Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET Who Are We? THIS WEEK WITH MARGARET by MARGARET DICKSON Many of us take great pride in our family heritages, whether our forebears arrived on the Mayfl ower or set down roots much more recently. Even if we have more skeletons in our family closets than we might wish, chances are strong we are still interested in our family histories and the characters — colorful and otherwise — who made them. A quick tour of TV land is proof of our interest with websites and services offering to help us fi nd out about those who came before us whose genes are part of our own makeups. But what if you know nothing about your heritage — the good, the bad or the ugly. What if you have no way to fi nd out any of it, no starting point for those websites advertised on TV? That is indeed the sad and frustrating case for thousands of people in North Carolina, adults who were adopted as infants or young children and whose records were sealed at the moment of adoption. There is a locked vault in Raleigh with literally thousands of such records dating from as far back as the 1930s, dusty in their fi le folders, some of them chronicling the births of people now long gone. There are people who would give anything they own for an hour in that vault. As a member of the North Carolina General Assembly, I worked on legislation addressing several adoption issues, and it was an eye opening experience. Early adoptions in our country were generally among family members or close friends, and while such adoptions may not have been widely known in their communities, they were not sealed from public view. Many states, including ours, though, began restricting access to adoption records in the ‘30s and ‘40s for a number of reasons, particularly those of unrelated adoptions in which a mother relinquished her child at birth and he or she was adopted by a family unknown to the mother. The idea was to give the new adoptive family a chance to bond and to give the mother who was generally referred to as “unwed” a chance to move beyond having given birth to an “illegitimate” child. Today, most of us can think of several young couples we know who have had children outside marriage, proof that our culture’s view of out of wedlock births has shifted signifi cantly. No longer is this a shameful stigma haunting a woman throughout her life, and we no longer brand any child as illegitimate. North Carolina’s laws in this area, however, have changed only modestly, and they remain among the most restrictive in the nation. It has been only within the last fi ve years that adult adoptees and their birth parents could seek information to contact each other without a court order, and then only with mutual consent. The reality is that for many adults in our state, the door to knowledge about how they came to be in this world is permanently locked. The desire to know one’s own heritage and perhaps one’s own family While children adopted by celebrities have their birth information splayed across the media, the majority of those children adopted in America today do not have the luxury of knowing who they are or where they came from. Free special appetizer sampler Watch the game on our 8 ft. big screen. Drink, food and beer specials. Wiley’s Grille & Bar at the Holiday Inn Bordeaux with dinner order. February 6 • 4-6 p.m. 1707 Owen Drive • 910-323-0111 or 800-325-0211 • www.hibordeaux.com OPEN DAILY FROM 4 P.M. - MIDNITE, GRILLE OPEN 4:30 - 11 P.M. Don’t forget Our Bridal Extravaganza February 19th, 10am - 4pm in our Grand Ballroom 6 UCW FEBRUARY 2-8, 2011 seems to me to be inborn in most of us, and I want to share several adoption stories I know, happy and not so happy. Two of the positive ones involve elected offi cials who have spoken openly about their experiences. A Mecklenburg County Commissioner suspected he might have been adopted even though the couple who raised him never said that. He fi nally asked and received the answer that he was indeed adopted. His search then lead him to Maryland where he found his birth father, and his two families, birth and adoptive, have embraced each other. A North Carolina legislator, an adult adoptee, learned of our state’s mutual consent program, the Confi dential Intermediary program, only after he took offi ce. He became the fi rst, and as far as I know only, legislator to use the program and discovered a whole new family in Sampson County, a family who had been looking for him as well. Last year, he introduced me to his “new” brother at a basketball game, and so emotional was that moment that the brother and I both promptly burst into tears. Other adoption stories are not so happy. A lovely man I have known for many years secretly located the daughter a former girlfriend relinquished for adoption, and he has followed her at a distance throughout her life, quietly attending her graduations and hoping she will want to make contact with him someday. She is a married woman now, and so far has not sought contact with her father. Another friend who gave up a child now knows her 20-something son suffers from a serious mental illness. She, too, would like to be part of his life. The county commissioner and the legislator have had happy reunions with their birth families, but not all such reunions are happy. Some people are shocked to know the circumstances of their births, and sometimes either birth families or adult adoptees are disappointed in the others who share their genes. Do you have an adoption story to share? I would like very much to know them and write about them. MARGARET DICKSON,Contributing Writer. 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