That Was The Week That Was

I have spent the past 10 days in a speechless state of horror, inspiration, heartache and renewed faith in humanity. We watched our former enemies from 65 years ago, now our friends and allies, as their nation was dealt blow after blow from the uneasy earth that lies beneath our feet.

I watched people who had lost families, homes and all their possessions reaching out to their neighbors, joining the rescue and recovery operations, whittling chopsticks and sharing what little they had with others. I watched brave people risking their lives trying to corral a nuclear monster before it could escape and wreak even more havoc than has already occurred.

One of the most poignant images, one I can't help but hold in my mind, is that of people desperately searching message boards in shelters,searching for the names of missing family members. Husbands, wives, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins...each, it seems, had someone searching for them except in that most horrible case where entire families were taken by the waters.

If ever the importance of blood kin was demonstrated, it was here, in this stricken nation with its stalwart people. NO ONE who has survived, so far, has been left behind or deemed less important than another. There has been no looting, no violence. There has been unbelievable courage, patience and charity. Stripped down to less than the bare essentials, people shared their fires, their blankets, what little rice they had and waited for help. And the joy on the faces of those who found their family members alive was transcendent. I shed tears of joy along with them.

It might be interesting to note that Japan, the third largest economy in the world, does NOT have an "adoption society." They take care of their own and family members see after their own flesh and blood when the need arises. I have already seen where salivating American PAPs are asking about orphaned, Japanese infants and toddlers. Not so fast, there, wannabes. The Japanese will FIRST make sure that every effort is made to find blood relatives of any child before they make any other moves. And they are not too keen on the idea of their children leaving their culture and home.

As winter passes and the fruit trees bloom, I am thinking of the reality of human need for the ties of blood. You can graft a limb from one orange tree onto another and that limb will still produce the kind of fruit from the tree from which it was taken. You cannot graft a baby onto another family and have it develop the traits of the adopters. I also know that the soil of Florida will not grow a cherry tree taken from Michigan. The tree will be stunted and the fruit sparse and of lower quality.

The Japanese people, like all other people, are not perfect. History boldly notes their mistakes. But when it comes to family and what constitutes a family and community, they have something in their culture that we would be wise to emulate.

So, as the bombs fall on Libya, and as the political and economic situations elsewhere roil and seethe, the people of Japan will mourn their lost, rejoice in their found and rebuild their lives.

And the blood family in the land of the rising sun will survive.

PS: This recent article had to be added to this post. Japan says "no thank you" to PAPs. YAY!!!

As The Brain Is Washed

In a recent review by the Washington Post, NPR's Scott Simon was lauded for his book, "Baby, We Were Meant For Each Other." The reviews that I have read are all of the "Oh, Isn't that just wunnnnerful" variety.

Once again, the defenders of this practice come to the fore with horror stories of Chinese orphanages and the assumptions of sainthood for the adopters. "Meant to be," is a trite concept and one that assumes that the natural mother must have been ruled by fate to conceive and then lose her child. I have a lot of trouble with that concept, just as I have a lot of trouble with the trauma dealt to the psyche of the internationally adopted. Bye-Bye homeland, language and culture along with family and home.

In this picture of Simon, wife and new acquisition, which one is NOT smiling? The happy couple are obviously successful and probably waited too long to conceive. Old eggs don't do a good job. This is another failure of the "You can have it all" idea. Children should be born to young, healthy mothers and allowed to stay with them. But "having it all" obviously means raiding another woman's womb or even the womb of a woman in another nation in order to "create a family" when natural children are not in the picture.

Adoption is a construct of human beings. It has nothing to do with fate or "God's Will" or destiny. It has everything to do with social engineering, the disruption of nature and the sense of self-entitlement of those who adopt. Add the greed of the facilitators, and there you have it. I hope that, one day, whoever came up with the idiotic phrase (I think it was Rosie O) about God putting a baby in the wrong tummy, will have to eat those words, dry with no water. What a pile of harmful crap to tell a child. And what a total lack of regard and respect this is to the mother who lost that child to adoption.

In a major case of synchronicity, my daughter's adopters gave her the same first name I gave her but dropped the last letter. It was still pronounced the same. In my one short and painful conversation I had with the woman who adopted her, when I pointed this out, she used that as an argument that it proved the adoption was "meant to be." Whenever I hear that phrase, I either want to scream or vomit. I don't think she even knew or cared how much that hurt me. She just wanted me gone, dead, in Timbuktu or Antarctica. My pain and loss meant nothing to her.

I have neighbors who adopted from China. The girls are precious and well-mannered and it breaks my heart for their mothers and families and for them every time I see them. My great-niece, whose mother is Caucasian and whose father is African-American, asked the oldest girl which parent was which race. Now Leah is only 4. She wasn't trying to hurt any one's feelings. She was just curious. But the adopter got a bit miffed and told her to go home (she and her family live just a couple of houses down). Now, I am sure that this is an extreme case. I would not think that anyone who adopted a child of another race would pretend that these children were anything other than adopted. But it still seemed to be a bone of contention with this woman.

I am so tired of the excuses and fantasies being used and spun to justify this kind of unnatural act. If they are going to do it, then call it what it is. Stop tying bows and farting rainbows. A tragedy had to happen to "create that family." If adoptophiles don't think it is a tragedy, then they need to speak to some mothers and adult adopted people. We're all, domestic and international, tired of being dismissed and our pain ignored.

That's why there are these blogs. That's why there is that rumbling you hear and why the industry and the likes of Mr. Simon have amped up the rhetoric. They have the money, but we still have our voices.

They can't out-shout us forever.