Guest Blog From Jackie - Day of Ani's Birth

Ani loves his Birthday. It is a great pleasure for me to share with him his delight and glee over the day of his birth. To be with Ani is to be given the gift of unabashed pleasure and fun as a child feels these things.

We can only wonder if Ani's mother and father felt some of this excitement and anticipation over his impending birth, but I have the feeling that they did. I came to know Ani's father from 2002-2006 and I spent quite a bit of time with him. He had a great respect for relationships but also some fear of them. As I came to learn more about Ani's father's family history, I understood more about the complexities of the Chosa family. I do not believe that Ben would have given a son his own name if he didn't intend to raise him. There is love and pride, promise and anticipation, in the act of giving his name to his son. And Ben was capable of huge amounts of these things. He was a man of very deep feeling.

From everything I have heard about Ani's mother, Betty, she was a very fun-loving and loving person. She also had a very complicated family history from what I know of it. It will be important to get more information about Ani's mother before relatives who store this information are no longer with us. Ani's mother Betty was her mother's oldest child. At some point, Betty lived with her grandmother and was adopted by her at age 14. At this time, Betty changed her last name to be the same as her grandmother's.

When Ben and Betty met in Chicago, they were not teenagers. Betty was 29 and Ben was 36. Betty had already had 7 (or 9?) other children before Ani. This was at least her 8th pregnancy. Modern science tells us that the mother's emotions create a chemical bath that passes through the placenta. In that way, the baby feels at a physiological level what his mother feels. If the mother is calm and peaceful, the baby's nervous system grows in an environment of different hormones and chemicals than if the mother is under stress. Ani's experience of family starts here, with a combination of genes, family history, culture, health, and intimate body states as he grew inside of his mother for 9 months, listening to his father's voice. Ani has a basic knowledge of what it means to be loved, and so I believe that joy was in Ani's mother's heart as she waited for her 8th child to be born. Perhaps there was also uncertainty at times.

Ani was born at 7:17 PM on Christmas Eve in 1966 at Cook County Hospital in Chicago, Illinois, named by his parents Ben Chosa, Jr. On his birth certificate it states that parents lived at 4131 N. Sheridan Road, that his father was a mover from "Laflambeau, Wis," age 41, and that his mother, Betty Marie Pierce Chosa, age 29, was born in Neopit, Wis.

This information is not available to many children and adults who were adopted. Ani was able to obtain it with the help of an attorney in 2002. This original birth certificate is an incredibly precious document. I would like to thank Attorney Michael Edmonds for helping us to obtain it and Jacy Boldebuck of the Adoption Search Program in Madison, Wisconsin, who sent Michael Edmonds the adoption file. We were told that the county who took custody of him in 1967 might have more records. So we then contacted Vilas County and after getting a court order - which was not a difficult process. After they got the court order, they looked in their basement and found his record on microfilm there. They printed it out and sent it to us and that file had the orginal birth certificate in it. We would like to thank Beth Moore at Vilas County for helping us to get the Vilas County records.

As I have learned first hand about Ani's experiences with family, I realize that I take family for granted. I take the fact that I know my mother and father for granted. Family members have repeated the story of my birth to me many times on my birthday. I take for granted the feelings that I store in my body that create my assumptions about permanency and security and who I am. It is difficult to realize that my beliefs and assumptions come from these experiences that shaped my world view from infancy through adulthood...and that my experience is just not true for Ani. I often state things about "the way life is" with such certainty that I must sound incredibly naive or superior-sounding to Ani. What must he think when he hears these unintended assumptions about parenting and family as if they are the only way life happens...and yet they exclude his experience entirely?

I was taught to "feel sorry for" children who didn't grow up like me. As a child, I sensed that there was something disrespectful, arrogant, ignorant, and downright dangerous about that teaching, yet I think that I was an unusual child. Aren't we wired to learn our culture's way of doing things so that we can succeed in it? And so wouldn't adoptive parents naturally try to teach their children how to succeed and give them the best they know? Yet, how this wiring must get confused and criss-crossed when a child is taken out of his own culture and raised by strangers who don't share his DNA, his instincts, his language, his history, or his culture! There was little or no education for adoptive parents in 1968 about raising children from another culture.

In 2002, Ani learned who his parents are and was told the story of his birth. During a visit in the prison visiting room, Ani's father told him the story of his 3 children. "I always said that you (Ben Jr.) were my Christmas present, Linda was my birthday present (born near his birthday), and Barbara was my turkey (born on Thanksgiving)." We all laughed at the family joke. I can still hear him saying that and it is a glorious memory.

In his last post about family, Ani said he can never make up for what he lost. The loss sits there, huge, and yet there are good things too. Families are never perfect. But Ani has one. In fact, for better or worse, he has four - his father's family in Lac du Flambeau, his mother's family in the Menomonee nation, his adoptive family, and now my family.

This is Ani's story.

Jackie