Our Bastard Moments: Real everyday adoption awareness, not just for November

We’re having a discussion today on the Bastard Nation Facebook page on The Bastard Moment. Those times when as an adoptee you are insulted, embarrassed, patronized, degraded, demeaned, dishonored, silenced due strictly to your adoptive status. It’s part of the legislative process, but it’s also part of the personal process in the construction of Class Bastard.

Bastard Moments often occur out of no where when bumblers make rude, gratuitous. yet genuinely clueless and innocent remarks about your adoption, usually built around the theme of gratitude. My favorite is, “aren’t you glad you weren’t brought up in a trailer park?” Actually, I know adoptees in rural southern Ohio who were! I call them Bastards on Blocks) Continue Reading →

The Stolen OBC: Another Bastard Moment

I’ll be tied up later in the day (not literally) and don’t have much time.  NaBloPoMo calls however.  So to make things easy, I’m going to include another Bastard Moment–hopefully the last. I’m sure you all have your own. You don’t need reminded by mine. In June 1989 my adoptive  mom died about three weeks after suffering  a debilitating stroke. As required by law, a couple days later, her attorney, whom I’ll call by his initials JR, and I went over to the bank to open her lock box.and inventory its contents. My boyfriend, Gordon, who was pretty– hmm– impressive– (the only Orthodox Jewish hillbilly in the State of Ohio) came along.  I believe a bank official was also present as a fiduciary witness (or something) to oversee the entire affair. Afterwards, we were to hop over to the county seat and file the will for probate. All on my dime, of course, or rather the estate’s dime, of which I was the heir. By the time it was over, Lawyer JR had collected about $20,00 in lawyer’s fees. Adoption was the farthest thing from my mind that day. I’d gotten my original birth certificate and decree  in 1980, and Continue Reading →

My Wedding Anniversary; My Bastard Moment; My Bastard Month

Today is the xxth  anniversary of my marriage to T..  I refuse to write the number  It’s too depressing. It is also the anniversary, or thereabouts, of my first big Bastard Moment..  You know, the moments that hit you in the gut and remind you that as an adopted person–a Bastard–you are different from the rest  Suspect. Damaged, Troubled .Inadequate. Unloved. Abandoned. I met T (he is an intensively private person,  virtually invisible on the ‘net, so I’ll only use his first initial) when I was close to the end of my junior year in college.  I worked three evenings a week downtown at a bookstore, and he came in nearly every night.  He’d stay a couple hours, stand in the aisles, and read mostly poetry, European literature, plays and sometimes philosophy. He was especially fond of Beckett and Ionesco and German writers.  He’d memorized passages from Goethe’s Faust–in German–and could rattle them off.  He believed  Goethe was far superior to Shakespeare.We talked a lot.. He very much opposed the war in Viet Nam and had done civil rights actions in college.  He was a Taoist. Although I read The Village Voice and The Evergreen Review when I got my Continue Reading →