Novice film maker tells An Adoption Story

Kelly Hansen

It's always thrilling when someone not a first mother or an adoptee gets it. Kelly Hansen, a high-tech professional in Portland, Oregon not only got it, she turned what she knew into a film.

Kelly was looking for a subject for a film she planned to make as part of an amateur video group.  She happened upon Ann Fessler's compelling 2006 work The Girls Who Went Away which profiles mothers who lost their children to adoption in the decades before Roe v. Wade. 

Kelly wanted to learn more history of first mothers sought them through Concerned United Birthparents. She learned that many women are still manipulated into relinquishing their babies. Eventually she connected with Holly and Hannah, a reunited mother and daughter, and me. In the

Jane

course of the film--only 12 minutes long--myths are shattered. I do a brief intro about adoption, then and now. Then we meet Hannah, a young woman who contacted her mother on Facebook while still a teenager. She met her mother, her mother's husband, and three siblings. Two years later she made the difficult but right decision for her to move in with her new-found family.

Like most of us, when I see a film of myself, I cringe. Kelly says I did great but I think I should have talked more clearly, explained things better, sat straighter. But then I think hey, I did it, maybe made a small contribution to letting people know about the dark side of adoption.

Here's the video on YouTube.  An Adoption Story.  Please pass it along!--jane

PS What's with my right eye? It was removed twenty years ago because I had a tumor attached to the blood vessels which fed my eye. The doctors tried to remove the tumor several times but were not able to and thought it would become malignant. I make the patches myself in various colors so I can  coordinate them with what I am wearing. I do have a false eye sitting in my bathroom cabinet. It doesn't look real because I have no eyelid and the false eye doesn't move. It's held in with glue and always in danger of falling off. It's good for Halloween, though.