World Adoptee Day, Adoption Day, National Adoptee Awareness Day/Month

how Cinderella lost her other slipper

Today is World Adoptee day or Adoption day. How you phrase it matters. Is it a day for Adoptees to celebrate? Yeah you lost your family, but you got a new one. Be honored? You were an orphan, but now you aren’t. Or perhaps you weren’t really an orphan as some who do birth searches find out. Be remembered? Yes, in the United States as Adoptees you are killing yourselves 4 times more than others. But wait that was Suicide Awareness month, are we not supposed to mention that now? Or is it World Adoption day? Yes, you can be legally imported, at some cost to a family that has no knowledge of your culture, may often suppress or demonize it and then, may actively hide your biological history. Let’s celebrate! Yes, I know the alternate narrative, “Thank God” with a capital G..insert….justification, and G for Grateful.

Now if god had been so great he would not have orphaned children in the first place. Couldn’t god have done something about that war or that nasty poverty, or the lack of healthcare, or the lack of contraception or the lack of education. I am sure with all that omniscience and planning he could have done something about all that napalm they used to decimate Korea, and then Vietnam. God seems to be good at furthering industrialization, colonialism, capitalism all very good. God in his wisdom created all these orphans like special opportunities, gifts of purpose to be scooped up and transported to a “new” family. Oh we do like new things don’t we? A “New” car is always better than a “Used” one. Wait am I mixing my metaphors, what is new? What is used? Oh well, thank god for those workers looking for orphans, willing to pay people for their children, so they would not have to worry about feeding them. They could only feed themselves. And thank god for the catalogues of images, child after child like a magazine of orphan porn. So many choices like the varieties of trinkets in the Oriental Trading co. catalogue little china dolls. “What’s that? Not from China? I don’t know that country,” But some of you did, your husbands did anyway..they called us gooks.

Yes, let’s celebrate World Adoptee Day, World Adoption Day, World Adoptee Awareness day, month, let’s get it right. Let us remember there are mothers who are unwillingly impregnated, who cannot support their child either physically or emotionally, who cannot keep “her” because she is a “she” and not a “son.” There are families and refugees devastated by war or natural disasters who cannot feed their children. Poor them, we can take your children. There are women who with very little opportunity for income have babies for foreigners and will receive very little money along with the life long loss of that child. Who does that kind of mind **** to a child? If you are not seeing it, if you are not sitting in the body of a child waking up to the world with the understanding at 8, 9, 10? That your birth mother was treated like a third world incubator, then yes you are lost to me.

How do we adequately honor Adoptees of the World? How shall we celebrate World Adoption day? How do we mark World Adoptees Awareness day without weeping? So weep with me, over a world that values her women and children so little that they should be lost to each other. Weep with me that another woman can buy that honor and call it a burden and readily abuse it in the name of God and Gratefulness. Ownership is never love, not between a man and a woman, nor a mother and a child. And weep with me for my sisters and brothers who could not find peace in assimilation, and never knew love from others and could not give it to themselves. And finally weep for joy that some

did,

do,

will,

find love and peace and survive, as I did to make families with love and respect and honor. Tonight, I will weep with you, and for the child I once was. Today and every day I honor you, your struggle to look in the mirror and see someone whole, someone worth loving, someone wanted and I send you my love as a sister and as a mother and I am glad you are here.

Happy Disney Day! Orphans, adopted, fairy tale, witches, happy endings, fantasies and glass slippers, for my sweet adoptees of the world.

#NAAM