The Pendulum Swings – Adoption comes Full Circle

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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.

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Adopting Amelia Island

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adoptee, adoptee restoration, adoption, All the Wrong Places, Amelia Island, Beaches, Fernandina Florida, parents, The Book Loft

It’s always fun to play on the beach!

Lucky to have stepmother Margaret in my life! (Birthfather’s widow)

Adoptees possess a multi-layered parentage. As one pundit observed, being adopted is “both a blessing and a curse.” My beloved adopted parents, Richard and Reva Beard, passed away in the 1990s; my birthparents shortly thereafter. But I am not without a parent. My birthfather’s second wife, his widow Margaret, has taken me under her wing. Over the years, she’s welcomed me into her Florida home. Today finds me in Fernandina, on beautiful Amelia Island, both visiting Margaret and doing an “east coast launch” of my new suspense novel All the Wrong Places.

“Launch” is the term I like to use for my upcoming book signing, but for me it’s the launching of much more. I hope to be spending part of every year in Fernandina Beach. Amelia Island is small (13 miles long), friendly, literary and enticingly beautiful. Its main town Fernandina, Florida is the perfect contrast to my high and dry hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Verdant. Bordered by pristine sandy beaches, it is literally an island paradise.

Now available!

In addition to a book signing I’m using my island sojourn for beach walking, reading and working on the next adventure of my All the Wrong Places protagonist Clara Jordan. If you’re in the area this weekend, please join me on Sunday for a 4 p.m. signing. at The Book Loft, tucked away at 214 Centre Street. I’d love to inscribe a copy of All the Wrong Places for you and chat about books and writing.

Being Adopted Meant Being Rescued

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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?