Names and Dates

Rather than interrupt the thread "A Position on Adoption Reform",  I'd like to respond to Tina's comment made about the names and dates documented on our birth-records.   She wrote,

The registration (my personal feelings) of a birth is like a validation that your here and you are someone significant. To change that bit of personal history to suit someone else's likes is like saying your not good enough as you are, but never mind we can fix it and pretend it never happened and a lie will be better than who you are.

It's one thing to read about falsified records.   [Church, State & Adoption:  Adoption Schemes That Violate Separation of Church & State, http://www.amfor.net/church.html ].

It's one thing to see specific alterations made by each state.  [Falsified Birth Certificates - Data and Samples,  http://www.peoplefindernow.com/3adofals.htm ]

It's one thing to read what's being told to the general public.  [Amended Birth Certificate, http://glossary.adoption.com/amended-birth-certificate.html ]

But nothing prepares you for the moment of truth when you realize it's YOUR life that has been altered by the sneaky hands of untraceable strangers.

I was 35 years old, and a mother myself, when I was told I had been named by my own mother during a baptism ceremony days after I was born.  According to the social worker who had my file, I was baptized in the hospital before she was discharged and I was put in foster-care.  My mother was a 26 year old educated, unmarried woman who had a daughter with her long-time sweetheart.  She named me.  Did that name mean something to her?  Did she tell my father my name?  The only information given to me that day that sounded familiar to me was my birth date. 

I remember the social worker saying, "At least your birth date was correct." 

Yes, my birth date, (the day and year I was born), was the only information that was not a lie told to me by my family.

I remember naming each one of my babies.  Each name meant something personal, and each name reflected the past, the present and the future.  A name is how a parent sees his or her child.  I had a life with one group of people in one country, with one given name; a year later I had a different life in a different country with a different name, living with different people.  I image that being true for my own children, and I can't.  I can't imagine a year without my children, and my children re-named, living with someone else.

My mother's influence and memory was erased from my adoptive parent's world when my name was changed.

"It" was removed and erased from documented memory, as if the named person never existed.

That's how life began for me.  I can't erase those facts as easily as strangers can and did.