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Abuse Case File

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Submitted by nikkiv2 on Thu, 07/23/2009 - 10:45
My name is Nikki
I am told I was born on September 27, 1969
in Our Lady of Victory Infant Home in Lackawanna, NY.
I am told I was placed with my adoptive family on April 23, 1970 and that my adoption was finalized on February 5, 1971.
I was raised outside Buffalo, New York, first in a duplex that housed me and my afamily upstairs, and my afather's mom & dad, two sisters and three of their daughters downstairs. After my grandfather died, my aparents would convert to born again christianity. They bought a house of their own and cut us off from my afather's side of the family because they refused to forsake their Catholicism.
My amother was the person from whom I received the most crap, but my afather would also dole out the punishment. There were six kids, my older brother T and myself were adopted (but not related). Then there were two girls, St and E, and two boys, Sc and J, who were born following my adoption. My older abrother terrorized all of the kids, bullying his way to whatever he wanted. One time T went to punch my youngest brother J so hard, he put his hand clear through the wall when J ducked.

Having spent the first seven months of my life in the Infant Home, I would need to be placed with a family where the adults had the ability to patiently nurture me in order to bond.  You could not have picked a person more the opposite than my amother.  She could be that person in doses, but usually saved those doses for her bio kids.  For me she saved her hate and venom, telling me repeatedly from the time I was 4 or 5 that I was stupid, retarded, that I had my brains in my ass, and that she knew I didn't love her.  (She repeated the last one following my wedding.)  She hated that I was a tomboy and told me to grow up and act like a girl should. 

She wouldn't wait until I actually did something wrong to beat on me.  If she had a bad day, she would seek me out.  Punching, kicking, grabbing me by the neck, ripping out my hair, etc.  I didn't even have to say anything to get my face slapped out of the blue.  She would just say that I should wipe the look off my face.  There were times when my afather would stop speaking to me and looking at me for weeks and then explode and beat me in a fit of rage.  It seemed to happen periodically, at least once a year.  The last time was when I was 16. He tearfully apologized the next morning, and never beat me again.  I am still not sure what those incidents were about.

My amother was convinced I was going to become pregnant before graduating high school like my bmom.  She never said this outright, but controlled my every move (I had a 9 pm curfew until I was a senior in high school.  Then it was 10 pm.), who my friends could be, and my "sex" talk at 16 was if I got pregnant, I was not allowed to have an abortion, they would not raise the baby and that I would not be allowed to raise it in their house.  All the isolation, control, verbal and physical crap drove me to enlist in the Navy when I was 17 just to get away from her.  I knew if I stayed I would commit suicide just to escape her insults, her rages, and her control.  I had already tried several times by then.

Your Message
About Abuse: 

The mistreatment of children, in whatever form, regardless of the period of time, robs us of being able to root ourselves in a safe, caring world and sets us up to spend an untold amount of energy throughout our adult lives wrestling with the fact that we will never have a caring, nurturing childhood.  We then have to find ways to fill the hole we're left with.  Some can do this more successfully than others.

The foster care, adoption, and child placement industries have priorities that are financially motivated first and foremost, which means the needs and wants of children are secondary.  Knowingly giving a child to a household that has no skills and no ability to raise a child into a confident, caring young adult should be a crime.  If the state has to pay to care for and provide for children because there aren't adults who are adequate parents, and to keep siblings together, then so be it.  It's not just a moral responsibility to guarantee children safety and health, it's a social responsibility.  In a country that claims to be a democracy, it ought to be a mandate.

About adoption: 

I cannot remember a time that I did not know I was adopted.  But I do remember that I was not allowed to ask what that meant and where my bmom was without being beaten and punished.  Just as when I was a child/adolescent, I'm now expected and legally required to live my life without being able to anchor who I am to history, to a place and to people.  Not only me, but my son is expected to do the same, to make do with half his history, and so will his children.  To have to live out my life in the 21st century according to the social moors and resulting laws from the middle of the last century is nonsensical. 

There is a whole generation of unfinished stories with no substantial, logical reason for remaining so.  At one point in the 1970's, women couldn't secure an abortion, could not obtain birth control pills without their husband being present, were still, for the most part, working in the home, and a whole generation of women had built up no social security benefits or credit record.  All of those things have changed, and closed adoption is one of  the last bastions standing from that era.  It is time for lawmakers and citizens alike to get over their insecurities and their need for control so that a generation of adopted adults who have had decisions made without their consent can start choosing for themselves.

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