The Pendulum Swings – Adoption comes Full Circle

Tags

adoptee, adoption, celebrity, celebrity adoption, diary, DNA, family, international adoption, orphans, parents, public, roots, struggles

Hollywood Adoption: Photo found on yahoo.com

When I was adopted at the end of WWII, it was top secret. A stigma, at least in my adoptive parents’ circle, was attached to not being able to give birth to your own children. Adoption was considered a last resort. It was invisible. In large measure because of celebrity adoptions, nowadays adoption has gone public. It is seen as a viable way of forming a family. In sharp contrast to the era during which I was adopted, people who adopt children are more likely to be admired than spurned.

Celebrity adoptions have helped transform attitudes toward adoption. Magazines and newspapers feature photographs of movie stars holding adopted children. Often these little ones were adopted internationally.  Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, for example, have several children of their own and three from other countries (Cambodia, Ethiopia and Vietnam). Madonna’s tots are from Malawi. Sandra Bullock and Charlize Theron are recent Hollywood adoptive moms.

There are 145 million orphans in the world today, boys and girls who will have to grow up without the love and guidance of parents. Any situation which allows even one of these children to gain a family is a victory, a triumph, a cause for celebration. Celebrity adoptions call attention to the option, when a couple or single parent cannot or chooses not to have children in a traditional way, of “the adoption solution.”

In The Goodbye Baby: Adoptee Diaries, I relate that my birth father Giovanni was born in Italy and tell how it cut off I felt from my Italian-American heritage. Years after being adopted, I traveled to San Martino Sulla Marricino, Italy with my birthfather. I saw the house where he was born. I met aunts, uncles and cousins who welcomed me—the American cousin—with open arms. I was filled with joy at meeting people who were “blood relatives,” people with the same DNA. I felt very much at home and at the time wanted to live in that little Italian village forever.

How much was I hurt by not being in touch with my roots all along?

Join Elaine on alternate Mondays for reflections on adoption and sneak previews of her newest novel, The Hand of Ganesa.

Until I became a teenager, the answer is not very much. When, at about age 15 or 16, I pondered  the question of “nature versus nurture,” I was troubled by the lack of knowledge about my heritage. I felt disenfranchised (though at the time I would not have called it that). Despitethe fact that my new adoptive parents were loving and gave me every advantage, I felt deprived.  I had been cheated of “the back story.” I strongly urge adoptive parents to provide that “back story”: how he or she came to be adopted and as much as possible about the child’s original parents. Obviously, all of this should be presented truthfully but positively. It requires great care and sensitivity on the part of the parents.

The Goodbye Baby: Adoptee Diaries gives readers a case history of adoption’s effects and dramatizes my journey of recovery.  Through actual diary entries from the 1950s through the 1980s, it proves how awareness can provide the path to a healthy shift in attitude. The diaries give personal history a living voice in a way that remembrance never can.

Adopting an Orphaned Bridge

Tags

1850s, adoption, Bridges, Manifest Destiny, memoir workshop, New Mexico history, orphans, Santa Fe Botanical Garden

Editor’s Note: Thanks to Kathy Knorr, guest blogger, author of this post, originally published Sept. 23, 2013 The big red bridge is part of Santa Fe Botanical Garden, where author Pat Goehe and I will be facilitating a memoir writing workshop on September 18 from 1-3:30. You are invited to register for our event, which is a benefit for the Garden: http://www.santafebotanicalgarden.org/planting-the-seeds-two-ways-to-memoir. All workshop proceeds go to future developments at SFBotanical Garden. Our books will be available at the gift shop.

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It has been nicknamed the bridge to nowhere. Yet it has been places. And it

Bridging the gap from past to present.

had been

traveled over by people on foot, burros, horseback, wagons and rail.
In 1850 the bridge was built and placed over an arroyo in Kearny County, New Mexico. Then it was deserted – along with the abandoned lands which could not sustain the farmers and ranchers who optimistically settled during the Manifest Destiny years. The Bridge seemed destined to age and rust under the blazing sun and monsoons of the high desert.
During 2008, an environmental scientist for the State of New Mexico saw this bridge and researched its history. In doing so, she learned there is a Society of Orphaned Bridges. The SOB group collects the history of many orphaned bridges. Their mission is to support the reuse of these bridges, bringing them into a vital community and to benefit the citizens by being attractive, low cost and functional.

As chance would have it…the scientist who first located this bridge also volunteered with a local group hopeful of building a new garden in Santa Fe for botanical research and education.

After a few years, and many optimistic attempts to find a site for their garden, the City of Santa Fe agreed to lease land to the Santa Fe Botanical Garden for this purpose. Our heroine remembered the bridge and proposed the adoption. The bridge could become a focal point for the planned garden – and be a member of a new community.
What a surprise for this 100 year old orphan! The bridge was uprooted, sent to the beauty shoppe and refurbished and delivered to the Santa Fe Botanical Garden on Museum Hill, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA!
December 10, 2011 this was our first view of the adopted bridge:

Kathy has been a resident of Santa Fe for the past five  years.

Kathy Knorr

 

 

During this time she and her family have embraced the local history, beauty and gardening challenges.  Kathy serves on the Board of Directors for the Santa Fe Botanical Garden.  The Garden’s mission includes sharing 3 lovely sites with the public and increasing awareness of the need for water conservation, environmental education and having these beautiful spaces available to all of the community.  Though not new to social media and web sites, this is Kathy’s first blog post.

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Sunday, September 18, 1-3:30 p.m./ “Planting the Seeds: Two Ways to Memoir”
Authors Pat Goehe and Elaine Pinkerton will help you jumpstart that writing project.Register by Wednesday, Sept. 13 as class size is limited.

Being Adopted Meant Being Rescued

Tags

adoptee, adoption, adoption child, blended families, diary, discover, empower, family, my story, national adoption month, New Mexico, orphans, parents, separation, struggles, wounded

Note to readers: My website was born a year ago this month, and this post was my first. I’m recovering from dental surgery—a bit under the weather— so rather than a Blog-less Monday, I decided to re-publish. Please forgive the redundancy!

A popular definition:

“Adoption offers a solution for children who, for whatever reason, cannot grow up with their biological parents. Adoption can be the answer for infertile parents.”

I was adopted at age five.

For me, being adopted was being rescued from a bad situation.

Me (Elaine) with my birth mother, Velma.

Born to an ill-matched couple during the final years of WWII, you might say I was a “Goodbye Baby.” My birth mother, abandoned by her sailor husband, was not capable of mothering two young children. She did what adult children have done in every era when there is no place else to go: she went back to live with her parents. From staying with her husband’s family in Massachusetts, she fled to her home state of Iowa. Her idea was to earn her teaching credentials and somehow make her own way in the world.

There was no day care back then. As much as my birth mother could not abide Giovanni Cecchini’s family, neither could she stand living with her austere German family. She enrolled in college and my brother and I were shuffled about, staying first with abusive “cousins” and then in foster care. When my future adoptive parents came along, my life changed for the better. Instead of being a burden, I was now a chosen daughter. I was born again!

The dreary past, however, stayed within me. In the years after WWII, there was much to get beyond. My adoptive parents mistakenly believed that if they didn’t talk about the abuse I’d suffered and the instability of my birth mother.

I would stop wondering about the past. The opposite happened. In lieu of facts, I invented. Why was I adopted and not one of the “real” children”? How could I find answers?

Enter my diaries: Personal journals, four decades of small books filled with written accounts of every day of my life from 1950-1980. I started reading about the past to learn how being adopted had become such an emotional burden, how it had become a dark shadow tainting my formative years. The journey took me to unexpected enlightenment.

Now my attitude toward adoption is far broader and more inclusive. I’m able to adopt a new attitude, to adopt the deer that come to my back yard every day to feed on apples fallen from my prolific backyard tree. Above all, I have literally “adopted” Elaine. I came to the same conclusion as Oscar Wilde: “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.”

Adopted or not, isn’t life’s journey about becoming oneself?