INTRODUCTION
I wrote this book in an attempt to deal with my adoption and the trauma of divorce, to get an overview of my life, to set the record straight from my point of view and to give my daughters an inheritance. For fifty years I have denied my adoption and started to talk about it only when I returned to Canada, the country where I was born. I was always under the illusion that I had grown up in a loving family and that my upbringing was normal.
I have labored to remember childhood events. Letters I had written to my parents and my children's letters to me have helped in the recollection. I have tried to rebuild my life and then to extract those events which contributed most to my identity. Historical data has helped to weave a tapestry of the times into which I was born and raised, meaningful in the development of my consciousness. I have read numerous books, talked to many people and realized that however we try to understand what it is to be adopted, it is not easily handled nor has it been satisfactorily dealt with for most of us adoptees.
The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s, initiated by racial minorities, had a broad effect on other minority groups as well, one of which was adoptees. We, as well as our children and all generations yet to come, have been deprived of the right to know our origins. Why? I have not found a substantial reason for this rule.
I wanted to face my adoption head-on and get a clearer picture of who I am, which would tell me who my birth parents were. Until we adoptees face who we are, we live in a dream.
"Through the 1940’s there were fewer children available for adoption and independent adoptions flourished, with many high-priced 'black-market' operations taking advantage of desperate childless couples. Obviously, no counseling or education were available to these adoptive families. This was also true in the large numbers of secret intra-family adoptions which continued into the 1940’s. In these cases, in order to hide an illegitimate birth, a relative would take the child and raise him/her, with the origin being concealed. During this same era, when agencies arranged non-relative adoptions, they often advised the parents against disclosing the adoptive status to the child and to treat him/her as if he/she were their natural born." 1
"What matters is what you do in this world, not how you come into it."2