Tag Archives: Gotcha Day

Gotcha Day: Turning the private into the public

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Wiki says that Gotcha Day comes from animal rescue/ pet adoption (just as “forever family.”) I don’t know when it began to refer to humans.

I first heard about Gocha around 15 years ago. I was immediately squicked. Gotcha sounds like trapping a rat under the stove or grabbing up the last flat screen TV on Black Friday at Wal-Mart. It’s a predatory term. A scary tern. A cheap term. A violent term. Gotcha relates adoption to aggressive consumerism; and consumerism to a public act of virtue. Daniel ibn Zayd writes that , Gotcha moves the private into public space: Continue Reading →

Below and Beyond Offensive: Gotcha Day book review

Posted on by — 4 Comments ↓

Gotcha Day, the perverse label given by clueless adopters to the day they received their Bundle of Joy, is universally considered offensive by all but the most blindly entitled inhabitants of AdoptionLand..  Now there’s a book by the same name:  Gotcha Day: a Celebration of Adoption. Some of us have been posting 1-star ratings of the book on amazon.com.  I just posted mine:  This book is below and beyond offensive.  Gotcha is something you say when you catch a pesky mouse or stomp on a cockroach that been running across your kitchen floor for the past week..  It is not a term that should be used to “celebrate” adoption or the “gotten” adoptee. I understand why people would want to commemorate the day, but Gotcha is obscene. If I could give it less than one star, I would.Full disclosure.  My adoptive parents used to commemorate the day I was placed with them.  It was known as Betsy Day (that’s the name I went by most of my life–nothing wrong with the name, but it’s not me, and I reverted to Marley, derived from my original name, Marlene). Betsy Day was  low key-not  Gotcha!  I cannot imagine either of my parents (or my Mama Dot who Continue Reading →