Fundraising To Facilitate Adoption

Until my FB friend, Laureen Pittman, author of The Lies That Bind (a book I’ve read and reviewed in this blog), posted about this, I was unaware of an adoption agency known as The Cradle. It turns out they have existed longer (since 1923) than Georgia Tann did and have facilitated more adoptions than she did (having placed more than 16,000 children), including internationally and including celebrities (just as Tann did).

As my friend points out in her blog, the film related to the trailer above – is NOT only a Hollywood produced film about adoption meant “to capture 99 years of [The Cradle’s] work through emotional, inspiring stories of adoption.” It’s a polished, obviously professionally produced and edited documentary-style film. But to say it’s “about adoption” is terribly misleading. What it’s really about is fundraising – to facilitate adoption.

The Cradle is a private adoption agency that’s been around for nearly a hundred years. The film is presented and stylized as a celebration of The Cradle’s work by showcasing several “successful” adoption stories from the perspective of the heroic savior adoptive parents and the counselors employed by The Cradle. The fairy tale-like stories portray adoption as something “magical,” and The Cradle as someplace where “dreams come true.” Lofty words and phrases describing The Cradle and its work, such as “destiny,” “meant to be,” “special place,” and even “divine intervention,” are sprinkled throughout the forty-five minute campaign.

She asks – What’s missing? It’s obvious to adoptees. Whether we’re “well-adjusted” or struggling, in the fog or out, wrestling with identity issues, facing secondary rejection, muddling through a reunion, or fighting against the powers-that-be in a closed records nightmare, the emotional turmoil of the adoptee is sorely missing from The Cradle’s fables of the adoptive family.

Laureen caught my attention, and caused me to go looking yesterday, when she wrote –

I’m so proud of my peers and friends in the adoption community: adoptees and many birth mothers who are brave enough to share their voices in the face of the evil, backwards for-profit adoption industry. We recognize that the adoption industry continues to commodify children and when we are witness to such blatant money-grabbing emotional-pandering as seen in the documentary-cum-fundraising film, “Stories From the Red Couch,” we band together. The 45 minute video is here – https://youtu.be/Gze92CxOOEA.

Laureen writes – This video comes on the heels of my last blog post, written as a review or reaction to the film. Apparently, and thankfully, I wasn’t the only one offended by the film and the continued, age-old tactics of The Cradle to promote and facilitate adoption and discourage (putting it mildly) family preservation. The voices in this rebuttal video are only a handful of the brave adoptee-voices (and one lovely birthmother) who had something to say regarding the “Stories From the Red Couch” video regarding the questionable practices of The Cradle. Be certain to read some of the comments below the YouTube video.

Laureen adds that you can tune in to the National Association of Adoptees and Parents‘ Adoption Happy Hour on Friday, April 15, 2022, to join in the discussion. Their happy hour is every Friday at 7pm Eastern. Replays of their interviews are also posted on YouTube.

The Lies That Bind

I finished reading this book yesterday evening. On Saturday, it absorbed my entire 4 hour writing session because I simply could not stop reading. That was the first time a book truly did that to me. It is a page turner, at least it was for me, because having been on my own journey to discover my family roots – I understood empathically the disappointments and the excitement of being on the hunt.

There are differences in our experiences. Laureen is an adoptee and she definitely offers a clear-eyed and honest expression of the issues that most adoptees face. It was easy for me to recognize the truth in these descriptions.

I am not an adoptee but what I have discovered is that as the child of two adoptees (and neither of my parents knew much at all about their origins or heritage when they died after 8 decades of life) I am almost as impacted by the issues adoptees face as the one who is adopted is. My situation has only been slightly better because I do know who my parents were but nothing beyond them until very recently.

There is a bittersweet aspect that I won’t give away but I do highly recommend the book – even if adoption has not impacted you. Why ? Because it is written so very clearly about why reform is needed in adoptionland – from the practice of placing children to the unsealing of adoption records in all 50 states. This is a situation with societal impacts which all people should care about.

Hiraeth

I have started reading The Lies That Bind: An Adoptee’s Journey Through Rejection, Redirection, DNA, and Discovery by Laureen Pittman. I may have more to say about her book when I finish reading it.

Yesterday, I came across this concept of Hiraeth. It is a Welsh word meaning a homesickness for a home or place to which you cannot return, somewhere that perhaps never was; nostalgia, yearning or grief for the lost places of one’s past.

Hiraeth is an unattainable longing for a place, a time, a person or people; a history that no longer exists or may never have actually existed at all. To feel hiraeth is to feel a deep incompleteness and yet recognize it as familiar.

There was something left undone within me when I embarked on discovering my family’s true origins. There was a deep desire for the real. My original grandmothers both nursed and cared for my parents for several months of their lives, approximately 6 to 8 mos of those lives. This is far different in my own mind than the mother who gives up her baby at birth. These women were beginning to know the person that these babies were becoming. I cannot imagine the pain that followed them throughout their lives.

This morning “family of choice” has a different meaning for me. My adoptive grandmothers chose my parents to raise as their own. I cannot say that my original grandmothers truly had a choice. They were pressured into relinquishing their child.

As I have been uncovering their stories, there is a deep longing in me to know them and I never really can. I’ve been able to find some cousins and an aunt who can share with me some things about the persons I long for, including the grandfathers I’ll never know as well. It helps but cannot fill the hole left in my soul when my parents were taken from their parents by strangers to raise.