A Gift to You – The 12 Days of Adoption

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adoptee, adoption, celebrate, discover, family, friends, Holidays, Self-Empowerment, wounded, writing

NOTE: Those of you who’ve been following my blog, welcome back. Greetings to new readers. Winter finds me (at last) finishing a long-in-development sequel to All the Wrong Places. Enjoy one of my favorite posts from the pasts, as I work today on editing Clara and The Hand of Ganesh. Being thankful is a strong motivator, I have learned, in this lonely process of writing. Below, a song of gratitude. Adoption is a mixed blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. Here’s wishing you and yours a beautiful holiday season!

Love and Blessings, Elaine

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Join Elaine on alternate Mondays for reflections on life through adoption colored glasses. Please let us know what you’re most grateful for this holiday season!

Enjoying winter outdoors is a gift.

 

A Gift to You – The 12 Days of Adoption

Tags

adoptee, adoption, celebrate, Christmas, discover, family, friends, Holidays, wounded, writing

I was adopted at age five. That event shaped the rest of my life. It’s made me who I am. Adoption, it’s been said, is both a blessing and a curse. For me. it’s a blessing. In this late December post, the last of 2020, I count the ways.

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An Adoptee’s Song:
“The Twelve Gifts of Adoption”

With the holiday season upon us, Hannakah past and Christmas around the corner, music fills the air. From our devices, television or radio, we often hear “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” In your imagination, listen to the melody… then read with an open heart as this ADOPTEE offers a different take on a familiar song…

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Join Elaine on Mondays for reflections on life through adoption colored glasses. Please let us know what you’re most grateful for this holiday season!

Snowshoeing is a great way to celebrate the Winter Solstice

Adoption: Still my “Something”

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adoptee, adoption, adoption child, discover, empower, healing, separation, wounded

Note from Elaine: I continue to write adoption stories. Clara Jordan, heroine of my recent suspense novel All the Wrong Places, travels from Virginia to New Mexico hoping to locate an unknown birthmother. Instead of finding roots, she falls in love with a two-timer named Henry, a sly character who betrays her. She runs further into trouble as she searches petroglyphs for traces of a mother she’s never known. All the Wrong Places is available from http://www.pocolpress.com or from Amazon. My novel-in-progress, Clara and the Hand of Ganesha, takes our protagonist to the shore temple of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu, India. Participating in NaNoWriMo, I plan to finish the first draft this month. Stay tuned!

 

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It’s been said that trauma is not a mystery, that it attaches itself to you in a way that’s hard to undo. My story, as related in The Goodbye Baby, offers living proof. Being an adoptee has added melodrama to my life, created a passion for writing, and ultimately inspired me to take off the masks and to discover who I really am.

Though I was fortunate enough to land in an adoptive family who loved and cherished me, it could not make up for losing that first “mother connection.” My birth mother and I said goodbye before I started first grade, and I waited 38 years for her to come back into my life. I was deeply wounded by the separation.

My struggles have been with feeling abandoned, isolated, and rejected. I’ve worried for years that I will be misunderstood and that I’m simply not good enough- as a daughter, a friend, a partner, a mother, or even as a human being.

With my infant son in Greece

Because of being adopted, I felt small and insignificant. Probably because adoption wasn’t something my family discussed, my negative assumptions became deeply embedded. Throughout my adult years, I accomplished a great deal, but in my mind, I was never admirable. Harmful pangs of inadequacy took root and shaped my outlook, my decisions, my disastrous romantic choices.  Until I re-read my diaries, I never realized that I myself had invented the self-damaging myth.

How did I deal with my adoption-induced complexes? My adoptive parents had to raise a delinquent teenager who drank excessively, stayed out too late and attracted bad boyfriends. As I grew older, I tended to be an over-achiever: running nine marathons to lower my finishing time, yet always “keeping score” and endlessly coming up short.

Thirty years ago, when I first started to write about my adoption, the title of my book was Reunions. My plan was to meet both my biological parents and write about finding the missing puzzle pieces. I met my original parents, but the reunions were not what I hoped for.  The pieces were in place but the puzzle remained. Only writing The Goodbye Baby completed the picture.

After both sets of parents died, I found that looking into the past gave me the wisdom to see where I’d been and how to go forward.

 

 

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What my adoption has taught me is that the world reflects my inner reality, that my happiness or unhappiness depend on my actions and not on outside forces. I’ve learned that it is never too late to make a fresh start.

I have always known I would be a writer. In the summer of 1962, I wrote in my diary,

“Some of this frantic recording is wasted energy. How can I have a future as a writer?…I need to find something to say.”

The theme of adoption is that “something.”

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Join Elaine on alternate Mondays for reflections on adoption and sneak previews of her newest novel, Clara and the Hand of Ganesha.

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In Pursuit of Roots

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adoptee, adoption, adoption child, celebrity adoption, diary about adoption, elaine pinkerton, family histor, family roots, family tree, friends, juniper tree, the goodbye baby, wounded, writing

Dear Readers: Family matters have lately consumed me and there’s been no time to write. Enjoy this re-posting of thoughts originally published in 2012. The lack of “roots,” though I’ve come to grips with it, continues to be a challenge. If you’re an adoptee and have ever felt the need for a family tree, please send your feedback. Like other adoptees I’ve met, I’m still searching for the answers!

Last night I watched a program on public television that reminded me of being an adoptee. The emptiness and longing for a tribe of my own, a feeling I wrongly assumed I had put to rest, was back with a vengeance.

“Finding your Roots,” which featured three celebrities exploring their family trees, was all about searching to find a place where you belong, piecing together the past, and learning where and how your ancestors lived. The show was well presented and dramatized the interviewees’ journeys to discover their their true heritage.

My outsider status syndrome immediately kicked in. How fortunate, I thought, to even possess a genealogy that you could call your own. Growing up as an adoptee, I longed for years to claim a so-called “family tree.” I’d been to Italy with my birthfather Giovanni Cecchini. After our reunion, we travelled to Abruzzi, where he was born. I met my non-English-speaking cousins, aunts and uncles. Following the journey to Italy, my birthfather’s second wife (not my birthmother) helped me secure a detailed listing of paternal relatives.

With my adoptive mom’s help, I’d was able to chart out a family tree for my ancestry record, going back just a couple centuries. Those two charts were intellectual exercises, but I couldn’t relate to them.

Two family trees, but neither really fit who I was. Though I had the DNA of the biological parentage, I was shaped and molded by my adoptive parents. Rather than give in to an emotional meltdown, however, I thought long and hard about why the “Finding your Roots” program tried to break my heart. Tried but failed.

When I was young, I made up a myth about being adopted.The underlying theme was “Oh, poor me.” That was a way of reacting to everything, seemingly as fixed as the stars in the Big Dipper or the belt of the constellation Orion. However, I was not a fixed star and I could shape a new truth.

Juniper Tree. Everything, seemingly as fixed as the stars in the Big Dipper or the belt of the constellation Orion. However, I was not a fixed star and I could shape a new truth.

 

I decided to emulate the indomitable juniper tree. It will send roots down 25 feet in order to survive. Here’s a description from the National Park Service’s website:

“Junipers grow in some of the most inhospitable landscapes imaginable, thriving in an environment of baking heat, bone-chilling cold, intense sunlight, little water and fierce winds. Often they appear to grow straight out of solid rock.”

This is the kind of family tree that will serve me well.

Join Elaine on alternate Mondays for reflections on adoption and life. Your feedback is invited!

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My Diary is my Best Friend

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adoptee, adoption, adoption child, best friend, blended families, diary, discover, empower, family, my story, national adoption month, separation, wounded

After being adopted by a college professor and his wife, I received a diary for Christmas. It was a gift that changed my life. Because my new family avoided discussing or even mentioning “adoption,” I felt that  I could be authentic only in my daily journal writing.

From the first five-year diary with a lock and key, 1950s style, to the blank books I fill today, I record exuberant or dismal thoughts,  poetic or melancholy reflections, and events both quotidian and dramatic. My happiest moments, the dark nights of my soul, commentary on family, the weather, current events —all of it is grist for the mill. Book after book, the diaries run like a turbulent river through my six decades.

Eight years ago I read through journals from my past and wrote a memoir about growing up adopted.

Who would ever read all these written chronicles after I was gone? Unable to answer that question, I appointed Elaine as reader. What my diaries said about me was that I really did not like myself. Throughout school years, I judged nearly everything that happened as not measuring up.

Some examples from 1956:

April 5—I felt sort of depressed and inferior at school today.

April 27—School dance. I had flowers on my headband and a pretty blue formal. The dance was a big disappointment. I had a miserable time.

May 26—Went to cheerleading practice. I’m not very good and I know I won’t be chosen.

In 1960, I wrote that February was a particularly low month. I was arguing with my parents and fighting bitterly with my brother.

In 1961, my situation had gone from bad to worse. An entry dated June 10: “Upsetting evening with the family. Because I failed to give a message to Daddy, my brother almost got lost or something and it was all my fault. Daddy couldn’t find him. Everyone got mad at me. Mother was furious—very enraged. What a horrible night. I hate family life.

Marriage seemed to offer an escape, so by 1966 I had become the wife of Jack, my college sweetheart. However, I took my unhappiness with me. As demonstrated in these entries from 1977, my sense of abandonment had intensified:

January 1—Jack stayed glued to TV football. Nothing the children or I did made a dent. He watched without pause from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. I felt very angry, helpless. And yet, I was too exhausted to pursue a constructive discussion.

January 5—I hate being alone in the house. I feel desperate when there is a blank wall of non-communication. I hate the feeling that I can bleed inwardly, that I can be melted by despair, and Jack doesn’t notice, doesn’t see, doesn’t care.

January 9—Jack and I had another non-conversation, very unproductive. I am filled with anger and despair. I would like to wake up single.

Three years later, I was single but with two young sons. What followed, as reported in more written chronicles, were more failed relationships. My unhappiness lay within; I was afraid the become close to a partner. My original mother’s departure taught me that if you love someone, he or she will leave you.

Fast forward to the 1990s,  some twenty years later. As I re-read my diaries, I realized that I had assured the failure of any prospective romances or partnerships. What the younger me taught the older me is to beware of assumptions. The idea that I could never be good enough tainted even the sweetest successes and accomplishments. In so many ways, I was my own worst enemy.

My negative interpretations so overwhelmed me that at last, I had to look them in the face, recognize them for what they were, and decide that I was not a robot. No one was making me think the self-depreciating thoughts.

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The Goodbye Baby: Adoptee Diaries depicts my journey from victim to heroine of my own life. It is a book that offers hope not only to adult adoptees trying to heal adoption-imposed injuries, but to parents who are dealing with the invisible wounds of their adopted children. It is the kind of book that would have helped me when I was growing up adopted. Since that book didn’t exist, I wrote it myself. 

Adoption is both a curse and a blessing. My memoir chronicles a journey from doubt to acceptance.

Adopting an Attitude of Hope

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adoptee, Adoption recovery, diary, empower, Gratitude, healing, struggles, wounded

“You see, you cannot draw lines and compartments, and refuse to budge beyond them. Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair.” – The Proofreader, a minor character in A Fine Balance

Rohintan Mistry, in his novel A Fine Balance, presents an epic tale that takes the reader from India’s independence in 1947 to the Emergency of the 1970s. It is one of the most absorbing (and heartbreaking) novels I’ve ever read; In many ways, the book’s characters and themes remind me that grappling with the invisible wounds of adoption is a life-long process.  It is one thing to recognize negative assumptions about being adopted and quite another to truly free oneself of their sting. In other words, the shackles may be gone but the scars remain.
Those of you who’ve followed my posts are familiar with the master-underminer I’ve named “Edgar,” that uninvited but ever-present demon of self-doubt who is always on the prowl for ways to squash ones spirit. It does little good to repeat the cliche “Look at the half full and not the half empty glass.” Edgar wants us to feel small, unworthy, and marginalized. After all, he harps, we were given away by our first parents, so obviously we were not good enough to keep.
This troublesome idea—”not good enough”— is one of Edgar’s favorite weapons. We, the adopted ones, may try to pretend that being adopted fades in importance. We did not choose to be raised by other than our original parents. A tangled web of emotions surround a child being separated from the first mother and father, transferred to an adoptive family or single parent. All of this happened before we had words or the maturity to understand. The emotions of others involved were implanted in us, even when we were in the womb. Add to that the feelings we had in our earliest years about the “transfer.” This history is Edgar’s playground.
Can we ever escape the ripple effect of adoption—the fears and fantasies, the doubts, assumptions and longing? We cannot. It it is folly to pretend otherwise. Therein lies the conundrum. The events happened. We need to acknowledge them but constantly transcend their draining effect.
My fireplace has been busy this winter.  I am burning the last journal pages that went into The Goodbye Baby-A Diary about Adoption. Even though “it” isn’t done with me, I’m done with the old wounded self-image. My diary-reading “archeological dig” revealed a deep pit of unresolved angst. Each day I strive to “take the best and leave the rest.”
Along with lesson number one is a more important thought: We have the freedom to choose hope over despair. Recently, my birthday brought home a reminder: We don’t have forever. In my remaining years on the planet, I’ve resolved to take a symbolic road to the bright side. Though it may be a fine balance, we always have a choice.

Stay tuned for more posts that offer an adoptee point of view.

What do YOU think? /The Adoption Conundrum

Tags

adoptee, adoption, adoption child, best friend, blended families, celebrity adoption, david smolin, discover, empower, human trafficking, international adoption, national adoption awareness month, national adoption month, separation, wounded

International adoption: The transaction involves fees and money so whether it a private or agency adoption, it resembles a commercial or market The danger of international adoption being tied to human trafficking cannot be ignored. — David Smolin

Village girl in Rajasthan

NOTE from Elaine:

During part of the upcoming holidays, I’ll be sharing formerly-published posts. Thanks for staying tuned!

Though my birthfather Giovanni Cecchini was Italian-born, I began life in America. After WWII ended, a college professor and his wife adopted me and my brother, giving us love, stability, and advantages that my birthmother knew she could not provide. I tell this story in my memoir The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption.

When touring India a few years ago, I saw firsthand the plight of gaunt, ragged street children.  Begging in stilted English, they followed us relentlessly through the streets of New Delhi. I felt deep compassion for these small boys and girls. I wanted to help them, but their need was too deep. A few rupees might stave off hunger, but homes were what they needed.

Perhaps they were not all orphans, but clearly  they were not being nurtured by parents. They lacked families, but it seemed unlikely they would find them in their native land. What if they were adoptable? Could international adoption provide an answer? Each country has its own policy about international adoption, and there are many hoops for prospective adoptive parents to jump through. Sometimes it takes years to satisfy legal requirements, and the barriers can be insurmountable.

International adoption, I am learning, is fraught with debate. 

Here, briefly, I present some of my research about the potential dark side of international adoption…

Orphan boys at Jaipur Children’s Aid

Author David Smolin, in a paper published online by Valparaiso University, presents both sides of international adoptions. Smolin asks “When is intercountry adoption a form of child trafficking?” and comments that “the answer is surprisingly obscure.”

Smolin points out that in international adoptions, the majority of children are transferred from poor to rich countries, “stripping children of their national identity, native culture and language.” On the other hand, he continues, if international adoptions are universally banned, there will be more of the world’s millions of orphans abandoned, killed, left in dismal orphanages or living on the streets.

Journalist Bryce Corbett, in The Australian Women’s Weekly, interviews Leith and Rob Harding and their adopted daughter Zed, originally from Ethiopia. A photo of the beautiful 18-year-old Zed and her adoptive parents radiates happiness and love.

Me (Elaine) at Fatehpur Sikri, India

Zed, studying nursing at Queensland University of Technology, says “I am so blessed to have everything I have in my life…Every day, I thank God that I am here and not in Ethiopia. That I wake up in a warm bed and not on the side of the road. If I had been left in Ethiopia, I most likely would have died on the side of the road without anyone even knowing who I am.”

The article cites a recent press release announcing Ethopia’s attorney-general’s decree: a halt to all future adoptions of Ethiopian children into Australia. In sharp contrast to the Harding family is the couple, Bronwyn and Scott McNamara, who have waited eight years with high hopes of adopting a child from Ethopia. They are in their fifties. The magazine article includes a photo of the McNamaras, arms entwined and looking heartbroken.

Bronwyn laments, “All we have ever wanted is to have a family and the concept of providing a home for children already in need seemed a more rational approach…now the Ethiopia Program is closed…we are in shock, we are grieving. Our whole future has been annihilated by this.”

Me (Elaine) leaving India. Promise, those suitcases are not all mine.

The prediction for international adoption, claims author Smolin, is bleak: Because it operates as a market in human beings, he says, unless reforms are made, intercountry adoption will eventually be abolished.”

A ban on all international adoptions? Will this come to pass? Should it? This needs to be talked about!

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?

Fighting the Adoption Blues

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adoptee, adoption, adoption child, depression, diary, discover, empower, friends, healing, separation, struggles, wounded, writing

When troubled by having grown up as an adopted child, I let insecurity and self-doubt take root. Reason eludes me. I have given that negative state a name—Edgar. Like burning flames, Edgar is fueled by his own energy. Like fire, he feeds on everything, which he transforms into negative thoughts about my past, present, future. Edgar is a demonic artist who paints the world in stark tones of black and gray. Like a disease, Edgar undermines my physical well-being. Edgar lurks, waiting to arise when I am feeling healthy and balance…he is poised for the kill.

From my memoir The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption

Depression. I’ve battled with it for a lifetime, and no matter how much I try to avoid going down the “slippery slide,” it comes along with every perceived failure or dashed hope. It’s almost as though something within me has decided, “Elaine, the adoptee who was not good enough for her birthmother to keep, does not deserve to be happy.”

The reason I’ve labelled this emotional state “Edgar” and not just “depression” is that one of my literary heroes and spiritual leaders, the late Hugh Prather, called his own sadness and doubt “Edgar.” In lectures, of which I attended many, Prather would describe waking up each morning and finding that his nemesis, a depression he referred to as “Edgar,” was right there on the pillow, teeth bared and ready to gnaw away at heart and soul. Prather spoke of beating “Edgar” back into his cage and locking him up.

The metaphor that works for me is similar. I acknowledge the infuriating recurrence of Edgar. Rather than beating him with a club and sending him into a dungeon, however, I outrun him. I go outdoors for a walk or a hike, in the process usually re-setting my mind. The air cleanses and refreshes me. The movement feels

wonderful. More often than not, I forget about being miserable. It’s a powerful way to not only ward off whatever “Edgar”

might be bothering me, but also to burn calories. It’s almost like getting revenge.
To Edgar, I say “Thank you for sharing. Now let me get on with my life.”

Going for a Personal Best

Tags

adoptee, adoption, adoption child, blended families, diary, discover, empower, family, friends, healing, journal, marathons, my story, running, separation, wounded, writing

Coming to terms with my adoption has been like training for and running a marathon. WALK. JOG. RUN.

A little history…In the 1970s, I discovered running. I’d never been good at sports, but this was something I could do. Running was my escape, my self-medication, my therapy. As a member of the Santa Fe Striders, I participated in 6K runs, half marathons, fun runs, turkey trots, moonlight adventure runs and full marathons.

Truth be told, I was obsessed. Completing nine marathons in three years, I bettered my finishing time with each 26-mile race. This was before I came to terms with being adopted; perhaps it was a substitute for a face-to-face with my adoption and the self-examination that loomed ahead.

The parallels are as follows. First: WALKING. Exploring my past, I started out with baby steps. Second: JOGGING. I published my diaries in the form of a memoir, The Goodbye Baby: A Diary about Adoption. Finally, RUNNING. Thanks to the Internet, I engaged with the adoption community and decided to focus my writing on adoption-related topics.

My weekly blog posts will continue to spotlight adoption, adoptees, birth and adoptive parents. A novel ARUNDATI, available in installments on my website, is about an Indian orphan who is adopted by American parents. Coming to terms with my adoption is very much like being in a marathon, except that this 26.2-mile race will never end.

Life is a journey, especially when it comes to dealing with adoption. The experience of coming out with my diaries was training camp. At first I was afraid the contents would be so embarrassing that I would no longer have any friends. I thought that when people knew about what I’d grappled with all these years they would write me off as borderline strange.

The reaction has been the opposite. Even people who were not adopted or dealing with adoption have found The Goodbye Baby inspiring.

Because of a knee injury in 2006, my running days are over.  I now walk and hike instead. Though running was a long and uphill endeavor, all the hours and miles of training paid off. The end of every race brought a rewarding rush of adrenaline. The endorphins that people like to call “runner’s high” seemed to carry over into empowering me in everyday life.

Like training for a marathon, using social media to communicate with others in the adoption community has been empowering. Each week, I’ve added miles. Each posting deadline is like another road race. As in running, I’m continue to compete with myself. In writing, as in running, I am still going for a “personal best.”

Below, a verse that inspired me to reach a running goal (3-hour 35-minute marathon in 1979). I believe the words apply to life itself.

“But those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.” – Isaiah 40:3