Modern Orphanages

From a generally anti-foster care perspective, a question was asked –

Why did the government move away from orphanages/group homes to children living with foster carers ? Bottom line is that it is about money. It is cheaper for the government to give foster carers a stipend than provide for the full needs of children in a modern orphanage or group home.

My mom spent a few months as an infant at Porter-Leath, an orphanage in Memphis TN. Her original mother took my mom there only for temporary care while she tried to get on her feet and estranged from her husband, the father of my mom, who was most likely tied up one state over fighting a SuperFlood on the Mississippi in 1937. He was in Arkansas working for the WPA and that was where most of his own roots and family were. That is how Georgia Tann got involved and my mom ended up adopted.

My family visited Porter-Leath in 2017. It is now an amazingly peaceful place and much changed but still provides some sheltering for runaways who need a safe place to go.

The discussion was not about orphanages of the past though. It was about facilities that are geared towards children’s best interests. A revamped system. An environment where the kid never has to become someone else to fit in with a family he isn’t related to. One that is very consistent and stable. That is vital for kids.

And no competition with a foster carer’s biological kids, or being made to feel like a burden or an inconvenience compared to the carer’s biological children. Modern orphanages are really structured. Everyone there is on the same playing field. It totally eliminates the foster vs biological conflicts. The experience of former foster youth is that biological kids are horrible towards foster kids. Full of disdain and resentment for these strangers being in their homes.

I was intrigued by the mention of modern orphanages, I found a link to an Atlantic article highlighting Palmer Home for Children in Mississippi that is fairly current.

Secrets

Reflecting on another blog I wrote several years ago, I see how it applies to this one. I believe also that those that have something to hide from other people will divert one’s attention away from that secret anyway. However there is a current of support for truth in Life that will “out” what should or needs to be known. That is why secrets can’t be “kept”. Secrets are the answer to the question and the answer will out itself because a secret usually does not exist for any good reason. For some people it is only in the seeking for answers to questions deep within them that they have the courage to go on living. It is as though the impossibility of finding an answer is itself a motivation that keeps them keeping on in vitally alive ways.

Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote – “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

My mom had questions about how she ended up adopted because she did know that the Tennessee Children’s Home Society was the agency and that her conveyance to her adoptive parents occurred in Memphis. In fact, growing up we all believed she had been born in Memphis. At some point, she learned she had been born in Richmond VA. This puzzled her. How could she have been born there but then adopted as an infant at Memphis ? She had heard about the Georgia Tann scandal when it broke in 1950 and she was still a school girl. She worried then that she might have been a victim and her adoptive mother, while admitting that her adoption had taken place through that agency, said my mom was not “one of those” babies.

Life moved on. My mother gave birth three times, each time to girl babies. But the questions never really went away for her. Then in the 1990s, awareness of the Georgia Tann scandal hit the national consciousness 40 years later with features on 60 Minutes and on Oprah facilitating reunions between separated mothers and their children. My mom learned about Denny Glad in the 60 Minutes broadcast and did speak with her, learned some minimal information and received some advice. So, my mom requested her adoption file from the state of Tennessee. Sadly, this was premature in the sense that her inquiry occurred before the state was forced to open it’s files for the victims of Georgia Tann. They did offer to ask my mom’s original parents if they were okay with her receiving her file.

Sadly, they informed her that her mother had died several years before devastating my mom’s desire to let her mother that she was okay. As a mother herself, my mom felt her mother would want to know. She also had a mysterious health condition and no family medical history to assist in revealing whether this was genetic and even what the condition might actually be as a diagnosis was proving hard to come by.

The state had promised to make every effort to contact my mom’s parents. They did not. They only sent a minimal inquiry to the Arkansas Driver’s License Bureau to determine if my grandfather had a current Arkansas license. They replied “no record”. Of course they had no record. He had been dead for 30 years. They could have checked the Social Security Death Index but they never tried. This really vexed my mom (not that she knew he was dead but he was much older than her mother – my mom did know that much) because they denied her the adoption file on the basis that they were not able to determine whether he was alive or dead.

It is really a shame – these secrets that adoption has forced on it’s victims. Seeing her adoption file would have answered at least some of my mom’s questions. The question I can’t answer (since I now do have her adoption file) is why her father left her mother when she was 4 months pregnant because they were legally wed. I have to live with that question unanswered because there is no one alive who could answer it for me.

St Anne’s in Maryland

Some charitable organizations endure. When I saw this article, I thought of Porter-Leath in Memphis but the outcome for my grandmother (losing her infant, for which she was only seeking temporary care until she could get on her feet) was not so good.

St. Anne’s Center for Children, Youth and Families in Hyattsville Maryland has existed for 160 years. They were originally an orphanage and a maternity hospital. The organization founded during a crisis has reinvented itself time and again since. The same could be said for Porter Leath as well.

The organization was created in 1860 to serve women and children during the Civil War and it continued to do so through the 1918 flu pandemic, both World Wars, the Great Depression and now, a new pandemic.

Over the years, it has changed its name and purpose. It went from “asylum” to an “orphanage” to a “center” that now houses mothers and children, sometimes for years, if that’s what they need to successfully escape homelessness.

In recent times, they have seen incredible successes like they had not seen before in terms of families leaving them and going into permanent housing. It’s nothing short of incredible how these families are doing that.

When a single mother with a young child comes to St. Anne’s, she and her daughter are given a furnished apartment complete with a bookshelf filled with children’s books. They share a kitchen, laundry room and playground with other families, but otherwise have their own space.

One such mother said –

“I used to say, ‘I don’t want her to remember any of this stuff,’ ” she says of her daughter. “Now, I want her to see where we were, and how we are in a much more amazing place. I want her to see, ‘My mommy did it, my mommy figured it out, she took care of what we had to take care of.’ ”

When they move into their new house, she says, she wants her daughter to know that from these hard times, her mom created something better for them.

A Sad Holiday

For many adoptees, Mother’s Day is a complicated holiday. For many children in Foster Care it is the pits of unhappy reminders.

All my life, Mother’s Day has been a happy one. When we were young, we made my mom breakfast in bed. When I had my oldest son in 2001, that next Spring during the month of May in celebration of Mother’s Day, I began a family tradition of taking my children out among the Wild Azaleas that are at the peak of their annual blooming for “see how you grow” photos. It is cherished by me that we have not missed a single year with my oldest son now 19 years old.

Truth be told, it was my mom’s adoptive mother who started the tradition. She had grown up in Missouri. Her childhood location is some distance to the west but is very similar in rural wildness to where I live. One year she came to visit me before our sons were born and I took her on hikes around our farm. She cherished the experience because it brought back memories of her own childhood in Missouri.

When she learned the Azaleas were blooming, one morning she dressed up (though she was always fully dressed with jewelry and make-up before breakfast). She chose a pink blouse to wear and a spot to sit framed by the Azaleas blooming all around her. Later during that visit, she took me to see her own childhood home and I was surprised to see her farmhouse was very much like our own. We were fortunate because the owner of that house allowed us to go inside and my grandmother shared with me what remained the same and what had changed over time.

As an adoptee, my mom yearned to have a reunion with her own mother. She knew that Georgia Tann played a prominent role in her own adoption story. When news of the scandal resurfaced in the early 1990s, she contacted Denny Glad who lived in Memphis and helped the victims of Georgia Tann’s questionable adoption methods. My mom learned about her from watching a 60 Minutes special about the scandal that had aired on TV around that time.

Adoption records were still sealed in Tennessee as my mom tried without success to learn about her origins. Devastating news was delivered to my mom that her mother had died several years earlier and they would not release her adoption file because the status of her father, twenty years my grandmother’s age, could not be determined (in truth he had been dead 30 years but the state didn’t try very hard at all).

Mrs Glad was instrumental in getting adoption records opened late in the 1990s for Tann’s victims but no one ever told my mom. My mom died believing she had been stolen based on anecdotal stories she read or heard. That wasn’t far from the truth but in reality Tann’s network of suppliers made her aware of my mom and my grandmother, through only the best motivations of a caring mom, got trapped.

Since my mom was deceased before I began to learn so much about adoption overall, I can’t ask her the questions that weigh heavily on my own heart about how she honestly felt about a lot of the issues related to her adoption. She didn’t speak about it to anyone else in our family beyond acknowledging that she had been adopted. That is, except with me and with me her feelings about it were definitely conflicted.

Orphans In An Epidemic

I became fascinated about a time in the history of Memphis Tennessee when I learned more about the circumstances of my mom’s adoption related to Georgia Tann and the Tennessee Children’s Home.

Recently, the fact that few children get Coronavirus reminded me that something similar happened with the Yellow Fever that devastated Memphis TN in the late 1800s. This caused a lot of orphans because the parents died but children continued living.

On August 13, 1878, Kate Bionda, a restaurant owner, died of yellow fever in Memphis. A man had escaped a quarantined steamboat and subsequently visited her restaurant. The disease spread rapidly and the resulting epidemic emptied and actually bankrupted the city.

Yellow fever was transmitted to humans by mosquitoes. It came to the United States by way of West Africa and was brought here on slave ships. The disease required warm weather to survive. It thrived in the wet and hot summers since that is when mosquitoes breed prodigiously. After a three-to-six-day incubation period, the afflicted person would experience flu-like symptoms, such as fever and aches. Sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it ?

After a very short remission, a more intense stage followed. The victim vomited blood and suffered from liver and renal failure. Jaundice was a typical symptom (why it was called yellow fever). The victim usually died within two weeks. Survivors of the illness could still feel it’s effects for months.

Memphis, a city of 50,000, had outbreaks in 1855, 1867 and 1873, with each outbreak getting progressively worse. Those who came down with yellow fever were quarantined in an effort to prevent the disease from spreading. Often, they were made to wear yellow jackets as a means of identification.

In July 1878, an outbreak of yellow fever was reported in Vicksburg, just south of Memphis. Memphis officials reacted by stopping travel to the city from the south. However, William Warren, a steamboat worker, somehow slipped away and into Kate Bionda’s restaurant.

Most of the residents who were able to fled the city. Twenty-five thousand people picked up and left within a week. For the most part, it was the African-American residents who remained in town, although they died at a much lower rate than the white residents who contracted the disease. An average of 200 people died every day through September. There were corpses everywhere and near continual ringing of funeral bells. Half of the city’s doctors died.

The epidemic ended with the first frost in October, but by that time, 20,000 people in the Southeast had died and another 80,000 had survived infection. In the aftermath, open sewers and privies were cleaned up, destroying the breeding grounds for mosquitoes and preventing further epidemics.

Sister Constance of St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral stayed in Memphis during the outbreak, going from house to house to care for the sick. Sometimes she found abandoned children amid the rotting corpses of their parents. She did eventually contract the disease and die. Father Joseph Kelly of St. Peter’s Parish became known as the “Father of the Orphans” and “selfless caregiver among victims of Yellow Fever epidemics”. During the 1873-1878 epidemics, he evacuated all the orphans.

The Influence Of Money

I am enough of a realist to know that the influence of money is not going away anytime soon. Even so, in adoption, I believe it can be a corrupting factor.

Had it not been for cooking the books and overcharging the prospective adoptive parents, Georgia Tann’s crimes may never have been discovered. When someone is making a lot of money off of an altruistic effort, it attracts attention. It also buys protection as in the case of Tann and the Boss Crump political machinery in Memphis Tennessee.

I do believe that my dad’s parents probably paid less for him at The Salvation Army than my mom’s parents paid for her through Georgia Tann. The Tennessee Children’s Home Society was careful not to document the money that was changing hands or was at least doing so in a very hidden way. There is no doubt in my mind their eagerness to go looking for yet another baby after my grandparents had already adopted two must be an indication of a monetary motive.

In a novel I finished reading yesterday, there grew an awareness that the Catholic Church was making money selling babies. I’ve no doubt that it is likely the truth. Adoption is a kind of human trafficking that has the approval of society in general. Who can object to people wanting to give unfortunate children a good home ?

But society has no interest to providing enough support for mothers to keep and raise their babies. Something is terribly rotten in such a system of priorities. The reason adoption records have remained sealed in most states in the US for so long is for the protection of the people who have the money – the adoptive parents. Agencies, lawyers and social workers as well as the courts are all making money by taking the product of unfortunate young women and delivering babies to those who can afford to pay.

It was not lost on me in the recent NY Times article that the two men in a stable marriage who adopted out of Foster Care not only had no out of pocket expenses directly related to that but received subsidies for doing so. This is where money actually helped the situation.

Robbed Of Heritage

The symbolism in this painting calls to something very deep within me. It is a painting by Barbara Taffet. In 1973, she reinvented herself as Maria Alquilar, a Latina artist whose fictive back story included a Sephardic Jewish father from Argentina. Drawing on her deep knowledge of world myths and spiritual traditions, filtered through her own personal mythology, she began creating idiosyncratic works inspired by the work of the California Sacramento-Davis area narrative expressionist, outsider and funk artists she admired and collected.

Adoption robs us of our actual cultural heritage. All my life until very recently, I believed my dad was half-Mexican and my mom possibly half-African American. They were both adoptees and for what little we knew about our familial roots, we could claim any story we wanted and not even our own selves knew whether it was true or not.

So along came inexpensive DNA testing. Both my mom and I had ours done at Ancestry. Later on, I had mine also tested at 23 and Me. My mom has some Mali in her and so, I suspect slavery had something to do with that. My dad’s dark complexion actually came by way of his Danish immigrant father. I have learned there is some Ashkenazi Jew in me and suspect that comes via a family that lived for generations on Long Island New York.

Why does this painting call so deeply to my soul – there is that Jewish symbol and there is the Southwestern symbols as well. There is a predator protecting it’s prey – my maternal grandmother was preyed upon by Georgia Tann, the famous baby thief of Memphis Tennessee. And it is always about the bunnies in my household. The angelic image at the top is more like a Jackrabbit which fits nicely with my New Mexican birth.

In many transracial adoptions, the very young child is not only cut off from their cultural heritage but loses contact with their native language. It may be difficult to understand how disorienting that is but I get it. It’s time to change the rules of the adoption game.

Our First Union

We seek love, because of that very first union we had with another person – our mother. Of course, at birth, it was necessary for us to separate physically from her, in order to grow and develop further. Even after birth, and more importantly still, if we are totally separated from her – taken away from her and given to a complete stranger (as in adoption) to raise us – very deep within us, we know her still.

In the womb, we heard her voice, experienced her emotions, tasted the foods she preferred flavoring the amniotic fluid that cushioned us from the blows of a harsh world. We were ever intimately connected to all the interior sounds, her heartbeat and other organs functioning. They say a pregnant woman is a totally different gender from the typical male/female divide.

Though we celebrate our mother’s love in May, the month of February is full of constant reminders of the importance of love. We send Valentine’s to other people, even children do this as they celebrate the day in school and church. We remember to tell people we love them.

Yesterday was my own mother’s birthday. I lost her to death in 2015. The years fly by so quickly. Most years on her birthday, I called her up on the telephone and we would talk for a very long time. During a difficult time in my life, I remember going into the darkened kitchen to cry alone in my deep despair. Suddenly, she was there. Her maternal sense knew I needed comforting.

My mom was taken away from her mother after a brief visit. Her desperate mother was struggling to find a way to support the two of them. The father (she was married) inexplicably did not answer when her cry of distress through the Juvenile Court in Memphis was issued. I like to believe he didn’t get the message in time to prevent my mom from being taken from her own mother by exploitation and unbearable pressure (surrender your child or be declared unfit by my good friend the Juvenile Court judge said Georgia Tann, the master baby thief, to my grandmother).

Separating a child from their original mother causes deep wounds. I grieve that our country cruelly does this to migrant children. It is an abomination. Truly.

The Broken Birth Mom

This sculpture speaks so strongly to my own heart. I empathize with my grandmothers who gave up my parents to adoption. In a sense, though less permanently, I am one myself. Each of my sisters truly are. There are no words for how this haunts a person. No mother should have to live without her child, even though I do understand that sometimes the safety issues are so strong because that mother is so broken as a person, the child isn’t safe with her. I get it.

Adoption isn’t just a one-time event and it’s over. It is never over, it can’t be and it isn’t. It is something that follows an adoptee and their original parents throughout their lives.

I have obsessed in my guilt for not raising my daughter. Just like my maternal grandmother, I never intended to leave her daily life permanently. In my effort, just as it was in my grandmother’s effort, to work things out financially, circumstances changed and it was no longer the best outcome for her to take her back. Both my maternal grandmother and myself would have, if it had been possible or truly made sense to step back in.

There were no role models for absentee mothers in the early 1970s though one read a lot of stories about absentee fathers. I realize I caused the situation for myself. My grandmother stepped into a serious trap without realizing it when she turned to Porter-Leath Orphanage in Memphis TN for temporary care of my mom.

The superintendent there betrayed my grandmother and my mom to a master baby thief. Miss Georgia Tann was backed up by her good friend, the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley, in her pressure campaign to exploit my grandmother and wrest my mom out of her possession so that she could sell her to my adoptive grandmother.

Being a birth mom who permanently surrenders her child is not a club you should want to join. It is a grief that lasts a lifetime. The pain of that wound will change over time but it will never go away. It will always be there. I have spent years trying to resolve my own. I know the reasons and the causes but there is no recovering lost time and those precious memories of your child growing up.

If you are an expectant mother, especially a single and financially challenged young woman, seek out the help that will make it possible for you to keep your baby. You will be glad you did. Here’s one place – https://savingoursistersadoption.org/

Honoring My Grandmother

In 1916, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Lou Stark was born to James Coleman and Mabel Irene Stark on this date in Eads Tennessee. It is my understanding that her father was a difficult man and quite old when he began to have children. Lizzie was the oldest and her nieces and nephews called her Aunt Lou.

It seems that her siblings and my grandmother each escaped their family home as soon as they could. One can surmise that my grandmother chose the possible opportunities of the big city, Memphis, to her west. There she would meet an older man who had become both widowed and had lost one of his children not long before. Most likely he was attached to a big WPA project building a hospital in Memphis.

So they married but his children and the mother to whom he was devoted and who supported him by caring for one or more of his children caused his heart to remain in Arkansas. For reasons I will never be able to explain, he left her in Memphis four months pregnant. Whether it was considered an end or a temporary separation can never be known.

What I do know is that my grandmother was sent away to Virginia to give birth to my mom. Most likely, she was an embarrassment pregnant with no husband in sight in a very conservatively Christian community. I suspect she was supposed to leave my mom in Virginia but she could not.

I cannot believe she brought my mom back to Memphis with any intention of giving her up for adoption. Juvenile Court records do show that she reached out for my mom’s father over in Arkansas but he did not respond. In his defense, there began a Super Flood on the Mississippi River the month my mom was born. Refugees poured into Memphis from Arkansas who bore some of the worst destruction. My grandfather was out shoring up levees.

My grandmother found the going difficult in Memphis. The people who had been supportive of her previously were suffering from charity fatigue. In desperation, my grandmother sought temporary care for my mom in an amazing citadel of an orphanage with a storied history. The superintendent there betrayed her to Georgia Tann who was a master at separating children from their natural parents.

After being given a no win choice (surrender your child or be declared unfit – a threat with teeth in it because the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley was good friends with Tann), my grandmother tried to get my mom back 4 days later. But Tann had a paying customer on her way from Arizona by train to pick my mom up and no way would the baby thief give my mom up.

Such a sad story. She never had another child . . .