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Stuck in the middle with you. posted 11/30/09
Stealers Wheel caught my attention with the first verse when they recorded “Stuck In The Middle With You.”
“Well I don’t know why I came here tonight
I got the feeling that something ain’t right
I’m so scared in case I’ll fall off my chair
And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs
Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am
Stuck in the middle with you.”
International adoption separation is not my area of experience and knowledge. But, the pressures brought to bear on mothers to surrender in the US is definitely something to which I can speak. Unfortunately, many of our sisters in other nations had to contend with outright theft of their babies.
When you are the object of constant brainwashing, coercion, lectures, threats and sly manipulation, you have trouble sorting out the jokers from the clowns. The industry and the market demand that drives the industry have left generations of mothers and their children stuck in the middle of a mass of people intent on either the bottom line, social engineering, or attaining their desire of parenthood, not caring who is hurt in the process. I can imagine that the mothers in other countries who were scammed out of or had their children stolen feel much the same frustration, rage and pain.
There are those that will argue that the adoptee is the only true victim of the giant machine of adoption, but I beg to differ. Your mothers are stuck, right there in the middle with you. We are co-victims and being victimized is the fault of others, not ourselves. It is easy to use the infant with no ability to speak for himself/herself. It is also easy to use the disenfranchised mother, dependent, frightened, without financial or social autonomy, and vulnerable, to obtain that precious commodity of an adoptable infant.
It has been estimated that anywhere from 1.5 million up to 6 million women were used as breeding stock for the adoption wave of the Era of Mass Surrender which, for the sake of a little clarity, we usually figure to have begun at the end of WWII and then started to wane with the court approval of Roe v Wade. Surely no one can believe that, out of so many young women, all of them surrendered their children, willingly. For those that believe it to be so, I have a map to the Fountain of Youth to sell.
Speaking for my generation and my sister mothers of adoption loss, we did not “give our children up for adoption.” We had nothing to do with or to say about the adoption of our infants. We were warehoused, shamed, blamed, conditioned by so-called “professionals” and betrayed by our babies’ fathers or our families or both. We waved the white flag from our position of broken spirits and backs against the wall and surrendered our babies to agencies and social workers. THEY engineered the adoptions.
Now our children and the children of our sisters in other lands are bringing pressure to bear on the powers that be to produce the information they have been denied for so long. This is information that, rightly, belongs to the adoptee and the natural mother…NOT the agencies, nor the adopters. Along with the rights to those records, there is also a calling to tell the true stories of these little families, torn asunder by someone else’s greed or need to control or own. Those records can be altered to tell a different story from what really happened. But we mothers and our children can continue to tell the truth. We can defy the clowns and jokers and stand above them rather than between them.
It is past time for governments, bureaucrats and others to be held accountable for the pain of the helpless. It is past time for the truth to be told and the industry dismantled. It is time to stop the machine before anyone else is damaged by the lies of surrender and adoption.
Robin Westbrook, Senior Mother of Four
What adoption means to me. posted 11/24/09
Adoption means to me the loss of one family and the creation of another family. Yet in between the transition there is a child that grows up without an identity, yearns for completeness, strives to belong, and is always on the path to find their true history.
by Pam Reiser, adoptee born in Colombia and raised in Orlando, Florida