If the guest poster wants advice on finding this English agricultural engineer with pretty specific history in Alaska, I have several friends who do adoption searches like this all the time and I'd be glad to share contact information with Shmax.
That said, I found the line from the last paragraph They're the ones who parented me. fascinating because I've chosen to always use "parented" the other way, that I'm the one parenting my daughters now, though in all their cases their parents had more active post-birth roles than in an infant adoption.
And I've probably said this before, but since Lee was adopted within her family (by grandparents) and knows most of her biological relatives, there was never much of a "search" aspect to it, though we've only met some of her half-siblings as adults. But I still think it's sort of fascinating that her mom's three children, the oldest raised by their mother's own parents, the middle (Lee) raised by paternal grandparents, and the youngest she raised in that relationship, all ended up going to college on athletic scholarships, going into the corporate world and business schools, ending up working for the same multinational corporations at different times, which doesn't really seem like the most obvious progression for black kids born poor in the '60s in Oklahoma and neighboring states.
I find those connections fascinating. My world is better because I know my daughters' families not only for the insight it gives me (and eventually them) into their lives and health and histories, but just because they are wonderful in part because of the bits of awesomeness they share through shared biology and I have been lucky enough to get to see that. I may come across as glamorizing those biological connections and I don't mean that everything I see is healthy or that I don't understand why the state got involved, but I've also been able to see a whole lot more grace and perseverance and selfless love than the standard narratives of foster care might suggest.
I've lost the details of the plot, what does "she was the other woman" mean?
He had a secret first marriage to someone with the same first name as my grandmother. It was kept a secret from everyone in my parents' generation, and we weren't sure whether my grandmother even knew. She did indeed, and so did her sister, at least.
Oh, you mean he left his first wife for your grandmother? And she knew he was married? Was this before or after the identity switch?
I first misread that as your grandmother being BOTH the first and second wife.
I think it's a relief to know your grandmother knew, but it sounds like that may have been the extent of her knowledge of the rest of the weirdness, right? (Not that being previously married and not mentioning it is all that weird. But the rest definitely is!)
I found the line from the last paragraph They're the ones who parented me. fascinating because I've chosen to always use "parented" the other way,
I think it's clear he means "biologically parented." But it sounds a bit odd because he's combining the old-fashioned definition of parent (biological progenitor) with the newer "parenting as a verb" usage.
8: We think so. That she never knew about the previous identity. But frankly, I never thought she'd be capable of keeping a secret, and she kept this first one pretty well, so who knows.
9: Yes, his use is very clear. It just drove home that I use an idiosyncratic definition. There are a lot of camps when it comes to adoptive-world jargon, basically deciding whose version of the story gets privileged, and it's interesting to me to see him navigating some of that as he writes.
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Just to complain: so I survived the weekend, with Jammies in Korea. On Monday, Ace was at daycare, but Pokey and Hawaii had dentist appointments. So it wasn't as tiring, but it wasn't a breeze. Today was the day I'd get some time off with just Rascal.
But it turns out Hawaii is sick and getting sent home, so she'll be home today and tomorrow, now.
It's not the end of the world - a 5 year old and a newborn is nothing like a 5, 4, 1.5, and newborn all at once. But I was looking forward to having some peace and quiet for a bit.
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12: Oh god, the "Surprise: sick kid!" days are so frustrating! Extremely heart-felt sympathies!
My attempt to do 23andMe failed because I neglected to collect enough of my father's spit.
11: We're in Camp Thorn re use of "parenting." We also generically say "birth mother" and "birth father" for biological parents of adopted kids, but that is indeed idiosyncratic. The kids came from Korea with Korean names, so we speak of their birth mothers using those names. Have very little info about the birth fathers.
Isn't the sense of the verb "parent" as "act as a parent to" dominant at this point? The biological meaning is dominant with the verbs "mother" and "father", perhaps.
I would have thought so. My impression was that using "parent" as a verb referred to the actual raising of the child (usually, in my experience, the constantly aggravating and having to be more responsible than you feel like parts).
14: Trombonists' children never fail.
18: Whoever came up with the term "spit valve" owes generations of brass players an apology. It's not spit, it's condensation!
I am occasionally tempted to track down the genetic mother of my daughters, but now I think I might just let them do it if they want. You can get your genome analyzed for 99 bucks now? That's insane. I'll encourage them to wait until certain issues get ironed out, though.
19.1: Right. And it's condensation on the floor in front of the urinal.
Trombonists' children never fail
On the other hand, you can always pick out which children on the playground will go on to become trombone players. They can't find the slide, and they don't know how to swing.
They don't need to be accused of filling their instruments with spit to make them unattractive. They have their personalities!
Likewise drummers' children in pickup basketball games.
And violists waiting outside your door.
19.2: We may do one of the African ancestry tests in a few years to see what kind of overlaps we find, if the girls stay interested. If I'd had my act together it probably would have been a good gift for this Christmas, but oh well.
24 reminds me of the threshold of familiarity you needed to "get" Victor Borge.
reminds me of the threshold of familiarity you needed to "get" Victor Borge
I'd be curious about that, whether it was familiarity as you say, or might also be affinity. I come from white picket fences and canned spaghetti, but I always "got" Victor Borge.
I'm married to a Yekka, and my best and worst relationships have been with women from that tiny sub-ethnicity. Was this pre-ordained?
There's more to Victor Borge than piano-related silliness?
that tiny sub-ethnicity
So tiny it eludes my attempts to Google it (unless it is the same as a Yekke).
Not sure who 28 is to-- but it assumed a familiarity with pianos as they were used by classical musicians, and more generally classical music tropes. Furrfu!
I believe I've told my Cornish game hen-related Victor Borge story here, but I can't find it in the Google hoohole.
Comments have to be "to" someone now?
So tiny it eludes my attempts to Google it (unless it is the same as a Yekke)
It is. I'm not sure I've ever seen it written before; I spelled it as it's sounded.
33: TO WHOM THEY MAY CONCERN, at least.
I may be wrong about what DNA testing can really do, but HG's mother isn't going to have a Y from her father: what will it be able to show at all, then? Obviously, HG, and her mother, are going to have mDNA from HG's mother's mother.
HG's mother's brother would have the father's Y. The most immediate issue, though, would seem to me to be matching the Name Switcher to the offspring of his possible sister.
but it assumed a familiarity with pianos as they were used by classical musicians, and more generally classical music tropes
That I certainly would have had, but there was also an affinity in what's funny about the incongruousness, against enormous self-importance and pomposity as an expectation.
Her family's humor has always been a joy to me.
The standard panel is about 500k known SNPs. Each of these positions has been inherited from either mom or dad with about 50% probability. You can identify degree of relatedness between two individuals of either sex from a set of these, no need for Y or mt. You can't reliably say that the related individual is a parent without some extra information.
If there exist memeber's of hg's extended family dad's side who have done 23andme and chosen to share data, they could be identified that way. Precise relationship above degree of consanguinity is not possible without many individuals of known pedigree.
In that case, there's no reason not to wing one in.
I am much less cautious about the language of adoption regarding my own experience than when speaking to my adoptive parents, because they often seem a little freaked out by the fact of it. In day to day life, both my adoptive cousins and my biological cousins are just cousins.
So my biological parents parented me in the sense of making me, and my adoptive parents parented me in the sense that they raised me, and you can bet I would be very clear on that distinction when speaking to my adoptive parents, because tracking down my biological family has them more than a little off-kilter. I'm fairly sure neither read my blog, though, so I went with "parented me" because it was the sentence that made the most sense in my own head.
Thanks for posting!
The whole spit thing never bothered me, and besides woodwind player use spit rags, even further along the undignified path.
I have so little interest in my biological family, it is actively alarming to a few of my close friends. Obviously my feelings are totally neither here nor there for people who've been adopted, but whenever I read about an adopted person with zilch curiosity about birth relatives I feel like saying "sounds perfectly sane and normal to me!" I mean, so there's this group of people with whom I clearly share physical, mental and emotional traits to varying degrees, ditto experiences, but the most rewarding and affecting attachments in my life have definitely been with non-blood relatives.
I'm quite sure I'm waaaay out on the weirdo end of the spectrum in this, but at any rate - solidarity with the incurious!
Good luck on your search, Max! I wasn't being critical of your terminology and I know it's often a tough balance in how to talk to and about various family members, which is something my partner has struggled with a lot. She and I have adopted three girls we also fostered and my policy has always been to use the most expansive terms I can to allow them to choose whatever terms they want without hurting my feelings. So I say "your mom [name]" or just "your mom," though they also know "first mom" and "birth mom" as terms they can use, and the older two have gone through various versions just in their two and four years with us. So for one, her (biological) parents are Daddy and [Mom's First Name] and that's fine, whatever, but I'm pretty good at not getting my feelings hurt by any of it and I don't want them to have to go through the contortions my partner has in navigating her relationships with the different sets of parents.
At one point Mara's older sister, who was 6 or 7 at the time, decided that she was going to tell people I'm her stepmom because I'm obviously not her mom but I'm her sister's mom, and I thought that was a sweet and child-centered approach to something we don't really have a name for in English.
Thorn, that's one of the reasons I describe myself as "godmother" to my friends' kids in Alaska even though I have no part in their religious training. (As it happens, my own officially designated Catholic godparents did nothing for my own religious training, and I haven't been in touch with my godmother since early childhood.) I'm as close to them--or closer--than an aunt, but it would hurt my sister's feelings for me to claim that relationship with anyone other than her kid or our stepsister's future kids, and the godkids already have a real (though totally inferior) aunt with my name. That said, both my nephew and my godkids call my husband and I the Polish words for aunt and uncle, so we aren't super consistent, I suppose.
43: I have a friend who was adopted by family friends when he was 11 after his parents fied. He and his older brothers obviously remember their parents and took a while to figure out what to call his guardians. He refers to the both as his step-parents, which makes some people confused, but I think makes perfect sense since it's a similar relationship.
A FB acquaintance is really into the Bonus Mom/Bonus Kid language for her step-son, which I guess is harmless.
44: Lee went through a period of a few years when she was young where she called her adoptive parents/bio grandparents "Grandpa and Mommy," which was apparently occasionally unsettling for strangers observing the situation. I actually do find this particular kind of self-definition really interesting, so I appreciate the stories!
I kind of hate Bonus X, but I think that's just leftover hate from "bonus room" that shows up on HGTV shows all the time. The friend I have who uses it for her stepchildren clearly loves them and is being cutesy. I mean, I also have friends who talk about their in-loves rather than in-laws (possibly because it's an extralegal marriage, more likely because once they decide something is cute they stick with it) and I don't know if other people go after them online for it like they have me for talking about my child having a mom who isn't me, which some adoptive parents think is disrespectful and damaging to the reality of adoptive families (and fuck them!) but I try to cut people some slack or at least judge quietly.
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For those who might be wondering, thought I'd share that I accepted a gig today back in my hometown that will run through the end of January and potentially much longer. So things are looking up!
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That's great, Millhouse. Temporary gigs are all the work I've done in the past dozen years, but I've been able to put enough together to pay the bills. Hope you're able to stabilize, and that being home is a net positive.
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Since we're doing pause/play on job things, I'll say that I just got a new gig. (I am saying goodbye to two of my three current jobs, but holding on to the library Sundays.)
I'll still be based in Philadelphia, but working for a DC-based policy org. I expect to be racking up the Amtrak points.
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Congratulations.
And enjoy the frequent roller miles.
holding on to the library Sundays
The most lucrative of the positions.
48 & 51: Congrats! I hope the new gigs are filled with lovely coworkers and work you enjoy.
That's the one with the Ninja team. Of course she's holding on to it.
I'm stranded in Nome! Again! (Marginally on-topic because Alaska has been mentioned a couple of times in the thread.) I'm booked on a flight out tomorrow, so it's not that big a deal, but it is stretching this trip out unexpectedly.
Good news all round! Except Teo. Sorry Teo, maybe you'll meet somebody incredibly intelligent, funny and beautiful hanging around the airport who just happens to be going your way.
Where's Balto when you need him?
You never hear enough about Balto's sense of humor.
57: Thanks. I'll be okay; there are worse places to be stranded.
I'm not stranded, but I am in Sacramento without just cause; the meeting was cancelled and they mistakenly thought I was copied on the early morning emails. On the plus side, I was informed in time to catch a train back immediately; on the minus side, that train is delayed.
there are worse places to be stranded
Ouch.
63: company notwithstanding
Boom.
I made it home! Thanks for your support, everybody.
That's okay. We all get must grumpy at times.
65: Yay! Make any new friends while delayed?
For those following along at home, I'm still grading. I'm also praying that my students did indeed learn something important from this class, even if whatever that thing is isn't apparent from their final papers.
Possibly they gain wisdom instead of knowledge.
69: Nah. I did get to have dinner at Airport Pizza and stay in the nice hotel rather than one of the crappy ones, so there's that.