Excerpt. Roots, Wings and Other Things

Roots, Wings and Other Things.
A Mother’s True Story on Transracial Adoptions.
Gillis Spalding, Dr. Donna
ISBN 13: 978-1-897381-00-7
Paperback; perfect bound; 5.5 x 8.5


Sample Excerpt, © Rain Publishing Inc.


1


The idea of adopting a family was a dream I’d had since I was a teenager, when I did volunteer work in an orphanage. Most of the children in the orphanage were older and of mixed race. As a teenager, I could not imagine what it would be like to live without a family. Every year I would bring home a child from the orphanage to spend Christmas with my family. I would beg my mother and father to adopt these visitors, but of course that didn’t happen. I never forgot the children in the orphanage and decided I would adopt children when I married.

Anytime I got interested in a man I would make sure I knew his views on adoption, and fortunately, I found Howard. We were married in 1964, and now have eight children. This is the story of our family and how it developed.

Our family could best be described as “unplanned.” We have one biological child, six adopted children, and one child who was old enough when she came to us that we did not have to go through the legal process of adoption. Our children come from different racial backgrounds, and their ages at adoption ranged from three months to fifteen years.

Most parents do not know what problems their children will face in life, but because we were a transracial family, we had the advantage of being able to identify at least some of them in advance. Some of our children had little knowledge of their biological background, and consequently had difficulty developing a sense of identity. Others had lived with their parents, but for one reason or another had been placed in foster homes.

After years of going from one foster home another, these children had no concept of family. All but one of them had experienced physical and/or mental abuse. For all these reasons, I felt it was of paramount importance to provide the children with new roots. It was equally important to give them the confidence to take on the world and build their own lives.

Before getting on with our family story, I would like to express my feelings regarding our family. An awkward situation we often had to deal with was having people tell us how wonderful we were for adopting children—especially older, interracial children. Many people think that choosing to adopt is unnatural and somehow deserving of praise. We believe we were the lucky ones, because we experienced the love of these children.

Adoptive families can be as real, loving, and permanent as other forms of families.

My roots are in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. My maternal great-grandfather came from Scotland and settled in Rocky Boston, on Cape Breton Island. By the time his son (my grandfather) was old enough to work, Rocky Boston was a thriving community, and most of the people were subsistence farmers.

Over time, my uncles moved to Sydney to work in the coalmines. They boarded at a home during the week and went back to Rocky Boston on weekends. By the time I was a child, there were only two houses in the area: one belonged to my grandfather and the other to his son, my uncle. Today Rocky Boston is uninhabited.

My grandparents had six sons and four daughters. My grandmother died giving birth to my mother, and my grandfather could not take care of a baby. Another Scottish family who spoke Gaelic raised her, but her position in the new family was ambiguous; on one hand she was accepted, but on the other, she was not considered to be a real member of the family.

Consequently, my mother never met her biological family until she was married and had her own children. You can imagine her surprise when she found out she had so many brothers and sisters. Five of my uncles (her brothers) and one aunt (her sister) continued to live at home with Grandpa at Rocky Boston. My aunt did not marry because she had to look after the men.

Only one of my uncles—Norman—married. Uncle Norman and his wife had one child, who was killed in a car/pedestrian accident when he was sixteen. My grandfather lived until he was one hundred and five, but never got over the fact that there was no one to carry on the family name.
Gaelic was the only language that Grandpa spoke, so the rest of the family spoke Gaelic whenever they were at the farm. My mom also spoke some Gaelic at home when she did not want us children to understand what she was saying.

She was not very happy when she heard me repeating her Gaelic words to Grandpa. I don’t know what he said to Mom, but he sure seemed upset with her……….