Glad I could provide some helpful insight.
It’s good to hear that your open adoption situation is working out well.
So many situations don’t work out in the long run.
I think maybe we just hear more about the ones that don’t work out.
LOL I know I do because that’s my line of work to deal with the disruptions.
My niece was adopted from Korea back in the late 70’s. She was approximately 3 years old, but it was hard to tell - they did not know her actual birth date and she’d been undernourished at the orphanage or whatever. (It took them a few years to break her of the habit of taking food and hiding it under her bed).
She apparently got a letter from someone claiming to be parent or family back in Korea back in the 90’s when she was in her 20’s. Her mother suggested it was up to her if she wanted to make contact, but warned her to beware that it could be a scam from someone with access to adoption records wanting either money or a green card. AFAIK she never made contact.
Interesting. The same thing was true of Soon-Yee Previn (Woody Allen’s wife). She was discovered wandering the streets of Seoul on February 12, 1976. She appeared to be between five and seven years old. She was then registered as officially being born on October 8, 1970, although there was no way to actually say when she was born. She was adopted by Previn and Farrow in 1978. She and Allen were married on December 22, 1997.
You also see headlines like “Foster parent arrested for abuse,” or “Adoptive parents in sex abuse ring.”
When was the last time you saw “Biological parents arrested for abuse”?
My daughter’s best friend was also adopted from Korea, and would gobble food when she was over for dinner. She said that she remembered always being hungry in the orphanage. Her parents were alive, but they couldn’t afford her and put her up for adoption.
I don’t know if it helped that she was far from the only Korean adoptee in our small town.
BTW, not talking about adoption is not the only weirdness. I know someone who only found out that she had half sisters when she went to college and saw a plaque with people with her not very common last name on it. Her father never told her that he was married before and had had children.
It’s time for everyone to get over adoption as being anything weird that has to be hidden from the child or lied about by the adoptive or the biological parent or used by anybody to bully the child or to shame everybody involved. Adoption is something that has always gone on and will always go on. There are all sorts of variations on it. One example of something that went on is what apparently really happened with Eamon de Valera. He was the first head of state of the Republic of Ireland and was born in New York City. What kind of Irish name was de Valera? It’s actually a Spanish name. Supposedly his mother Catherine Coll immigrated to the U.S. in 1879, where de Valera was born in 1882, the son of her and a Spanish artist named Juan Vivion de Valera, who died in 1885. One of Coll’s brothers brought Eamon back to Ireland. He was raised by his grandmother and an uncle and an aunt. Coll remarried, had two more children, and never went back to Ireland.
The problem is that there are no records of Juan Vivion existing or of he and Coll getting married. It’s more likely that he was made up. Coll probably became pregnant because she was raped or otherwise had sex with someone who dumped her. The Coll family apparently made up the whole story to explain Eamon being brought up by other members of the family in Ireland while his mother didn’t move back to Ireland with him. This is one sort of story that was made up back then to avoid embarrassment of everyone involved.
And the whole story of Eamon is typical of how things owrked often in those days - absent formal adoptions, children were often raised by close or distant relatives with no formal paperwork; family looked after their own when the parents were unable.Like orphanage insitutions, a common trope in old literature too. Even nowadays, children raised by grandparents (JD Vance?) or other relatives rather than thrown into the foster system is common.
Yet it’s still considered funny to make wisecracks about being adopted.
It’s really not “rather than” - I don’t know specifically about Vance’s family, but for at least the past forty years or so, there has been a preference for kinship foster parents over non-kinship foster parents and it’s very possible that his grandparents were also foster parents. There are advantages to kinship foster care rather than informal arrangements so it’s not uncommon for those relatives to become foster parents.
When we adopted twelve years ago, there was a frequently expressed belief among the social workers that “We’ve moved on from the bad old days when adoption was a shameful secret”. Our kid knows he was adopted* and is in touch with the birthmother. It’s not a thing.
*which people are often surprised to learn, despite the fact that we’re not the same race. Not sure how people think that works.
I was watching the documentary about Simone Biles, who was adopted by her grandparents along with her younger sister. Her other two sibnings were adopted by her aunt. But then, she was 3 or 4 when that happened so obviously she knew and they didn’t hode it.
Another story is Joni Mitchell, who had a daughter in the 60’s and could not support her as a single parent so gave her up for adoption (she couldn’t even afford the $200 union dues that would allow her to play nighclubs). She only found her daughter in the 90’s.
Played for comedy in an early Steve Martin movie, The Jerk, had a slogan / tagline something like “Raised in a family of poor black sharecroppers, he never dreamed he was adopted”. The movie began with his 21st (or some such) birthday, where his parents finally tell him. He exclaims in horror “You mean I’m gonna STAY this color???”.
“I was born a poor Black child.”
Another example of an adoption being hidden is that of the son of the writer Dorothy L. Sayers. You can read about it in her Wikipedia entry. One more example is the daughter of Clark Gable and Loretta Young, and again you can read about it in Wikipedia.
I had to google this, naturally - and Loretta’s daughter was placed in orphanages for months. Horrible. At least Dorothy’s son was placed with a relative for a while.
Nm, mis-post.