In Defense Of

I do believe in all the reforms I have previously written about – retaining identity and family history information, not changing names or birth dates and not listing adoptive parents as the original parent. Beyond that is a consideration for guardianship rather than permanent adoption.

All that said, from direct experience, adoptive parents have been a part of my own family’s life in positive ways. First of all – my grandparents by adopting each of my parents. On each side, they were a positive influence on my life and the lives of my siblings as well as on my parent’s lives. They were good people who meant well. What we now know about the wounds suffered by adoptees was not known at the time they took possession of my parents.

My mom’s adoptive parents modeled financial security for us and affirmed the value of advanced education. My dad’s adoptive parents modeled faith and uncompromising personal values for us. My dad’s adoptive parents may even have been responsible for keeping my parents together by getting married and preventing me from being given up when my teenage mother found herself pregnant. I am grateful for that much.

Each of my sisters gave up a baby to adoption and these two children are fine adults. In one case, my niece is showing us what a good and consistent mother she can be. Even though she has been reunited with my family, she has remained steadfast in her appreciation for the people who raised her.

My nephew could not be a higher quality person. His adoptive mother has gone the extra mile to answer the identity questions that evolved as he matured. It appears that even my sister either didn’t know who his actual father was or chose to name the person who had the financial resources to help her make what has proven to be a quality choice as a substitute mother. Given my sister’s very evident mental illness, it is for the best that she didn’t try to raise him.

All that to say, while I remain firmly of the opinion that there are better ways to provide for the welfare of children than adoption, it is not that the adoptive parents in my own family’s life were to blame. It was naive ignorance and the intention to do good – which all of them have.

Not Bad, Not Good, It’s Life

Even though I have learned so much about the process of adoption – how it affects an adoptee, how it affects the original parents and how it affects those adoptive parents who try to fill a void, it is the truth of my own family, the one I was born into and I would not exist if the adoptions had not happened.

One of the success stories in my own family is my nephew. When I met him and his adoptive mother, she admitted to me that for a long time, she felt that she should not have been in the picture. When she learned about my nephew’s mother, about her struggles in life with mental illness, this gave his adoptive mother a lot of peace about their situation.

She has been a champion for my nephew. She has been with him every step of the way as he sought to discover his origins. She has supported him in his desires and has even gone the extra mile, smoothing the way for him.

Yesterday was his birthday. I sent him greetings by way of her email. She replied to me last night with the good news that he has met his birth father and has discovered he has two half-siblings, a boy and a girl, who are only a little bit younger than him. All of them have welcomed his arrival in their lives.

His birth father is not who my sister named on the birth certificate. The kindest explanation is that she didn’t actually know who fathered her son. My nephew’s adoptive mother actually paid a private investigator who triangulates DNA to discover the true identity of my nephew’s father.

Beyond being probably the best adoptive mother I’ve known in my lifetime, within her nurturing, my nephew has become an amazing young man. He is the Assistant Emergency Management Coordinator in the town in which he lives. He is now a Lieutenant in the Fire Department and holds down a job at the local utility. I am very proud of the high quality person he has turned out to be.

Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ?

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

I’m not thinking of the famous movie but of the author. Like my grandmothers, she lost her own mother at a young age. I was encouraged to read her book “To The Lighthouse” by Jean Houston when I attended a week long Salon at her home in Ashland Oregon. There is an element of her personal story to speaks to that loss of a mother.

Virginia Woolf was concerned about the injustice of patriarchal domination of women, the horrors of incest, the consequence of a social system which places no value on educating women and the astonishing liberation of moving from acceptance of a Victorian sentimental notion of marriage to easy and tolerant attitudes toward sexuality.

She was a genius at conveying inner experience. At age 25, she wrote a set of reminiscences for her sister’s child, though it is actually a memoir of her childhood and adolescence. In it, she sets out to convey how the death of her mother when she was twelve affected the family.

Shortly after her mother’s death, Woolf became violently emotionally ill – hearing voices, physically violent, racked by physical pain, unable to sleep or rest. Neither her half brother’s forced physical intimacy or her bout of insanity – form any part of the story of her coming of age.

In “A Sketch of the Past” (written when Woolf was 60 yrs old) she speaks more directly. Her stepbrother’s abuse gave her such a fear of male sexuality that she had another breakdown and was in a nursing home for a long spell.

Finally, she retrieved her self-confidence enough to take up her writing career, and even marry, though she remained sexually frigid. Woolf went on to write some of the strongest feminist fiction and nonfiction to be produced in the twentieth century. She became an icon of the liberated female consciousness – sensitive, ironic, detached, capable of profound human insight because she embodied the androgynous blending of reason and intuition.

Woolf would have insisted that human affairs are much more complex than the confessional autobiography suggests.