SUBSCRIBE

Get new posts by email:

How to Use this Blog

CHANGES to format AGAIN - click older posts!
BOOZHOO! We've amassed tons of information and important history on this blog since 2010. If you have a keyword, use the search box below. Also check out the reference section above. If you have a question or need help searching, use the contact form at the bottom of the blog.

PLEASE follow this website by clicking the button above or subscribe.

We want you to use BOOKSHOP! (the editor will earn a small amount of money or commission. (we thank you) (that is our disclaimer statement)

This is a blog. It is not a peer-reviewed journal, not a sponsored publication... The ideas, news and thoughts posted are sourced… or written by the editor or contributors.

Blogger forced a change to our design so please SCROLL past the posts for lots more information.

Support Info: If you are a Survivor and need emotional support, a national crisis line is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week: Residential School Survivor Support Line: 1-866-925-4419. Additional Health Support Information: Emotional, cultural, and professional support services are also available to Survivors and their families through the Indian Residential Schools Resolution Health Support Program. Services can be accessed on an individual, family, or group basis.” These & regional support phone numbers are found at https://nctr.ca/contact/survivors/ . THANK YOU MEGWETCH for reading

NEED HELP WITH AN ADOPTEE SEARCH? Have questions? Use comment form at the bottom of this website.

email: tracelara@pm.me

SEARCH

Friday, November 14, 2014

Cast Off by CUB mother Lee Campbell #flipthescript #adoption

NEW BOOK CAST OFF in 2014

“Cast Off” exposes the roots of adoption reform and offers a blueprint for the wings that adoption reform still needs. 
“Cast Off” also offers a personal postscript. My work in adoption reform revealed the real Lee Campbell’s thirst for knowledge. After I earned a doctorate, I taught social sciences at the college level for 30 years. When I retired, I returned to CUB as its Curator. I reassembled CUB’s history.

Now, here’s something else you may not know: Cast Offand its prequelStow Away: They told me to forget. And I did. Now my memory has mutiny in mindare far more than memoirs.  They narrate my collection of CUB history. And after 2015 — drum roll —my books and the CUB collection will become permanent fixtures of history . . . at Harvard University! More good news is, you won’t have to travel to Cambridge to appreciate these works. CUB has advanced a chunk of change to digitize 4,000 pages of the collection for its website (www.cubirthparents.org).  As for my two books, both of these are now available, too.

 For print copies, visit www.createspace.com/406829  (“Cast Off”) and www.createspace.com/4147943 (“Stow Away”).

EXCERPT:
During a freezing winter rain in 1963, adoption banned me from my baby. He needed to go to a “better” family and I needed to get lost. If I didn’t “do the right thing” and surrender Michael, I was told I would owe a shitload of money to a list of people my social worker, Carole, rattled off. But if I “let him go,” all those costs would disappear. At the same time — and on my own, without help from Carole or anyone else — I needed to find a job (Fine! I learn fast! Sign me up!). I would also need to somehow find housing and someone to watch my child while I worked (there was no such thing as daycare then). But I balked. I couldn't grasp that Carole and my family were really going to allow me to give up my son. I kept hoping they would give me a jumpstart in the right direction, if I waited them out. Meanwhile, my social worker put her “convincing” machine on “high.” It was like the drip, drip, drip of water torture. After three months, I was as eroded as a dune after a hurricane. Then Carole told me Michael’s new family had already seen him and loved him. I was in the way. With the ink of my signature still wet on my Surrender, I woodenly turned away from my social worker. Only then did she offer me some advice: “Forget,” she told me. “Make a new life.” I grabbed her lifeline. I stuffed my memories deep in the core of the innermost atom of my smallest toe. By coiling my memories teeny-tiny, somehow I made them fit, like a circus tent in a duffle bag. The drone of “Forget. Move on” was a new kind of relentless drip – like anesthesia into a carotid artery.

After ten years, the prescription petered out. Then my memories began to unfurl, taking up more and more space in my mind. They threatened my new life, my only compensation for my loss. My husband, our two boys, our standing in our small Cape Cod village — all were at the mercy of my memories. But my memories won their mutiny. I decided to fight the real culprits. A retort and a comeback were overdue. Defying the mandate to cross the street if I ever came face-to-face with any other mother like me, I began to search and find them. I invited them to trust my vision. In there was a mission, an organization, a movement — the first of its kind in the world. My first steps were tentative. I used a phony name and was in shadow for my first TV show. I called myself a biological (ugh) mother, even though I now knew there was so much more to me than bones, organs and DNA.

Nine months later, I finally gave birth to the real "Lee Campbell." My unique band of mothers began to use our words, our stories, and our emerging research to do our own convincing. Some professionals began to “get it,” some even crossing the dark side of adoption to do the real right thing for us and with us. Along the way, I invented honorable language and new ways of being “Lee Campbell.” I became a presidential appointee. My amazing mothers, our supporters and I were interviewed on local and national television. Countless and varied print media carried news of our work. Together, we battered the gates of closed adoption. Of course, the keepers-of-the-way-things-are recruited more money and might to turn us away. We gained and lost ground.

After thirty-seven years, the fight goes on. Meanwhile, I returned to the educational system that had kicked me out when I was pregnant. I made up for the interruption. After earning a doctorate, I taught social sciences at the college level for thirty years. And . . . Michael and I recently celebrated 35 years of reunion. This is my story of triumph after surrender. If I could make a difference, so can you.

My books “Stow Away” and, now “Cast off,” are ready. Let them reveal how, you too, can do what you “have to do.”

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please: Share your reaction, your thoughts, and your opinions. Be passionate, be unapologetic. Offensive remarks will not be published. We are getting more and more spam. Comments will be monitored.
Use the comment form at the bottom of this website which is private and sent direct to Trace.


Happy Visitors!

They Took Us Away

They Took Us Away
click image to see more and read more

SIXTIES SCOOP NEWS

Blog Archive

Most READ Posts

Bookshop

Canada's Residential Schools

The religious organizations that operated the schools — the Anglican Church of Canada, Presbyterian Church in Canada, United Church of Canada, Jesuits of English Canada and some Catholic groups — in 2015 expressed regret for the “well-documented” abuses. The Catholic Church has never offered an official apology, something that Trudeau and others have repeatedly called for.

You are not alone

You are not alone

What our Nations are up against!

What our Nations are up against!

To Veronica Brown

Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.

Did you know?

Did you know?
lakota.cc/16I9p4D

WATCH THIS

Diane Tells His Name


click photo

60s Scoop Survivors Legal Support

GO HERE: https://www.gluckstein.com/sixties-scoop-survivors

Lost Birds on Al Jazeera Fault Lines

Lost Birds on Al Jazeera Fault Lines
click to read and listen about Trace, Diane, Julie and Suzie

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.

NEW MEMOIR

Original Birth Certificate Map in the USA

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.

GOOGLE

In some cases, companies may even take it upon themselves to control the narrative according to their own politics and professed values, with no need for government intervention. For example: Google, the most powerful information company in the world, has been reported to fix its algorithms to promote, demote, and disappear content according to undisclosed internal “fairness” guidelines. This was revealed by a whistleblower named Zach Vorhies in his almost completely ignored book, Google Leaks, and by Project Veritas, in a sting operation against Jen Gennai, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation. In their benevolent desire to protect us from hate speech and disinformation, Google/YouTube immediately removed the original Project Veritas video from the Internet. - https://desultoryheroics.com/2023/11/12/internet-censorship-everywhere-all-at-once

Google Followers