Stone Walls
An Ugly Duckling Story: An adoptee’s search for identity, “family,” and understanding
by Sandra Patricia

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Sandra Patricia grew up unwanted and unloved, only to become pregnant and give a daughter up for adoption. A few months later, Sandra is horrified to discover that she was adopted specifically to keep her adoptive parents from divorcing. Their unhappy and stressful marriage and family life fed years of depression, stress in Sandra’s own marriage, and alcoholism. When Sandra flees her husband and children and subsequently crashes her car, she is forced to face her addiction. As her life and marriage turn around through sobriety, she rebuilds her life, pursuing a university education and searching both for her own birth family and the daughter she gave up. Sandra’s thirty-five-year search reveals power struggles with social service agencies, an outdated and barbaric social service system—both within Manitoba and throughout Canada—and a web of secrets, lies, and deception. Stone Walls relates to all adoptees and birth families who search for connection and are denied relationships due to the outdated and cruel laws and practices of social service agencies and their personnel.

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Sandra Patricia studied adoption issues at university and seeks to educate people about some of the difficulties in adoption, adoptee struggles with identity, and the importance of sobriety. She lived the experience of being an adoptee, of abuse in an adoptive family, and of giving a child up for adoption. She lived with alcoholism and learned sobriety. She lived the experience of getting an education and of searching for and being denied information and connection. Sandra has learned that, ultimately, happiness and identity do not come from family but from within. She is firm in the belief that her life is not a theory; it is a lived experience. She lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

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Contributors

Author

Sandra Patricia

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