The Adoption Community Rejoices at the Hope of Oprah Giving Adoption a True Voice

Dear Oprah,

Welcome to the Adoption Community! I know you didn’t plan on being one of us, but I have seen that often adoption sneaks up on people. I don’t think many of us actually plan on being part of this group. SO after you find out there was family you didn’t know you had, then there is a bigger all inclusive family that you never knew you had in the adoption community. We understand.

“Patricia and I are still sorting all of this out,” Oprah says. “It’s a process.

It is a process and it will take some time. In fact, expect that this will shake the very foundation of how you feel about many things, but especially, I guarantee that you might begin to see things differently then what you previously thought when it comes to adoption. Of course, you had no idea, and, of course, it is a rather big shock. It’s so different when you realize how these issues you were unaware of affect you personally. And now it is very personal for you and it’s very personal for us too; as a sibling of an adoptee you now are now a very important part of the adoption community.

Oprah: The Best Thing Ever for Adoption

To be 100% honest, the recent events in your life has the potential for being one of the best things that could ever happen to the adoption community. So many of us have been fighting for years to be heard. There are many other mothers and adoptees and adoptive parents and siblings of adoptees who have been fighting for even longer. All we want to do is have the truth about adoption be understood. And you, well, you are Oprah! Of almost every other human being in the world, you have the power to get our voices out there. If you tell the stories, it you ask people to listen and to help adoptees, then they will.

Oprah, your Adoption Story is not just your Adoption Story.

Your story is all our stories and your sisters search for you and her true identity as your sister is the story of every adoptee in this country. We all need you to help us make things right for the adoptees that we love. For the mothers who are still living in the shame. For the siblings who are denied whole branches of their family trees. We need to you learn about adoptee rights and adoption truth from your new community and extended family and then, we need your support and your voice.

I hope you know how lucky you are that Patricia was able to piece together and find out who you are. The laws were stacked against her. It’s only because you are Oprah that she was able to do so. Most adoptees searching don’t have that. And like your sister they have no other recourse but to hope that something miraculous happens and they can find their family. For too many of my friends have been waiting years for their miracles, but their families are no different than yours and just want to have their chances too.

“For the next seven years of Patricia’s life, she bounced around from one foster home to another before finally being adopted.”

During those 7 years, Patricia’s birth certificate was still her original birth certificate that had your mother’s name on it. It wasn’t sealed from Patricia or the public, until her adoption was finalized. People like to say that they can’t allow adoptees to know their true identity because they have to keep the promises of confidentiality made to birthmothers, like your own mother, but obviously, with a public original birth certificate for 7 years there could be no promises.

“My whole goal with wanting to have my daughter is to have a part of me—to be able to look at her and see a part of me,”

Words spoken by your own sister and shared by very many adoptees in this country. The natural desire to see your own features in another person’s face. The official terms are “generic mirroring”, but it’s just human nature. The current sealed adoption records laws in this country make it so the only way and adoptee can have this need filled is by having children of their own, which is great and normal, but so sad that they cannot have this human need sanctioned by our own governmental laws.

“Now that Patricia’s found her family, she says she feels connected, a sense of wholeness— … “[It’s] a miracle to know that we have a family, to know that we have someone that looks like us, to know that we have someone that may have the same mannerisms as we do. It’s just amazing to know that we have another half.”

This is something that you can help us with Oprah. This is where we need you. The 7 million adoptees in this country who long for their own sense of wholeness, who want to know their identity, who want to know their own stories, they need help changing the laws in this country so they don’t have to wait any longer or beg for the same reunion that your family has had. They probably won’t read about their birth families in the paper and many will never have the same chances as your family has.

Patricia says her children were interested in meeting her family too. “It made me realize if they were coming to me, asking me the same thing, ‘Can you go look for your side of the family?’, it started to make me think that they’re not feeling complete,” Patricia says. “I didn’t think about that. I just thought it was just me. … I said, ‘Let me go into this for them.’

I can so relate to your sister’s feelings and motivation on searching. Granted I am a birthmother, but when I first began searching for my son it was because my second son had questions about his brother and while not knowing was good enough for me, it wasn’t good enough for my son. I think this is the thing that people really don’t understand about adoption. A single choice ( if it is a choice) made by one person has the ability to continue affecting more people as the years go by. When my son was relinquished, I never could imagine how my other children would feel being denied their brother. As a mother, it hurt me that adoption was hurting them too and I had to change it.

“Patricia received a heartbreaking phone call from the state’s adoption agency. “[The caller] was telling me that my birth mother had called her back, and she had made the decision at that particular time that she did not want to see me,”.

I hope you can verify if this was true of not, Oprah, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it isn’t. Many adoption agencies and confidential intermediaries don’t really assist in helping families connect with each other. They play God and make decisions for other grown adults which is really insane when you think about the fact that every other human being in the US has the right to contact another human being without government interferences. Isn’t it just the most incredulous to imagine that Your mother needed to be protected from Patricia or that Patricia had to be kept safe from you?

“I thought it was a terrible thing for me to do, that I had done, gave up my daughter when she was born,”

I understand your mother’s feelings. Of course, I relinquished in 1987, so I was told I was a family being angle and I was making the right choice, the loving choice, but there is still shame. Because mother’s are not supposed to give up our children. It’s just not a natural feeling and I think inside, no matter how much we say that we have to ( and there often is only a rock and hard place to choice from) the emotional issues don’t get forgotten, the connection to our babies are always there and only shame and horror are left.

Oprah says she had an epiphany: Her mother is still stuck in 1963. “She is still of the same mindset of 1963 and is still carrying the shame that would have been put upon her in 1963, and therefore, she hasn’t been able to release herself to fully embrace [Patricia] and embrace this miracle that has really happened in our family,” Oprah says. Now that Patricia is a part of Vernita’s life again, Vernita says it makes her “feel wonderful.”

While not every adoption reunion is the easiest thing in the world, only by the truth and facing what we fear the most can people even begin to heal. Imagine, Oprah.. there are approximately 7 million adoptees in the US ( we don’t know for surer because there isn’t anyone really keeping track!@) and for every adoptee there are at least one mother and one father who are wondering? I know you have done some great works in your life, but can you imagine knowing that you help bring 7 million families back in touch so they can being to heal and feel whole again?

Oprah, can you help us bring that miracle to 7 million more families?

The Adoptee Rights Demonstration needs support, Oprah. We need YOUR support so we can go to San Antnio this year and fight to change adoption laws in this country to help your sister and every other adopted citizen have the same  civil rights as the rest of us. Help us give your sister the right to her idenity. Help my son have his right to his history. Help us all. Please.