by kindred | Jul 15, 2015 | Uncategorized
My name is Paige Adams Strickland, and I’m a teacher and writer from Cincinnati, Ohio. I’m also an adoptee from what we now call The Baby-Scoop Era, and I’ve written a book called Akin to the Truth: A Memoir of Adoption and Identity. It’s about growing up in an era of closed adoptions, sealed records, falsified information and all the shame and stigma associated with those practices. In the 1960s and 70s, in this country, the status of being adopted was like wearing a Scarlett Letter ‘A’ on my soul. No one discussed it. To my knowledge, there were no other adopted children around with whom to relate. It was like being camouflaged out in the open. You just don’t go up to people and say, “Hi! Are you adopted too?” so I lived with this unmentionable label and lots of guilt for wishing it wasn’t a secret and wanting to know more about what happened to my biological parents and me years ago. It took years to come out of my adoption closet and realize, “Hey! I’m not a freak. I want to know what went on back in 1961, but I’m OK anyway.” Searching for my birth family was a huge accomplishment, and not just because of the work it took to locate and contact them. It was also the process of accepting myself as an adoptee and knowing that this isn’t something to be sad or ashamed of. No one was going to bully me on the playground as an adult, so it was time to “come out” with it. The book writing began in 2002 as...
