Children’s Aid Society

No More ‘Ends’- Birthday Reflections

/ V.L. Brunskill / 1 Comment

As a teen, I requested information about my biological family from the New York agency that handled my adoption. More than curious, I felt incomplete without my roots. When my ‘non-identifying’ information arrived from the Children’s Aid Society, a surprise fell from the folds of typed revelations. It was this photo.

firstphotoDated March 1965, it is the only photo of me prior to my adoption at eight-months-old. Today, as I celebrate my Christmas Eve birthday, I can’t help but reflect on the circumstances of my arrival and survival. As I sit on the soft leather of my decades old sofa, watching the simmer of bubble lights on our memory- filled Christmas tree, I am counting every blessing.

I came into the world quite alone, survived a traumatic childhood, graduated high school, attended college, and found love. I have enjoyed three terrific careers in various writing capacities, and own a three-bedroom house that I would have considered a mansion as a child. It’s all good.

I was reminded of just how good, as I shopped this week for cold cuts to make my husband’s favorite dinner- ‘the sandwich bar’. When the deli counter worker asked me, “How would you like that sliced?” I laughed. The question reminded of my (post divorce) childhood, when sliced meats were rare treats.

“Anyway you like, just don’t give me the ends,” I replied.

I went on to tell the grocery worker how, as a child, my mother could only afford to purchase what the supermarket called ‘the ends’. ‘Ends” were the unsalable hard ends of the meats and cheeses. To my twelve-year-old psyche, ‘ends’ were the pitiful leftovers of rich folk’s sliced orders.

Every other week, the deli set aside ‘ends’ for my mother, each generously priced at pennies on the dollar.  At the grocery checkout, the ‘ends’ embarrassed me to my teenage core. I wondered why we could not buy sliced meats like everyone else.

Today, I admire my adoptive mother’s creative use of ‘ends’ to enhance boxed mac and cheese, and as an alternative to the endless peanut butter and jelly sandwiches we consumed.  She bought and prepared them with love.

While I consider the bounty we will enjoy for my birthday and Christmas Day, a tiny part of me wishes for the simple abundance of a few choice ‘ends’.

Blessings for a Christmas full of precious morsels & memories,

V.L. Brunskill
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Closed Adoption System: 50+ Years of Stolen Biological Rights and Broken Identities

/ V.L. Brunskill / 7 Comments

The closed adoption system in America is broken, and has been for more than fifty years.  Just look to Facebook for proof of the lifelong wounds inflicted by the closed adoption system. Everyday, hundreds of desperate adoptees post photos embellished with birth dates and non-identifying information in hopes of finding family.

The closed adoption system steals identities and often results in lifelong personality issues.  Even after reunion, many adoptees report a sense of not feeling bonded or belonging 100% to their biological or adoptive families.  We adoptees live in a limbo that tests the concepts of nature vs. nurture and like a science experiment gone horribly wrong, many of us can only guess at the biological tendencies that define us.

Having experienced the all-encompassing sense of loss that adoption brings, and knowing that my birth mother suffered the same emotional trauma, I have been thinking about the origins of closed adoption.  Who first decided that it was ok to take a child from one woman, charge a fee, and hand it over to another family to raise? Who decided that stealing and sealing away the medical and birth records of adoptees was a just legal procedure?

Adoption in America started informally in the mid 1800’s, as a way to place orphaned children. According to InfoPlease.com, “In 1851, Massachusetts passed the nation’s first adoption statute. It required that judges determine if adoptive parents had consent from the adoptee’s guardian or parent, “sufficient ability to bring up the child,” and that it was “fit and proper that such adoption should take effect.”

Two years later, Charles Loring Brace founded the Children’s Aid Society of New York in 1853. The Children’s Aid Society was meant to serve orphans, and created the Orphan train phenomenon. InfoPlease writes, “Between 1859 and 1929 some 200,000 orphaned children were transported from coastal cities to rural areas in the Midwest.”orphan train

After World War I, modern day adoption methods started to take shape. The choice to close off the records of adopted children was not a result of too many unwanted babies. It was a decision born of married couples wanting babies with no strings attached.  Adoption and social agencies supplied well-off couples with children and promised that biological families would not contact them.  Agencies claimed that closed adoptions would protect children against the social stigma of being illegitimate, and help them to bond.

Those of us who have searched or are currently searching know that the real stigma of closed adoption is being citizen with less inalienable rights than American’s who were raised by their biological families.  The idea that sealing away records would help a child to bond is the most laughable aspect of the closed adoption model.  Books like ‘Primal Wound‘ and ‘Being Adopted‘ chronicle the lifelong search for self, and the biological need to imprint that is inherent in all animals.

In the 1970’s, Roe vs. Wade and a change of social attitudes allowed for some open adoptions, but by then an entire generation of adoptees had been damaged. Many states are now considering laws that will allow adoptees to obtain their original birth certificates (OBCs), but for some the awakening of America will come to late.  How many biological mother’s went to their graves without ever once looking at their child? How many adoptees have searched in vain for information sealed away in their best interest?

It is sickening that in a country that prides itself on freedom of religion, protection of civil rights and freedom of speech, adoptees are still denied the right to know. Slavery was a broken system based on inequality, oppression and denial of basic human rights. It was abolished and slaves were freed.

When will adoptees be freed?
Blessings for equal access,
Vicki-lynn