HAPPY HALLOWEENI love the holiday, but there is a bittersweetness to it that makes me pause, because the next day is the kickoff to the National Adoption Awareness Month. Jane Edwards at Firstmother Forum has a really good history of the co opting of this month by the Adoption Industry, and it is well worth the read. You can find it here....Halloween ushers in National Adoption Awareness Month.
Since I live in S. Texas, Halloween has always had a sort of special significance, because not only is it the funnest holiday EVER, it is also the prequel to the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos on Nov. 1. That is the day to honor and remember and celebrate our loved ones who are deceased. Here in S. Texas, the sugar masks, the altar items are for sale on the street corner and in the malls, Dia de los Muertos items all over the place. They are bright, colorful, playful and happy, a refreshing attitude toward deceased loved ones, I feel.
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I have always thought it ironic that the first day of National Adoption Awareness Month is on Dia de los Muertos. Adoption, legally, is the legal death of the child to its natural family, "as if dead to", and the legal rebirth or "as if born to" the adoptive family. The mothers, however, are never reborn. Adoption Surrender, many mothers will tell you, is for them the death of a part of the soul of the mothers. It is a walling off, a sealing of the psyche, the symbolic death of the woman that the girl was intended to become. It is a living death, of the child to the mother and the person the mother was before she gave birth.
Dia de los Muertos is important to the Hispanic people where I live in S. Texas. The San Antonio area is a heavily Hispanic area, very rich in Hispanic traditions, some of which I have learned to appreciate and love, including this one.
Behind each and every one of the 6 million adoptees in the United States today, there is a mother whose rights were terminated in order that the child be adopted. Some of the mothers had little choice and their rights were terminated against their will, due to issues of poverty, neglect or abuse. But, the far greater numbers of mothers are women who signed their child's Surrender documents because their backs were against the wall and they had no other options.
These Mothers didn't wish to sign their children away for adoption. They wanted to parent their children, be the ones who claimed the right as parents and changed their poopy diapers, kissed their boo boos, tucked them in at night, saw the first tooth, the first step, the first bicycle, the first date and taught them how to drive. They would have loved to send their children off for their first day of school, to their first haircut, and listened to them whisper to their friends about their first kiss. These mothers, mothers like me, were denied this for our firstborn children. I, like millions of other women, was deemed by our society unfit to parent, before we had ever committed a crime. We were unfit due to the fact that we had sex outside of marriage and for that crime, that heinous act, we paid the unthinkable pr of the loss of our firstborn, never to be seen or heard from again.
We were told to go home, forget, get on with our lives, and that someday we could have children, "of our own" that we could keep...unless we failed to sign the papers and then we would become a part of the "system" and all our other children from that time on would be suspect and removed, even in marriage. We believed them, rightfully, because we knew that they meant business. We KNEW that we had no rights of our own, as women, except those conferred upon us by the men in our lives, our owners, our fathers and husbands.
Much is changed now. Women DO have rights and they have been tested in the courts. The Civil Rights Era not only restored many rights to black Americans, but to Female Americans, too.
I propose that November 1, for mothers of adoption loss, be given a new designation in our community....the first day of November, the start of Adoption Awareness Month begin, like Adoption itself does, with the mothers. Perhaps in future, National Adoption Awareness Month will not only end with National Strange and Mournful Day, but begin with Dia de los Madres, the forgotten, dismissed, inconvenient and disrespected mothers. It will be a reminder, this month and all month long to REMEMBER THE MOTHERS....LA DIA DE LOS MADRES!!
8 comments:
YaY! I am with you!
Thank you for this reminder of what it was really like for women back in the day. I think it can be hard for those of us who were born in the BSE or later to really understand what second class citizens women were and how powerless females were before the women's movement. I think those of my generation and later take it for granted that women can speak their minds and be heard and that no one tells us what to do. But that certainly wasn't always the case.
Well written, well said, Sandy. I am glad that some "get" the fact that we were so powerless. I think that is why I dig my heels in, today, and don't let anyone tell me what to do. That inability to do anything except get caught up in the machine is a horrible feeling. Thanks for this one. I love November, but I hate the Adoption Awareness crap.
I like the idea of Dia De Los Madres, but not on Dia De Los Muertos.(All Saint's Day to us Anglos)
I am very much alive. As are we all reading this. Maybe another day in November that did not coincide with a day to remember the dead, a very good thing to do, but reminded people that mothers who surrendered a child are still living and active and in many cases back in our children's lives. Just a thought.
Maryanne,
I like the first of the month, because it is the beginning of NAAM, and, as I said, Adoption begins with a mother. However, Halloween would also work okay, since it is the day before. I like this idea...
Thoughts, All?
Dia de las muertas works for me because I did feel like my motherhood was relegated to the dead. But then again it is such a wonderful holiday in its own that I don't want to detract from it.
Halloween has never been a favorite of mine. The twisted tricks of relinquishing in the BSE seem fitting for Halloween. It fits with the nonsense of
pretending to be something other than what you are.
Jjanet
Halloween is my favorite holiday, because it is fun and I love costumes, as does most of my family including oldest son and wife. They always send me pictures of their costumes which are home-made and imaginative. And cats, owls and good witches have always been among my favorite things:-)
Like Day of the Dead, Halloween is its own thing, was originally Samhain, an old Pagan Celtic holiday to honor the dead, when the veil between the worlds of the spirits and the living was thought to be thin. It was also the beginning of the Celtic year. Christianity made it All Hallows Eve, but many of the customs predate that and still live on today.
Not sure if Dia De Los Madres fits with that, maybe Nov 2 which is All Soul's Day, which follows All Saints' Day Nov.1. November is a bleak month, so in that sense it is fitting for Adoption Month.
Hi Lori,
Absolutely. Dia de los madres. I'm with you. I relinquished my daughter for adoption when I was 17, very much against my will. It nearly destroyed me then and, now, many years later, after 10 years of reunion with my daughter, we are going through a no-contact period and that is almost as tough. Sometimes, I think of adoption as the loss that keeps on taking.
Angela
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