Adopted Grandparents Quotes

No one 'just adopts'.

She worries about the older children. Newborn babies are the most desirable for adoption. It is more difficult to find homes for the older orphans. If the child’s parents or grandparents were known to be Spanish Republicans, those who opposed Franco during the war, then the child must be rehabilitated and reeducated as a rational human being. Puri heard one couple tell Sister Hortensia that they didn’t want a child who had been “circling the drain.” They said they wanted an infant—“a bright, fresh canvas.

You know, Marco, they can leave us, they can grow old, but it's like they're still here, running around our feet, just like when they were little tykes.

The truth is that we never know from whom we originally get the ideas and beliefs that shape us, those that make a deep impression on us and which we adopt as a guide, those we retain without intending to and make our own. From a great-grandparent, a grandparent, a parent, not necessarily ours? From a distant teacher we never knew and who taught the one we did know? From a mother, from a nursemaid who looked after her as a child? From the ex-husband of our beloved, from a ġe-bryd-guma we never met? From a few books we never read and from an age through which we never lived? Yes, it's incredible how much people say, how much they discuss and recount and write down, this is a wearisome world of ceaseless transmission, and thus we are born with the work already far advanced but condemned to the knowledge that nothing is ever entirely finished, and thus we carry-like a faint booming in our heads-the exhausting accumulated voices of the countless centuries, believing naively that some of those thoughts and stories are new, never before heard or read, but how could that be, when ever since they acquired the gift of speech people have never stopped endlessly telling stories and, sooner or later, everything is told, the interesting and the trivial, the private and the public, the intimate and the superfluous, what should remain hidden and what will one day inevitably be broadcast, sorrows and joys and resentments, certainties and conjectures, the imagined and the factual, persuasions and suspicions, grievances and flattery and plans for revenge, great feats and humiliations, what fills us with pride and what shames us utterly, what appeared to be a secret and what begged to remain so, the normal and the unconfessable and the horrific and the obvious, the substantial-falling in love-and the insignificant-falling in love. Without even giving it a second thought, we go and we tell.

Why do people have this thing about their roots?' Klinsman asked Karen when the laughter subsided. ‘Is it really that important?’ 'Only if you don’t have any,' said Karen, 'Most of us take our roots for granted. We know where our mother and father came from and probably our grandparents, maybe even our great grandparents, but not all people have this foundation and it can be a big miss. The people who suffer most are orphans who know nothing at all about their origins. Many will spend their entire lives worrying and wondering about where they came from and who their folks really were.' 'I guess that’s why adopted kids often insist on tracing their real parents,' said Mike Kellerman. 'Exactly that,' replied Karen. 'And it causes such distress because it's construed by the folks who brought them up as ingratitude. But it's not. It's just something the kids have to do. They can't help themselves.' 'So what's Mac's problem?' asked Kellerman. 'I suspect he's just mildly curious,' smiled Karen.

Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT. As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help—aka Mr. Napp—only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the “save” button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one’s only recourse—unpalatable though it may be—is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one’s limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends— all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed. Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former mason or carpenter or salesman—someone over the age of twenty-five—is at this very moment being retrained in the subtle art of the computer and will, upon taking over from Mr. Napp, refrain (at least in the presence of anxious faculty seeking his or her help) from sending text messages or videos of costumed dogs to both colleagues and friends. I can almost imagine it: a person who would speak in full sentences—perhaps a person raised by a Hutterite grandparent on a working farm.

Here are some practical Dataist guidelines for you: ‘You want to know who you really are?’ asks Dataism. ‘Then forget about mountains and museums. Have you had your DNA sequenced? No?! What are you waiting for? Go and do it today. And convince your grandparents, parents and siblings to have their DNA sequenced too – their data is very valuable for you. And have you heard about these wearable biometric devices that measure your blood pressure and heart rate twenty-four hours a day? Good – so buy one of those, put it on and connect it to your smartphone. And while you are shopping, buy a mobile camera and microphone, record everything you do, and put in online. And allow Google and Facebook to read all your emails, monitor all your chats and messages, and keep a record of all your Likes and clicks. If you do all that, then the great algorithms of the Internet-of-All-Things will tell you whom to marry, which career to pursue and whether to start a war.’ But where do these great algorithms come from? This is the mystery of Dataism. Just as according to Christianity we humans cannot understand God and His plan, so Dataism declares that the human brain cannot fathom the new master algorithms. At present, of course, the algorithms are mostly written by human hackers. Yet the really important algorithms – such as the Google search algorithm – are developed by huge teams. Each member understands just one part of the puzzle, and nobody really understands the algorithm as a whole. Moreover, with the rise of machine learning and artificial neural networks, more and more algorithms evolve independently, improving themselves and learning from their own mistakes. They analyse astronomical amounts of data that no human can possibly encompass, and learn to recognise patterns and adopt strategies that escape the human mind. The seed algorithm may initially be developed by humans, but as it grows it follows its own path, going where no human has gone before – and where no human can follow.

What if, rather than asking women to bear the burden of responsibility for our nation’s health and intelligence, governments invested money in research for better formulas that can improve health? If what we feed our babies in the first year really has that much of an impact on lifelong health, this should be a priority. Because in reality, not all babies are going to be able to be breastfed, as long as we want to live in a world where women have the freedom to decide how to use their bodies; whether to work or stay home; whether to be a primary caregiver or not. In reality, there are going to be children raised by single dads; there are going to be children raised by grandparents; there are going to be children who are adopted by parents who aren’t able to induce lactation; there are going to be children whose mothers don’t produce enough milk, or who are on drugs not compatible with breastfeeding. Rather than demanding that every mother should be able to—should want to—breastfeed, we should be demanding better research, better resources, better options. We should be demanding better.

Occasionally, I give kids days off. If a child seems to be losing ground at school, return him home for a few days or even a week or two to recoup. He rests from so much outside contact, and gets recharged to cope with the world in a constructive way again. Parents usually only use a few days a year, so school progress is not much affected. For the occasional child who is out ten days in a year, the problems are serious enough that school achievement is secondary to health. In these cases the school is the communication loop with parents and therapist. Working parents have used sick days to stay out with their child. Some parents have asked a grandparent or relative to come in while they work. Often the regression has so worn the parent down, that a two-day break is a welcome respite for both of them to sleep in and recharge. Using these breaks has helped keep kids from ruining the gains that they have made in the school and community over a series of months. While these breaks need to be used judiciously, they have helped children to keep friendships and reputations that would otherwise be at risk.

We all search for ourselves in various ways. We visit the ancestral lands and homes of our grandparents. We look within us and around us to find out who we are and what our purpose is. This is true for everyone. The search for adopted people is thwarted by closed records and legal fictions—false birth certificates. As adopted children grow, they begin to wonder more and more about the story of their lives. They may ask questions, and often, as we’ve seen, their parents do not have answers.

Giovanni, in love with her unabashed feminine strength and her reconciliation of love and revolution. I spent nearly every waking moment around Nikki, and I loved her dearly. But sibling relationships are often fraught with petty tortures. I hadn’t wanted to hurt her. But I had. At the time, I couldn’t understand my mother’s anger. I mean this wasn’t really a woman I was punching. This was Nikki. She could take it. Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past. My mother came to the United States at the age of three. She was born in Lowe River in the tiny parish of Trelawny, Jamaica, hours away from the tourist traps that line the coast. Its swaths of deep brush and arable land made it great for farming but less appealing for honeymoons and hedonism. Lowe River was quiet, and remote, and it was home for my mother, her older brother Ralph, and my grandparents. My maternal great-grandfather Mas Fred, as he was known, would plant a coconut tree at his home in Mount Horeb, a neighboring area, for each of his kids and grandkids when they were born. My mom always bragged that hers was the tallest and strongest of the bunch. The land that Mas Fred and his wife, Miss Ros, tended had been cared for by our ancestors for generations. And it was home for my mom until her parents earned enough money to bring the family to the States to fulfill my grandfather’s dream of a theology degree from an American university. When my mom first landed in the Bronx, she was just a small child, but she was a survivor and learned quickly. She studied the other kids at school like an anthropologist, trying desperately to fit in. She started with the way she spoke. She diligently listened to the radio from the time she was old enough to turn it on and mimicked what she heard. She’d always pull back enough in her interactions with her classmates to give herself room to quietly observe them, so that when she got home she could practice imitating their accents, their idiosyncrasies, their style. Words like irie became cool. Constable became policeman. Easy-nuh became chill out. The melodic, swooping movement of her Jamaican patois was quickly replaced by the more stable cadences of American English. She jumped into the melting pot with both feet. Joy Thomas entered American University in Washington, D.C., in 1968, a year when she and her adopted homeland were both experiencing

Stupid dog, do you realize you have actually LITERALLY bitten the hand that feeds you?" Schatzi looks at me with a withering stare, arching her bushy eyebrows haughtily, and then turns her back to me. I stick out my tongue at her back, and go to the kitchen to freshen her water bowl. Damnable creature requires fresh water a zillion times a day. God forbid a fleck of dust is dancing on the surface, or it has gone two degrees beyond cool, I get the laser look of death. Once there was a dead fly in it, and she looked in the bowl, crossed the room, looked me dead in the eye, and squatted and peed on my shoes. I usually call her Shitzi or Nazi. I suppose I'm lucky she deigns to drink tap water. Our bare tolerance of each other is mutual, and affection between us is nil. The haughty little hellbeast was my sole inheritance from my grandmother who passed away two years ago. A cold, exacting woman who raised me in my mother's near-complete absence, Annelyn Stroudt insisted on my calling her Grand-mère, despite the fact that she put the manic in Germanic, ancestry-wise. But apparently when her grandparents schlepped here mother from Berlin to Chicago, they took a year in Paris first, and adopted many things Française. So Grand-mère it was. Grand-mère Annelyn also insisted on dressing for dinner, formal manners in every situation, letterpress stationary, and physical affection saved for the endless string of purebred miniature schnauzers she bought one after the other, and never offered to the granddaughter who also lived under her roof. Her clear disappointment in me must have rubbed off on Schatzi, who, despite having lived with me since Grand-mère died neatly and quietly in her sleep at the respectable age of eighty-nine, has never seen me as anything but a source of food, and a firm hand at the end of the leash. She dotes on Grant, but he sneaks her nibbles when he cooks, and coos to her in flawless French. Sometimes I wonder if the spirit of Grand-mère transferred into the dog upon death, and if the chilly indifference to me is just a manifestation of my grandmother's continued disapproval from beyond the grave. Schatzi wanders over to her bowl, sniffs it, sneers at me one last time for good measure, shakes her head to ensure her ears are in place, like a society matron checking her coif, and settles down to drink.

The elder generation may also take the opportunity to grow. Becoming a grandparent is the crowning event for many people, so why should it present a challenge? Because the rules are about to change, and promoting harmony in the family under new circumstances takes patience and modesty. It requires that the elder generation adopt a long view.

But the Seventh Generation idea, articulated more than 300 years ago in the Iroquois Gayanashagowa (the “Great Binding Law” or “Great Law of Peace” 9 ), remains as radical and visionary as ever: that leaders should take actions only after contemplating their likely effects on “the unborn of the future Nation . . . whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground.” Seven generations, perhaps a century and a half, is longer than a single lifetime but not beyond human experience. It is the span from one’s great-grandparents to one’s great-grandchildren. From the standpoint of the Seven Generations principle , our current society is a kleptocracy stealing from the future. What would it take for this old idea to be adopted in a modern world that does not even acknowledge time?