Family Forum / Parenting / Adoption / April 2007

HELL NO....do you wanna come clean it for me??

--

KL

Can anyone else say, "MELTDOWN!!!!"

--

KL

Joy, I said you *seem* angry to me, and posts like this are the ones that
have made me feel that way.   It is entirely possible that I am wrong, and
if I am, I apologize.  It has just seemed *to me* that you have a lot of
angry feelings about adoption, and, yes, the way you have phrased some
things makes it seem like you have some anger toward your adoptive parents.
Again, it is entirely possible I'm off-base in my assessment.

Sheila

Um, what?

Yes you have Joy..

http://groups.google.ca/group/alt.adoption/msg/b00e928982e11d9b?hl=en&

Newsgroups: alt.adoption
From: joymadse...@yahoo.com
Date: 2 Apr 2007 12:53:47 -0700
Local: Mon, Apr 2 2007 3:53 pm
Subject: Re: In Somewhat Shocking News
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On Apr 2, 6:03 am, Jackie <jackiejda...@w3connex.ca> wrote:

(snipped some..)

Jackie

Stealing my aparents fortune has really helped support my extravagant
lifestyle, did I mention I am going to Eurpoe AGAIN this year,  or
that hd has his own label?

Yes, I was aware that I live in an expensive neighborhood, thanks,

And that has f.ck all of what to do with who I am a person, or
adoption?

Bon vivant, guilty as charged but so the f.ck what?

.... end of quoting..

So what is it Joy.  Do you live off of your aparents money or not?
Do you hate them even tho they set you up on Sanfrancisco?

Jackie

Why should someone assume that?  Do happy adoptees have happy aparents?  Do
sarcastic adoptees have sarcastic aparents?  This kind of logic reminds me
of those that say adoptees who have a desire to search for their bparents
have aparents who did something wrong when they were raising them.

Kathy 1
Sarcastic adoptee with nonsarcastic aparents ;)

Apparently not according to Martin Rowlandson:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/04/15/borow14.xml

Victory of nurture over nature.
Ruth Scurr reviews Stuff by Martin Rowson

Two-thirds of the way through this memoir, Martin Rowson states his
position on adoption: "I'm not entirely happy with the idea of being
classified as an 'adoptee' or 'adopted person', not because the
condition itself bothered me, but because I don't like labels." He
does not want readers to think his book is really about his being
adopted, when he meant it to be "about much, much more than that".

Rowson is an acclaimed political cartoonist who attributes his gift
for drawing to genetic inheritance, yet is more interested in the
other side of the nature v nurture debate. He was born in Hammersmith
in 1959, but it was not until the late 1990s that he started searching
for his natural parents. Stuff is a skilful corrective to what he
scathingly calls "the literature of adoption stories".

Aside from labels and the glib judgements they imply, it is the
tendency to "talk up adoption" as a variety of victimhood that Rowson
berates. He does not deny that some people's experiences of adoption
have been truly terrible, but resists the view that the practice is
inherently traumatic for babies and their parents. Further, he
suggests that "the adoption experience is just a formalised version of
most people's family lives, where you can hardly hear yourself think
for the noise of skeletons rattling in cupboards all around you".

Rowson assembles his memories in a series of eccentrically themed
chapters that cleverly illustrate his argument: Dream, Bones,
Formaldehyde, Distance, Colours, and so on. Four central characters -
Rowson's adoptive mother, father, stepmother, and the Stanmore house
they all lived in - are first introduced in his dreams. Next come the
bones: a box of them in the loft, left over from Rowson's father's
medical student days; his father's own hip, replaced as a consequence
of Perthes' disease; and the ashes of the tiny bones of baby
Christopher, whose death led to Rowson's parents' decision to adopt a
little girl, and afterwards him.

As a child, Rowson found a wad of roubles stashed away in a wardrobe
in his parents' bedroom. Afterwards, he pretended that his father was
a Russian spy, and admits to being almost disappointed that there
"wasn't a thickset stranger standing at the back of the crematorium at
my father's funeral, who'd leave without saying a word after dropping
a small floral tribute, with no message, on the steps outside".

Rowson's father visited Russia in the course of his career as a
medical scientist. The postcards he sent home to Stanmore carried
remarkably banal messages ("this evening it is raining and I have had
dinner at the hotel") but they still inspired Rowson to read Soviet
Weekly on the bus back from school.

Rowson's mother was a midwife who not only lost her own baby, but
believed she was responsible for another baby dying during her routine
work. After adopting two children, she began fostering a succession of
babies awaiting new homes. When Rowson was clearing the family home,
he came across an album of photos of all the fostered babies, with
notes as to whether or not they had been successfully placed after
leaving his mother's care. "A depressingly large number hadn't been,
and I can only begin to guess at whatever might have happened to them
subsequently."

His mother died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage when he was 10. He did
not go to the funeral and regretted it, because afterwards he had
dreams in which his mother reappeared and claimed to have just been
hiding. This is why, in recounting the process of tracing his natural
parents, Rowson writes: "If ever I was haunted by the idea of a
missing mother, you already know the source of that."

Another extraordinary fact is that Rowson's father remarried a woman
who turned out to be the midwife in the maternity hospital who had
carried him from his natural mother to his adoptive mother. When he
was growing up, he knew her as his godmother, before she became his
stepmother, even though he had never been baptised, so did not
officially have any godparents.

Many would have approached this astonishing narrative conventionally,
letting the revelations drop one after another in sequence. Rowson is
more creative. He interweaves memories and images, reflecting
carefully, never pretentiously, on their formative power. He thinks of
himself as his parents' "little victory of nurture over nature", and
he insists that, these days, we are too credulous about genetics.
Stuff is a candid, sanguine, often very amusing, illustration of a
serious point of view.