Sept. 1: Adoption

 

It is probably not a coincidence that North America’s three most beloved superheroes – Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man – came from broken families.

In what is likely the most famous origin story of all time, young Bruce Wayne watched both of his parents get gunned down by a mugger somewhere in an alley in Gotham City. The family’s butler, Alfred Pennyworth, later assumed guardianship of the boy, whose trauma eventually led to his transformation into Batman.

Superman, whose birth name Kal-El, is an alien from the doomed planet, Krypton. His scientist parents placed their infant son in a rocket and sent it to Earth, where he was discovered by a kind Midwestern couple, Jonathan and Martha Kent, who took the baby in and raised him as their own.

Even Spider-Man, aka Peter Parker, was an orphan being raised by his aunt and uncle after his own parents died in a plane crash. His Uncle Ben was later killed by a thief, leaving poor old Aunt May to raise Peter on her own.

The moral here is that if you come from a nuclear family, you’re probably not going to be a superhero.

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We sympathize with the plight of the orphan. We know the importance of a father and mother’s love and, we must know, that the child will miss out on something if some of that love is minimized (or removed altogether.) And so the orphan is at a disadvantage. He has a steeper hill to climb. By necessity, he must be stronger.

And because of this, we are jealous of him.

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The child who was born into a loving family knows that he was not chosen. He (or she) emerged from the womb through a natural biological process. His (or her) parents didn’t choose a baby from a catalog. They took, and loved, what they were given.

But the adopted child was, in some part, chosen. The adopted child can feel special because his (or her) adopted parents must have seen something special in them, something that convinced them to invest this child with love.

And thus is born the adoption fantasy.

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If you were old enough in the early 1980s, you have to remember the Cabbage Patch Kids. Originated by American artist Xavier Roberts in the late 70s, the Cabbage Patch Kids became so popular that parents would often fight each other in toy stores as they desperately tried to get their hands on one of those coveted dolls. Cabbage Patch Kid mania had taken over North America and almost every little girl (and some little boys) wanted one for Christmas.

But there was nothing special about the Cabbage Patch Kid, nothing aesthetic anyway. They were neither as beautiful as Barbie nor as cuddly as a teddy bear. They had cloth bodies and molded plastic heads and were originally manufactured by that old video game giant, Coleco.* The dolls were homely, creepy looking, even. But they were pretty much everywhere in 1984 – on lunchboxes, on Saturday morning cartoons, and especially in the bedrooms of young and adolescent girls. On a personal note, as a Grade 6 student at St. Gerard’s School in southwest Calgary, I remember the shelf at the back of Mr. Lemire’s classroom being the de facto home for his female students’ Cabbage Kids. They would wait patiently back there, basking in the sunlight that streamed through the window, as Mr. Lemire taught us about Canadian history or how to do long division. Later, when the recess bell rung, the girls would grab their Cabbage Patch Kids and join the other Cabbage Patch Kid mommies in the schoolyard.

I’m of the opinion that what made those dolls so popular was that the manufacturer tapped into our adoption fantasies. How many of us – even those who had imminently happy childhoods – have not fantasized about being adopted, or just discovering that we were adopted? Suddenly, our lives would take on an air of mystery. We could bask in the glory of knowing we were chosen – singled out – and weren’t simply the byproduct of sexual reproduction.

Coleco or whoever it was acted on this. You didn’t “buy” a Cabbage Patch Kid. You “adopted” one. The Cabbage Patch Kids came with adoption certificates and had predetermined names; my sister had two and even today I can remember their names - Victoria Adel and Damon Darwin (how’s that for the power of marketing?) Thus you weren’t buying a doll, you were committing yourself to “parenthood.” The dolls became ever-present accoutrements for so many girls who invested them with more personality than any boy could breathe into He-Man or the most lifelike Star Wars action figure.

Kid Sister grew up and the Cabbage Patch Kids were banished from her bedroom and later found a home in a black garbage bag in the family’s cellar. I would think about them from time to time. I knew that the younger version of my sister would be horrified at such treatment, that she would honestly be concerned that they were cold or lonely or on the verge of suffocation. But in the end, logic beats emotion and the Cabbage Patch Kids became what they always were – a collection of cloth and plastic and paint and thread assembled in a factory somewhere to render an illusion of life.

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Literature, I am sure, is filled with protagonists who were adopted or are being raised by people who are not their birth parents. Off the top of my head I can think of Matilda, Harry Potter, Little Orphan Annie, James Bond, Tom Sawyer, Anne of Green Gables, Luke Skywalker. There must be something about the orphan that readers find enduring. Perhaps that’s because happiness, which is supposed to be what life is all about when you come from a nuclear family, just doesn’t make very good reading.

And now we know why the Family Circus was only a one panel cartoon. That’s all we could take.**

 

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·       *An interesting note: Coleco is short for Connecticut Leather Company, which just goes to show how a company can change direction over the years without changing its name.

 **Now that I think about it, cartoons seem to be a safe haven for the nuclear family. Think Peanuts, Calvin and Hobbes, Simpsons, For Better or For Worse