By the way, here’s the official site for her book and the documentary that inspired it: SecretDaughter.com

I wrote this up last night but firefox crashed and I lost it.

June Cross was placed in an informal adoption when she was about four because she couldn’t pass as white. (She is biracial — her mother was white and her father was African American.) There’s a harrowing scene when she’s splashing in a bubble bath during one of her visits with her mother and her mom idily says, “If only you hadn’t gotten so dark, you could have stayed with me.”

Her aunt and uncle (really her parents’ old landlords) take her in but never legally adopt her (something that becomes a problem towards the end of the book when her aunt is ill). And she continues to have regular visits with her mother, Norma, who also sends money for her keep.

Throughout her life, June’s loyalties are torn as she grapples with family, with race as perceived by her family and with race as is the reality of living in America in the 50s and 60s. For transracial adopter such as myself, there is a lot to think about.

One of the things I was thinking about when I was rocking Madison last night was the revelation in this book (not in the documentary) that June has an older sister who was placed for adoption in a formal, state-supervised adoption. (There are very little details about this in the book but June’s sister is white so race isn’t an issue in that adoption.) She also has an older brother (older, too, than the lost sister) who was raised mostly by Norma’s mother. Then even later, June discovers that her mother was farmed out to relatives, too, as a child. June herself never has children.

This was hot on the heels of reading this (courtesy of a link from Susan):

Of course, there was the occasional blip. Like the time the yoga teacher asked us to visualize our own birth. At first I pictured a wooden-paneled station wagon. But then I went somewhere else. My non-adopted friends left the room feeling relaxed. I left the room terrified.

Then there was the nightmare I had that I was leaving the hospital with my baby when the lights suddenly went out. When the lights came back on again, all the newborns had been stolen, including mine. A man with a stethoscope explained that he wasn’t really surprised, as babies were getting top dollar on the adoption black market that week.

–from an essay by Alison Larkin

It’s strange how things get handed down. This, of course, made me think about some things specific to our adoption and specific to my family of origin, (which includes a history rife with reproductive crises and difficult resolutions).

Then (because my mind will wander however I try to reign it in), this made me think about FauxClaud’s tragedy post because I was thinking about how deeply run our choices and how impossible it is to take adoption as a stand-alone event in anyone’s life.

Anyway, I’m not quite ready to articulate how this is all coming together in my head but this is how it’s all running around in there.

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