[ Back ] [ Home ]

 

PACER Newsletter's Latest Issue:  Spring 2010

Starting with the Summer 2009 issue, PACER is combining the benefits of membership with the power of the Internet by bringing its members more content in the periodic newsletter.  We can do this cost effectively by putting longer articles, more pictures, and expanded issues on this page in our website, and mailing out a shorter paper document. 

Because the newsletter is a benefit of PACER membership, this page contains only the continuation of the full article.  To read the beginning, click here to see a PDF of the paper newsletter and follow the remainder of each article below.   

To read the remainder of each article, click on the appropriate link below OR print the whole page and create your own paper version!

We are interested in hearing what you think of this new format.  Send your feedback to our newsletter editor.  Thank you!
 


Healing Adoption Wounding:
Carista Luminare, Ph.D., Talks about her True Self Model        
[ Back ]

By Geneva Anderson

As members of the adoption community, we have all acknowledged that “adoption is forever,” but how many of us are really comfortable with how adoption has impacted our sense of self worth, our ability to trust, and to experience healthy love?  Many of us subconsciously let our adoption wounding run the show, determining how we feel about ourselves and how we interact with others.  We become “stuck,” acting out patterns of behavior that we can’t seem to change.  We may never experience the love and acceptance we need to thrive.  Carista Luminare, Ph.D. is a Bay Area counselor and expert on pre- and postnatal bonding who is a keynote speaker at this year’s AAC conference.  She will present “Getting UnStuck: You Can Heal Yourself,” the purpose of which is to show us that, with hard inner work, we in the adoption constellation can learn to conquer and transform our unhealthy patterns and beliefs. 

In 2000, Luminare wrote Parenting Begins Before Conception: A Guide To Preparing Body, Mind, and Spirit: For You and Your Future Child, a holistic approach to parenthood including how to prepare for conception and pregnancy, including the development of body, mind and spirit of the child and future parent.  She also co-founded and directed The Center for Creative Parenting in Marin County, where she assisted hundreds of parents in preconception planning and conscious parenting.  Her unique methodology, called the “True Self Way” was not specifically designed for the adoption community but it directly addresses how to heal the adoption trauma that Nancy Verrier, MFT, brought to our community’s attention 24 years ago with her seminal book, The Primal Wound.   

Verrier posited that there is a “primal wound” (or trauma) that develops when a mother and child are separated (by adoption) shortly after childbirth.  This is because the birthmother and child have a unique physical, psychological and physiological realtionship which begins in-utero.  Disrupting that abruptly by separating birthmother and child can manifest in trauma and loss of Self.  This wound, occurring before the child has begun to separate his own identity from that of the mother, is experienced not only as a loss of the mother, but as a loss of the Self, that core-being of oneself which is the center of goodness and wholeness. A central theme is the assertion that all adoptees, even those adopted at birth, will retain memories of the separation from their birth mothers, and that regardless of the way the adoption is presented and handled by adoptive parents, these memories will have profound affects on the emotional and psychological well-being of the child and adult adoptee.

Luminare believes that many in the adoption community do suffer from this primal wounding which is very real and this impacts the fullness of their adult lives.  It prevents them from being their True Self, which is the transcendent or unlimited potential in all of us, not dominated by our wounding or conditioned self.  “You become your True Self when your personality is able to sense, express and embody the loving presence of your soul in a sustained way.”  Luminare explains that if we were to imagine an old-fashioned slide projector, our True Self would be the pure light shining through the lens, without any lens or filters.   However, our adoption wounding—that unique collection of patterns (beliefs and behaviors) that we developed in childhood as coping mechanisms to help protect ourselves against the challenges and traumas that arose, acts as a filter so that we are acting as our false self.  The false self is simply distortion of the true nature which is independent from our conditioning, yet profoundly affected by it.  Using the slide projector analogy, the false self would be slides (beliefs that are internalized as a part one’s self -identity) that obscure the light of your true self.  The identity that you project out into the world is the synthesis of these slides, much like the movie screen that captures the slide images projected onto it.  

Many adults live their lives unaware of their patterns and are not able to fully connect with their inherent strengths, virtues and talents—soul qualities.  We flail and sink in despair and become entrenched, or stuck.  We cannot think ourselves out of this state because even our intellect is hostage.  Actually this situation applies to everyone to some extent but is particularly relevant to adoptees.   Luminare states “Most people struggle with the impact of their childhood wounding whether they are adopted or not.”  She suggests that adoptees are often hit with a double whammy.  They struggle with the impact of prenatal ambivalence and postnatal separation from their birthmother, which is a unique set of issues.  They also have the challenges of childhood conditioning that most people get from their parents.  Theirs comes from their adoptive parents.

Primal Matrix: birthmother ambivalence, volatile infant---primal wound/false sense of self

While adoption can have unintended consequences for all parties involved, the impact on the adopted child/adult and the birthmother who form the “Primal Matrix,” are most profound because of the unique in-utero birthmother-child bonding that begins after conception.  Luminare views the developing fetal child as a multidimensional being with a physical, etheric, emotional, mental body, and a soul which is its spiritual, immortal essence.  Healthy ego development thrives when a child attaches to a primary love source from the beginning of his or her life.  In her book, Luminare states that leading edge research contends that prenatal life and the birth experience are often profound determinants of human personality and aptitude and that unborn children see, hear and feel in the womb (seen in studies by Verny, Chamberlain).   

In terms of adoption’s impact, Luminare believes that birthmothers who are deciding whether or not to relinquish their child typically go through a myriad of ambivalent feelings during pregnancy, coupled with high stress, which can create a highly challenging developmental environment for the growing child.   Most birthmothers have stress during pregnancy and there are many kinds of stress, and not all are associated with lasting damage but intense chronic stress and persistent fear have been shown to have adverse influences on prenatal brain and endocrine system development that control behavior.  This may impact how the child learns, solves problems and relates to others.  (“The Effects of Toxic Stress During Pregnancy,” National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, Harvard University, 2006) The impact of this prenatal trauma, along with the shock to the new born of relinquishment and abrupt separation from its birthmother can negatively impact the adoptee’s self-identity.   Birthmothers are designed by nature to be their infant’s first unconditional and dependable love source.  The subconscious messages the child may internalize from relinquishment include “I am not loveable” or “I am not wanted” which contribute to the development of a “false self.”   Throughout the course of the adoptee’s life, he or she develops a number of beliefs and behaviors that compensate for and actually reinforce this false self.

Self Love can release us from the trauma and negative behavioral patterns that have come to define our lives.  Self Love is a developed skill—learning to make healthy choices to nurture one’s sense of self worth and choosing relationships where one feels valued.  This is most challenging for those who were never taught or inspired by a positive role model. Yet, with a willingness to take charge of healing the past wounding, and with a wise guide who understands this self discovery is primal and essential, anyone can learn to accept and love themselves unconditionally.

Are You Stuck?

Ask yourself the following questions:    

  1. Are your primary love relationships empowering your True Self ?   Or, is the relationship conducted/filtered through slides (yours or theirs) resulting in you not connecting in a direct experience of feeling accepted, empowered and loved?   Is your primary love relationship reinforcing a feeling of abandonment and insecurity?   Do you realize that you have a choice?
     

  2. Do you have acute or chronic dysfunctional or addictive habits that may be medicating feelings of being unwanted or suppressed feelings from adoption trauma?   (Look at your choices/consumption of food, alcohol, drugs, self care practices, lifestyle.  Do you love and respect yourself and treat yourself and your body with respect?)
     

  3. Do you feel healthy or is there a health crisis brewing due to chronic stress of feeling deeply unsettled with your adoption experience?  

The Negative Love Matrix

As humans, we learned love from our primary love objects, our parents.  How they modeled love becomes our archetype and motif for what love is.  For most parents, though, due to their own childhood programming, they did not know how to nourish our true nature or how to help us develop a strong sense of inner security.  Love was mixed with other toxic, unhealthy patterns such as shame, control, rejection, aggression, neglect, abuse, addiction. 

When a child unconsciously adopts its parents negative attributes and mirrors them back in an effort to be loved and to demonstrate love (and we all do this, none of us are immune), he or she becomes a victim of the Negative Love Syndrome.  This term for enacting inherited patterns that cause emotional and spiritual pain was coined by therapist Bob Hoffman.  How we as adults choose our primary love objects—our lovers—and how we treat our children—is a dynamic borne out of this early familial conditioning.  Unless we do personal work to free ourselves from this negative patterning and re-educate ourselves about how to make healthy love choices, we will not achieve our full potential and most likely will live with some degree of inauthentic, compulsive and self-sabotaging behavior, making our children vulnerable to our unhealed patterns as well. 

The Negative Love Syndrome disconnects us from our own true source of power, our inner spiritual self, our True Self.    As adoptees, we suffer twice having been conditioned in the womb by our birthmothers and after birth by our adoptive parents.  We all pay dearly for our negative conditioning—we project our parents’ patterns of negative love unconsciously and automatically onto our lovers and authority figures, and recreate our early family system with its dysfunction.  As adults we can become triggered and actually recreate our childhood behaviors---our inner child is in control--- trying to please, avoid pain.  We actually do this instead of resolving the adult conflicts in our lives and moving forward. We get stuck in childhood, acting like a child. 

True Self Recovery Program

“Valuing and becoming fascinated with your true self is the key to getting unstuck from adoption trauma.  Anyone can take charge of their inner life and re-pattern themselves to wholeness.  It can be done….but no one can heal you for you.  You must use your free will and do the inner work to dismantle your false self conditioning.  You need to become fascinated with developing and embodying your true self.

The big difference between an adult and a child is that as an adult you can educate yourself and differentiate between healthy and unhealthy choices.  As a child, you did not have the wisdom, resources or guidance available to you to separate yourself from negative love influences and to heal yourself.  The True Self Recovery Program is a diagnostic system that identifies how the Negative Love Matrix has impacted your self-identity and belief system.  It then helps you dismantle your false-self identity and replace this with new beliefs and behaviors that reflect your loving true self nature.  This requires that you become the adult/parent for the wounded child aspect of your self identity.  This generally requires the guidance of a professional who can model and teach healthy self-love practices. 

The good news is that the false self is just patterns—in your mind--that you have come to rely on, that can be changed.  Using Luminare’s slide projector model, you can identify your false patterns, those slides that project negatively onto your True Self, and consciously remove them.  Those limiting patterns can then be replaced with a more positive belief and identity system that empowers your True Self expression.  You can consciously create the life you want to live by choosing positive relationships that nurture and embrace you, work that fulfills you, and a social matrix where you are honored and respected.

Living as Your True Self

As an adult with new awareness, you now have an intentional (or conscious) choice who you love, as well as a natural instinct to protect yourself against negative love influences and to cherish yourself.  Or, you can give your power away to unhealthy relationships that dishonor and disregard you.   At the core of this is Self Love, a developed skill set where one is dedicated to making daily choices to nurture one's sense of self worth, and to choose relationships where one feels valued and empowered so that the light of your true self shines through you and is projected clearly into the other and into the world.   The True Self Way = you consciously create a self–affirming self identity and belief system that is an expression of the life you want to live.

If adoptees internalized the belief that love is mixed with abandonment, this is often projected in their adult relationships with a primary love person.  This person either threatens to or actually does abandon them and often they recapitulate this dynamic over and over.   This is really the wounded personality’s way of trying to resolve the issue.  This can only happen when one recognizes that they are in a cycle and are willing to dismantle the complex of patterns to free themselves from it.  The inner dialogue would be: “I don’t have to choose a lover who constantly abandons or threatens to abandon me in recapitulation of my past.”  The healthy self love outcome is “I can now discern and protect myself from negating, indifferent love sources as my primary relationships.  I will choose protective nurturing people who want to love me and cherish me.”  
 


Open Records Legislation in California: Update AB372, CARE       [ Back ]

By Gene Sperring (a founding member of CARE)

Although we cheered last April when AB372 passed the Assembly Judicial Committee by a unanimous vote, we now report the bill has died, and with it, our hopes for passing open records legislation in California in 2010.  For the past months, AB372 has been lying in the Assembly Appropriations suspense file with a huge price attached to its enactment.  These are estimated costs associated with expected large numbers of persons applying for their OBC (original birth certificate) should this legislation pass.  A great deal more research and lobbying effort would have been needed to get this bill passed.  It suffered the fate of a great many bills last year that were essentially suspended due to California's extreme financial crisis.

Leadership changes in C.A.R.E. (California Adoption Reform Effort) had further complicated issues. CARE founder and President Jean Strauss resigned due to her move to Texas.  Her wish is to continue to help support open records legislation in whatever way she is able.    

CARE’s executive committee met in December to discuss the organization’s status.  Those attending the meeting in Sacramento were Stephanie Williams, Executive Director, and the three Vice Presidents--Bonnie Burnell, Linda Orozco, and Gene Sperring.  It was decided to change CARE’s legal non-profit status from 501(c)4 to 501(c)3 in order to simplify finances.  CARE set an immediate goal to form research committees to prepare for the introduction of a new open records bill in 2011.  It was also agreed to search for a new president.  

CARE wishes to thank Jean Strauss for her leadership and commitment in the important beginning stages of crafting this complex and vital legislation for our state of California, which has the greatest number of adoptees and therefore the greatest number of sealed adoption records.  Thanks is also extended to all those who have helped make our historical progress possible.  We are not giving up but recognize that we will have to fight for access.  PACER, as an organization, continues to support efforts to restore the right of access of every person to their original birth certificate in the state of California.

 


New California Law AB 1325 Impacts Native American Adoptions [ Back ]

By Geneva Anderson

A new California state law, AB 1325, enacted in October 2009 addresses Customary Adoption Practices and will result in changes in Native-American adoptions.  AB1325 creates an alternative option to the definition of “traditional adoption,” in the case of adopting a Native American child.  In traditional adoption, termination of parental rights of the biological parents must occur for a Native American child to be adopted.  The new law states that a Native American child’s birthparents will not be required to sign away all parental rights in certain circumstances.  This bill will add the option of “Customary Adoption.”  Customary Adoption is defined as “a traditional tribal practice recognized by the community which gives a child a permanent parent-child relationship with someone other than the child’s birth parent.”

This new law applies only to California Native American children and only in California.  The intent of the law is to strengthen the existing Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), a federal law.  This ICWA states that a Native American child who is available for adoption because the birth parents are unable to care properly for the child will be adopted within the child’s native community and if possible within the extended family.  The next preferable alternative is adoption within another Native American group or tribe.  If neither is possible, the child will be allowed to be adopted by non-Native American parents. The ICWA has not been implemented consistently across the foster-adoption system which has resulted in Native American children losing their language, culture and family and tribal connections.

The intent of AB1325 is to help birth families maintain connections through continued contact wherever possible and advisable with an emphasis on extended family raising the child where possible.
 


PACER Supports Orphans Affected by Typhoon Ondoy in the Philippines             [ Back ]

By Mark Kunkel

On September 26, 2009, Typhoon Ondoy struck the Philippines, dropping 17.9 inches of rain on Metro Manila in a span of 24 hours—the most in 42 years.  A month’s worth of rainfall in a single day caused over 350 deaths and $100 million in damage from resulting floods and landslides.  Among those impacted was Heart of Mary Villa, a Catholic convent and nursery in Metro Manila that I have a deep connection with.  Heart of Mary Villa is where my birthmother stayed during her pregnancy.  I was cared for there by their staff for about 6 months prior to my adoption in 1976, which was 34 years ago.  The nuns helped me with my 7 year search for my birthmother.  I had my reunion with my birthmother there in 2007 in one of their counseling rooms.  The nuns have always been extremely kind to me and I am very impressed by the quality of the social workers and staff who work there.  Furthermore, Heart of Mary Villa runs a community center called Damayan for the children and families who live in the poverty stricken neighborhood.  When I learned that an 8 foot high flash flood had affected the facility and everyone in it, my heart cried.  I approached PACER about helping with relief.

After the flood hit, Mary Villa sent out a flyer listing the damage to its compound which includes a chapel, nursery, maternity home, administration buildings, community center, adoption office, counseling rooms, dormitory, kitchen, and bathrooms.  All in all, 23 infants (four newborn), 17 mothers, nine caregivers, one social worker, one driver, three maintenance men, two volunteers and two executives were impacted.  About 80 meters of concrete walls caved in.  All ground floor facilities, including the nursery, were fully submerged and most equipment was destroyed, including office equipment, communication equipment, documents, appliances (vital refrigerators), nursery and medical supplies.  The infants had to be moved.

In response, PACER worked with two Filipino-American nonprofit organizations, the Philippine American Foundation for Charities, Inc. (Washington D.C.) and Mabuhay, Inc. (Maryland) to raise over $2000 for flood relief.  The latest news we have is that the damage was so extensive that the babies were moved to another facility while renovation is going on. Ongoing donations are needed.  To find out how you can help, please email ebayadoptee@pacer-adoption.org.

 


A New Study on Identity and Adoption Affirms What We Have Lived, Plus Important Insights                     [ Back ]

By Geneva Anderson

(Continued from page 3)   Still a work in progress!  Check back for the remainder of the article.

 


Two New Films Tackle What It Means to be Asian and American   [ Back ]

The 2010 28th San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival, March 11-20, 2010, included two films with adoption-related themes that had their world premieres at the festival.  The films are so good that they have both been selected for the prestigious PBS award-winning series Point of View and will screen on public television later this year.

Film:  “In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee” (World Premiere)                    [ Back ]
Director Deann Borshay Liem, USA, 2010, 60 min

Reviewed by Geneva Anderson

Berkeley director Deann Borshay Liem journeys back to Korea to explore her true identity after living with the knowledge that the name on her adoption papers “Cha Jung Hee,” given to her at age 8, is not her true identity at all.  Liem was adopted at age 8 from the The Sun Duck orphanage in South Korea in the 1960’s and sent to America as “Cha Jung Hee” for her eager American adoptive family—the Borshays.  Liem grew up as “Deann” in this very loving family and lived her life quite successfully.  She ultimately became the executive director of the National Asian American Telecommunications Association.  She essentially forgot who she was before she came to America.  Through dreams and events that jarred long-suppressed childhood memories, the urge to know her story became an obsession.  She began to believe that she was both victim and complicit in a complex hoax that altered the course of her life and the life of the real Cha Jung Hee, whose place she had taken in America.   The film captures her attempts to heal as she pieces together her identity with what facts she can find and people she meets along the way.  This is a sequel to her Emmy award winning “First Person Plural” from 1999 (Encore POV performance of “First Person Plural” scheduled for August 10, 2010.  Check your local broadcast schedule.)   
 

Film:  “Wo Ai Ni Mommy” (World Premiere)                   [ Back ]
Director Stephanie Wang-Breal, USA, 2009, 76 min

Reviewed by Geneva Anderson

How do you adapt to a brand new family member from a different culture?  Director Stephanie Wang-Breal’s first feature film  “Wo Ai Ni Mommy”  (“I Love You Mommy”) breaks important ground as she travels to Guangzhou, China with adoptive mother Donna Sadowsky of Long, Island, New York, to meet her 8 year-old daughter, orphan Sui Yong (“Faith”) for the first time.  Wang-Breal acts as a fly-on-the wall documentarian, capturing the moment by moment complexities of forging a loving and healthy bond with an older child from another culture.  While over 70,000 children have been adopted from China into the U.S. since 1992 and everyone’s experience is different, this story is unique.  It is told in real time and captures the child’s perspective, often in her own voice.  Most adoption documentaries are told from the perspective of the adult adoptee looking back in time or the adoptive parents’ experience or even the relinquishing birthmother’s point of view.  This one is straight from the psyche of an 8-year-old who was abandoned as a 2-year-old and has been living at the orphanage and in foster care.  She has never seen a Caucasian before but has been told by a kindly Chinese social worker named Leila that she is going to have a good life in a place called America. 

As the film unfolds, nothing is held back.  We first meet the Sadowsky family in Long Island.  Jeff and Donna have two teenage sons and a 3-year-old Chinese daughter, Dara, who was adopted at age 14 months.  The decision to adopt another child was agreed upon by all family members and everyone’s view seems to have been respected.  The action then moves to China with Donna in her hotel room, a few hours before she is going to meet her new daughter, Sui Yong.   Her elderly father has made the journey with her.  Her husband Jeff made the difficult decision to stay at home and care for the rest of their children so that Donna could devote her full attention to Faith.  Donna is anxiously preparing stacks of hundred dollar bills and organizing gifts for the orphanage. Sui Yong’s care for 6 years has been subsidized by the Chinese government and Donna is paying $3,000, a pittance compared to costs in the US. 

At the Guangzhou Civil Affairs Office, the first meeting between mother and daughter unfolds in the chaos of what appears to be a dozen similar introductions taking place all at once.   The tension is palpable.  A social worker carefully handles the introduction and Sui Yong is asked what she thinks of the name “Faith.”  She is then told that she will now be called Faith and she should call Donna “Mommy.”   She is told many times that Donna loves her and that she will come to love her Mommy too.   As Donna gives her daughter her first hug and pulls her into her arms, Faith is stoic, shell-shocked.  When given the chance to ask Donna questions, she asks only one—does the Sadowsky family eat fish.  To which Donna answers yes, “We like fish.”  A smile emerges.

What follows is a linear narrative—tracking moments of happiness, ambivalence, sheer fright and acting out, an unexpected meeting with Faith’s Chinese foster family, traveling back to Long Island where Faith meets the rest of her new family, and her subsequent struggles to integrate into family life in America.   Language, food, habits—everything Faith has known as young Chinese girl vanish as she struggles to adapt to boisterous Jewish family life.  Donna is a no-nonsense mom and establishes boundaries and expectations right away–Faith must learn English to communicate and she needs to learn to share what’s going on inside so that her family can understand her needs.  Dad Jeff is a very loving father who is keenly aware of the impact of his smallest gestures of affection or discipline and is very careful to treat all his children equally and with sensitivity.  

Over the course of 17 months, we gradually witness Faith’s transformation into a lively, outspoken American child.  Rapid immersion has had a remarkable impact– there is a noticeable set of cultural gains and losses and actual shifts in her personality and identity.  She moves differently, has different expressions and attitudes and now identifies herself as American.  Sadly, she has nearly forgotten her native Cantonese language but wants desperately to communicate by Skype with her beloved foster sister in China.   Of particular interest is the rare footage of adoptive mother Donna meeting Faith’s Chinese foster mother and family in China.  (In China, the law prohibits foster parents from adopting.)  We are poignantly aware throughout the film that this foster family nurtured Faith for several years in China.  This loving bond, her most significant source of attachment and love after her birthmother abandoned her, has been a healing anchor for Faith.  The Sadowskys recognize that and welcome the foster family into their lives as well.

In all, we marvel at the courage of the Sadowsky family to allow a camera to roll uncensored through this intimate and often raw experience.  Some very difficult moments are captured and this is actually what gives this film its real force.  When Faith does not get her way, she pitches a fit and says she wants to leave and return to China.  When she struggles with carrying her books due to her impairment, she doesn’t ask for help and is scolded when they drop to the ground.  At one point she blurts out to Donna “You are a white person and I am Chinese.”  Adoptive mom Donna Sadowsky has a strong parenting style.  She doesn’t always achieve immediate success but she is consistent, respectful and always listens to her children.   We never doubt her love for Faith.  As the film progresses, we witness the entire family trying to strengthen their bond with Faith and to protect her.  In all, what emerges is a very realistic account of the hard work, self awareness and love it takes to pull adoption off on a daily basis.  This is a deeply moving and intelligent film that probes the very heart of what family means while exploring issues of identity, cultural assimilation and bonding. 
 


Film Review:  “Lost Child"                     [ Back ]
Directed by Karen Arthur, USA, 2000, 94 min, DVD available on amazon.com
Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation based on the book Looking for Lost Bird by Yvette Melanson and Claire Safran

Reviewed by Vicki White

“My earliest memory is of a sense of guilt . . . then terror.” So begins the film the “Lost Child.”  The speaker is Rebecca Hoffman, a little girl adopted and raised by loving and caring Jewish parents.  Prior to her adoption, Rebecca had been passed around from person to person.  When she was about 4 years old, she was put on a bench in a train station by a social worker, told to   be a good girl and was then left alone. After awhile, her “new parents” came for her. Her mother said, “Your mommy’s here now, you won’t be alone anymore.”

Though she knew she was adopted, Rebecca was kept in the dark about her heritage, “There were secrets in the big house. They never talked about where I came from.”

When Rebecca was 12, two things happened that changed her life forever. Her father let it slip that she was born a twin. “We wanted you, not your brother.”  Then, one day after school, her mother, who she adored, was not at school to pick her up.  In a panic, Rebecca ran all the way home, exploded through the door, only to find that her mother had died and had been taken away.

Rebecca’s father remarried not long after and her new jealous and conniving step-mother did everything in her power to keep her husband all to herself. Rebecca was sent away to boarding school and felt she was no longer welcome at home. The final blow was felt when her father died and her step-mother didn’t call early enough for her to come home to say goodbye.

Up until this point, the film validates the inherent unspoken loneliness in the adopted person.  I could feel the depth of Rebecca’s loneliness, especially when she decided to search for her twin brother. She was asked why, and answered, “He might be lonely.”

As Rebecca begins her search for her twin, the perspective broadens to include the feelings of the birth parents and birth family and the impact of losing a child.

Via the internet, Rebecca is connected with a birth sister. She learns that she is Navajo and has three siblings all living on a Navajo reservation in Arizona.  A horrible piece of her history is also related to her.  A few days after she and her twin were born, she fell ill and both babies were taken to the “white man’s” hospital in Fort Defiance and left there to recuperate. The parents heard nothing back from the hospital and when they went to claim their children, the babies were gone . . . stolen!

As Rebecca’s reunion with her large Navajo family unfolded, I began to understand the reasons for my inner discontent.  Although my adoptive parents loved and cared for me in a wonderful environment, I was not allowed to stay “home” and was taken away.

Rebecca’s birth father was very matter of fact about his daughter, the “lost bird,” as were the rest of her family.  “This is your home. Out there, you are lost. Here, you are known.”  He assumed she would put her life with her husband and two daughters in Pennsylvania behind her and come home to the reservation. This didn’t seem plausible to me, but I understood it more when the Navajo practice of burying the umbilical cord was spoken about.  “You and the land are one. Here the wind knows your name. You are not a stranger here. You knew where you belonged from day one.”  The worst insult you can make to a Navajo is, “He acts as if he has no family.”

“Lost Child” is a rich and beautiful film. The comparison between Odette Marie’s Navajo roots and her Jewish upbringing is striking. You will be moved by backdrop of the beautiful Arizona landscape and the spirituality of Navajo traditions               .

I gained this insight. As certain as was Odette Marie’s family’s assumption that she was their lost bird, far from her home, that is how big her emptiness was.  This film helped me understand the immensity of the suppressed feelings I have lived with all my life.  These are feelings that no words can describe but that have steered me much like an invisible rudder in directions I do not want to go.

You will have to see the film to find out if Odette Marie stayed on the reservation. Whether she did or didn’t, she gained new knowledge about where her “home” is and about who she is.  With this new sense of self, she is centered and can choose where she wants to go from there.   I hope you too will become more aware of the immensity of the feelings that have come from “losing your home.”  Not knowing something can shape your life just strongly as knowing something.  I hope that whatever way you find yourself and your home that your life will be of your own design-- comfortable and contented.
 

 

PACER  •  Post Adoption Center for Education and Research  •  pacer-adoption.org

[ Top ] [ Back ] [ Home ]