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What adoption cost me #NAAM2019
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Edie holding me in 1957 |
reblog from 2014
By Trace L Hentz
Someone asked me recently what had adoption cost me personally.
What a loaded question, I shot back in my email. I said I needed to think about it.
Obviously I didn't ask to be adopted!
This situation was thrust on me by a damaged 22-year-old small-town
Wisconsin girl who loved Chicago night-clubs and partying too much.
She didn't want me after my 28-year-old father (also a big
drinker) kicked her out. He moved back to his Illinois farm-town and
found a new wife. She went to an unwed mothers home in Minnesota and
signed me away.
If my soul wanted a big test this lifetime, this was clearly the route to take. Finding out neither would ever look for me? That painful discovery cost me.
What kind of man would desert a woman carrying his child and who would
tell a woman she cannot keep her own baby? Who made them this way?
Belief systems, religions, social workers, neighbors, parents, judges,
priests? Even your own family can be so damaged, it's risky to find
them. There are times now I wish I had never looked but I had to know
why I was adopted. Taking risks to find out the truth cost me years.
Being told by my natural mother to never contact her again? That rejection cost me.
I made all the moves, made all the calls, did all the travel and took
all the risks to find both parents. I put myself out there to join a
family who didn't even know I existed or cared that I did. That hurt
cost me.
The adoption trade in babies was booming in the 1950s. In my opinion my
adoptive parents were not carefully screened. Despite his raging
alcoholism and their marital discord after two miscarriages, Catholic
social workers still qualified them to be my parents. Very young I was
sexually molested by my adoptive dad. That betrayal cost me.
I had to pretend for years I was alright when really I wasn't. I tried
to live up to their expectations and be the baby they lost. That
impossible situation cost me.
My adoptive parents didn't know adopting kids won't fix a marriage and
might even make it worse! I had to suppress my shock and disappointment
in them for too long. It took me years to get therapy and counseling
that worked. This delay cost me.
My lack of trust and being able to love someone cost me a marriage.
Many years later I was shocked to learn my ancestry. My father, who had
the Native blood, didn't intervene to keep me. How did that make me
feel? Betrayed.
I had no idea what to think about being Shawnee/Cherokee since there was no one alive to reconnect me to my tribal culture. That cost me.
How can you measure cultural loss when there is no dollar amount or
apology that can undo what happened? There is no way to get that back.
What did adoption cost me? Everything.
What did adoption give me? The strength to persevere.
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ADOPTION TRUTH
As the single largest unregulated industry in the United States, adoption is viewed as a benevolent action that results in the formation of “forever families.”
The truth is that it is a very lucrative business with a known sales pitch. With profits last estimated at over $1.44 billion dollars a year, mothers who consider adoption for their babies need to be very aware that all of this promotion clouds the facts and only though independent research can they get an accurate account of what life might be like for both them and their child after signing the adoption paperwork.
Why tribes do not recommend the DNA swab
Rebecca Tallbear entitled: “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe”, bearing out what I only inferred:
Detailed discussion of the Bering Strait theory and other scientific theories about the population of the modern-day Americas is beyond the scope of this essay. However, it should be noted that Indian people have expressed suspicion that DNA analysis is a tool that scientists will use to support theories about the origins of tribal people that contradict tribal oral histories and origin stories. Perhaps more important,the alternative origin stories of scientists are seen as intending to weaken tribal land and other legal claims (and even diminish a history of colonialism?) that are supported in U.S. federal and tribal law. As genetic evidence has already been used to resolve land conflicts in Asian and Eastern European countries, this is not an unfounded fear.
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