The metaphor of “coming out” has been used elsewhere as a way to describe the experience of disclosing one’s status as adopted. What do you think about how this metaphor illuminates and distorts being open about one’s adoption experience?
Author Archives: Snow Leopard
I received my original birth certificate today, which confirmed one of my better guesses (based on genetic testing and genealogical research) about the identity of my genetic mother. However, as I had been forewarned would likely be the case, the document contained no information about my father, since (as in many states) birth certificates in […]
Having lately resorted to genetic testing to uncover my immediate genetic family, I confront therefore the panoply of folks, mostly not adopted, who are on a similar (but different) quest for their origin.[1] Compared to whatever conceits are at work in the efforts of committed and serious genealogists, the amateurish, armchair types—the ones who causally […]
Manifold disclosures about the unethical and immoral practices of those trafficking in human children now make clear the systemic, not merely idiosyncratically aberrant, character of those ethical and moral violations. [1] My adoptive parents paid for a white baby, but they didn’t get one—as 10.4% of my genetic heritage makes clear in its tracing back […]
As I plod slowly along on the slow trail of information-gathering to hunt down trails of my possible genetic origins through different genetic testing tools, I sometimes note an obnoxious petitioner’s syndrome that being adopted [1] can engender. Petitioner’s syndrome points psychologically to having to address a greater power for essential information and structurally to […]
Several for-profit companies now make personalized genetic testing more widely and readily available than in the past, adding the particularly attractive feature of widespread comparison amongst people’s genomes.[1] The usefulness of such genetic testing (for orphans and non-orphans alike) resides almost wholly in the breadth of participation by other people who have been tested, since […]
A recent study on adoption and suicide suggests genetic (biological) rather than environmental factors play a dominant role in risks for suicide. Researchers used Danish adoption data and compared non-biologically related siblings of orphans (children who had been adopted and biologically related siblings that the orphan did not grow up with. Basically what they looked […]
One question three ways: At its bluntest: when is the worst time in one’s life to be adopted? Asked more reflectively: what age at time of adoption creates the greatest risk for negative consequences in an orphan’s life (e.g., at birth, or up to age 2 or so when language is acquired, or from post-language […]
I went to the local animal shelter yesterday. I do that sometimes. To get back to my roots. This is therefore in two parts. The first part summarises details from the trip. The second part poses some of the questions as: To be chosen or not to be chosen, is that the question? What are […]
In our postmodern Occidental milieu, the articulation of new “meta” levels (of market) becomes necessary. Thus, it seems inevitable that extended organizational networks[1] to facilitate the facilitation of adoption[2] would come to exist,[3] along with the usual sorts of fees, such as $395 to attend a mandatory orientation workshop before even being allowed access to […]
In Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, at one point he remarks on the irregular origins of birth for heroes in many sacred traditions: The hero is not born like an ordinary mortal because his birth is rebirth from the mother-wife. That is why the hero so often has two mothers. As Rank has shown with a […]
I hope, if proposing this question re-treads material already exhausted previously, that revisiting it has also a quality of refreshing it. But also, to avoid taking up a lot of space with any sort of startled “discovery” of the issue on my part, I intend only to submit it to the collective intelligence of the […]
A friend recently asked me: I was wondering how you would suggest I respond when people trot out the, ‘don’t be selfish just wait 9 months and give your child up for adoption’ BS. Besides the other things I thought to respond with, I also came up with: “Whoa, really? Your solution to the ‘problem’ […]
The following arrives at the point of asking: In the face of too much irresolvable complexity, must we simply say “fuck it” and accept and live by the (untenable) premise that we can go on living “without culture” by taking whatever we pick up (individually) to have the sustaining and grounding quality that actual culture […]
NOTE: to address this issue, I start with an analogy to white privilege, which in any case represents an integrally related aspect of the whole. Does this seem like a fruitful analogy? What don’t you like about it? And does the alternative–the demonic, as opposed to the insane or the immoral–seem like a helpful alternative […]
Transracialeyes 