Subj : Parenting, adoption, love, children, and choices.
To : All
From : Damon A. Getsman
Date : Fri Aug 01 2014 02:04 pm
I saw this awhile back, and I've just got to repost it, at least in places
where my bio-mom won't see it. I don't want to bring up anything bad for her
again, but this is something that, I think, has value in it for a lot of ppl.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Here's the post that started it; I've got a bit of personal passion and
stake in the matter, as you'll soon see:
An African-American welfare-dependent mother of three told me this story about
the birth of her son with Down syndrome. She had been planning to put the
newborn up for adoption, a decision she had reached shortly before his birth,
due to the domestic stress and violence with which she was living. When the
baby was born and diagnosed, a white social worker came to see her about
placing the child. The mother asked what would become of her baby and was told,
‘We’ll probably find a rural farm family to take him.’ ‘Then what?’
she queried. ‘He’ll grow up outside, knowing about crops and animals,’
was the reply. ‘Then what,’ the mother repeated. ‘Maybe he’ll even grow
up to work on that farm,’ the social worker replied. ‘Sounds like slavery
to me,’ answered the mother, who decided to take her baby home. This imagery
and its legacy contrast strongly with the stories many white mothers tell, in
which they fantasize a peaceful, rural life ‘in nature’ as the perfect
placement for their children with Down syndrome.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
A reply from someone else:
in Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in
America by Rayna Rapp, p. 271.
This paragraph like, knocked the wind out of me.
(via this-reading-by-lightning)
I am so glad that this woman had the necessary cultural slant to see right
through the BS that is pseudo-utopian farm community institutions. Because
most white mothers can’t see through it at all, and they put their
developmentally disabled children there, whether as children or as adults, and
they don’t see the awfulness at all. And even those of us with
developmental disabilities… we feel the awfulness, we feel its effects in our
soul, but we don’t necessarily register that something is going horribly
wrong, and we can’t necessarily say anything about it, we may even fight to
stay in such places. So anyone who can see through it, for any reason at all,
that is a really important thing. And it’s also really important that the
white people who usually make these communities have overlooked how such an
institution looks to someone with a family history of slavery.
(via youneedacat)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Finally, what I had to say about the subject, from personal experience being
adopted:
Yay, I've got something new to write about.
I'm the white child of a white biological family. Let me be a little bit more
specific; a very intelligent white biological family. My bio-mom is now a
published author (guess that explains why I like to write so much). She's
wicked intelligent, but a year before I was born (a little more, actually, but
I don't know the exact amount), she was in a car accident which crushed over
1/3 of her spine and caused her total amnesia for everything before that point.
She's still got mobility, amazingly enough, but she has a horrific amount of
chronic pain. She's totally off of the painkillers, though. I admire her
more than I can say.
When I was born, she ended up offering me for adoption. She was going to keep
me, but as I grew closer to birth, she started wondering what kind of life she
would have to offer me. It's a good question, too. She was totally and
completely alone. In a way that you and I can't truly comprehend. Her
mother and father came in after she came out of her coma, and she had no idea
who they were. Nineteen years wiped. She told me about the time when she
was supposed to disrobe for her doctor, while her parents were present, and she
wouldn't do it, because they were complete strangers to her.
To get on with my point, she gave me up for adoption believing that I would
have a better life. Maybe I did, maybe I didn't. I don't know for sure.
What I do know is that I was adopted into a family that was sterile for some
goddamned higher-purposed reason. My adoptive mother cannot do more than
remedial addition and subtraction. My adoptive father was a school teacher,
at first, but he was drawn to that for the same reason that police are often
drawn to the force. Control and dominion.
My adoptive mother needed someone to be controlled by. She held two jobs in
her life. She needed someone to financially get her by, and someone to make
the decisions that she never had the confidence to make on her own. She tried
to sexually proposition me, before I was in the double digits. They both were
members of a doomsday cult based on Judaism. They wouldn't let me have
friends (and there were exactly two that I had in the cult-- not by choice); as
I got older they wouldn't let me have a girlfriend. I got a job and they
wouldn't let me buy anything worthwhile, tangible, or anything that had the
potential to let me learn responsibility in the increments that most people
take for granted. I quit, of course. I got kicked out of the cult, on
purpose, at sixteen, and they still wouldn't let me have friends, and I had to
follow by the cult rules though I wasn't still a member.
They put me into my first placement when I was 16 years old. The reason?
They had taken us to a family counselor that made a pact for us; if I kept up
my grades and responsibilities, they would let me use the phone at night.
That lasted precisely 3 days. My adoptive father wasn't able to sleep.
Finally he ripped the phone cord out of the wall. That was my fuck you
point.
I came back, after making friends with all sorts of juvenile delinquents that
were ten times worse than me. At least now I finally had friends! Not quite
the right ones, though. I partied. Hard.
My next placement was less than 2 months later, for totally just ignoring their
ridiculous rules. It lasted a half a year. More, much worse, friends.
Before I turned 18, after I'd finished there, they kicked me out on the
streets, which isn't even fucking legal. I had no place to go but to live
with a burglar friend who had forged all of his school records, thus not having
to go to school, and having his own trailer. Bam, opportunities destroyed for
my entire life due to a criminal record. This wasn't enough. They stole my
college fund, too, which had been waiting for me since I was 2.
My life, up to the point of 30 years old, at least, has been shit. I'm not
going to point any fingers, but I didn't have any decent role models to learn
from. My biological mother beats herself up, to this day, regarding all of
this. She hates my adoptive mother (my adoptive father died awhile back).
My adoptive mother has now stolen well over $20,000 dollars from me;
heirlooms and valuables left to me by my adoptive father, and has sold off the
greater parts of what I owned prior to this last relocation.
What did it teach me? Sometimes love can be worse than hate. They thought
they were doing the right thing, but there was no intelligence behind that.
They had no idea how to press me towards my potential. They had to have
order imposed upon them by a cult, in order to make life worth living. They
should have been given an aptitude test; intelligence, tolerance, and other
issues should have been tested.
You want to know how well my adoptive dad was at 'teaching' his family? He
force fed my adoptive mother liver, because it was a 'blood builder', until she
vomited at the dinner table. He did the same with me with overcooked, canned
asparagus; it was gel by the time I ate it. I was maybe 6, if I was lucky.
I'm considering suing the adoption agency, but I've got no resources. The
only time I had resources is when I got out of the Army, and all of them went
to saving my son from an abusive mother. I only identify with broken people,
most of the time, and I hang out for too long in relationships where I'm the
one that gets taken advantage of and abused, because I'm so desperate for the
acceptance and caring that I've so rarely felt in life.
When I saved my son, he saved me. I wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for
him. Only through his unconditional love, and the responsibilities that
suddenly seemed worthwhile (since I obviously wasn't worth the trouble or
effort); he was lost without me.
My life is still buried in oversensitive pain, because of how I was raised.
I'd take slavery on a farm over it, maybe, but I have never experienced that
first hand. At least I would've learned the value of work, and a work ethic,
instead of being ignored in the corner, while my OCD mom with serious mental
problems stood at the kitchen window over a sink of cooling dishwater, and
cried for hours on end. She was hallucinating Satan, but couldn't get out to
see a doctor because of cult rules. My father came home and spanked the
everloving fuck out of me. She tried it a few times, too. Usually with
implements.
Don't trust adoption agencies. Don't do closed adoptions. Screen your
candidates yourself. They just need to place babies, and get bonuses for each
one that they place above the institution's average.
Adoption is necessary, but certainly not always the dream life that a parent
can't offer his or her children.
Good job, mother of the son with Down's Syndrome. My heart goes out to you.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
If this can help even one person avoid some pain, or even find a kindred spirit
to banish the loneliness for a bit, I will certainly consider it time well
spent.
-=-
"It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick
society." -- Jiddu Krishnamurti
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