What can I say about music as it relates to my life as a transracial adoptee? What can I say about the freedom and saving effects that it has had on my soul for the past thirty-plus years? I believe that words can only do so years of repressed anger and pain. By the pain of adoption, I could have easily been a killer, dead or in jail without music. Music is a weapon. Music is a friend. Music is a lover. Music is there to the end.
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IN THE VERY BEGINNING
I was born February of 1983 when a man with the number of the beast was president. Somewhere in Detroit, my first memory of life was me being spanked in a small rectangular kitchen that housed the smell of an old radiator. Apparently I liked to urinate in my diaper so it warranted constant spankings by a black woman in her thirties. I remember hunger and being accompanied by a little black girl that moved around in a walker. Unfortunately, violence and hunger was all I knew in my young life, so I remember pushing that same little girl down a flight of stairs to the basement.

I have little memory of the foster homes that I stayed in. I remember black people with a cold indifference and me playing with toys alone. Apparently I was malnourished and very sick when my current Irish Catholic adoptive family had fostered me. I had acquired cough related asthma and was taking Depakote for seizures which had unknown origins.  I don’t remember any of the social workers or other children in the past foster homes or my biological mother. I remember a black man that may have been my biological father, holding me up and giving me a kiss on the lips with cigarette breath that drained out all of the oxygen from my lungs.

My current adoptive family had fostered me and other children in a nice suburban home that took me out of my element. I grew a liking towards the foster family’s mother, father and natural sons. The youngest son played John Lennon’s Imagine on the piano and it was very soothing. The music and constant medicine from my foster mother had made me healthier because I was so weak that I could barely lift my arms. The music I heard was from an old upright spinet piano, a piano that was to be my practicing companion for my musical climb.
After fostering me for a time, the foster family decided to adopt me but the state had other plans. I was forcefully removed from the home and taken back to Detroit where I went into the deepest depression. (See the movie “Losing Isaiah” but I was never reunited with my biological mother) 

My adoptive family sued the state and I was returned to the home a traumatized and psychologically severed child. (Because of such events, we were invited to be on the Oprah Winfrey show, 1985.) I had acted out on numerous occasions from unconsciously trying to drown and harm my neighborhood friend, to lighting things on fire. I also had a repressed attraction to men that I did not understand.
As the years went by, I learned to brutalize the piano with my favorite cousin as young kids do. At seven years old, I accidentally played a chord and loved the way it sounded. 

My adoptive family would go to Catholic mass and I would come home and play the hymns on the piano from memory. Seeing that I had talent, my adoptive family signed me up for piano lessons and I found it irritating and unnecessary to read music. My childhood friends and I would play video games and I would play the themes on the piano.

Growing up, there were a lot of emotions and feelings that I was too scared or shamed into not exploring. I was taken to different counselors but didn’t know what to tell them. I found that I could play the piano while my adoptive parents drank tea, and I felt a whole lot better. As the years went by, totally developmentally delayed and ignoring any adoption feelings or sexual feelings towards men, I lived life and faced racism as normally as I knew how. I had trust issues and hated black people along with women in general. I went to an all white grade school, went to a predominately black high school and moved back to a majority white high school. Not only was I facing issues of self love and acceptance, I was ignoring the trauma I had suffered as a young child.

Music healed me before I knew what it was doing. The piano was my spiritual adviser, doctor and counselor through my college years and up to now. With my childhood friends nowhere to be found, my adoptive mother passing, my adoptive father voting for Trump, and my adoptive family’s refusal to take my side over issues of race or to acknowledge racism at all. Music and the piano have reached and continue to reach damaged parts of my being that no other person could have.

See 'Loosing Isaiah' Movie Trailer 

​An African-American baby, abandoned by his crack addicted mother is adopted by a white social worker and her husband. Several years later, the baby's mother finds out her son is not dead, as she thought before and goes to court to get him back.
Country: USA  |  Language:  English
Release Date:  17 March 1995 (USA) 
Also Known As:  Les chemins de l'amour