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What Would Sappho Say?

Lectori Salutem! or L.S. (Greetings to the Reader!)

This next subject is as universal as the human experience and spreads throughout the world in many different forms, both legal and illegal, friendly and stolen, and in the mere disappearance of one child and unannounced appearance of another – no questions asked. There are so many other on the black market and simply sold children for economic reasons in the poorest of regions and the wealthiest of communities as if a child is a simple commodity, not a living, breathing life. In between there exist the most vilest of the child trade for sex, work and any other whim an entitled person might feel to any other thing on the market place to be bartered over as if it were a trinket in the world’s largest flea market. I grew up an adopted person amidst these images and one pondering what made me so fortunate to get the luck of the draw, ending up with upper, middle-class, phenomenal parents through a Los Angeles Superior Court County Adoption, is a tale of randomness in the extreme.

You would think I started out as any other baby, a full term girl born to a single mother putting her self through college without the luxury of being able to raise me on her own. There was one huge difference keeping this white little baby alive until birth. Roe V. Wade was not legal at the time. Compared to today’s statistics, the chances of a Caucasian baby being born into a white family through a public Superior Court adoption happens quite rarely. Those types of adoptions are usually handled through private adoption agencies where money exchanges hands for expenses and all that it may entail up in the $100,000’s of dollars deemed legitimate baby needs or expenses incurred by the mother for the good of the baby.

So, the line between buying a baby with gifts and services in this country is hidden better in the U.S. with a prettier bow that the poorer countries. Places like China exchange cold, hard cash for infants to the pregnant mothers that need the money to live, breath, and survive since they will be taxed out of affording the child as soon as it is born. You will find no clean and easy answers in the adoption ways across this globe. Horrible conditions exist in orphanages in Russia and Haiti but governments are cashing in with red tape and fees to get the children into good meaning American hands.

You may be ready to insert your opinion based on American values but that would only be your first mistake. The reproductive laws of a nation are strict (quotas), their view on the disabled and selective abortion as an alternative in predetermining sex, as well as many other cultural and societal views of the family unit must be understood before a cultures’ idea of mixed race or similar raced adoptions are even breeched as a subject.

You see, I was born in 1966 prior to the 1973 Landmark Roe V. Wade Decision in an era when the Civil Rights movement was in full swing as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had recently been passed and now were attempting to be implemented in the South with hellacious results. It is also of note to remember the Summer of Love was 1967 but that is not to say that free love wasn’t on the up swing well before that. Women’s rights were barely on the radar screen the year I was born and the only option available to my biological mother was adoption – a very different scenario than what is available and utilized by young, white women today. As a feminist, I will always hold the opinion that a women’s right to do with her body as she wishes is paramount but with my own birth the issue becomes a little cloudy. I might not be here had Roe V. Wade been passed just 10 years earlier. I have to say it has given me pause over the years, not for a woman’s right to choice but certainly what I would have done had my slutty boy-toy days had gotten me into any real trouble (another story for a different day).

The question I get asked most that reveals my true non-lineage, is “What is your ethnicity?” Apparently, I have strong features that lead one to believe I am from somewhere and since most have no class and will immediately follow the answer I have to that question, “I don’t know” or “I am adopted”, with some insanely personal question like “Have you found your birth mother yet?” I mean, really? Do you people not know that is an invasion of privacy my own mother would not have the guts to ask me about? I don’t understand the liberties some people take these days with asking complete strangers the most personal of questions.

I developed I defense mechanism for all of this over the years. I stop people at the ethnicity question cold. Since no one ever picks the same place, “Italy”. “Greece”, “The Middle East?”, etc. The reality of it is they aren’t really looking at me too closely and we are in a darkened bar. I have darkish features with hazel green eyes and reddish white skin so it is easy to provoke an argument between them. After a few minutes they forget all about me being adopted and we are on to something else. Thank God for people’s small attention spans these days!!!!

So, I’ve introduced you to one of the layers of who I am. I am adopted. This will become a theme in the days and weeks to come as I have made the decision to jump off the cliff and dive into the search for the woman who birthed me and perhaps the sperm donor as well. This won’t happen anytime soon, so hang in there with me as I go through the trials and tribulations as the information trickles in over the next several months.

Thanks for being there.

Much Love.

Inspired By Sappho’s Muse

QUOTE OF THE DAY
Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan “Adoption, not abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.
Barbara Ehrenreich

What Would Sappho Say
www.sapphospeaks.com