In Celebration of June 1st, Adoption Records in Ontario

Today is the day adoption records are opened in Ontario, Canada. Of course we know government office workers are working hard to process our adoption records requests and we celebrate...it is June 1st!

I started this blog as the time ticked towards open records in Ontario a few years ago. Then they closed again because of a few people too scared to look deeper into their own souls. All around them adoptees, birthmothers and a few birthfathers were desperately wanting records opened. Those touched by adoption have lived years carrying the grief caused by adoption. Now we all stand at the opened door, ready to cross through, those touched personally by the pain of adoption and those who caused the pain. What will be on the other side? For most I pray it will be tears of joy, for some unfortunately there will be tears of disappointment and for some I hope there will be realization and a seeking of forgiveness.

Opening records will not impact me the same as it will a mother who has mourned her empty arms all these years. I have been reunited with my son and I am in relationship with him today. I have applied for my record just the same because I am hoping it will give me a sense of righting a wrong that happened so many years ago, thirty-nine years and two months less two days, but who is counting. That wrong was committed by a faceless entity that embodied society, the government, the social worker and my parents, all who said I could not and should not raise my baby. They did what they did and I was left to live forever with the consequences. Am I still angry, you betcha! But please don't mistake that for the place of joy I now live in today in reunion with my son and June 1st is here!

There is no doubt in my mind that the son I have been reunited with is the son I had taken from me in early 1970 but I still wait for the records to be sent to me. I know I will cry the day they arrive in the mail. I am hoping I will feel I have come full circle and now what is left is to live from this point on, to build new hopes and to make new memories.

I met a vendor yesterday at a yard sale. She makes anklets of crystal and silver beads; some of them have letters on them. They are lovely. Thirty-nine summers ago I wore an anklet, a gold one. It was the type that had a small place to engrave a name on it, like an ID bracelet. I remember buying it and having my name engraved on the outside of it, but secretly on the inside I had the name I had given to my son in the hospital when I was forced to name him and fill in the papers. I had "Paul" engraved on the inside. When I first started to wear my anklet my parents reminded me that it was the "streetwalker" who wore an anklet. It made me love to wear the anklet all the more. Maybe it was a bit of defiance, maybe a bit of "call me one, I'll be one", maybe it was in alliance with all women made to feel they were outcasts because they didn't fit neatly into an ideal. I wore that anklet for years and still have it in my jewelry box. Like carrying my son secretly in my heart I often found ways to carry him publicly. Yesterday I asked the vendor to create an anklet for me of the crystal and silver beads spelling out his name today as my way of celebrating June 1st. It will have his name on it... and I will wear it both publicly and openly... like the records unsealed it will show his name. I will wear it this summer as a symbol.

Happy June 1st to all people touched by adoption in Ontario, Canada and to all the people around the world who still live in hope that adoption records will become unsealed in their lifetime.