Tag Archives: Michigan Adoptee Rights

Death finally takes my birth mother, did you come to gawk at the photo?

Rudy Owens took this photograph of his birth mother in 2009; what do you see and why are you looking at it now?

The entire time I have communicated about my history as an adoptee and the widespread denial of basic human and legal rights to all adoptees, I held a line.

That demarcation point, for me, represented a conscious act of power and an act of defiance.

Until today, April 27, 2024, I have never publicly published a photograph of my closest biological family relative that showed their face.

Here it is. Are you amused? Do you care?

On a few occasions I published very old pictures of my biological grandparents, on my maternal and paternal family sides. These are so buried in my archive, they are likely impossible to find. These photos are also old, and they are more like museum artifacts than documentation of blood lineage.

But now I have arrived at a new destination, because the Angel of Death arrived late this week.

In fact, I started writing this essay when my birth mother* was among the living, a day before her passing. Now she is among the dead, having died in a Michigan hospital this week after a long declining trajectory to death’s final clutches.

SEE COMPLETE ESSAY ON THIS WEBPAGE.

News Year’s Day 2024 reflections on adoptee rights and possible reform in Michigan

One of my annual traditions is to start the new year with a healthy outdoor activity. I did that taking a lovely hike in the green hills around Portland, Oregon. Being outdoors and in nature gave me a nice clean head and opportunity to reflect on adoptee rights in my birth state, Michigan, and on larger issues of being an adoptee at this stage in my life. This stage means people are passing away, and these inevitable losses have perhaps sharper meaning for countless tens of thousands of adoptees born in the USA, and also in other countries, who may never, ever know their family origins or be able to answer life’s great and most important question: “Who am I?”

The year 2023 ended with family loss. The year 2024 begins with awareness of who I am, how adoptee rights advocacy works in the messy world of U.S. legislative sausage making, and also how I need to focus on things I can authentically control. It is OK to be in the wilderness, as I have long known. But I am also glad my network has expanded to kin in Finland, where new beginnings with kin mean roads to places I never could have dreamed in 1989. That year I found my biological family and I first violated Michigan’s discriminatory and still current laws denying me my human right to know myself and from whence and where I come.

The Detroit Adoptee Manifesto: Time to change the battlefield

As the year 2017 comes to a close, millions of American adoptees are no closer to receiving equal treatment under U.S. laws than they were decades earlier. In 1975, the United Kingdom long moved on from this issue, giving all adoptees full access to their records once they turned 18. In fact, the issue of adoptee equal rights is not even a concern in most developed nations. Not so in the United States, the country with the greatest number of adoptees than any developed country in the world.

Robert Greene’s The 33 Strategies of War

From a strategic perspective, most U.S. adoptees have not organized cohesively or embraced successful strategies that have altered this battlefield. This includes the all-critical inner battle of the mind that must occur first before any change and tactical advance occurs on the messy, fluid field of combat in the real world. I believe its time to reset the chessboard and start anew, starting first with each individual adoptee.

I recommend that adoptees read author Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, Mastery, The 33 Strategies of War, and more. His treatise on war offers a cool, hard look at human conflict and offers wisdom demonstrated by historic greats from Sun Tzu to Napoleon Bonaparte to Muhammad Ali. He provides a set of ideas how to grab victory from whatever conflict and foes you face.

I just published The Detroit Adoptee Manifesto. In it, I draw from key concepts explained by Greene in The 33 Strategies of War, which I think adoptees should consider as they choose how they want to live their lives and then change the world around them, including the adoption system that denies millions of Americans basic human rights. Most of these ideas are explained in greater detail in my forthcoming memoir on the American adoption experience, You Don’t Know How Lucky You Are: An Adoptee’s Journey Through the American Adoption Experience. The strategies I describe in my essay are:

Author Robert Greene

  • Projecting Strength, Not Vulnerability
  • Learning from the Masters and Applying that Wisdom
  • Having a Grand Strategic Vision
  • Learning from Defeat
  • Defining your Opponents and Exposing Them and Their Weaknesses
  • Becoming a Fighter, Not a Victim
  • Defining The Battlefield
  • Knowing Your Enemies
  • Launching a Revolution of Thinking

Greene notes that all persons can benefit from thinking strategically, to achieve critical life goals: “To have the power that only strategy can bring, you must be able to elevate yourself above the battlefield, to focus on your long-term objectives, to craft an entire campaign, to get out of the reactive mode that so many battles in life lock you into. Keeping your overall goals in mind, it becomes much easier to decide when to fight and when to walk away.”