Is EastEnders About to Insult Adoptive Parents Now?

The absolute ignorance of some people is still difficult to fathom.

I know not everyone in the country has had an experience with adoptive children or adoptive parents, but a little bit of common sense in dealing with an issue concerning adoption, as well as a big dollop of sensitivity, wouldn't go amiss.

EastEnders is selling short adoptive parents again, treating them as if they don't matter.

Their first instance in doing so was in the case of drippy Danielle, she of the Brummie woiiiiiinnnne, who showed up four years ago tracking down Ronnie Mitchell, who was her birth mother.

I get the picture that Danielle hoped to have Ronnie acknowledge her, then spend the rest of her life mooching about Albert Square and going to the park with Ronnie to have ice cream. I also understand that Danielle's adoptive mother had just died, and maybe she did feel the need just to meet her birth mother; but she seemed to be doing so at the expense of her adoptive father, who was still alive, and her brother.

She hadn't been mistreated as a child. In fact, she'd been cherished and loved. Her dad even came to Walford, begging her to return home.

I don't doubt there are adoptees who effect this sort of behaviour, and those who do are callous and shallow, especially if they have adoptive parents who've given them nothing but love and affection. But to present this as the norm is as stupid and misguided as the misinformation the show propagated with Martin and Sonia miraculously having the baby they gave up for adoption  restored to them six years later.

Now we have the Saga of Ava the Rava and Cora the Bora.

Some numpties on Digital Spy are incensed that Ava and Cora haven't bonded yet.

Why would they?

For the past 48 years, Ava has been the much-loved daughter of a middle-class white couple from Surbiton. That's certainly her backstory and the way she was presented, when she was introduced. She even stated that her parents gave her the utmost love and all the best opportunities, and she sounded as middle-class as they were supposed to be. 

Whoever adopted her had more love, courage and fortitude than the ineffectual drunk of a birth mother with whom she's now been lumbered. All very well and good to speak of how cute a baby was after the fact; but Cora (who probably conceived Ava whilst drunk as a skunk) didn't have the courage to front her community with a bi-racial daughter.

Although Five-Episode Original Ava seems to have been run down-market and made common as muck, speaking like a guttersnipe complete with bad grammar - a real inspiration to the children she's inspiring to better themselves, living on a council estate whilst earning £65k a year (some might say she's taking subsidised housing away from the deserving poor) and raising a son, whom she's obviously not been arsed to encourage to speak correctly and intelligibly, she would still be horrified at the freak show otherwise known as her birth family.

Just last week, she mentioned twice, and very favourably, the help her adoptive family had given her when she was weaning Dexter off his gangabanga fetish, so relatives must still be about. It's even reasonable that both her mother and father are still alive. To thing that she might even remotely bond with Cora is insulting to the woman's adoptive parents.

It's even more insulting that she's taken to referring to Cora as Dexter's "nan," when she isn't. Dexter has a nan already, whose helped him out of trouble, rather than a nan with an ASBO, who'll encourage him to do more.

And if Lorraine Newman pursues this path showing yet another adoptee throwing aside a lifetime of love and good upbringing, just to feed her fetish of creating rainbow coalition families full of cosy love and varied ethnicities all for the benefit of being politically correct, then she needs to be taken out and slapped.

In point of fact, I don't know what's worse -the phony and condescending concern Tanya shows for Ava, which is the height of white privilege bordering on almost considering Ava and Dexter to be their pet negroes or the pushy behaviour of Cora, almost demanding that by forcing her presence on this woman even more will force her to bond. Neither Ava nor these women can even love each other at the moment; they're strangers.

In fact the most realistic "reunion" came a couple of years ago, when Billy and Julie met their heretofore unknown granddaughter, Lola. Julie was brutally honest in telling Billy that not only did she not even know Lola, she didn't like what she'd gotten to know of her.

I could actually and realistically see Ava reacting that way. If she's got any common sense, the sort of which she showed Bianca the Branning Village Idiot last week, she'd be well advised to keep her son, who's borderline stupid, away from the clutches of his newly-discovered too-cool-for-school ASBO Granny.

Oh, and by the way, I know a fair bit about adoptees meeting birth parents and being distinctly underwhelmed, as I'm married to an adoptee.