Welcome to National Adoption Awareness Month
It’s that special time of year again when adoptees young and old, are objectified, commodified, homogenized and monetized by the media, the adoption industry and its special- interest hangers-on– consumers, lobbyists, politicians, anti-aborts, evangelicals, white saviors, neo-colonialists, social engineers, nation builders, and kitchen table entrepreneurs–rallying ’round the flag chanting their good works.
Note the invisibility in this celebratory circle jerk of producers (natural, birth, first, original biological parents) and products (hapless schmuck bastards) and the emphasis on white picket fence consumers with disposable–or crowd funded– incomes in need of “a child” to make them “complete.” 
With their stories dripping in sentiment, personal drama, and public theatre, you’d never know that the adoptee rights movement is well into it’s 7th decade or that not all adopted people are enamored for a myriad of reasons, with adoption in general or their adoption in particular. Hell, most people outside of AdoptionLand don’t even know that our original birth certificates are sealed. NAAM, in essence, is a time for hard core primal woundies and reunionists, and hard core political organizers and activists, often at odds, to issue a collective projectile upchuck.
Most adoptees I know hate it when NAM rolls around. Watching our lives and narratives bowdlerized and mythologized, and dare I suggest, bastardized to fit a sentimental consumerized industrial narrative which seldom touches real-life adoptee legal and civil rights,psychological issues, and lives is enough to make any thinking adoptee stick her head under a pillow for the month.
Being an odd one out, I rather enjoy NAAM. For a long time I didn’t pay much attention to it other than to consider it a pesky fly at the dinner table that keeps trying to landing on the icecream.
Then in 2009 I had the brilliant idea to join Blog Her’s NaBloPomo’s open November effort and blog about adoption every day simply to get a badge to put on The Daily Bastardette saying I actually wrote a blog a day for 30 days–and to make the Daily Bastaradette live up to its name. I survived NaBloPomo and NAAM! A double feat of endurance. Since then I think I’ve made it through every year but 2013 when my work schedule got in the way of writing. (Getting up at 2:30 AM to drive 150 miles and back to inventory a Dollar General Store across the Ohio River is not conducive to anything,) With NaBloPomo virtually married to the brilliant #flipthe script action, started last year by Lost Daughters, I’m excited about coming back with a win and joining a lot of disruptive beautiful adoptee voices, bloggers, and activists.
My schedule is better this year, so I’ll try desperately to hang in for the duration, even if it’s just a few sentences.
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I actually started NAAM a little early this year with my National Adoption Awareness Month Prequel: Blessed by Adoption published on October 13. This month I plan to write about adoptee rights and obc access (obviously) along with safe havens, baby boxes, evangelical adoption nuts, movies, books, and news stories among other topics. Who knows what will come up. I’ve developed an almost fetish-like “appreciation” for adopta-wear, such as featured in Prequel, so I’ll be commenting on that. Any parent who puts this shirt on their kid needs to be rushed into adoptafamily-therapy immediately before the kid lands there himself. I cannot imagine my adoptive parents or my birthmother, who was also an adoptive mother of two, subjecting any of us kids to this narcissistic kitsch.
What next? Yard signs?
Oh wait a minute!
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. A lot of adoptee and bastard voices will be heard this month with #flipthescript. Please join us with your blogs, letters to the editors, call-in shows, comments on Facebook and media.
Adoption industry: shut your mouth! The experts are taking over.
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