Betts wasn’t the only Dodger making game-changing defensive plays in the NLCS. With the Braves leading 3–2 in Game 7 wit

There is a scene where we see Beth’s father has remarried and had another child — her half sibling. This moment hit hard for me. I’ve spent a whole life separated from 6 siblings I never knew I had until recently. One of them died 8 years ago, so I will never get a chance to know him. Perhaps it was ‘for the best’ that I was not raised by my biological parents, but that does not make it right that I was never allowed to know my brothers and sisters, or that our children — first cousins — might never know each other if not for DNA testing and my own obsessiveness. Likewise, there are aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents that I lost in my adoption, and they lost me. I wondered, while watching this series, how many of those connections Beth had lost and if she’d ever re-establish them.,Beth is placed in an orphanage until she is adopted by a couple when she is roughly 13-years-old. It is during her stay in the orphanage where she discovers chess. The game is taught to her by a janitor, Mr. Scheibel, who is no slouch at the game himself. So when Beth beats him after only playing for a short while, he knows she is something special. For the rest of the series, he remains a constant source of behind-the-scenes support for her.,For a third straight game in the NLCS, Betts came up with a vital defensive play. His last was a robbery of a would-be home run from Freddie Freeman. The Dodgers trailed 3–2 at the time in a game they won 4–3 to go to the World Series.,Another thing the series depicted accurately that I have yet to see discussed is adoption. Not because it portrayed adoption as a wonderful solution to a supposed social dilemma, nor because it celebrated adoptive families as unique and wonderful. Quite the contrary. The Queen’s Gambit showcased the complexity of adoption from the adoptee’s perspective, something rarely, if ever done in popular film. The timing could not have been more perfect either, as we are smack in the middle of National Adoption Awareness Month (NAAM), a month that has become dominated by adoptive parents sharing how amazing adoption has been for them, with hardly any voice given to the children adoption is supposed to benefit.,In the orphanage, Beth also befriends Jolene, an outspoken and independent girl who happens to be black. Jolene never gets adopted. Here’s another hard truth depicted accurately by the series: white children are more likely to get adopted than non-white, but in terms of adoption fees, white children are far more expensive. Jolene gets angry when Beth gets adopted and steals her favorite chess book. But she hangs onto it and eventually returns it to Beth at the end of the series.,The Queen’s Gambit does not sugarcoat Beth’s experience as an adoptee. While it is easy to get swept up in her genius and fame — I found myself idealizing her so often in the show — even her prodigious chess-playing does not come without great cost. This is what so many adoptees want you to know about adoption. For all its supposed greatness and happy family-building, adoption is, fundamentally, a great loss.,This story focusses on new addition about customising your git with fancy badges, connect with me icons, dynamically include your blogs sourcing from the parent website, include your youtube channel videos and update changes, your git stats, your git recent activity and you could include the song that you are listening in spotify. Awesome isn’t it? Let’s go over how to do it.,The Dodgers swept the Padres in the NLDS, but who knows what would’ve happened without this home run-robbing grab from Bellinger on Fernando Tatis Jr. Pandemonium ensued after Bellinger prevented what would’ve been a go-ahead run in a 6–5 win.,Another important thing that happens to Beth while in the orphanage is she becomes addicted to the tranquilizers that the girls are given to help them sleep at night. The show dramatizes the effects of these pills, with Beth hallucinating chess pieces on the ceiling at night. She becomes addicted, not so much to the pills, but to the effects the pills have on her. They flood her mind with visions of strategic gameplay. Chess becomes her escape. The pills are a vehicle for that escape. This is an overwhelmingly common theme with adoptees. We are far more likely to suffer from addiction problems in life.,As researchers have noted, part of the strong correlation between adoption and addiction stems from the trauma adoptees face. Early maternal separation, for instance, disrupts the normal biological bonding process and sets an infant’s autonomic nervous system into a dysregulated and often permanent fight or flight state. In The Queen’s Gambit, Beth grows up for the first few years with her mom, so she is not plagued by the preverbal trauma infant adoptees undergo, but her life is depicted as traumatic all the same. Her mother attempts a murder-suicide, but Beth survives, and she revisits this memory throughout the series, seemingly trying to confront the harsh reality that the woman who should have protected her most in life tried to kill her.,Female empowerment is what most critics have focused on when they discuss the series, and of course, many chess players have weighed in on the accuracy of the games depicted. As Jennifer Shahade, two-time U.S. Chess Champion notes, she was not expecting complete accuracy and was more interested in the effect the show might have — namely, drawing more women and girls to chess, which so far, seems to be happening. However, as she notes, since Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini were asked to consult on the series, it turned out to be extremely realistic.,For a third straight game in the NLCS, Betts came up with a vital defensive play. His last was a robbery of a would-be home run from Freddie Freeman. The Dodgers trailed 3–2 at the time in a game they won 4–3 to go to the World Series.,When Beth is 8-years-old, her mom dies, leaving her orphaned. However, she is not technically orphaned, and we learn later that her father is alive, but has refused to take responsibility for her. It turns out many adoptees are merely “paper orphans” and adoption agencies often make it seem like they are truly without parents or extended family to care for them, when this is far from the case.,Beth’s character embodies so much of these ambivalent identities as she struggles to figure out who she is in a world where it never seems she fully belongs. She was not completely ‘at home’ with her biological mother, and her time in the orphanage is no different. Perhaps the most compelling depiction of her attempts to blend in while also forging her own identity is seen in her life with her adopted mother. The filmmakers did an exquisite job of portraying the entire relationship in this uncomfortably contrived manner. On the one hand, it is clear Beth loves her adoptive mother, but on the other, she does not relate to her at all. There are glimmers of genuine love from her adoptive mother as well, but there are also clear indicators of narcissism and exploitation of Beth’s gift for chess. Her adoptive mother capitalizes on Beth’s abilities and uses them to jet set around the world with Beth for tournaments, to drink fancy alcohol, and have affairs with mysterious men. Despite all of this, when her adoptive mother dies, the undeniable truth that this is yet another traumatic moment for Beth is made clear. She keeps her adoptive mother’s robe, and even sets it up on the bed, so when she returns from having lost several speed chess games against Benny Watts, she can fall into the robe and cry in its arms, like she would have done before her adoptive mother’s death. Beth even wears this robe on several occasions, seemingly trying to invoke her adoptive mother’s personality. Again, the symbolism of such moments in terms of the adoptee experience is remarkable. So many of us adoptees cloak ourselves in superficial identities because we are too scared to dig inside and find our own voices and speak our truths. We might get abandoned all over again if we do that.,While it’s not a perfect analogy, the sense of betrayal many adoptees feel regarding their biological family is strikingly similar to how Beth grapples with her mom’s role in her life. It doesn’t matter if giving us away was truly done in the hopes that we could live a better life. One of the pervasive themes you will hear if you sit down and listen to adoptees is that we inhabit this ambivalence with regards to the parent figures in our lives. We are told we are chosen, but we know we were not chosen by the people our infant selves desperately wanted. We are told we were loved so much by our biological parents that they gave us away to strangers. We are told our birth mother did the most selfless thing by relinquishing us, so we infer that choosing to parent your own child is selfish. We live these mixed messages our whole lives. No wonder so many adoptees have identity issues.