PERSPECTIVES ON A GRAFTED TREE
Thoughts for those touched by adoption
compiled by
PATRICIA IRWIN JOHNSTON
illustrated by
Diana L. Stanley*
Perspectives Press, Inc.
Indianapolis, Indiana
The print-book version of Perspectives on a Grafted Tree contains many lovely black and white drawings by Diana Lee Stanley. This was one of the things that made this anthology a lovely gift for those touched by adoption. E-book technology, however, does not yet lend itself well to illustrations, so we have omitted illustrations in the Smashwords version of Perspectives on a Grafted Tree.
Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for yourpersonal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person with whom you share it. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it,or it was not purchase for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respective the hard work of this an all authors.
Text and illustrations copyright © 1983/2009 Patricia Irwin Johnston.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner or form whatsoever, electrical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by an information storage and retrieval system without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address the publisher, Perspectives Press. www.perspectivespress.com.
Published by Perspectives Press Inc.
P O Box 90318
Indianapolis, Indiana 46290-0318
(317)872-3055
Manufactured in the United States of America
hardcover ISBN 0-9609504-0-0
ebook ISBN 0-944934-46-3
The editor gratefully acknowledges the following:
Michael Anderson "Welcome Home" © 1976 Hallmark Cards, Inc. from Childhood Memories. Used by permission.
Leslie Brooke "Mary Cassatt's Mothers and Children" reprinted by permission of the Scholastic 'Writing Awards Program. Copyright © 1982 by Scholastic Inc.
Mary Anne Cohen ("Agency Poem," "Confession," "Sea Poem") is one of a large number of birth mothers for whom adoption has been a bitter, painful, and negative experience, not really a free choice, or a good choice. She now spends much of her time as an activist in the adoption reform movement, trying to fight what she believes to be a cruel, exploitive, and corrupt system.
Kahlil Gibran "On Children" reprinted from The Prophet by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright 1923, renewed 1951 by C.TA Administrators of the Kahlil Gibran Estate and Mary G. Gibran.
Fleur Conkling Heyliger "Not Flesh of My Flesh" reprinted from The Saturday Evening Post, © 1952 The Curtis Publishing Company.
Jane Merchant "The Family Tree" from Halfway Up the Sky, copyright renewal © 1981 by Elizabeth Merchant Used by Permission of the publisher, Abingdon Press.
Carol Lynn Pearson "Little Spirit to Childless Couple" and "To An Adopted" from The Search. Copyright © 1970 by Carol Lynn Pearson. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday and Company, Inc.
Rabindranath Tagore "The Beginning" and "Benediction" reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc. from Collected Poems and Plays of Rabindranath Tagore. Copyright 1913 by Macmillan, renewed 1941 by Rabindranath Tagore,
The authors of "Some May Be Born, " "Legacy of an Adopted Child," and "The Heart of a Child," have been diligently sought both in library indices and through various adoption-related groups' members' sources. The authors remain unknown to the editor, who welcomes their identification for acknowledgement in future printings of Perspectives on a Grafted Tree. If you can provide us with proof of authorship, please contact patjohnston@perspectivespress.com.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (updated, 2009)
A book begins like any plant, as a seed in the soil of its author's mind. Perspectives on a Grafted Tree was a seed which lay dormant in the minds of many of those who submitted pieces for it. The fact that it germinated, rooted and grew here is due to the nurturing that came from those who encouraged me to follow my heart and begin - Dave Johnston, Carol Hallenbeck, Sue Schneider.
The actual fertilization of the tree, however, was done by the groups who willingly and without payment printed a notice to their members and readers in their newsletters and magazines that I was seeking poetry to include in such a volume. To the staffs of Association for the Rights of Children of Indiana (ARC), the Child Welfare League of America, Concerned United Birthparents, Eastern Nebraska RESOLVE, Families Adopting Children from Everywhere (FACE), Families for Children, Feminists Writers Guild, Happiness Holding Tank, Indiana RESOLVE, Inc., North American Council on Adoptable Children, News of OURS, (now Adoptive Families magazine) Poets and Writers' CODA, Pudding, and RESOLVE, Inc., I am most grateful. Other groups, too, seem, unbeknownst to me and therefore unacknowledged, to have picked up the announcement as they shared each other's newsletters in the vast adoption network. This book would have been impossible without those generous bits of publicity.
In the warmth of the summer sun, the seedling flourished and finally bloomed. All the while, my ever patient family watched and nodded their encouragement as I typed away trying to meet deadlines so that I could gamble with our precious savings in order to self publish this book after it had been rejected or overlooked by large publishing houses, who considered either its genre - poetry - or its audience - those touched by adoption - either too limited or too risky for them.
And so you hold in your hands my harvest - a sapling straight and tall and proud. May it shade, shelter and support you as you gain your own perspective on the grafted tree that is adoption
PIJ
September, 1982 updated 2009
TABLE OF CONTENTS
"On Children" Kahlil Gibran
INRODUCTION'
BEGINNINGS AND ENDINGS
"Little Spirit to a Childless Couple" Carol Lynn pearson
"Mother's Day" Margaret Munk
"Trying to Conceive #2" Marion Cohen
"The Intake Interview" Marilee Richards
"waiting for The Call" Shelia Stewart Darst
"Adoptive Father" Bill Thompson
"To David" Rosemarie Gross
"Opting for Me" Opal Palmer
"Confession" MaryAnne Cohen
THE GRAFTING
"My Child Was Born Today" Angela McGuire
"Pre-Adoption Picture" Isaac Mozeson
"Oh, Little One" Ellen Hyers
"Prelude" Elayne D. Mackie
"On the Night of Andrew's Birth" Margaret Munk
"I Just Gave Birth to a Son" Judith Steinburgh
"Picture 254" Richard Stanin
"Adopting for One's Own" Barbara Fialkowski
"The Beginning: for Kathie" Malcolm Glass
"First Meeting" Miriam Proctor
"Early Morning Ritual with a Newly Adopted Daughter" Nancy Cash
"Daughter" Pam Conrad
"Welcome Home" Michael F. Anderson
REACTIONS
"Why This Child?" Lori Hess
"Kinship" Margaret Munk
"Some May Be Born…" author unknown
"How Could They?" W. Steven Hollingsworth
"Not Really Yours" Vicki Andres
"Our Gift" Norel C. Waldhaus
"Stevie Didn't Hear" Grace Sandness
"Kitchen" Pam Conrad
"AdoptionFor Sarah" Carol Burnes
"The Adopted Ones" Janet McCann
"The Easy Way" Patricia Irwin Johnston
ATTACHMENT
"Not Flesh of My Flesh" Fleur Conkling Heyliger
"To an Adopted" Carol Lynn Pearson
"Tighter in the Weaver" Kirk Shuster
"The Mother of Red Jacket" Philip St Clair
"AdoptionAlex, twenty-three months" Ann Chandonnet
"My Daughter's Dowry" Arthur Dobrin
"Gold Bangles: For My Indiana Daughter" Erika Mumford
"Reflection on Love" Dawn Newell
"For Anthony: Christmas, 1964" Lola Zierer Beihl
"Sonnet for Michelle" Barbara Nector Davis
"To John David" Rosemary Bleeke
MOTHERSPEAKINGS
"To the Birth Mother" Shirley G. Cochrane
"To Leah" Christina V. Pacosz
"For My Husband's Mother" Ellen Bass
"If Only You Could Know" Elayne D. Mackie
"A Birthday" Sue Westrum
"A Birthday Ode to Wendy" Sandra Kay Mussser
"Is This the Day?" Dawn Newell
"The Mother of My Child" Judith Steinbergh
"Doin' Time" Helen Garcia
"Stifled Love" Your Birth Mother
"Our Child" Chris Probst
"Agency Poem" Mary Anne Cohen
"To Michael, Brian Ricky and Susie" Kathie Garlitz
"A Few Days" Elizabeth Omand
IDENTITIES
"The Beginning Rabindranath Tagore
"Legacy of an Adopted Child" author unknown
"First Grief" Margaret Munk
"Acceptance" Judith Steinburgh
"Foundling" Patricia Storace
"Bloodlines" Walter McDonald
"Lost History" Dawn Newell
"To Mama" Sue Walker
"The Search: Identity, Out" Marianna F. Gentile
"The Search: Identity, In" Marianna F. Gentile
"Mary Cassatt's Mothers and Children" Leslie Brooke
"My Brown Daughter" Grace Sandness
"Sea Poem" Mary Anne Cohen
"Mother May I?" Marcia Massco
REFLECTIONS
"My Naomi" Elizabeth Morgan
"from that pont on…" Didi S. Dubelyew
"My Daughter's Mothers" Dawn Newell
"Who Loves Me? Deloris Selinsky
"The Cradle Is Too Small for Me" Dainne Drilock
"I Am a Ghost-Written Book" Elizabeth Morgan
"The Chosen One" Virginia Cain
"Search for Yesterday" Didi S. Dubelyew
"Family Tree" Jane Merchant
BENEDICTION
"Benediction" Rabindranath Tagore
"The Heart of a Child" author unknown
RESOURCES
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, speak to us of children.
And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself
They come through you but not from you.
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies, but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows might go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness,
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
Kahlil Glbran, 1883-1931 Syria
from The Prophet
INTRODUCTION (revised, 2009)
perspective, n. the relationship of tile parts of a subject to each other and to a whole.
graft, v.-to unite with a growing plant by insertion or placing in close contact
adoption, n. the process of accepting tile responsibility for raising an individual who has two sets of parents.(1)
This book began as a project of the heart. I am by training, interest, and experience an English Instructor and librarian. The written word has always fascinated me, and poetry is a special interest of mine because, when it is well done, it crystallizes experience, capturing in beautiful imagery and few words the essence of human feeling. Some time ago (in1975), while our oldest child (age 34 in 2009)was yet a baby, I realized that while I had seen many lovely poems addressing adoption themes, those poems were not collected in any accessible place, and that several of them, though widely recognized in adoption circles, were quoted differently in each source and were often attributed to unknown authors. How lovely, I thought, to have an anthology of such poems - a collection of beautiful, positive thoughts for sharing with our children, who were adopted, which would reflect the overwhelmingly positive influence that adoption has had on the lives of my husband (who also happens to be an adoptee) and myself
That original idea changed somewhat as I grew. I was born into a family which had not experienced adoption from any perspective for several generations. Or so I thought in 1982. It was in 2009 that my cousins and I learned that our grandmother had given birth to a child for whom she planned an adoption in 1918, two years before marrying our grandfather.
My view of adoption before I was married was a very stereotypical one, I am certain. It has been many years, and I've changed and grown so much over that time that I cannot tell you exactly what my adoption perception was, but I recall that I made several rather widely held myths a part of my "knowledge" of adoption. The myths formed this commonly known scenario filled with the phraseology of negative adoption language:
Once upon a time a pair of undereducated teenagers "got caught" with a pregnancy after engaging in an illicit sexual relationship that was purely physical and involved no emotion other than puppy love. In order to "do the right thing," this couple (or more likely just the girl and her parents - since the stereotypical teenaged father had probably already gone his irresponsible way), with the help of a kindly and supportive social worker who carefully laid out all of the options for them without offering any personal bias, "put the baby up for adoption" by an older, wiser, more financially stable barren couple, who, though "denied their own children," took this "poor, rejected infant" to their breasts to nurture "as if s/he were their own."
Meanwhile, the teenagers went on to improve their lives, marry others, and have other children. With a form of selective amnesia they forgot entirely their "unwanted mistake," burying their "shameful pasts" in anonymity as they became productive members of society.
This left the adoptive parents and their child to build a happy family life together, where they would forget the fact of adoption and successfully blend "like a real family" into the community. The children, if they "truly loved their parents," would never feel or express any curiosity about their genetic history or the events which took them from their "real parents" and brought them to their adoptive family.
This scenario was from the uninformed viewpoint of one totally untouched by adoption. My perspective on adoption began to change first when I married into a family in which, of the six cousins added to the family tree in my husband's generation, four of them - including my husband and his sister - had been adopted.