Prolifically Raw

Monday, February 08, 2010

Retirement

I disassemble my coffeepot and dump out the last pot that has been sitting for so long (embarrassing to admit) that the contents are mostly mold. I don't drink coffee anymore. I'm not sure how that happened--I just stopped liking it. First I downgraded to decaf and then poof, I was past all that.

As I scrub the carafe clean of mold and coffee stains, I am taken back to a woman I once knew--a friend of sorts--who got me hooked on five cups of Joe a day. She needed rescue from an unhappy marriage, my favorite neurosis--and I needed someone to mother me, her favorite weakness. I gave her advice for leaving a man and she made me pots of coffee and let me take refuge in her cabin in the mountains. Oh what a time we had, laughing as we dipped biscotti into cups of coffee with a pif of cream. At nights, we drank beers and told stories and shared secrets. We made a thousand plans to be friends forever and become old women together. There was care between us until she went back to her man and I finally stopped stalling and found my real mother.

I roll up the cord to the pot, dry off the carafe and carry the whole mess down to the basement to be stored away.

Coffee was our connection and now, all I have are the memories and the lessons.

I leave the old Braun pot on a shelf, in the dark and stand there for a long time--digging into my truth. I never really liked coffee and if I had to have another cup--one day--it would be the kind my mother made when we finally met; that one cup at a time with the flavored creamer that comes in a bright yellow carton. I remember loving the way she made coffee for me, both of us so awkward and confused. I was so damn happy to have found her, alive and real and mine, I'm pretty sure I would have been happy with a cup of mold.

But that's another story.

Not this.

This Article's Link

Sunday, February 07, 2010

Adopting Haitian Children

I receive calls, asking what I think of the children being taken from Haiti. As a woman with a history of being adopted, twice, I suppose I have a level of experience.

But it isn't a very deep level. I am not a woman living in Haiti, being pressured to give up my baby due to my challenges with poverty, homelessness and perhaps grave injury. Nor am I an orphan in Haiti.

Having said that, I know that I would not want to be taken from my people under these or any conditions. As a baby, I did not want anyone but my own mother. I am clear about the biological truth of that statement. As a woman, I have only found peace by knowing my birth mother. I know I am part of my birth family, as well as a part of their fate.

What is true for me is true of all human beings. No matter how dysfunctional or disturbed or poor, you cannot discount the genetic truth of who we are and what matters to each of us as human beings.

I believe the children of Haiti must stay in their country and with their people. They need their culture and rituals and homes. If we, American's, want to help--we should send funds and blankets and ideas. We should send man power to rebuild and empower the people of Haiti. We should not increase their sorrow by taking away the children.

How many countries sent adoption emissary's to the U.S. during 911? Or Katrina? How would we, as U.S. citizens feel about babies and children being distributed before the dead can even be counted? How would you, as a mother, feel to know your children are gone?

What we do, in the name of being helpful, is to bring great suffering to ourselves and to the children of Haiti. I beleive what is happening is quite self-serving and wrong.

This Article's Link

Saturday, February 06, 2010

Eight is Great

There she goes.
Running into her self.
Jo is Eight.
At last.

This Article's Link

Thursday, January 28, 2010

Adoption Defined

This except is from Wikipedia, the free dictionary:

Adoption is a process whereby a person assumes the parenting for another who is not kin and, in so doing, permanently transfers all rights and responsibilities from the original parent or parents.

Adoption has a long history in the Western world, closely tied with the legacy of the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. Its use has changed considerably over the centuries with its focus shifting from adult adoption and inheritance issues toward children and family creation...

Adoption has been called the quintessential American institution, embodying faith in social engineering and mobility. While it is true that the modern form emerged in the United States, civilization has a long history of the practice of adoption.

Ancient History

The use of adoption by the aristocracy is well documented; many of Rome's emperors were adopted sons. Infant adoption during Antiquity appears rare. Abandoned children were often picked up for slavery and composed a significant percentage of the Empire’s slave supply. Roman legal records indicate that foundlings were occasionally taken in by families and raised as a son or daughter. Although not normally adopted under Roman Law, the children, called alumni, were reared in an arrangement similar to guardianship, being considered the property of the father who abandoned them.

Other ancient civilizations, notably India and China, utilized some form of adoption as well. Evidence suggests their practices aimed to ensure the continuity of cultural and religious practices, in contrast to the Western idea of extending family lines.

In ancient India, ‘secondary sonship,’clearly denounced by the Rigveda,continued, in a limited and highly ritualistic form, so that an adopter might have the necessary funerary rites performed by a son. China had a similar conception of adoption with males adopted solely to perform the duties of ancestor worship.

Modern period

The next stage of adoption’s evolution fell to the emerging nation of the United States. Rapid immigration and the aftermath of the American Civil War resulted in unprecedented overcrowding of orphanages and foundling homes in the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Loring Brace, a Protestant minister became appalled by the legions of homeless waifs roaming the streets of New York City. Brace considered the abandoned youth, particularly Catholics, to be the most dangerous element challenging the city’s order.

Brace's solution was outlined in The Best Method of Disposing of Our Pauper and Vagrant Children (1859) which started the Orphan Train movement. The orphan trains eventually shipped an estimated 200,000 children from the urban centers of the East to the nation’s rural regions. The children were generally indentured, rather than adopted, to families who took them in. As in times past, some children were raised as members of the family while others were used as farm laborers and household servants.

The sheer size of the displacement—the largest migration of children in history—and the degree of exploitation that occurred, gave rise to new agencies and a series of laws that promoted adoption arrangements rather than indenture. The hallmark of the period is Minnesota’s adoption law of 1917 which mandated investigation of all placements and limited record access to those involved in the adoption.

During the same period, the Progressive movement swept the United States with a critical goal of ending the prevailing orphanage system. The culmination of such efforts came with the First White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children called by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1909, where it was declared that the nuclear family represented "the highest and finest product of civilization” and was best able to serve as primary caretaker for the abandoned and orphaned. Anti-institutional forces gathered momentum. As late as 1923, only two percent of children without parental care were in adoptive homes, with the balance in foster arrangements and orphanages. Less than forty years later, nearly one-third were in an adoptive home.

Nevertheless, the popularity of eugenic ideas in America put up obstacles to the growth of adoption. There were grave concerns about the genetic quality of illegitimate and indigent children, perhaps best exemplified by the influential writings of Henry H. Goddard who protested against adopting children of unknown origin, saying, "Now it happens that some people are interested in the welfare and high development of the human race; but leaving aside those exceptional people, all fathers and mothers are interested in the welfare of their own families. The dearest thing to the parental heart is to have the children marry well and rear a noble family. How short-sighted it is then for such a family to take into its midst a child whose pedigree is absolutely unknown; or, where, if it were partially known, the probabilities are strong that it would show poor and diseased stock, and that if a marriage should take place between that individual and any member of the family the offspring would be degenerates".—Henry Goddard, Wanted: A Child to Adopt

It took a war and the disgrace of Nazi eugenic policies to alter attitudes. The period 1945 to 1974, the Baby scoop era, saw rapid growth and acceptance of adoption as a means to build a family.[40] Illegitimate births rose three-fold after WWII, as sexual mores changed. Simultaneously, the scientific community began to stress the dominance of nurture over genetics, chipping away at eugenic stigmas. In this environment, adoption became the obvious solution for both unwed mothers and infertile couples.

Taken together, these trends resulted in a new American model for adoption. Following its Roman predecessor, Americans severed the rights of the original parents while making adopters the new parents in the eyes of the law. Two innovations were added: 1) adoption was formulated as a legal act meant to ensure the "best interests of the child;" the seeds of this idea can be traced to the first American adoption law in Massachusetts, 1851 which mandated that placements consider the welfare of the child, and 2) adoption became infused with secrecy, eventually resulting in the sealing of adoption and original birth records by 1945. The origin of the move toward secrecy began with Charles Loring Brace who introduced it to prevent children from the Orphan Trains from returning to or being reclaimed by their parents. Brace feared the impact of the parents' poverty and their Catholic religion, in particular, on the youth. This tradition of secrecy was carried on by the later Progressive reformers when drafting of American laws.

The number of adoptions in the United States peaked in 1970. It is uncertain what caused the subsequent decline. Besides the legalization of artificial birth control methods and abortion, the years of the late 1960s and early 1970s saw a dramatic change in society’s view of illegitimacy. In response, family preservation efforts grew so that few children born out of wedlock today are adopted.

For sources and more complete definition, refer to Wikipedia under Adoption.

This Article's Link

Monday, January 25, 2010

The World Within

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.
I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation.
When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town.
I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself,
and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself,
I could have made an impact on my family.
My family and I could have made an impact on our town.
Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

~ Unknown

This Article's Link

Friday, January 08, 2010

Two Wonderful Books

The Girls Who Went Away by Ann Fessler

Without a Map by Meredith Hall

If you want to understand your mother's generation, both books are most helpful.

If you want to appreciate how different you are than your mother and how truly lucky for the we are for the time we now live--they are equally helpful.

If you want to know your story is getting told, as a woman who went through such a terrible, dark time, well, these books are not enough but they are a start.

This Article's Link

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Experiments in Writing - #3 Faith

Each day, early in the morning, I wake up and put my pencil to a notepad. I wait and then, when words come, I write. It's an experiment in writing.

What is faith?

Faith is not measurable. Faith is surrender of mind but not necessarily of will.

There is a deep driving will in all forms that contain life. A form has the will to expand, to survive, to grow and to express fully. Life is an unbound force of will: slow, steady, omnipresent, relentless and oh so patient.

The will of life is evident everywhere you place your eyes--tree, moss, ivy, bugs, snails, dogs, humans. The will to be is the art you create, the songs you sing, the awakening each morning to a new dawn. The life will is clear. Life is alive and flowing.

Faith is the surrender of the mind and its questions of how life will turn out. Will life, as it is known now, flourish or fail? Faith is the surrender of this question and an abiding in the will of life, within the human form and everywhere on the planet. Faith is a quiet confidence. Faith is trust and more, faith is intelligence. It allows the form to relax.

Re lax. Re lax. Re lax.

When the form that life uses to express itself can relax the tension of anxiety and mental struggle, life can more fully flow.

Humans, encumbered (and blessed) with cognition, mammalian nurturing and primal survival functions have a miserable time with relaxation.

Relaxation is being explored at this time, to a great degree. There are pharmaceuticals, spa treatments, therapies, centers for meditation, breathing, stress relief and the entire spiritual movement. There are whole schools of thought around what is "relaxing." Travel? Food? Sleep? Drinking? drugs? Sex? Shopping? On and on.

Relaxation is not escape. Relaxation is the release of the mental tension, learning how to unburden the form from the tension created by the mind--brain--primal and mammal brain which tells a flood of stories about "survival challenges."

A human being, well fed, warm, comfortable and secure in a house can tell himself countless stories of doom that produce so much anxiety and stress for the system that there is no relaxation at all. Rather there is a massive depletion of energy through the mental processes and the system is taxed. All systems connected to that system are taxed as well, and since all life systems are interconnected, the result of one systems tension impacts all systems. It is quite stunning to see how one human being's mental anxiety can trip up the entire system of life.

Have we lost track of faith? No. Faith is the major component of re-laxation. The faith in life, the surrender to the will of life, as an entirety, is a deep and basic function of being. Faith is available, in abundance when one observes a planet or an animal. Stand and observe a dog, a flower, a tree, a turtle. Borrow a bit of faith from these forms to calm the mind and to relax. All beings on the planet, from plant to man, have the capacity to relax in the faith of being--to rest in the will of life and to trust life--as a force and as a presence.

Some say faith is a childlike quality. Simple. And this is true. But faith is also more than simple. Faith is innocence infused with great wisdom. Innocence is faith and trust and knowing of the goodness of life. And life is truly good.