The Dead Heart

We don’t serve your country
Don’t serve your king
Know your custom don’t speak your tongue
White man came took everyone

We don’t serve your country
Don’t serve your king
White man listen to the songs we sing
White man came took everything

We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken

We don’t serve your country
Don’t serve your king
Know your custom don’t speak your tongue
White man came took everyone

We don’t need protection
Don’t need your hand
Keep your promise on where we stand
We will listen we’ll understand

We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken

We carry in our hearts the true country
And that cannot be stolen
We follow in the steps of our ancestry
And that cannot be broken

Mining companies, pastoral companies
Uranium companies
Collected companies
Got more right than people
Got more say than people
Forty thousand years can make a difference to the state
of things
The dead heart lives here

–From  Midnight Oil, The Real Thing

 

Digging Toward the Root of the Crime

As an adoptee in elementary school, books were my best friends; sometimes my only friends. I read in trees, I read under the covers with a flashlight at night, I read until I got carsick while traveling, and I read while I ate meals. I read many of the children’s classics and was a member of a children’s book club. My library card began to fall apart from use (this was before lamination).

One of my favorite fiction characters in my ‘tween years was Sherlock Holmes. His ability to solve mysteries fascinated me, as they do many people (I think I read somewhere that the character Greg House on the  “House M.D.” television series was based on Holmes, which makes sense, with Wilson his sidekick filling in for Watson.) I still have the complete collection of Sherlock Holmes stories.

Anyway, now as an (undiagnosed ADHD) adult adoptee I’m obsessed with digging up some of the root causes of my own suffering and the suffering of everyone who’s been affected by adoption. I’ve never been satisfied with condescending answers from “experts” or people who place themselves in authoritative positions, or people who are in such denial that they must moralize about my inability to heal from my PASD (post-adoption stress disorder). My reasoning is that those in charge, those who have always wielded power over me, always get their way. WHY? (I ask “why?” a lot, and it irritates the hell out of some people.)

So, I have to come around through the side door to confront my problem from a lateral perspective to try and reach some understanding.

So far my postings here have covered my own history, my rants, and my style of hitting as many nails as I can into the coffin of the malicious adoption machine that has destroyed so many people’s lives. I’m just one person with a tiny, unimportant blog found by news readers and mostly left uncommented, but as other adoptees in this community will agree, a blog is cheaper than therapy.

I must add a disclaimer here that I don’t carry Sherlock Holmes’ credentials for sleuthing. My findings are purely my own and may or may not be provable or reliable or valid.

With that said, I’ve been thinking about the tangled mess in which humanity has ensnared itself over millennia, and how we can’t apply the old solutions to solve problems that they caused in the first place. The way I see it is that the adoption machine is a microcosm of the bigger mess, but it’s a very telling microcosm. And there’s no way I could ever untangle it here, even if I wrote about it daily  for a century. But I can hack away at it, and that’s better (for me) than just stewing.

The old saying “(the love of) money is the root of all evil” comes to mind. I don’t think anyone could justifiably argue against the idea that money supplies the mechanism behind the adoption machine. Maybe you can already see where I’m going with this.

Yesterday I wrote a little about the two ends of the economic spectrum involved in the adoption machine (I left out the middlemen–the adoption agencies, the attorneys, etc.), which comprise the wealthy or upwardly mobile who have the money to fill their empty nests with other people’s children, and the poor who can no longer pay their bills and are thus deemed unfit to be parents.

Before anything can change we first have to see the truth.

Scarcity is one of the main driving factors in all economic systems.–unknown

As long as people will accept crap, it will be financially profitable to dispense it.
– Dick Cavett

Wherever money becomes the sole measurement of value we find dehumanization, objectification, gentrification, and a million other “-tions,” including adoption. Which means that we as a race have decided that a dollar is more important than the health, welfare or lives of other people.

Apparently one of the problems frequently faced by the rich is guilt. Along with guilt there’s the question of how to raise kids responsibly when with such rarefied incomes almost anything is affordable. The wealthy can afford to have “experts” manage their lives. For example, financial management firms are now hiring their own in-house psychologists to help those rolling in piles of filthy lucre, and there are entities called “wealth psycholgists” (you can do a search for this term if you don’t believe me). Above all, the wealthy can afford to purchase conveniently impoverished other people’s children through attorneys and agencies.

According to The Wealth Legacy Group, some of the problems faced by the wealthy are:

• Fear of being loved for their money rather than themselves.
• Worry about how money will affect their level of intimacy in personal relationships.
• Being nervous when others ask for a loan.

Oh boo-hoo. Doesn’t that just make you feel sorry for them?  So, having enough money doesn’t mean their psychological problems evaporate. What it does mean is the wealthy have the cash to hire the services of psychologists, and so a form of ’boutique’ psychologist is born, just as a form of ’boutique’ baby shopping is born.

Contrast the psychological problems of the wealthy with those of the poor:

• Fear of being hated for being poor.
• Worry about how money will affect levels of intimacy in personal relationships.
• Being nervous about asking for a loan.

So, money has a way of causing people (regardless of economic status) to perform ’socially insensitive’ actions and cut themselves off from others by thinking selfishly. Money cuts us off from others. The wealthy live apart from and “above” everyone else and help themselves to endless benefits unavailable to the majority of society.

The wealthy (yes, those in power) also decided that it’s appropriate to poison the air, the land and the oceans in order to maintain the illusion of money (ever notice how the wealthiest neighborhoods are enshrined with trees and ponds and streams, etc?) through competition for resources.  But the new revolutionary thought is that the idea of money can only continue as long as we all agree to it. If we decide that life is more important than money, if enough of us decide that we’d rather live our lives for ourselves rather than to serve money, then that ’s what will happen.

No matter who you are, no matter what you do, regardless of what you like to think of it all, you serve money. As a species we’ve never had a greater evil than the idea of money.

So, to sum up how the idea of money applies to adoption. If money somehow lost its status as the sole measurement of value, how would anyone have the wherewithal to buy anyone else’s baby? Life is, after all, outside the realm of artificial valuation.

This topic to be continued.

 

“Loving Option” is a Total Lie

There seems to be a growing number of affluent couples who turn to adoption to solve their infertility problems. The film Juno is a great illustration of this trend. I mean, how can you possibly have two six figure incomes, matching Beemers and a half-million-dollar home garnished with trendy, upscale decor, but no designer baby to continue your genes? Well, these upwardly mobile couples are the bull’s eye for court-sanctioned baby trafficking.

At the other end of the scale we have the hollow “family values” rhetoric used by politicians and religious leaders over the past decade or so; rhetoric so hypocritical it has become criminal negligence, and it needs to be exposed for what it is. All economically challenged families everywhere are under heightened siege.  The institutions that divide families (war, high interest rates, food insecurity, mortgage defaults, pro-life legislation, un-affordable health insurance, etc.) are flourishing more than ever before. But the most heinous crimes are always done in secret. And Jess DelBalzo’s essay exposes adoption as  America’s secret crime against the family:

It is child abuse, slavery, and rape all rolled into one pretty package, marketed to wealthy infertile couples as the answer to all their prayers and forced upon unsuspecting members of the lower classes. It is an industry that earns $1.4 billion each year shamelessly promoting its product with no regard for the damage it is doing to children and their parents. Surprise! It is not the tobacco industry, nor is it a chemical company polluting our air and water. It is adoption, and it is toxic to America’s families.

Deemed a “loving option” by social workers, agencies, and anti-abortion crusaders, adoption puts children at risk for a myriad of psychological problems that range in severity. That may sound like love to the people who receive a portion of the $1.4 billion, but it should scream child abuse to anyone else. After all, parents can be prosecuted for child neglect over something as simple as a messy house. And in reality, adoption workers are guilty of more than neglect. Since the 1940s, professionals have known about the damaging effects of adoption on mothers and children. In fact, the Florence Crittenton Home brochure from 1942-1956 responded to suggestions of adoption with the statement, “Motherhood, and the love and care of a baby, strengthens the character of every girl who has the mentality to grasp it. As to the child: psychologists and social workers have learned that no material advantage can make up for the loss of its own mother.” In spite of their knowledge, the Florence Crittenton homes went on to become some of America’s biggest adoption proponents, once supply and demand made it more profitable to sever a mother’s rights and sell her infant to a wealthy but sterile couple. (more…)

 

Adoption is Imperialism

Been reading some of Adoption Roadkill’s posts for May 2008 about the violence of adoption. They resonate strongly with my own experience.  I was thinking even before I read them that adoption is a truly a sanctioned form of occupation, colonization, and imperialism.

Here are just some reasons why adoption is a form of imperialism:

• Both are incredibly violent in obvious and not-so-obvious ways
• Both are a form of exploitation and theft
• Both divide and conquer
• Both believe what they do is “for the good of the conquered”
• Both force obedience to an external power
• Both are sanctioned by artificial “legalities”
• Both ignore human rights except their own
• Both are blind to the harm of their exploits
• Both degrade, objectify, and dehumanize
• Both strip the conquered of their history and identity
• Both are a form of subtle genocide
• Both come from a sense of selfish entitlement
• Both destroy all sense of continuity and personhood.

The following quote is from Chris Hedges who co-authored Collateral Damage: America’s War Against Iraqi Civilians

…you cannot understand a war or conflict unless finally you see it through the eyes of the victims, because in wartime, there is a great disparity of power, there is the all-powerful and the all-powerless.

Similarly, you cannot understand the violence that is adoption unless finally  you see it through the eyes of its victims (adopted children and their families who are torn from each other), because in adoption, there is a great disparity of power, there is the all-powerful and the all-powerless. The parallel is so clear: Adoptees and natural parents are collateral damage of the American adoption machine just as civilians are collateral damage for the American war machine.

I know that people who adopt think they do so out of the best intentions. But that’s because they haven’t taken the time to examine what they are really doing. I would encourage anyone who is contemplating adopting another woman’s baby to read Personal Adoption Stories to see things from the perspectives of those they are about to exploit.

 

Getting Up to Speed Again

I’ve been away from the adoptee/first parent community for awhile.  It’s been interesting returning and learning who is active and who has been, like me, dealing with other life issues, away from their blogs. Since I found Heatherrainbow’s comment left in February, I decided to open my blog again to the public. I was unable to continue for awhile and changed the status to invitation only.

I’ve been spending today drinking coffee and building and playing on this little corner of the community, feeling like someone who’s been on vacation somewhere for a long time and finally returning to see who’s still around, who has moved on, and what’s new. My link lists may not be up to date, but over time I’ll fix them.

As I type and mess around getting ECB back up to speed I’m listening to Stephen Fitzpatrick’s wonderful harp music. For anyone who’s unfamiliar, he’s an adoptee, a writer, and an accomplished international harpist. He’s written seven amazing articles that focus on adoption–some of the best I’ve ever read–and what it takes to begin healing. Altogether, he’s an amazing human being. I encourage you to delve into his talent.

As for myself, I’ve been taking post-bac classes in creative writing at Portland State University. I’ve been improving my fiction writing as well as gathering letters of recommendation. I plan to apply to grad school there (Master’s program in Creative Writing) sometime before Winter term. If all goes well and I’m accepted, I’ll begin in Fall 2009 (not this year).

At any rate, I’m getting some good feedback on my fiction stories these days. I’m also getting more used to Portland, discovering all the cool things about it.

But of course Oregon isn’t California, and there is a lot of settling in to do. So far R and I are still renting. We aren’t sure if we want to keep renting, to join an ecovillage, or commit to buying. The part about buying doesn’t sit well with either of us in the current economic climate. I’ve heard that it’s a good idea to get rid of all debt right now. Mortgages are two to three grand a month and that’s a little out of our league. The eco village thing, well, that sounds interesting. We have to go to a meeting on July 1 to learn more about it. There are about five or six active eco villages here in Portland. I’ll blog more about this as I go.

For now, the photo below is of the house we’re renting. We live in the top story, and our landlady lives in the bottom. This photo was taken in the winter, so the trees are bare. But springtime in Portland is, well, divine, with its amazing, incredible green foliage and dazzling flowers.

 

Someone Else’s Baby

Everyone who knows nothing about what it feels like to be an adoptee has an opinion. Everyone has a moralistic stance and they feel no qualms about telling you how mistaken you are to be a lost and empty adoptee. “If you’d had more supportive parents, everything would have been fine,” or “You should be grateful for having parents. You could have been an orphan,” or bla bla bla.

Sometimes I think it would have been better to be an orphan, because then no one would be fooling anyone. No one would have stood in the way of my past, pretending to be my parents. I’d have been abandoned and that would be that. I’d make it somehow without having to deal with the baggage of complete strangers who happened to be rich enough to steal someone else’s baby (instead of supporting that person’s ability to keep the child). And no matter how old you are, six months or six decades, you’re still seen as a baby in the eyes of the state.

 

Identity Erasure

I must write about the horror of being an adoptee. I must write about it for the rest of my life. I must write about it for the rest of my life because it’s the only way I can deal with it. I don’t pretend to have answers; I only know what I feel in my guts.

Let me see if I can help someone who wasn’t adopted begin to understand the horror I feel.

Identity is the story of who we are as human beings. Closed adoption un-makes this story. It puts the adopted person into a permanent state of shock (cutting of roots) through mind control (denial, guilt, secrecy, etc.).

Closed adoption, with its amended (falsified) birth certificates, is set up to erase the adoptee’s history and and his/her heritage so that the new parents can begin with a new slate; so that the new parents can start from scratch with someone else’s baby. This process effectively shatters and destroys the identity of the adoptee. It allows the new parents to re-boot the adoptee with a scrambled message that is impossible to decipher. It reboots the adoptee from zero.

 

Emptiness Defines Who I Am

The holidays have never made me cry or miss anyone I’ve ever loved. I’m not sure why not–everyone else seems to get depressed during that time when they miss someone’s presence at that time of year. I guess for me, it’s pretty much the same old same old, that heaviness that presses against my chest every waking moment of my life. A permanent state of mourning. Welcome to this adoptee’s world.

I burst into tears when I think no one can hear me crying out to my mother all through the year. Once, when I was getting acupuncture, the needles in my back stimulated some bottomless grief and I began to cry unconsolably. All I could think of was my mother, wanting her so badly, the yearning took over my entire body and expanded out through infinity. I didn’t think there were enough tears in all of creation for me to access and pour out. I cried so hard I had difficulty stopping, all the while embarrassed in front of the acupuncturist, who was “very understanding,” as people tend to be. I thought I was going to crumble into a black hole of agonized longing and sorrow–there are no words to describe it. It’s far deeper than depression. It’s at the cellular level. I hear that there’s more space inside us than there is matter, when seen from a quantuum viewpoint. To me that means that every nucleus in every cell of my body is missing something in the matter, even in the spaces between the matter.

 

Acting Out Your Own Death (unedited)

(The title of this entry is from “Shadowplay,” written and sung by Ian Curtis of Joy Division. )

I’m living an experience that only other adoptees understand. But few of them ever talk about the experience as one that colors every part of their existence. They see it, from what I gather, as an inconvenience rather than an illness. Is there something uniquely wrong with me? Does adoption have the power to erase memory of being redacted? Or not the memory of being redacted, but the FEELINGS of being redacted? If “be grateful” is repeated enough throughout life, does it replace the authentic internal scream of grief and rage? An inability to attach oneself to anyone else? Permanent anxiety?

Adoption, they say, is really not so bad. You get a second chance in life–to live in a higher income bracket with parents who aren’t drowning in poverty and its abuses. Adoption is good for you. Children (and adults) should learn to live with not knowing who they are or where they came from. The void of identity is a place to loll around in while waiting for the void of annihilation that comes to everyone. It’s an anticipation for the next redaction. Experts tell adoptees to just get over it and get on with their lives. It’s not so bad. All this blubbering about emptiness is just melodrama, a spoiled demand for attention. But my emptiness is not fleeting. I don’t recall a moment in my life when it didn’t gnaw around my heart leaving permanent teeth marks, devouring all ability to relax within myself; my existential condition. The only absolute certainty in my life (besides death) is that relief will never come. A permanent gnawing empty feeling that nothing will ever fill.

Experts who pontificate about how adoptees should feel and live assure us that our loneliness is a temporary condition that can be healed–much like someone is only temporarily gay, a condition that can be healed. “Lonely” implies yearning and wanting. Most people I know aren’t truly lonely. They are unfamiliar with what it is to yearn and want beyond all possibility of satisfaction. It’s not the same as if my mother had died giving me birth. It’s that my entire family and all my ancestors were obliterated without a trace. This is the annihilation of the self. But we must not say so. We must not ever confess that we are nothing more, now, than empty shells, for to do so is selfish and weak; to do so is to deny our Inner Resources. But I have no Inner Resources. It’s all an act.

 

Conception and Deception

Odd how people who are hellbent to save fetuses could care less when it comes to babies outside the womb. They support and encourage the separation of families, let children starve and go without health care, and send young people to die in old men’s wars. Their hypocrisy is abhorrent to me.

Thought I’d share this from the Portland Willamette Week from December 13, 2006.

Womb Raiders

An anti-abortion group’s ads in local high-school newspapers fill the void left by Planned Parenthood.

By Beth Slovic | wweek dot com

When Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette stopped advertising this year in local high schools’ newspapers to save money, another group popped up in those pages for the first time to promote free pregnancy tests, counseling services and nurse consultations to teenage girls.

But what the ads for the Pregnancy Resource Centers of Greater Portland don’t say is that the nonprofit Christian group doesn’t share the pro-choice views of Planned Parenthood. In fact, Pregnancy Resource Centers opposes abortions and is committed to steering girls toward parenting or adoption, even suggesting on its website, prcofportland.com, that taking emergency contraception such as the morning-after pill could carry “emotional risks.”

Student newspapers at Lincoln, Cleveland and Madison high schools in Portland have all recently run ads for the anti-abortion resource centers, generating revenue of up to $80 per quarter-page ad for their generally cash-strapped newspapers.

With several Portland high schools having eliminated their newspapers because of budget cuts, Madison journalism adviser Gene Brunak says he feels some responsibility to generate cash for his journalism program. A quarter-page ad in the Nov. 15 edition of Madison’s Constitution covered one-tenth of that 12-page issue’s production and distribution costs.

Brunak says his staff may reconsider running future Pregnancy Resource Centers ads (after he’s had a chance to tell colleagues about the centers’ anti-abortion platform). But Lincoln’s newspaper adviser, David Bailey, says his high school will continue to run the ads for the entire school year.

“I see no problem in doing so,” Bailey writes in an email. “We have run ads for Planned Parenthood in the past.”

Nancy Bennett, a spokeswoman for the local Planned Parenthood chapter, says there’s a difference between her group’s ads and those of Pregnancy Resource Centers, which she contends misrepresent their services.

“When you’re young, pregnant and frightened, you need accurate information,” Bennett says.

Larry Gadbaugh, CEO of the Pregnancy Resource Centers, says the ad is accurate and that the group isn’t trying to deceive anyone. The group has long advertised in student newspapers, but has upped its ad budget this year to reach more young people in additional papers such as Madison’s, Gadbaugh says.

“We are pro-choice,” he says. “We’re not pro-all choices.”