virginia wolfe's room has broken angels

In reading, researching and writing about adoption, adoptee's rights, baby brokering and probing into my own family history, I'm unearthing details I couldn't write for fiction. This space - my blog- I think of as an online "room of one's own". And that is two-fold: it is the place where I can express my thoughts, and it is actually about my history. Not the one I've created but about my creation. Where I am from. All of those N/A's on my registry papers.

On Saturday morning I woke up and dug into a large tub filled with negatives and photos. On top of the tub was a Converse sneaker box filled with mostly letters from my friend Gillian, concert ticket stubs from high school and college, and some random photos. The first thing my hand pulled from the box were a group of photos stuck together from age. The photos were from different years, different subjects - I had never put them in this order- but they were together for a reason. A polaroid of me at 7 months (clearly marked in my 8 year old cursive), a self portrait in a white sequin tank top and a pink tiara from college where I had added wings and the word "angel" across my head in white out, and a snapshot of me as tinkerbell in a flying accident, our friend Bryan and David at Barney's Beanery on Halloween after my car accident in 1999. I had eccentuated the bruises on my face and had band aids on my arms. One of my wings was broken.

So what was similar about the polaroid baby photo? There were no angels in the photo, unless you count children as angels, which according to my parents and friends of the family, I was the most good natured baby and well behaved child. That's not it though. It is the bruising around my face, as if I had been in an earlier flying accident. This was no accident though, no normal child bruising. A doctor could tell me what I already know. How far back do you remember? Some things leave permanent marks.

And so if there is any grey matter with SM, it is that his "practice" whether it served people well, was still the selling of babies, not to people who were necessary perfect parents - he wasn't in the business of determining that. Did I have opportunities created by my parents economic status? yes. Did I get to become who I am today because of it? no. I have gotten to where I am despite it.
This is going to be a very nasty road to dig up. I hope we - adoptees and birth parents separated- find it worth it all.

what am I doing here?

about me/about my film:

I was adopted at birth. At age three, my adoptive parents divorced. My adoptive mother is bi-polar; my father remarried four times. Growing up I began to question who negotiated this adoption; had anyone screened my adoptive parents or was the price just right?

I began searching for my birth mother and found very little information until I got the name of the lawyer who handled my adoption. He is a notorious baby broker who coerced young and terrified girls into handing over their white babies and (unbeknownst to them) selling them to affluent Jewish families for 25,000 per child. He has been disbarred in three states, written about in "The Baby Brokers, The Marketing of White Babies in America" by Lynne McTaggert, and even sold the babies of female innmates.

I have been connecting with birth mothers and learning of their experience and adoptees like myself who found their birth mothers or who are still searching. My documentary is about the selling of white children as commodity and the lengths that others will go to profit from the pain, exploit the embarrassment of a pregnant woman who in these cases, were lied to, treated like garbage and threatened that if they did not "deliver", they would go to jail. My birth mother is one of these women.

My journey begins by interviewing Jaymie, a birth mother exploited by the baby broker, who became a police officer, and then committed her life's work to reuniting over 2000 successful adoptees/birth parents (including her own), to other birth mothers and adoptees who were casualties of the baby broker. The subplot is my own search for my birth mother (with the help of Jaymie), interviewing my estranged adoptive family and adopted friends who've chosen *not* to search for their birth parents.

The end goal is not to find my mother, but about the relationships lost and found, those who unknowingly sold their children, finding out that you were bought for a staggering amount of money, and those who orchaestrated and profited from a profoundly personal and painful experience. Whether it is $100 or $25,000, should people make money from selling children?