the parents of 3 boys treated me as the daughter they never had. They stood by me during a legal tussle with my ex-employer going with me to the sheriff’s office to help me retrieve the car (it wasn’t free and clear but had a lien on it making it officially not mine for my ex-employer to take). My dad was on the board of the credit union I had borrowed from. When I called my mom about my trouble, she could only say to me, “Don’t let your dad find out.” My in-laws also went with me to the hearing the in judge’s chamber. Just one example out of many of their kindness and support for me as their adopted daughter.

I reflect on my own mother. In the movie, all 3 of the main young people depicted had lost their mothers, just as both of my own natural grandmothers had. Like the bird in the painting, my mom was trapped by the fact of her adoption. Prevented from knowing the true details of what happened to her by the sealed adoption file the state of Tennessee refused to give her. Details that I now know, that would have done no harm at the time she asked for it because her natural mother and natural father were both dead but she could have known aunts and uncles who could have told her about her mother and half-siblings on her father’s side. Seeing the photo of her mother holding her for the last time would have brought her so much peace. My mom struggled with body image because she could not achieve her adoptive mother’s trim form but my mom had the genetic big boned body of her natural mother.

I believe my mom’s adoptive parents would have sent her off to have and give me up for adoption when she turned up pregnant, unwed, a high school student had my dad’s adoptive parents not intervened to get them married. In my own particularly defiant manner, I chose to be born on my mom’s adoptive parents’ wedding anniversary. My adoptive maternal grandmother was a painter. Today I have a painting of a large oak tree in Autumn hanging on our wall that my grandmother painted. She also painted an oval bust of my infant self and this hung on her own bedroom wall all the years I remember her living.

Therefore, I was close to my grandmother. She once took me to England with her. During the visit that caused her to buy the Goldfinch figurines, the Wild Azaleas were blooming. She decked herself out for a portrait of herself surrounded by them. She had grown up in rural Missouri and her visit here was a trip down the memory lane of her own origins. We even visited her childhood home as I drove her to visit her friends. That photo of my grandmother started my own tradition of taking photos on Mother’s Day and me and my boys.

Oh, the patterns of our lives and how these can inform our hearts at the most surprising kind of emotional trigger, like watching a movie . . . and then seeing the movie of our life reflected back to us.