So, What's with the Ribbons?

Every year, in November, a month is given over to the publicizing and advocating of adoption. Every year, mothers of adoption loss feel this "celebration" as a stinging slap in their faces and a rubbing of salt in an open wound. For those mothers and families and all the adopted people who have suffered from this unnatural separation, OriginsUSA has instituted a "National Strange and Mournful Day," to be an annual occasion, starting this November 30th.

For every "happy and heart-warming" story of the joy of adopters as they take a child as their own, there is the story of a deep and painful tragedy behind it. Even with overseas adoptions where unscrupulous facilitators assure the adopters that the child is an "orphan," there is usually a mother or other family members left behind with a heart's load of pain and grief.

The Internet is full of support groups here, in our own country, for women who thought they were "doing the right thing" under the careful guidance of facilitators and "Dear Beemommy" letter-writing adopters,who believed they would be able to live,comfortably, with their "decision."(Coercion doesn't have to be a gun to the head)

These women, along with those of us from the older generation who had our children just taken out of hand with a dose of shame and censure added in to boot, have come out of the fog and realized that adoption is NOT the wonderful win-win solution that proponents would have us believe. No amount of agency-sponsored "grief and acceptance" therapy can take away that hole that is in the heart the mother separated from her child. The amount of propaganda that goes into keeping the mythology of adoption alive and suitably cloying is tremendous!

So, on this November 30th, we will be wearing our pretty ribbons to honor and respect the feelings of mothers whose children were taken for adoption...For original family members, mostly grandparents, who weren't given the choice of becoming guardians for the children of a relative who was unable to care for her child...For women who trusted an "open" adoption, only to see it close and their child disappear behind a selfish veil of secrecy...For women in foreign lands whose tragedy of poverty, illiteracy and government oppression became a boon for the adopter..And for our children, for their confusion, pain and sadness.

The title of the day is, of course, taken from Paul Simon's "Mother and Child Reunion" posted here a few days ago. One of the phrases in the song, "I know they say let it be, but it just don't work out that way," is very appropriate when dealing with the lie that mothers who have been exiled from their children through adoption just "go on with life" and that we "forget." So we use this day to denote the unnatural (Strange) and painful, grievous (Mournful) results of that sad social experiment of adoption and invite anyone who is interested to join us. Contact the PR chairperson at OriginsUSA for more information or click on the link below.

Read More about this observance at http://www.prleap.com/pr/55615/

The colors used in the observance ribbon are the colors of OriginsUSA and they signify even more to each of us who will be wearing them.

Strange And Mournful Colors

Black is the color of anger and mourning,
A grief that's as cold as a bottomless well,
A color of yearning, of fear and not knowing,
From the shadow of pain and the lining of Hell.

Purple is dignity, a striving for justice,
A royal-hued banner that flies as we the fight,
A color of pride and a color of honor,
The soul of respect and a toast to what's right.

White, then is pure and above all the others,
The hue of new snow or a peace-bringing dove,
A color that calls to the heart of the mothers,
A color of hope and a color of love.

We wear the colors for what you took from us,
With never a "pardon" or reason or rhyme,
Empowered and stronger, we're facing you proudly,
The mothers have turned and it's just about time.

Robin Westbrook 11/13/2006


Proud and True Mother of Four

http://www.keepyourbaby.com/
http://www.originsusa.org
"Neither society nor the (adopter) who holds the child in
Her arms wants to confront the agony of the mother
From whose arms that same child was taken."
(Margaret McDonald Lawrence)