The History of Adoption

She explains in LINK>Dame how the historical traumas of family separation have shaped contemporary adoption in the US. How infants and children are valued and for what purposes. And since I don’t believe in burying this country’s history of slavery, I was happy to see her highlight that “Many of America’s earliest relinquishing mothers were enslaved Black women whose children were often sold away from them.”

Or how about this history ? Native American mothers fled to the hills with their children and grandchildren to hide from government officials intent on sending the children to military-run boarding schools. Also in the 19th century, poor white mothers in eastern cities, many of them immigrants, struggled to care for their children due to poverty, widowhood, illness, or simply having more children than they had the capacity to parent. They surrendered them to foundling homes or institutions that labeled the children “orphans” despite the fact they had living parents.

Of course, Gretchen Sisson doesn’t neglect to mention the scandal of Georgia Tann of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society in Memphis (from whom my own mother was adopted).

A favorite adoptee writer, Tony Corsentino knows Sisson and by chance I received a notification – Relinquished, 1: The Adopter Hustle – from him about the book yesterday. He writes about the title of her book, that it is a verbal adjective for adoptees like him. He also notes that “In another sense, relinquishing parents are themselves relinquished: relegated, marginalized, generally voiceless in the joyful clamor that attends every new adoption.” He writes that – Gretchen notes in her book that “it is adopted and displaced people who have led movements for abolishing adoption as it is currently practiced.” He says further that “The book’s aim is to present the authentic voices of parents who have lost their children to adoption.”

Corsentino goes on to say – “. . . because its arguments are a crucial part of the case for reform and abolition of adoption, I regard this book as a landmark in the history of research on adoption, and one of the most valuable scholarly contributions to the struggle for adoptee justice in the entire history of that struggle.” In his essay, he shares an excerpt that makes the case that it is NOT either adoption or abortion. From pgs 63-64 of Sisson’s book – “women who’d recently had abortions found that none of them seriously considered adoption, mostly because they believed it would be too emotionally traumatic.”

“These feelings about adoption were equally held by focus groups of both “pro-choice” and “anti-abortion” women, all of whom considered adoption to be emotionally painful not just for mothers, but for the children who would be relinquished. In another study examining the decision-making of women who’d had an abortion, most of them were unequivocal in ruling out adoption, with one participant alluding to the flawed reasoning of anti-abortion advocates: I don’t want to give my child away to nobody, and I’m not … and that’s the part they don’t understand. I can’t just be bearing a child for 9 months, going through the sickness and then giving my child [away]. I can’t.“

Tony adds – “Our social world involves . . . Adoption agencies and hopeful adoptive parents (that )have become entrepreneurial; they hustle for birthparents.” “chasing pregnant people, luring them, seducing them.” They “use the techniques of search engine optimization to ensure that a wide range of phrases a person with an unplanned pregnancy might Google will call forth ads promoting relinquishment for adoption.”

Please DO read his entire essay !!

Why No Contact

Today’s story (not my own) – My adoptive mother keeps telling me that if my biological family wanted to contact me, they would have done that already, so clearly they’re not interested. I did have my biological brother reach out to me on and off a few years ago, but ultimately, he ghosted me. While I do see the logic that if they wanted to contact me they would have already, considering I’m 38 years old, at the same time I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Because one could say the same of an adoptee not getting in contact with her original mother. And there may have been lots of reasons why I haven’t made contact with her yet.

Anyway, my question is, would it necessarily mean you didn’t want to be contacted, if you haven’t been contacted already, and it’s decades later? I kind of want to contact my biological sister, but my adoptive parents have said clearly they don’t want to hear from me. I am 38 and I know they all could find my Facebook account, because that’s how my brother found me. (If I did contact anybody though, I’ve decided not to tell my adoptive parents.)

One woman who aged out of foster care noted – An adoptive parent repeatedly telling you your birth mother is not interested in contacting you, would make me more suspicious that she’s told her to stay away. I personally would not allow her to set that precedent for you.

One adoptee noted – and then there’s the fear that you will pick your biological family over your adoptive parents.

One adoptive parent said – I personally think that it doesn’t mean they’re not interested. They may very well just not want to come to you before you’re ready. They could just be waiting for you to reach out and even hoping that you do!

Blogger’s note – When I met the daughter of my mom’s paternal step-sister, she told me that when they visited Memphis (where my grandparents married and where my mom was taken from her mother into adoption), they would search the phone book for the surname Stark, which was my grandmother’s maiden name (clearly they knew that much). However, there were so many in the phone book with that last name, they didn’t know how to narrow down the choices to even try.

One mom who surrendered her child 43 years ago (often referred to as MOL or Mother of Loss) and finally reconnected with them only 2 years ago – agrees, yes fear, insecurity & selfishness !!! She says, I can’t with these adoptive parents!! They trigger me – they pass these negative feelings onto our children, which makes them feel OBLIGATED to regard their feelings towards their adoptive parents above their adoptee feelings. This is the main reason our children are afraid to search for us or even talk about us. And that is why adoptees are so conflicted about reaching out !!

Another mother of loss says – As old as you are, your mother was almost certainly strongly discouraged from contacting you, even after you turned 18, and she may have even been told that she was not legally allowed to.

Which led another person to note the obvious – You are 38 years old, you can do what you want.

Blogger’s note – in fact, it is not uncommon for adoptive parents to infantalize their adult adoptees. I have come across precisely that concept before, so I did a quick google search and found this in Kindred+Co by Sarah Williams – LINK>How Adoptive Parents Can Empower Their Adult Adoptees. She says, “Something prevalent in adoption; especially transracial adoption is the infantilization of adoptees. Maybe it’s unexamined prejudices and racist narratives adoptive parents have told themselves but I am finding more and more adoptees struggling to articulate for themselves their hopes and dreams apart from their adoptive parents. They are the same; until they aren’t. I have had many conversations with adoptees who want to switch their career paths, come out as LGBTQ+, search for their birth families, learn more about their birth culture, but are afraid to out of fear of alienating their adoptive parents whom they feel “indebted’’ to. So much so, that adoptees are no longer living their life informed by their hopes and dreams but entirely controlled by their adoptive parents who feel as if they have the “right” to project and control adoptees’ lives.

The Flying Baby Dream

A friend who is not an adoptee shared a LINK>Flying Baby Dream in her essay –

In the dream – which was intensely real – I was in a room with a friend, and a presumably married couple. The woman was very pregnant and about to give birth, but hey presto!, in the blink of an eye she had already given birth and was holding the swaddled newborn in her arms while the man gazed lovingly down at them…

…until ZOOOOOM! The baby ZIPPED out of the mother’s arms and hovered 2 feet off of the ground!

Whaaaaaaat? I looked at my friend…”Um…whoa…”, but wasn’t too surprised because I do – in real life – believe that anything is possible. However…a flying baby?

The baby was terrified for some reason. His eyes were large and frightened and he kept zipping back to its parents and then back away from them, like a giant hummingbird. It seemed like he wanted some kind of specific reassurance from them, but wasn’t finding it – some kind of information, or a word that would still his fear!

I sat on the side of the twin bed against the opposite wall watching this and wishing he would come to me. He suddenly saw me and zoomed through the air in my direction. He came very very close to my face – inches away – and I took hold of the sides of his little body. He looked searchingly and longingly into my eyes, wanting whatever he was wanting. And I knew what he wanted. So I said to him, smilingly and with a Zen-like calm and certainty, “Mother is with you here just as she was on the other side.”

He was drinking this in like a parched person drinks water. In a perfectly normal adult voice he said to me, “Really?” as in, “Do you promise?”, and my smile deepened as I said to him, “I do.” He threw his little arms around my neck and hugged me. When our hug ended, I held him away from me a little and I said, “I think I had better put you down on the ground. That seems the prudent thing to do,” because with the information he had, now he could feel grounded and probably could no longer fly.

I put him down on the floor to the left of me and he ran back to his parents.

~ End

I thought, wow, I could understand that an adoptee might have just such a dream for good reason. How a baby might feel having been taken away from his mother. How an eventual reunion in adulthood might bring them back together “on the other side”. How such a reassurance, when already adopted by strangers, might help deep in the subconscious heart.

When my adoptee mother died, I found a card among her belongings that read “I Am With You Always.” I would guess it had a religious meaning for her but I know without a doubt (because she shared this desire with me) that she also longed to reconnect with her birth mother, most of her adult life. I read her adoptive mother wrote to the Tennessee Children’s Home (that of the Georgia Tann scandal) that the train trip from Memphis to Nogales upset my baby mom but that the doctor had settled her down – hmmm, drugged her ?

My mom, 3 years before I was born.

From Orphan to Chess Master

Rex Andrew Sinquefield has been called an “index-fund pioneer” for creating the first passively managed index fund open to the general public Sinquefield was also a co-founder of Dimensional Fund Advisors. I may have seen his name mentioned before. In Missouri state politics he is considered somewhat of a king maker. Missouri is heavily Republican, and so most of the millions he has donated in political campaign contributions have gone to Republicans, though not exclusively. I suspect his story is more complicated than our divided partisan politics might indicate. The political cartoon alludes to the fact that because he is a chess enthusiast, he was instrumental in relocating the World Chess Hall of Fame to St Louis, making the city the nation’s chess capital.

I became interested in this man when I learned he was raised in a St Louis-area orphanage, the St Vincent Home for Children. He has also donated to them through his Sinquefield Charitable Foundation. When I was growing up, because I had learned that both of my parents were adoptees, I thought they were orphans. I had no idea of the truth that there were people out there I was genetically related to living out their lives more or less ignorant of our own existence. I guess this is why the idea of orphans always gets my attention.

LINK> St Vincent Home for Children was founded in 1850 following a cholera epidemic and a fire, both of which occurred the previous year and which left many St Louis children orphaned. The fire, begun aboard a steamboat at the levee, caused hundreds to be homeless and ravaged a 15-block area. Meanwhile, cholera transmitted by arriving immigrants had killed more than 4,000 of the city’s 64,000 residents. Diocesan orphanages at the time were already very crowded and many of the victims of the cholera outbreak were poor. An appeal to the German Catholic community brought the construction of the new orphanage in 1850 by the German Saint Vincent Orphan Association.

In 1914, a 20-acre plot in Normandy Park was purchased for $18,000. The Cornerstone for the new Home was set on June 15, 1916 and the children moved into their new home in Normandy on August 8, 1917. St Vincent Home sustained itself through the Civil War, the Great Depression, two World Wars and other conflicts, all of which brought their share of orphans to the Home’s doors. Over the years, the St Vincent Home has transitioned to meet the changing needs of children in the area. It is no longer an orphanage but a residential treatment center for at-risk youth very much like the Porter-Leath orphanage in Memphis TN where my mom spent time as my maternal grandmother struggled to find a way to support them both.

St Vincent is now know as The Core Collective. The image above is titled “Bed in the Attic” and was photographed by 16-year-old Shardae for the LINK>”Photography Project: St. Vincent Home for Children” exhibit. The featured pictures taken by teenagers, educators, support staff and volunteers of the north St. Louis County-based St Vincent Home for Children. Participants were taught photography through the University of Missouri at St Louis, known as UMSL.

One never knows what they might run into googling around. I’ve not seen this version of Dicken’s Christmas story but I am intrigued by some of what I read about it here LINK>An American Christmas Carol. The Bookshop Owner of Christmas Past whisks Slade back to his childhood at the orphanage, where local businessman Mr Brewster shows up looking for an apprentice to help him at his furniture factory. Instead of choosing one of the good kids, Brewster instead chooses Slade, a known troublemaker (“he likes to FIGHT!” warns the old maid running the orphanage), and teaches him how to whittle. No, really. He gave the kid a knife, and a stick of wood. And they whittle. And whittle. And whittle some more. So Slade becomes Brewster’s apprentice, and moves in with him. In other words, he’s basically been adopted.

And shades of Sinquefield, the real trouble starts when Brewster doesn’t change, and his business starts going down the tubes. This leads to Slade leaving Brewster and starting an investment firm with Latham. So the investment firm of Slade and Latham has a choice: they can either fund Brewster’s failing furniture business, or they can put their money into Slade’s new idea, which is basically to let people rent appliances and charge them a weekly fee. You know those rent-to-own places where you go and get an Xbox 360 for $30 a week, which you wind up paying $1,700 for before you actually own it? All Slade’s idea.

I don’t know – although it is probably awful, I might just have to watch that version of a Christmas Carol. Art has a funny way of imitating life.

Conflict of Interest ?

I got seriously triggered with my husband yesterday. I need to work through my thoughts and I’m sure this is going to prove a lengthy process of contemplation.

Some background –

Both of my parents were given up for adoption in the 1930s. Their circumstances were somewhat different and somewhat similar. My mom’s genetic biological parents were married but at 4 mos pregnant after 4 mos of marriage for reasons I’ll never really have reliable answers to (but a few theories given what I have learned), her husband left her. He didn’t divorce her for 3 years, so there is that as well. With no husband in sight, she was sent to Virginia from Memphis TN to give birth and I would assume expected to leave the baby there but she did not. Instead, after her return to Memphis with my infant mom in tow, she became a victim of Georgia Tann.

My dad’s mom was unwed. She had an affair with a much older married man. Then, she went to a Salvation Army home for unwed mothers to give birth. After about 2 or 3 months, she was released with my dad still in her custody. It appears my dad’s father never even knew he existed. When my grandmother found no support for her and the baby with her cousin, she returned to the Salvation Army seeking employment and was transferred with my dad still in tow to one of their homes in El Paso Texas.

My mom’s adoptive parents relocated to El Paso Texas and in high school, my adoptee mom met my adoptee dad. Probably during the summer after my dad’s graduation from high school before entering a university my parents had sex and my teenage mom discovered by Autumn that she was pregnant. My dad’s adoptive parents supported him marrying her and quitting his hopes of a university degree to go to work and support his new family. I’m pretty certain my mom’s adoptive parents, had they had a chance, would have sent her off to have and give me up. Thankfully that didn’t happen to me.

So the truth I cannot deny is that had my parents NOT been adopted and had they both not ended up in El Paso TX and attended the same high school where they met at a party through mutual friends, I would not exist at all. I owe my very existence in this life to ~gasp~ adoption. I think I once described this situation as imperfectly perfect.

Until about 5 years ago, when I was able to uncover the identities of all 4 of my original grandparents (something that both of my parents died still not knowing), I thought adoption was the most natural thing in the world and that my parents were orphans. I had no idea there were people I was actually genetically biologically related to living out lives as unaware of me as I was of them. I knew nothing about the mental and emotional impacts of the trauma of my parents being separated from their mothers may have caused. I’ve learned a LOT about that since then – as this blog very frequently shares. To be honest, I now would prefer to see vulnerable women supported, so that they could raise their own babies.

So what is my conflict of interest ? My husband’s desire that my writing add some revenue to our family. Of course, I would love for that to happen as well. I have developed a negative attitude toward Christian Evangelical saviorism as it applies to adoption. My husband wants me to make my next book oriented towards Evangelical Christians (I have just finish a revision of my parents’ adoption stories for the 3rd time and will go about trying to obtain a literary agent for that work).

What !?! I accused him of asking me to betray my values for monetary reasons. He spoke of “witnessing.” That stayed with me all afternoon. I reflected on the kind of people my adoptive grandparents were. 3 of the 4 were religious. My dad’s were fundamentalist in the extreme. When one church wasn’t as strictly interpreted per the bible as they wanted, they changed churches to a stricter one. My mom’s adoptive father has been described as morally ethical but not religious. I see that same characteristic in my husband. My mom’s mother however had a surprisingly enlightened spirituality – especially when I consider what I have heard of her own very bible religious mother (to the extent of neglecting home and family). This grandmother’s spirituality was not far different than my own (which was what surprised me when I discovered it). My husband has a negative perspective on religion in general and believes vulnerable people are exploited by it. So I could not believe that HE would suggest such a thing to me. He admits that he is a bit like Mr Krabs in the SpongeBob episodes – all about the money (only really he is incredibly down to Earth, he just worries about supporting this family as he ages).

Yet, aside from the last 5 years of having it banged into my consciousness through my favorite adoption triad group, where the voices of adult adoptees are given preference and describe all that is wrong with adoption and foster care in general, what is it that I actually know from my own experience ?

My parents each felt differently about their adoptions. My dad never spoke to me of his but cautioned my mom against her efforts at locating her birth mother – who had already died by the time she was actively seeking that. One of the last things she wrote to me before she died was an explanation regarding why she couldn’t complete a family tree at Ancestry.com – “it just wasn’t real, because I was adopted but I’m glad I was.” Though I cannot say that she truly was “glad.” She didn’t know any other life.

Both of my sisters gave up a child to adoption. I cannot honestly say that my niece or my nephew would have been better off being raised by my sisters. They are good solid people – both of them – now married in their own adulthoods.

So the question is – can I find a way to target a Christian Evangelical audience, who is going to adopt anyway – regardless of how much I might preach to them about all of the impacts of trauma in this child they desperately want for whatever reason (I do believe there is a bit of missionary purpose in those desires) – and gently prepare them for reality and hope this brings about better outcomes for the adoptee ? Honor fully my evolved values in the effort ?

Ancestral Emotions

Please bear with me (not to be confused with the mammal but in the sense of enduring any clumsiness in my delivery), if this blog seems to lack cohesiveness. Many times my day seems to develop a pattern and it informs my thoughts and my emotions as diverse elements seem to play off one another. So that happened today and it started as soon as I sat down at my computer. I will do my best to make sense of the notes I jotted down for you, my reader.

I spent most of the decades of my life with no knowledge of my familial roots due to both of my parents having been adopted before the age of one under sealed (closed) adoption files. They died clueless really but I had always thought after my mom had been denied her own adoption file (related to the Georgia Tann scandal in Memphis) that maybe after she was dead I would be able to get what she had not been able to obtain. All the state of Tennessee did for her was break her heart with news that the woman who gave birth to her had died some years before.

My day began with several links from a Facebook friend. She has been grappling with the admission that defines her as a NPE. In genetics, a non-paternity event (also known as misattributed paternity or not the parent expected). This happens when someone who is presumed to be an individual’s father is not in fact the biological father. Often an inexpensive DNA test at a matching site reveals that. The primary effect is a feeling of betrayal or having been lied to. Late discovery adoptees (meaning they didn’t know they were adopted until well into their maturity) experience similar feelings.

“The place where it’s interesting is what it takes to get from one stage of your life to another. The trick is finding a way . . . ” ~ Susan Rigetti in a Time article about her new novel, Cover Story. To which I add, to get there. In my own journey of genetic biological discovery, my past, present and presumably now future have come into harmony. And it feels so very good. For me, it has been entirely worth learning what I learned and brought me a surprised gratitude to understand that I could have so easily been given up for adoption by my unwed (at the time of my conception) high school student mother.

One link was a YouTube by Thich Nhat Hanh, he addresses ancestors one never knew. And he points out something quite obvious, some people in contact with parents still living don’t really know them. My parents, like many, did not share a lot about their lives. I am grateful for what they did share. He is correct that each of us is a continuation. As that, we have an opportunity to transform the negative and develop the wonderful.

One link related to a practice referred to as Emotional Genealogy. It is what we have inherited from those who came before us. It is the stories about our ancestors, and what their lives were like. It is the connection we have, with or without our awareness, to our grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents…going back two, three, four, five and sometimes more generations. It is the emotional traits that were handed down within our family lineage: the optimism, grit, rage, pain, inaccessibility, kindness, cruelty, avoidance, violence, tenderness, fear. It was noted that what is not transformed, is transmitted down the family line.

We owe our existence to those who came before us. Simply put, if they hadn’t lived, we would have no life. And simply put, the realization I arrived at was that if my grandmothers (because in each case it was the mother, the father did not have an actual say in the circumstances – whether my grandparents were married or not – there was one case of each) had not given up my parents to a different set of parents to raise them, I would not exist. That is a fact I can not get away from. I value the price that each of them had to pay. It is considerable, as I have learned from others that are part of the adoption triad of adoptee, birth parents and adoptive parents.

In my own roots journey, my family found over time that they didn’t come from the town or country that we (and at least I) had thought they originated from. For example, my mom was adopted in Memphis TN but was born in Richmond VA. My dad was not Hispanic and left on the doorstep of the Salvation Army. Yet because he had been adopted in El Paso TX I thought that. The crazy thing is that I also knew he had been born in San Diego CA. Go figure. When we lack complete information we fill in the blank places as best we can. And while I struggle with acknowledging double the usual set of maternal and paternal grandparents, I do know that because my adoptive grandparents cared, they deserve to be remembered.

Some people find out after twenty or thirty years that what they felt and suspected was true. Always know that intuitive knowledge IS knowledge, and it is a resource to be treasured.

My image at the top of this blog may still seem out of place but it is not to me. Robin Easton writes – “your exquisitely beautiful sensitivity. I see this refreshing trait expressed through you in so many ways: in your wisdom, your creativity, in the ways that you face life’s challenges, and in the ways that you help me walk through this life. Thank you, for such a sacred and intelligent gift.”

Whatever you know about your family can help you develop emotional intelligence. Make the effort.

Links shared with me this morning –

How to love and understand your ancestors when you don’t know them?
~ Thich Nhat Hanh
https://youtu.be/pdodGeRNjt0

What Is Your Emotional Genealogy?
~ Judith Fein in Psychology Today

How Your Ancestors Can Help You Become a Better Person
~ Crucial Dimensions
https://youtu.be/-Syo-QorTJQ

Why I Celebrate

My 67th birthday comes up in 2 days now. The image here is from early in my marriage, before our sons were born. We will celebrate 33 years this June.

There is so much I am grateful for but first and foremost it is that I was not given up for adoption. I could have so easily been lost to this family I grew up within. My mom was a 16 yr old high school student in El Paso TX who found herself pregnant with me and unwed. My dad had just started at the U of NM at Las Cruces that year. They are both deceased now. When I was cleaning out my parents belongings to ready their house for sale, I discovered that my mom had kept every love letter she got from my dad during that time. I also found a note where she was worried about telling him she was pregnant.

Both my mom and dad were adopted. That is why I think it is a miracle I was not given up. My mom’s adoptive parents were well to do, had made a lucky early investment in Circle K just as the stores were beginning and on top of that my adoptive grandfather was a bank vice president. My adoptive grandmother was a socialite. I believe it was actually my dad’s adoptive parents who were always poor, entrepreneurial sorts who made custom draperies for a living, that preserved me in the family and supported my dad in marrying my mom.

Because I was preserved my two sisters were born. Maybe they would have been or maybe my parents would have gone their separate ways but that is not what happened so it is a moot point. I believe I have now fulfilled my destiny in this life. Within a year of my parents deaths (they died 4 mos apart after more than 50 years of marriage), I had uncovered who my original grandparents were. I have met or made contact with an aunt and some cousins for each branch of my grandparents families. I am the only link between them because the four of them went their separate ways.

My maternal grandmother remarried but never had any other children. My maternal grandfather also remarried but didn’t have any more children with his third wife. Yes, he and my grandmother were married at the time she conceived my mom. It will always be a mystery why he left her 4 mos pregnant and why after being sent from Tennessee to Virginia to have (and probably expected to give up) my mom, he didn’t respond when she returned to Memphis and tried to reach him. Her desperation led to Georgia Tann getting her hands on my mom . . .

My paternal grandmother had a hard life growing up. My dad was conceived with the assistance of a Danish immigrant who was married to a much older woman. He probably never even knew about my dad. My grandmother simply handled it as the self-resourceful woman she was. She did remarry twice and had 3 other children. At the time my dad died, her last child (my aunt) was living only 90 miles away, totally unknown to my dad.

I celebrate that I am alive and I am happy to have now become whole in ways my parents (who died knowing next to nothing about their origins) never were. I had to wait over 60 years before that happened for me. It is true that, if my parents had not been given up for adoption, I would simply not exist at all. Even so, there is much wrong about the practice of adoption (I write about that here all the time) . . . including that the state of Tennessee denied my mother access to her own adoption file in the early 90s. No one told her when the law was changed for the victims of Georgia Tann to be given access but because of that law, I now possess all of the documents in her adoption file. In her file there were black and white pictures of my maternal grandmother holding my mom for the last time at Porter-Leath Orphanage. It was to that storied and respected institution that my grandmother, in desperation, turned for temporary care of her precious baby girl. The superintendent there betrayed my grandmother by alerting Georgia Tann to my mom’s existence.

At the Dorchester in London
thanks to a trip with my adoptive maternal grandmother

Is It Really ?

One hears this a lot from people who want to adopt a baby – “I applaud you for your courageous choice to give your daughter a chance at a better future. There are so many women with infertility issues like myself who would love to adopt a child. Please keep me in your thoughts if you know of other women in your situation. I have a lot of love to give.”

One cannot really say if being adopted gives anyone a “better life”. Both of my parents were adopted. They both would have grown up with some degree of poverty had they remained with their original mothers. And the truth of the matter is, my dad still grew up with some degree of poverty. In fact, he actually experienced food insecurity and hunger as a child. We always had more food on our table at dinner than we could eat. My mom told me that was the reason why. And my dad was so obese as an adult, he relished his nickname Fat Pat.

I do appreciate his adoptive parents. My granny was hugely influential in my life. We often spent days and weekends with her. A word from her that was very serious about some issue had the power to change the direction I was traveling in. Having learned my parents more or less full background stories, I believe had it not been for my granny, my teenage mother who conceived me out of wedlock, would have been sent away as so many girls in the 1950s through 1970s were, to have and give me up. I believe my dad’s adoptive parents insisted he do the right thing and quit college and go to work, after quickly marrying my mother so I would be born legitimate. And my nuclear family experienced hardships but we knew we were loved, even though our parents were strangely detached, having had their own familial bonds broken before the age of one year.

And how about my mother ? Her dad was the vice president at a large bank in downtown El Paso Texas. Her mother was a socialite and charity do-gooder. She was also influential in my own life for different reasons than my granny. She modeled for us good manners and good taste in home decor and clothing. However, my mom – while wanting for nothing of a financial basis – struggle with her adoptive mother. My grandmother was always thin and trim (she would starve herself if necessary, her mother and sister were quite rotund) and my mom’s body type was never going to be that – big boned Scottish farm girl stock that she was. My grandmother also dangled her wealth as a carrot and a stick over my mom.

My mom’s father was very poor and her mother’s family was also poor. My grandmother lost my mom when she gave birth while separated from her lawfully married husband during a massive flood on the Mississippi River. Unable to contact him for support or reconciliation, Georgia Tann along with her enablers the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley and the Porter-Leath Orphanage supervisor Georgia Robinson (to whom my grandmother turned for temporary care while she tried to get on her feet financially without family support) exploited her financially precarious situation and coerced her into surrendering my mom for adoption. She tried to undo this 4 days after signing the papers but Tann was not letting my mom loose as her soon to be adoptive mother was already on her way from Nogales Arizona by train to Memphis Tennessee to collect her. My grandmother had previously adopted a son from Tann.

One cannot actually say my mom had a “better” life either. The truth about adoption is – the child has a DIFFERENT life from the one they would have had with their original parent(s). Better is a subjective concept that adoptive parents like to believe in order to justify taking a child, due to their own infertility, from another woman. It honestly is that simple.

Barefoot & Pregnant in the Kitchen

Someone in my all things adoption group shared –

So I am in a tag group (about men) and someone posted a meme of some guy spouting off about how as women our goal should be to have and care for kids etc…

Well, I wrote that attitudes like that make infertile people feel as though kids are the be all and end all and can end up negatively impacting families.

And, of course I got comments saying let’s not judge infertile women and how there is nothing wrong if someone can’t/doesn’t want to raise a child because there is always someone else who would love to adopt them.

I’m sorry but I disagree.

Very rarely does it happen that a woman carries a child for 9 months, delivers that baby and then is like “naw, just kidding, I don’t want you.”

More often, mothers are separated from their babies due to poverty.

Now that I’ve become enlightened, I am always going to judge people who know they have a scared poor pregnant person up against the wall.

In contract law, if there is unequal bargaining power, the contract may be voided. So why are adoption contracts even allowed to stand? My desperate maternal grandmother never intended to give my mom up. Georgia Tann exploited her with threats that her good friend, the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley, would declare my grandmother an unfit mother – which she in no way was. She tried to get my mom back 4 days after she was coerced into signing the Surrender Papers but no way were they going to let go of my mom – an adoptive mother was on her way from Nogales Arizona to Memphis Tennessee to pick her up.

There is a clear imbalance of power when a woman or couple are poor, or homeless, or addicted to some maladaptive substance. And to have any woman sign Surrender Papers right after giving birth is clearly criminal.

It leaves many of us honestly wondering why our society always paints adoptive parents as knights in shining armor. Most people in modern society think adoptive parents are saints.

Three Identical Strangers

In the 1960s, a research project into identical siblings, placing them separately for adoption into different classes (poor, middle and wealthy), was done for the purpose of determining the impact of financial resources on their outcomes. Back in the 1930s to 1950, Georgia Tann had a similar thought – taking babies from poor families and placing them into wealthier homes would lead to better outcomes for the children.

My mom was one of those babies. She was adopted in 1937. Both of her parents were very poor and struggling to survive the Great Depression but they were exploited by threats from Georgia Tann that her close relationship with the Juvenile Court judge in Memphis would support any removal of children she suggested. Sadly.

So, in the 1980s, when these young men were 19 years old and began attending college, they discovered that they had been separated after birth into different adoptive families. Even the adoptive parents didn’t know there were other genetically identical siblings. The triplets accidentally found each other when two of them enrolled at the same college and found the third when he saw the story on the news. After the three siblings reunited, they became media darlings for awhile and even met their original biological parents.

It is not entirely a happy story and a suicide trigger warning is justified. The two surviving triplets carry the DNA, the history, the pain, and the heart of their deceased brother. As the three boys entered adulthood each of them dealt with mental illness and psychiatric care.

The carelessness of the adoption agency that gave the boys away turns out to be something far crueler and more deviously deliberate than possibly imaginable. It is a shockingly true story but not unlike other psychological research from that era. Ethics were just not on the radar yet. People were treated like lab rats.

One woman, now much older, who was involved with the research study is blasé about the whole thing saying it was exciting to mess with people’s lives and noting what’s done is done.

The children who were the study subjects involved will not have access to the findings until 2065, by which time they will likely not be still alive. This is because our own government funded this study.

This program does show how strong genetics truly are. Being separated at birth results in life long trauma. All adoption agencies exist to make money. The program suggests that some of the adoptive parents would have happily taken all three boys, if they had known the truth, at the time.

One of the scientists involved in the study interviewed for the program kept laughing, saying inappropriate things, none of what happened was funny. He said there’s probably at least four people (probably many more) who have no idea they are twins or that they were part of a study.

Currently one of the brothers practices law, the other sells insurance and investments. One of the two is (or soon will be) divorced. These kinds of mental health and relationship impacts are quite common among adoptees.

Which leaves me with two questions (I have not seen, only have read about this program) – Is science worth keeping secrets and being immoral to accomplish unbiased research ? And how much of who we are is Nature and how much Nurture ? (That second one I’ve been looking at for 20 years.)