I recently received an email from an old mailing list that I guess I’m still on because I presented at their conference a while back. It was promoting an online discussion of a train wreck of a book written by E. Kay Trimberger, entitled Creole Son [sic]. Everything about the event outlined in the email […]
Category Archives: Media Riposte
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 […]
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’ […]
Reading Friederich von Schiller’s (1795) almost continuously magnificent “Naive and Sentimental Poetry,” I encountered the sentence. (I have grammatically modified his pronoun use to avoid the exclusive “he”): All peoples who possess a history have a paradise, a state of innocence, a golden age; indeed, every individual has their paradise, their golden age, which they […]
Elsewhere, the “dis-ease” of nostalgia has recently been invoked. The medicalisation of this term already raises interesting questions, and its etymology sheds further light on this: 1770, “severe homesickness” (considered as a disease), Modern Latin (cf. French nostalgie, 1802), coined 1668 by Johannes Hofer, as a rendering of German heimweh, from Greek algos “pain, grief, […]
I found this sitting in the “pending” pile; Girl4708 has given me permission to update and post. She originally wrote: As I approved another comment today on a blog post I wrote about Woody Allen, I wondered about tan fever, brown fever, and black fever as Asian adoptions decline and other countries become sources for […]
(to the tune of “America the Beautiful”) O ugliness for specious lies, for endless waves of pain, for purple’s bruise and blackened eyes above a fruitless plaint …. America! America! god shat his grace on thee and crowned a hood’s false justice good from sea to shaming sea. O ugliness for grim-pulled feet a white […]
A researcher, or perhaps a journalist, Kathryn Boyce has recently written an expose, The Child Catchers: Rescue, Trafficking, and the New Gospel of Adoption (published 23 April 2013), on how evangelical Christians are preaching the new gospel of adoption. I haven’t read the book; I’m flagging it down here in case someone wants to. My […]
From another post not on TRE, written by an adoptee, I was told: We know that much of who we are today was created in the womb. We know that mother and child are a single entity, profoundly connected physiologically, emotionally and spiritually — even through early infancy. A baby does not understand that he […]
From another site, an adoptee seemed to overgeneralize that adoptees become adept at smiling through pain. I addressed that one way here. And while I make an effort to not merely was autobiographical when I post, I have to say this “smiling through pain” business gets me in a very personal way, and it is […]
In a well-intended, adoptee-written post elsewhere, the author describes some of the characteristic effects on the child who is torn from her or his site of initial gestation. Directing a question to nonadoptees, with an implicit comparison to adoptees, the writer asks: “Did you ever smile and act happy to hide your grief? ¶ Of […]
Someone recently treated me to the new Wes Anderson movie Moonrise Kingdom, which apparently has been getting all kinds of raves–so that’s a bad sign already. (I’m signalling my take on the movie already; I can’t recommend it too little). And now, I’m going to shamelessly ruin most of the plot for you. Here goes: […]
For me, these adoptee groups are like taking spoonfuls of bitter medicine. The sharing I do with other adoptees, the reflections of my past, and all the things that I have learned has healed me. Adoption is as varied as shoes, apples or the variety of labels of medication on the shelves of the local […]
I saw this post on the Huffington Post web site: Abyssinian Princess on Horseback: Inspiration for all Orphans And I was literally dumbstruck. Abyssinia? The European colonial name for the former kingdom of Ethiopia? They refuse to post my entire comment, so I would like to put it here: In adoptee circles, we joke about […]
There is so much to comment on in this story in the Washington Times. To start off, “Red Thread: An Adoptive Family Forum” is the discussion board’s name. Second, you might think that something called “an adoptive family forum” might allow posts from, say, the adopted. I’m pretty sure I was part of an “Adoptive […]
Transracialeyes 