Superheroes a Product of Amazing Adoptive Families?

Have you notice that most of our superheroes are adopted children?  AND their families are almost all wonderful?

So far I come up with

• Superman
• Spiderman
• Hulk

Can you think of anyone else?  Leave a comment if you do

Losing Isaiah, Losing Faith

Losing Isaiah is a movie about Isaiah, a black crack baby whose mother put him in the trash one night thinking she’d come back after scoring a hit but her getting stoned and passed out leaving the baby to found by strangers.  A white social worker named Margaret Lewin bonded with Isaiah in the hospital, she and her family later on adopted him.  In the meantime, Khaila was arrested and entered a rehab program.  Four years later, Khaila found out her baby was not dead, decided to fight for Isaiah’s custody and contested the adoption.  The court resolved to dismiss the adoption largely based on the issue of race.  Obviously, Isaiah did not adjust well to his “new” mother.  The movie did have a happy ending with the mothers putting asides their own feelings and placed the welfare and happiness of the child first.

My main grudge with this movie is how the court would feel that it was in the child’s best interest to literally tear him away from the only family he’d known and thrown him unceremoniously to his now-reformed mother. In this case, the court system behaved as if racial identity was the end-all solution and purposefully refused to figure the roles of responsibility and love into the equation.  I believe we need to examine the intentions of the parties involved before summarily positing a life-changing judgment.  According to my understanding of the movie, Khaila willfully abandoned her child in a dangerous place, the outdoor trash, to look for a cocaine fix.  The fact that she was stoned to the point of passing out did help the matter either, as it was, Isaiah was in mortal danger if the workers did not notice the boy and proceed to work normally.  Khaila did not volunteer to attend the rehab center but was placed there after she was caught shoplifting.  Therefore, one can argue that she did not intend to get clean, and the rehab center was a by-product of her arrest.  So the judge was taking the side of segregating the races and ignored the child’s safety and desire stay with his “white” family.  Just by saying Khaila was Isaiah’s mother and so her mother instincts should be enough to take care of him is wrong since Khaila had erroneously failed her son once before. 

The ending was pretty much a fairytale cop-out.  It looked like the director take a look at the plot and say “Well, we have to throw the Lewin character a bone to keep the audience happy and make us appear less racist.”

Open and Blind - Adoption Through My TV Screen

So I was listen to the soundtrack of the Runaway Bride, you know, that song "Where Were You On Our Wedding Day?" is really catchy, pop-ish and funny song.  Anyhow, it reminded me of the movie Juno, which also has a pretty awesome soundtrack and if you have watched it, you'd know the main character is a teenage girl who got pregnant with her high school boyfriend and then decided to give up the baby for adoption.  Throughout the movie, she maintained contact with the couple she decided on giving the baby to, one of those "open adoption" where the adopted family and the birth parents are not constraint by court order to seal the paperwork as in a "blind adoption."

This got me thinking: is it better for the kids and everyone involve if the adoption is "open" as oppose to "blind" ?  And does it really matter if the kids never found out about the adoption until the very last moment on the adopted parent's deathbed: "Oh, btw, you're adopted."  It's so clique, I can almost see it as a movie trailer, in which the kid immediately set on a journey to find the birth parents.  You know what?  I bet Hollywood, or at least Hallmark, has made something along this line...  IMDB is going to be my next stop.  No, I don't think there's nothing wrong about that self-discovery journey across the American landscape to find your birth parents, it's just that I happen to enjoy those type of movies from time to time.  It also remind me of that episode of Friends, where Monica and Chandler were trying to adopt and so they spent an evening at another random couple who have adopted this young boy.  Chandler, in his typical fashion, let it slip out that the boy was adopted and caused him to scream on top of his lungs "I'm ADOPTED?" when his parents had obviously decided to withhold the fact.

I know the practice of optimistic couples who want to adopt would go to these agencies, having interview with these (typically young girls) pregnant women and hope that someone would pick them to be their unborn child's parents.  Between The Blind Side, Juno and Friends and the fact that I've learned most of the necessary American culture tidbits from the tube, I'm wondering if the common type of adoption on the TV changes from "blind" to "open" because of the more open minded people we have now versus 10 or 20 years ago...  or is it the media was just portraying cases that would support their argument for "open" adoption?  I personally think that international adoptions are one of the major selling point for "open" adoption.  Really, if you are a middle aged, white woman walks into a school uniform store with a middle aged, white man and 2 kids in tow, the assumption the salesperson would have is that the man is your Significant Other and the 2 kids are your kids.  Would your perception change one bit if I say the kids are two cute Chinese-looking girls?  Everyone would take a wild guess and think you'd adopted from China.

My story is convoluted but my point is that international adoption leads to interracial adoption, which would be impossible to pretend that "I'm, the white woman, has [birthed] an Asian looking kid with my white husband."  Well, unless you used in vitro to have the baby then you should probably talk to your fertility specialist about the mix-up.  Just like that episode in Desperate Housewives where Gabriel and Carlos found out their in vitro baby carried by a surrogate was mixed-up with a black couple's baby-making materials.



Well, here is the obligatory link to the trailer for the movie Juno, if you haven't seen it yet, make sure it's somewhere near the top of your Netflix queue, OK?

Blind Sided by an Oscar!

Even though I've just posted a blog post already, I have to shout out a CONGRATULATION to Sandra Bullock for winning the Main Actress Oscar tonight!  So the Blind Side has been recognized aside from the random joke told during the presenting. 

And Bullock thanked Meryl Streep for being an very very good kisser and an excellent "partner."

Some people have all the luck!

and yes, my joke is corny...