#NAAM2019: National Adoption Awareness Month begins today

I plan to share posts from other adoptee bloggers all month...

Click and read:

The adopted ones blog

Two adoptees – one vocal the other not so much…

Day One of the longest month of the year (despite being only 30 days) where we all get to hear how wonderful and downright beautiful adoption is...

Day One 

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Daniel Drennan ElAwar

Isn’t it valid to compare adoption with a pregnancy?

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Adopto-Snark

 

Here We Go Again

by Snarkurchin

Yay! It's National Adoption "Awareness" Month, in which almost nobody is made aware of anything about adoption except that it exists. Apparently people's brains fall out every Halloween and they have to be reminded about adoption (and furniture and birds, for all I know).

In short, there's nothing special about November. It's pitching the same "awareness" we're told about adoption the rest of the year. That is bullshit, and it needs to change. Some of us who have an actual awareness of adoption have been trying to change it for decades now. Very few people listen.

https://snarkurchin.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/here-we-go-again/

 

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Adoptee Author Lynn Grubb

The Latest Breakthrough on My Birth Father Search

 

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 How the US stole thousands of Native kids (VOX)

https://youtu.be/UGqWRyBCHhw

  

These are great books and helpful:

Narratives of Adoption: My Dream #NAAM2016

By Trace Lara Hentz (author of One Small Sacrifice)

Every year we commemorate the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and I too have a dream.

I dream we’ve moved past sexism, racism… classism… and white privilege.  My ongoing prayer is adoption will no longer move any child outside their own culture and ethnicity …I pray everyone knows of the Indian Adoption Projects and 60s Scoop with its intended disastrous results and how my own story is woven into this mess.

In my dream, I pray all adoptees are CALLED HOME, called to be with all our relations, many nations and first families!

I dream that we now live in a new world where adoptees and first parents have educated others far beyond the fallacies… mistruths… myths created by a billion dollar adoption industry who benefits financially even now from trans-racial, international and closed adoptions.

I have a dream the entire world has finally realized children were sold like commodities in many countries and trafficked – too often adoption files were filled with falsehoods and lies to SELL a child to their prospective adopters.  These legal files were sealed to hide an adoptee’s identity, name and ancestry on paper, to conceal the truth. For too many of us, states still won’t release our own names and files to us, even as adults.

I dream all states in America open their closed adoption files in the near future, in 2016 and beyond.

I dream the world sees how this was a money-making operation… a business of baby selling and “creating” orphans; how this is trafficking in human life when mothers and their children are FORCED into this situation with pressure from society… religion… governments with little regard to those same women and children and the health effects on their minds and bodies.

I dream that adoptive parents know and accept we cannot be the child they want us to be or dream us to be – that we are born with our own biology and parents. If you do adopt us, then never lie to us. It’s your job as our loving guardian to share knowledge and truth about our first parents and recognize the lifelong health effects and the fog of stress that we adoptees endure under secrecy and the primal wound our adoption creates.

I dream the entire world sees how children feel like imposters in their adopted family.  As an adoptee, I was posing as a DeMeyer, when I know the falsehood of that name was legally forced upon me.

I want the world to know GOD had nothing to do with creating this torturous invention and experiment but rather adoption was invented to maintain power in ruling families in Roman times and this idea traveled to other lands.

I dream that open adoptions are working better for children who cannot stay with their first parents but we are not there yet. Read this important blog: http://birthmamawasteland.wordpress.com/2014/01/07/if-you-dont-like-what-i-have-to-say-why-are-you-here/

Closed adoption left adoptees like me lodged between two worlds yet not quite fitting in any world.  This is why I have chosen the title CALLED HOME for the new anthology...  I have two close friends who were called home and are back living on tribal lands and they are a testament to the courage needed to be in reunion as adults, as adoptees who were part of these government plans to rid the world of Indigenous and First Nation people.

I dream this new world is one where children and their safety are top priority, not who adopts them.  I dream we are now working harder to unify families, preserving family units, helping parents care for their own children, not separating them unless absolutely necessary. Children should not be placed with paying strangers or paid caretakers if there is kin, other family members who are willing.

[Called Home: The RoadMap is published on Amazon in 2016.]

{I wrote this on 2014 and still have this dream...]

AAC, SEO, Adoption Industry Profits? Read this

By Trace Hentz (blogger-author-adoptee)

I was very fortunate to attend the American Adoption Congress annual gathering in Cambridge, Massachusetts one week ago today... I sat on the Lost Daughters panel made up of unique and passionate adoptees who like me have been blogging on Lost Daughters and writing on their own blogs. It was my first time meeting them in person and they are all honest outspoken activists who care deeply about adoptee rights and finding our voices. You might recall last November seeing a trend of tweets about #FLIP THE SCRIPT and #VALID VOICES - those hashtags (#s) originated at Lost Daughters BLOG, created by Lost Daughter blogger Rosita!

One big thing I felt about AAC was the unity.  The first moms and adoptees had their voice respected and heard.  My friend Lindy was with me and she is a first mom.  Lindy is working on a book interviewing 15 birth moms and she blogs "Telling Our Stories for the Sake of Truth" here.  We are still talking about what we learned, who we met, and the conference itself.

The morning workshop we attended was on SEO (search engine optimization) and blog tips that help readers find blogs and websites, taught by savvy first mom Claudia Corrigan DArcy. (Claud is in reunion with her son Max who was there!)

SEO is critical in the age of social media to help readers find relevant writing and new thinking on adoption by searching Google, Bing and other search engines. I learned so much from Claud and will put it to work on this blog. (I am doing some things correctly as I do share these posts on Facebook and Twitter.) (You can share these posts too!)

Claudia blogged recently about Adoption Industry Profits. I wrote on this blog that billions are earned each year and it's alarming as well as profit-driven.

Please take a look and read the stats:
http://www.adoptionbirthmothers.com/adoption-industry-profit-data-2015/

I want to thank you all for reading this blog. It's truly appreciated.

Please read Lost Daughters blog and subscribe!

The more we learn and share, and help each other, the greater the impact!

xox Trace

[I am getting a brand new second edition of TWO WORLDS ready for publication. I will post more when it's all done...]

Broken: Trauma Bonding? #flipthescript #validvoices

trau·ma    

A serious injury or shock to the body, as from violence or an accident. An emotional wound or shock that creates substantial, lasting damage to the psychological development of a person, often leading to neurosis. An event or situation that causes great distress and disruption. 

 

By Trace Hentz (adoption survivor)

After many years, in many quiet moments, I recognize that adoption has affected me very deeply.   

In my case, the day my mother left me, how she never came back, my world changed.  All I knew as this newborn baby was my own mother was not holding me, nursing me, talking to me. I was devastated by that. Broken. Part of my brain shut down. That pain was too much.

That very early experience needed to be processed as stress and trauma much later as an adult.  No one explained this to me, not even a doctor. As an adult I understand that a church/adoption agency places an infant with new parents and society says this is good and permanent. Good? Good for who?

Years pass and I accept this happened to me and my early trauma scars me.  

This monumental loss of my mother cracks me open and I am left to survive it, or not.  No one explains that I need to grieve this. I figure it out.  After years pass, I finally understand.  This experience affected me in complex ways.  This pain has layers and layers and layers.

But for others to tell me adoption was good for me? What? Or how I need to accept this is "adoption." Accept it? Are they kidding?  My scars are invisible but they are there. I know they are there.

How Catholic Charities took possession of me, handled me, first placing me in an orphanage then foster home, with no regard for my physical health, or my trauma-ridden emotional body, this speaks to the inhumanity of child trafficking and the traumatic consequences of adoption for the infant.  This speaks to the inhumanity of the deadly colonization of Indigenous people whose children were taken from them, calling us stolen generations. This speaks to a society that only sees what it wants to see.

Once adopted, you’re erased, an outsider, a stranger to your own nation, lands and people. I prefer to think of my younger self as brainwashed.

The bonding I had made with those mystery foster parents was also broken. How Catholic Charities and other churches and adoption agencies did this to millions of babies has consequences. This leaves millions of adoptees in the state of trauma, a stranger being raised by strangers, and a stranger to your first family.

Adoption is a cruel and inhumane way to treat an infant. A very sick society would do this.  And removing me from my own mother affected me in ways that are now measured and defined as post-traumatic stress disorder, or reactive attachment disorder, or severe narcissistic injury...and this explains how I was unable to bond with my adoptive parents.

What’s Trauma Bonding? What is Complex PTSD? (traumaanddissociation.wordpress.com) 

 

"When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture, there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about that culture. A culture that requires harm to one's soul in order to follow the cultures prescriptions is a very sick culture indeed. This 'culture' can be the one a woman lives in, but more damning yet, it can be the one she carries around and complies with within her own mind....." -- Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes 

Canada: Vatican Crimes #adoption #validvoices

Christmas is not a good time for many of us adoptees, or mothers of loss... many of us feel loss and anger over human trafficking and loss of family... Trace

Vatican and nun crimes happened in Spain - research "Spain Stolen Babies" by BBC and this atrocity also took place in Australia (so much so that the government even forced the nuns to issue an "apology" in 2012 for stealing babies). The news program "Dan Rather Reports" did a story on this topic called "Adopted or Abducted?" highlighting the fact that this also took place in USA.
Now this video highlights that this also took place in Canada. In fact, we encourage viewers to look for the book called "GONE TO AN AUNT'S" where reporter and author Anne Petrie further discloses how this took place in Canada.

The Protect Your Children Foundation is committed to exposing all the lies and crimes of religion worldwide to alert the nations of the dangers these criminal organizations pose in our communities. For more information, visit: http://areyourchildrenprotected.org and http://www.protegeatushijos.org

Barbaric: Closed Adoptions #flipthescript #NAAM2014

Pray for mothers across the planet so they can keep their children with them until they grow big and strong.... (from my memoir One Small Sacrifice)

By Trace (Adoptee-Lost Bird)

How many more Lost Birds will lose hope unless laws change?  This breaks my heart again and again. I can’t take their journey for them. I can’t open their sealed adoption records for them. I will work with them and put them in touch with search angel Karen Vigneault. I also recommend DNA testing now. I recommend ceremony now.

I heard stern warnings from elders, too. I was taught if people are not receptive to your words, let them proceed – even into difficulty or dangerous circumstances. It is the only way they’ll learn. This does not mean I should not pay attention – it’s just means that taking care of someone else’s pain could be harmful to me. There are many books on being co-dependent. It is no way to live.

Each adoptee must journey their own way, as far as they can. I’ve learned this.

I've made my share of mistakes definitely. I did try to push myself and rush things. I acted impatient and hurt. I finally learned to take my journey as it happens, and not try to control it.

Adoption laws protect adoption agencies and social workers from lawsuits and shelter adoptive parents who think we are "theirs."

Adoptees must face the pain with these archaic laws, adoption myths, government sealed files and no answers. If people really understood, there would be no more closed adoptions.

Those who conduct adoptions must take a much closer look at the harm on infants, adoptee trauma, birth psychology, stress and mental illness. The system of closed adoption, in the words of one lawyer, is barbaric.

One day we will all look back at this and say “how did we ever let this happen to innocent children?” 

 

If you are still searching, contact me and Karen Vigneault. (See header for more info) 

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Trafficking in Babies?
Here is a link to a story about the Nightlight Adoption Agency who brokered the sale of Baby Veronica.
PURE PROPAGANDA - take a look for yourself...  Together for adoption?  
That's what they say... A child who has a parent who wishes to raise them is not an orphan but a commodity, someone sold into adoption, which is trafficking...Lara/Trace
HERE