73adoptee - adoption search, reunion and reform

Used Babies: new blog from Triona

73adoptee - adoption search, reunion and reform

Road Trip: BOOK TOUR

I hear this: “Oh, you wrote a book? When do you hit the road to read it?”

            I plan to share the story about American Indian adoptees with my hometown of Superior, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota on my “book tour” next week. 

            Hardly anyone knows this story, unless you’re an American Indian adoptee or an American Indian family who lost a child to adoption during the Indian Adoption Projects.

            Back in 2008 I read from my manuscript at the Wisconsin Book Festival in Madison, Wisconsin. My friend Mark Anthony Rolo (Bad River Ojibwe) read from his book The Wonder Bull and we had a great big audience with great big questions. One young adoptee came up to me afterwards and said he’d never heard anyone say that adoptees have a “gratitude attitude” which we’re expected to display on demand, our entire life. And he thanked me!

            I told him, “Trust me, when we’re adopted, it’s expected. Once you move past gratitude, you’ll find yourself in unchartered waters, torn between acceptance, anger, love and despair…you might even have to break a few laws to find your own parents.”  This young man was afraid to move forward and open his adoption because he imagined it would hurt his adoptive mother.

            How perplexing, I thought, since I’d been there myself, as I handed him my email address. I advised him to be totally prepared and do his adoption search without telling anyone in his family. I know. I wish every day I didn’t have to say this. 

            If you’ve read One Small Sacrifice, you know that many parts of the book are truly painful.  My 89-year-old neighbor Karolyn read my book and calls the Indian Adoption Project an atrocity and an outrage.

            What my hand wrote down at 4 a.m. – it was the best I could do. Every page was a canvas, a place to exorcise trauma and stir up ghosts.

            Slowly, the topic of adoption has shifted away from what I call “the gratitude attitude” to a more realistic discussion. Simply look at the numerous articulate writings by adoptees out there. This topic has grown up as we have grown up. Adoptees have sprouted new wings. Adoptees just need other people to hear us and read us. Perhaps then archaic atrocious adoption laws might change.

            So I’m planning a road trip. I am not managed or sponsored by a giant publisher…I’m simply a journalist who scoured adoption history and blended in some personal experience for a book.  

            That is really where the road trip began.  I had to look for strangers. I had to stop being afraid I might hurt someone if I found my family. I had to stop worrying how I might make people uncomfortable. I had to stop being afraid of the truth. 

             I decided I had to grow up.

            Trace’s reading schedule:

            Superior Public Library (on Tower & Belnap) Superior, Wisconsin, Wed., Sept. 29, 6:30 p.m.

            Jitters Coffee, Superior Street, Duluth, Minnesota, Friday, October 1, 5 p.m.

             (Trace will blog again after her road trip!) 

Check out my friend Mark's new book: 

Excerpt from One Small Sacrifice

New bookmark

THE JOURNEY

Who are you?

Stop and think about this… Who are you?

Think about your parents, your grandparents and great-grandparents, who you knew when you were growing up. Remember the stories of when, where, even how you were born.

Now… imagine you disappear, you’re erased, no longer a part of your family history and genealogy. How would you feel? Grateful? I don’t think so.

Now … imagine an adoptee who doesn’t know who they are … nothing, anything, zilch… Can you imagine looking in the mirror, not knowing anything? How might that feel?

A fairytale?

You think?

“Adopted people” are the only people in the world without free or unlimited access to their personal history…. we simply vanish into thin air.

This decision was made for us. Someone decided this long ago. Someone decided adoptees were better off not knowing anything. Someone decided this for me – I’d be fine, never knowing my identity.

Wait … I was dead without my identity, without my name. I can’t live like this.

My adoptive family had their stories, their names, their parents and grandparent’s names, where they were from, how they lived and died, everything.

Like my adoptive mom and dad, many families are very proud of their stories. There could be bank robbers or horse thieves or rich barons or fancy politicians. Mine could be, too.

To tell my story, I needed more than their story. I needed my own.

To contact Trace: email: tracedemeyer@yahoo.com

Ain’t Life Crazy?

Mind Masons

            Words, words, words. That’s what a blog is, right? Words.

            Yet I don’t think of this as writing words but sharing actual experience, my adoption experience, my American Indian experience, and my overall ain’t-life-crazy experience.

            Life is crazy when you think about it. Lots of ideas became American products which started out as patents and experiments: for example – adoption was an experiment and now we’re finding out for those who were the recipients of being adopted aren’t quite tickled pink about their experience. Few in the adoption business want to change anything. They prefer to be known as “do-gooders.”

            Secrecy permeates lots of experiments. I put this Albert S. Wei’s quote in my book: “My problem is secrecy. I believe that perpetually secret adoptions assure un-accountability and lack of transparency. And secret adoptions are only the tip of the iceberg. The secrecy permeates the process: secret identities, secret parents, secret records, secret foster care providers, secret social workers, secret judges and lawyers (all their identities are sealed, typically), secret physicians, secret statistics and, in the case of some adoption-oriented organizations, secret budgets and secret boards of directors. In any social practice, when people in positions of power hide behind masks, one can be pretty sure that they have something to hide.”  Wei is special advisor to the Bastard Nation Executive Committee.

            I had no idea how much was secret. Without the internet and light bulbs, I might still be in the dark.

            I write lots of words no one will ever see or read. Why? Writing has been a trusted friend and I consider some of my ideas secret.

            Writing is a way to work things out in my head. A way to reason, looking at things one way and then another. If I find out it’s a bad idea, I change my mind.

            Too bad those who could change things for adoptees haven’t had this happen yet.

Living a mystery

           Grief grows when someone’s missing. My “someone” was Helen, the woman who grew me in her womb. Helen decided to sign me away to be raised by total strangers.

            What type of blind faith was that? What was required for her to decide to make me an orphan? How could she know I’d be safe? Someone must have told her.

            Maybe the Catholics convinced her. The Catholics arranged everything for her and for me.

             Why doesn’t America know being orphaned hurts the baby in a profound way? Prisons and psychiatric wards are filled with orphans and adoptees, some of the scariest and most violent offenders. Why haven’t we heard about this? 

            Losing Helen did hurt me in a profound way, but not enough to kill someone.

            Adoption was an experiment. Remember this. No one really knew how closed adoption would turn out. Our mothers never imagined how this could hurt us as much as it hurt them. Mothers were assured giving us up would be ok, and we'd be better off. 

             CUB Mothers are rewriting history and fighting to get us back and fighting adoption secrecy. (CUB means concerned united birthparents). An important essential book on America's unregulated adoption industry is Stork Market (there is a link on this blog). Riben's book will open your eyes in ways you cannot imagine.

            Then I find out our government forgets to count adoptees.  As a journalist, I was disappointed but not surprised to find out their U.S. figures are not recent, reliable or computed systematically. We’re not that important, I guess.

            Writing One Small Sacrifice, I was confronted with one reality then another. I woke up. I lived in a mystery novel. I can say now with certainty, it was an adventure solving the mystery.

             With obvious fear, I opened my adoption, even if it got me banished from my adoptive family or arrested for criminally trespassing in my own family tree!

            What lawmakers decide about unsealing adoption records in 2010, if they were not adopted and if they know their names, they may not get it. Expecting an adoptee to be ok with living a mystery is crazy.

            When you think about this, it’s obvious. The tree roots of trauma takes its hold in children. Orphans roots are scarred. My roots are scarred.

            I don’t think it should be so hard to find the woman who grew you in her womb. I don’t think an adoptee should be denied their name and their family tree and their relatives.

            I think about a lot of things but I pray that moms and dads across the planet can raise their own children and those children become strong and healthy moms and dads. 

** An adoptee wrote on Facebook: My sister and I have so many issues that a shrink wouldn't know where to start… Another wrote: I shut down my emotions at a very early age. Because I agreed with them, I wrote Ghost Shell and posted it on this blog on July 1.