A Birthmother's Fears of Reunion

Unlike Lorraine and Linda, I am a birth mother who can fathom the idea of rejecting our children which I did--before Megan, the daughter I surrendered to adoption, and I connected in 1997. I became pregnant in February, 1966 when I was 23 and living in Fairbanks, Alaska. I had grown up in Chicago and had gone to Alaska in 1960 to attend college thanks to the generosity of my uncle, my deceased father’s older brother who lived there with his wife.

I went to San Francisco in September and Megan was born there in November. She was placed in a foster home and I struggled for a month about what to do. Giving my baby to strangers was wrong but when I tried to visual how to keep my baby, I stared into a blank wall. I finally signed the paper but I told myself our separation would be for only 18 years. I knew that records would be closed but I figured I would go to law school, learn how to beat the system, and find her when she turned 18. By making this promise, I was able to rationalize abandoning my newborn daughter.

While I was in the hospital after Megan was born, an attorney who had been referred by a doctor I had seen who handled private adoptions came to my bedside. The attorney placed babies with Mormon families and knew a Mormon family in Idaho that wanted a baby girl. Idaho and Mormons did not appeal to me and I sent the attorney away.

After I signed the surrender paper at the San Francisco County Social Services Department which served as the adoption agency, the social worker asked me about religious preference, telling me that, while they could not guarantee any religion, my preference would be respected. I had been raised in a liberal Protestant church but I was not religious. I preferred either a non religious family or a liberal Protestant one. However, if it was necessary to give my baby a good home, a Jewish or Catholic family was okay. Remembering the attorney and the Idaho Mormons, I added as an afterthought that that I did not want my daughter to go a family with a non-mainstream religion like Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Seventh Day Adventists. I thought it was unlikely this would happen – after all, I was in ultra-liberal San Francisco. I considered Mormons and the rest as kind of loony. I had known some Mormons in college and they didn’t even drink Coca-cola. One had tricked me into going to a service of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) church by telling me we were going to a meeting which would be beneficial to me. The social worker and I crafted a statement containing my preference for either no religion or a mainstream religion and specifically stating my objection to Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-Day Adventists. Over the years as I learned more about the LDS Church (its racism and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment), I thought “at least I didn’t let my baby be raised by Mormons.”

I graduated from law school four years later. When 1984 came around, I was living in Salem, Oregon; I had a good job as an administrator for the State of Oregon, was married, and had three more daughters. I decided to put off my search until Megan was 21 telling myself 18 was really too young. While my husband knew that I had placed a baby for adoption, we had not talked about it since the day before our wedding in 1968. My daughters knew nothing about this older sister. In fact the only people close to me besides my husband who knew anything were my now deceased uncle’s widow, a few friends, and of course Megan’s birth father, all of whom lived in Fairbanks, far enough away that I felt secure that my secret would not reach Oregon.

In March of 1987, I came home one evening and my husband told me that my aunt in Fairbanks had called telling him a young girl in Utah or at Brigham Young University, I forget which, was looking for me. My husband had written the girl’s name and phone number on a napkin. I barely looked at the napkin and I did not learn her name for more than ten years. I thought immediately that the caller might be, probably was, my daughter. I refer to her now as my daughter but until we united I always thought of my first born as “the baby.”

I was stunned, terrified. I had heard of adoptees searching but not this young; she was barely 20. I called my aunt reluctantly; I did not want to know anything about this girl in Utah. My aunt told me that she had refused to give the girl my name and phone number. “Did I do the right thing” she asked. “Yes.” I assured her. She said something to the effect that since you have the information, I don’t need to send this. Later I learned that Megan had sent my aunt a letter and I think that’s what my aunt was referring to. At the time, I would have agreed to anything. I wanted to get off the phone. My aunt is a good person but we were not close and I did not like her being involved in my personal life. I was also angry that she had passed along information to my husband instead of waiting until she could talk to me. Since the young woman who called lived in Utah, she was probably a Mormon. I rationalized that it could not be my daughter. It did not occur to me that the social worker might have gone against my wishes.

My husband and I were going out of town for a conference in a few days. I decided not to think about the call and the name on the napkin until we returned and I didn’t. When we came home, I could not find the napkin. My mother-in-law had come to stay with our daughters; she had thrown the napkin away while tidying up. I was relieved.

I feared meeting my birth daughter. She became a ghost, haunting me, ready to strike. For the next few weeks I jumped when the phone rang or someone came to the door. A few months later as I was doing “spring house cleaning,” going through drawers and closets, throwing out the worn, the useless, and the meaningless, I came upon a picture of me taken a few days before Megan was born and the identifying bracelet put on my wrist right after she was born. I had saved these objects for 20 years because it was all that I had of her. I cut them up and threw them away to keep the ghost from returning.

What was I afraid of? Unlike many birthmothers, I was never afraid that people would find out I had sex without being married. I never thought that was wrong. I was afraid of people learning that my life had been out of control, that I had failed myself and my family by getting pregnant, that I was not who I pretended to be: competent, professional, knowledgeable.

My mother died in July of 1988. Death brings to us a need to strengthen the bonds with remaining family members. I began to feel Megan’s absence acutely. My mother never knew about her and never would. I begin thinking about conducting a secret search. I did not think of calling my aunt to ask for the name of the young woman who had called a year and a half earlier. It doesn’t make sense but I had completely blocked out this phone call.

That winter, I came across Florence Fisher’s The Search for Anna Fisher on a table at the library. I snuck to the back of the stacks and read the book in one sitting. It included information about ALMA (Adoptees Liberation Movement Association) which Fisher had founded. I sent in the membership fee and reunion registry information with a note asking that any correspondence be in a plain envelope. Several weeks later I began receiving newsletters with words like adoption, reunion, search spread all over the front page in big letters. I cancelled my membership. Sometime later I received a call inviting me to an ALMA meeting in Salem. I hung up on the caller. I was upset that someone, perhaps someone I knew, a neighbor, a co-worker, a parent at my children’s school, knew my secret.

My aunt, the same aunt, called again. I remember it being in late 1990. She told me a woman was looking for me who said she knew me in college. She gave me the name but it meant nothing. I told her I did not know the woman and asked her not to give the woman my phone number. Again I was terrified. Later I learned that Megan had contacted my aunt in 1991 asking for my number which my aunt refused to give her. That may have been the call that I remember receiving in 1990.

As time went on, I thought more and more about searching. I registered with AOL’s search registry which resulted in a slew of emails from private investigators offering to search for a fee. I thought of writing to the adoption agency in San Francisco but I was afraid my daughters would see the envelope when the agency wrote back. I checked into renting a post office box so that I could keep my correspondence secret and learned that the post office would not rent boxes to people with street addresses.

I can’t explain my thinking because it doesn’t make any sense. On the one hand there was this ghost which if it appeared would change my life for the worse, damaging my relationship with my husband and children, adversely affecting my career, and diminishing my image in the community. I did not want to be seen as a woman who could not manage her life, who at 23 was less rational than a 16 year old in the back seat of a Ford tussling with the high school quarterback. In failing to respond to Megan’s overtures, I did not even consider that I was rejecting her; I deluded myself into thinking that I could excise a part of my life that never should have happened.

On the other hand there was this baby out there somewhere with whom I desperately wanted a relationship in order to restore a missing part of my life. I hid from the ghost and feebly pursued the baby. What I wanted – and needed – was the ability to control the timing and pace of a reunion.

On November 18, 1997, the day after Megan’s 31st birthday my aunt called for the third time and told me my daughter had called and had written again. This was the first time she referred to the caller as “your daughter.” My aunt indicated she was tired of dealing with this woman. I told her I would take care of it and asked her to forward Megan’s letter. Although in retrospect it would be easy to criticize my aunt for not passing along me Megan’s letters or pressing me to contact her. I believe that my aunt meant well. She was trying to protect me. I’m sure she assumed as many do today that I did not want contact. I also think that she had an irrational fear that the story of my pregnancy would be circulated again in Fairbanks which somehow might occur if she cooperated with my daughter. She and my uncle were prominent in Alaska and very concerned about scandal when I became pregnant. Alaska is a dull place for the most part, particularly in winter. The most interesting goings on tend to be the negative, who ran off with who’s husband, who crashed his car while driving drunk, and so on. My aunt was so fearful of possible scandal that she waited until she took a trip to Seattle a few days later to mail Megan’s letter. Apparently she feared someone at the Fairbanks post office would see the envelope and know what was in it.

I could focus on nothing while I waited for Megan’s letter. One minute I wanted to jump off a bridge. The next minute I was euphoric. I knew my life was about to change. While I had read an occasional newspaper article about reunions and The Search for Anna Fisher, I knew little about the search movement or why adoptees searched. I knew nothing about AAC, Origins, Bastard Nation, the local Oregon support group, the International Soundex Reunion Registry, the fight for open records, Lorraine’s memoir Birthmark, Betty Jean Lifton's writings, or any of the other “books." I knew of CUB (Concerned United Birthparents) only through adoptive mother Lucinda Franks’ biased and mean 1993 New Yorker article, “The War for Baby Clausen” about DeBoer case. With work and three daughters I did not have time for morning news shows or daytime talk shows. I barely knew who Phil Donahue was. I prepared to call Megan by watching Secrets and Lies, a 1996 British film about a mother/daughter reunion.

I called Megan on November 24, anticipating the conversation would last less than 15 minutes. It lasted two hours. It was an awkward conversation, however. Megan had a lot of information and misinformation from the adoption agency and I was on the defensive much of time. I learned she was indeed a Mormon to which I expressed my displeasure. I later learned that the social worker had simply written “no Jehovah Witness” on my file. So much for the carefully crafted statement.

Megan told me about her search. In the fall of 1986 when she was 19, she obtained her non-identifying information from the adoption agency. It was so specific that she was able to determine her father's name, where he lived, and my maiden name. She wrote her father. He wrote back (against the wishes of his wife) giving her some information about himself and the name of my aunt who he knew was aware of Megan’s birth. He asked her not to contact him again.

Megan did not tell my aunt who she was, only that she was a young woman in Utah. She believed that if she told my aunt who she was and my aunt told me, I would be less likely to call her. The opposite was true. If I had known who Megan was I would have been more likely to have called because I could not have pretended I did not know who called. Over the years Megan contacted my aunt several more times, keeping her informed of her address in case I should ask for it. My aunt soon realized, if she had not known at the beginning, who this woman was. Several times my aunt told her that I did not want anything to do with her. Learning from some of our readers who have not had contact with their first mothers, I can only imagine how much this must have hurt her.

In the fall of 1997, Megan was living near Chicago where her husband was going to graduate school. He brought home The Joy Luck Club and Tender Mercies as part of a class assignment. These movies about reunion with lost children brought her to tears. Encouraged by some church members, she considered searching again. Although the LDS church discourages searches, it has no formal position against it. Megan prayed to God for guidance. She signed on to alt.adoption, a former newsnet group, and met a birthmother online who encouraged her to search again and be more forceful in her telephone conversations. Megan wrote and called my aunt once more. She also called her father. He was now divorced and agreed to meet her at his home in California where he had moved from Fairbanks several years earlier.

Megan also knew nothing about the search movement. If she had obtained help from a search group, she probably would have been able to find me without going through my aunt. If Megan had contacted me herself I believe I would have responded positively.

I’ve met adoptees who think they can soften the blow on their birthmother by asking a relative (even her husband!) to be a “go between.” A big mistake, I tell them. “Reunion is between you and your mother. Don’t let anyone else, who, for all you know might be your mother’s enemy, get between you.” I suspect that the reason that some confidential intermediaries claim a low reunion rate (fifty percent some assert) is that mothers become angry that a stranger knows their secret. They react negatively and the CI uses that to confirm what the CI believes, that mothers don't want contact. The best practice is for states to give adopted persons their original birth certificates and leave the search to them. Unfortunately this is only possible in six states.

Next: Telling my family, coming out in a full-page newspaper ad for Ballot Measure 58.

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bear with us, this is a technical problem

Most Birth/First Mothers Want Contact but still the secrecy lingers on

How many mothers reject contact? It's a question that dogs us all involved in adoption reform, because when we lobby for open records for adopted people, we always hear ad nauseum about the first/birth mother in the closet who will drive her car in the river if she is "found out." And we know from our friends in the blogosphere, such as Triona and Ungrateful Little Bastard, that refusal for contact does happen!

It is hard for we first mothers to even imagine turning away--well, I was a searcher mother, so that was never an issue; Linda and Jane were sought by their daughters. So since none of us can even fathom the thought of rejecting our children, we wondered how many first mothers really want to stay in the closet. Who are these women? We were prodded in our quest, we admit, by a call from the Evan B. Donaldson Institute because they are updating their white paper For the Records: Restoring a Legal Right for Adult Adoptees.

A while back we heard from Jacy Boldebuck in Wisconsin where she does searches for the state for adoptees past eighteen, that she gets approximately a 50 percent refusal rate! Is there something in the water in Wisconsin that leads to these kinds of acts of random evil? Is there something they say to the mothers to prevent them from wanting contact? What is going on? From Indiana, I have a report of 70 percent acceptance rate; 30 percent refusal.

I found this hard to believe because it is so wholly off from everything else I have heard from sea to shining sea--as well as what kinds of statistics we can find. While these are anecdotal reports, here's what I've been hearing:

Confidential intermediary Linda Burns (read more at link) from Texas (pictured holding a sign on the right), said that she had done about a thousand searches and "finds" over the years, and in the end, she had no refusals to contact. A few reluctant at first, but in the end, no refusals in the end.

To find out more, I sent out a request on Adoption News Service to confidential intermediaries or anyone who does searches and asked about their refusal rate. The reaction was heart-warming:
from Searchquestamerica: a 92 percent acceptance.
Birth mother Marilyn Waugh in Kansas (where the records have never been sealed) says she does between 400-500 searches a year, and has done them for the past 18 years, and she finds about five women a year (approximately one percent) who do not want contact and refuse information.
Joe Collins, searcher extraordinaire based in New Jersey, says he has done about 2,500 searches and estimates the refusal rate at two percent.
And from Tina Peddie in California comes this response:

I have been an adoption search consultant, like I said, for over 25 yrs.... after being reunited with my son for 26 yrs .... and most of my people..my clients (who many I consider 'friends' as well.... ), ask me to make the initial phone call, esp the adoptees who are petrified to make that initial phone call to their birthmothers - even tho i talk with them at length and encourage them to make the call if they possibly CAN ...but most are too afraid to ... so I do it ... and I do believe that having an understanding, empathetic birthmother on the phone with them DOES HELP THEM, once they get thru the first few minutes ... even tho MOST are very happy to hear that their adult child is wanting contact.

My experience (even if I wasn't a b/mom) still seems to be that the majority DO WANT contact! There are those FEW that might be hesitant at first who it DOES seem to help to have me, another b/mom on the phone to talk with about it, that by the end of the call, are okay and relaxed about it, and perfectly okay to having contact ....

And, as I said, in 25 yrs, I have only had 2 or 3 who never would have contact with their child at ALL - and they all had one or two things in common: they were all ELDERLY (older than the average birthmom being found) ... and tended to be the very religious ones. But mainly ELDERLY, like now in their late 70s or 80s!

It's heartbreaking because I KNOW it doesn't have to be that way ... and the birthmothers do not have to carry around that fear, guilt and shame, that I know is what keeps them apart. They just cannot deal with it. And two of these adoptees are males in their 40s/50s, and they are sad about it, but not angry, hurt yes, and feel sad for their birthmother, that she has to hold this secret still. (But after her death, they both want to seek out their siblings by this mother, and I will help them. I feel they have that right.) And I know that that most likely those siblings will feel badly for their mother, that she had to carry this burden all alone, and that she couldn't share it with her husband or children all those years. Sad.

I know a C.I. who is a birthmother, who does a good job - but I don't know that all do. I don't think they put as much INTO CONTACT as we do - or if they have the same empathy, or keep them on the phone as I do ... just to keep them on the phone, talking, or 'listening' - if a birthmom starts off hesitating, I at least try to keep her on the phone by telling her about the adoptee as much as I can, just to keep her on the phone, and telling her what I know about the adoptee, making the adoptee 'real' to her... and it always turns things around. I just don't think C.I.'s go quite that far. That's prob. why they don't have the same, high 'success rate.'

Thanks for what you are doing!

Take care,

God bless!

Tina

What is so sorrowful are the adoptees who are rejected, when it appears that with the right kind of contact, the closeted birth mother would find the courage to come out into the light, fess up to her spouse, her family, her friends if she chooses to and give the adopted person the sense of completeness that he or she lacks.

CORRECTION: There is more than one woman in New Jersey upset over being contacted by her daughter conceived during a rape. Both have become poster women for birth mother anonymity from their children: Kathleen Hoy Foley, of Chatsworth, who is photographed here, and a woman from Atlantic City, both birthmother wretchedaires, are the two in question. The Atlantic City woman, whose name is not being published in the newspapers (but read comments below--apparently her name is Renee Blackwell) is suing the State of New Jersey's Department of Youth and Family Services for a million dollars for the pain and sorrow caused by being contacted by her daughter. Though she received a letter stating that her daughter was looking for her, she did not respond, and months later, the daughter showed up after allegedly receiving her name from the state. Hmm...just wondering: The daughter could have found the woman's identity through other means...there are successful searchers.

As adoptee-rights advocate Pam Hasegawa has noted in newspaper reports, the woman could have gotten a a restraining order; instead she is suing for a million bucks. My heart aches for her daughter. For both daughters. Children of rape are wholly innocent and not responsible for their parents' actions.

It takes all kinds. What I think about these woman is not suitable for a family newspaper. Er, blog.-lorraine

Adoption and Lying: Adopted Syndrome or not?

Over the weekend I met up with an old friend, a therapist who facilitates groups of parents of troubled children, and while some of them are divorced parents, she mentioned that a fair number of them are adoptive parents. Another friend of ours sent their teenage son for a year to a school for problem kids, and the son reported that many, if not most of the kids there were adopted, or children of divorce. I won't go into the children of divorce issue here, but the statistics of trouble are there, among the adopted:

"The number of Adoptees in the adolescent and young-adult clinics and residential treatment centers is strikingly high. Doctors from the Yale Psychiatric Institute and other hospitals that take very sick adolescents have told me they are discovering that from one-quarter to one-third of their patients are adopted. A great many of these young people are in serious trouble with the law and are drug addicted. The girls show an added history of nymphomania and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, almost as if they were acting out the role of the "whore" mother. In fact, both sexes are experimenting with a series of identities that seem to be related to their fantasies about the biological parents."--Betty Jean Lifton, Lost & Found.

The daughter I surrendered to adoption had a great many emotional problems, but because she also had epilepsy, it was impossible to ferret out what was caused by the social and psychological trauma of being subject to frequent seizures, and what was caused by being relinquished by her natural mother. Yet one aspect of her personality that made it difficult--for both sets of parents, adoptive and (one-half) genetic--to deal with my daughter was her proclivity to lie. Christ, it is even hard to write this because I wanted to type "not tell the truth" because that somehow seemed gentler than come right out and admit how often and how easily Jane made up stories that were not true.

Some adopted people reading this may find it troubling, and so I want to stress right here, that not all adopted people have such a loose relationship with the truth as my daughter Jane did. But her proclivity to make up stories--all right, to lie--is not singular among the adopted population. Yet this facet of her personality made it extremely difficult to have a relationship with her that was not somewhat always on edge, somewhat removed. Because behind most of what she said lay the question: What is the truth? And in the end, her recognition of this perhaps is what finally let to her suicide.

From Hole in My Heart, a memoir of grief, adoption, sorrow and suicide
by Lorraine Dusky
copyright 2009

....honesty was often in short supply when you spoke to Jane. She bent the truth so often when she was asked just about anything it was hard to know what she thought much of the time. When she needed a story to smooth the way, when she needed an easy excuse, out came the lie. If she were twenty minutes late, and a simple explanation, and a quick I’m sorry, I got involved in talking to X, might have led to a mild annoyance, she avoided that with an elaborate fabrication. About someone who stopped her in the street and needed her help doing something that took an hour, or the boss who asked her to stay over time and she couldn’t get to a phone, or the movie that started late because the sound system did not work, or the phone that was out of order, and on and on. Her excuses were sometimes plausible, more often unbelievable, but if you pointed this out to her, she simply denied it and stuck to her story while giving off a defiant attitude: Why don't you believe me?

Was I really going to call the movie theater and find out if the movie had started a half hour late? No. Or check up and see if someone’s phone was out of order and now amazingly working? No. Or track down the old woman who needed her help to cross the street, and then the woman fell, and it took a half hour to get the woman to where she was going? Of course not.

Some of her stories were indeed fantastic. There was the story about her friend in high school with spina bifida who, she said, was sleeping with her doctor. What! I said, how is this possible? How can it even happen? Where do they, umm, tryst?

He comes to her house to see her and he comes to her bedroom.

What? That’s impossible. Doctors don’t make house calls, and her parents would never go along with this. Jane, that just doesn’t make any sense.

It happens when they are not home, she countered with conviction. He stays for forty-five minutes or so. In her bedroom.

Honey, that can’t possibly be true. Doctors do not make house calls anymore. And—

He does so. Really. Why don't you believe me?

Where to begin? You know she must be lying, but after a while, after her ardent insistence, after you have said you don’t believe her but she still persists with this improbable romance, that her teenage friend is sleeping with her doctor, who makes house calls and visits her friend alone, in her bedroom, what really can you say?

You raise your eyebrows in disbelief, you shake your head, you shrug and look away. You drop the subject. But you know. That can not possibly be true. You wonder why she has made up such a ridiculous story.

After hearing numerous falsehoods and obfuscations—too many to recount, too many to remember—I told her the parable about the boy who cried wolf one too many times. We were in my office at home, I was at my desk, she in a leather-and- steel chair from the Sixties that spun around, so she could turn away from me, and spare herself some embarrassment. I told her that I loved her, but that her lying made it hard for people to believe her about anything.

Adoption-rights pioneer B.J. Lifton,[1] an author and therapist, emailed me this about the predilection of some adoptees to have a loose relationship with the truth:

“Since adoptees grow up with falsified birth certificates and secrecy about reality, in their minds there is no border between truth and lying. They have no true narrative, so they can make up anything they want. They are ‘free spirits, not entrapped by roots,’ as a birth cousin suggested to me.”

The subject of adoptee’s difficulty with truth-telling is a loaded one, related to what some call the Adopted Child Syndrome, a name coined by a Long Island, New York psychotherapist[2] who noticed that an unusual number of his clients were adopted. According to David Kirschner, the parents would bring them the children, describe the problem, and then on the way out, turn and say: “ ‘Oh, I don’t remember whether we mentioned it, but Mark is adopted.’ They would immediately add, ‘but that has nothing to do with the problem.’ ” Kirschner writes that when he examined the child, he discovered a rich fantasy life, revealing that indeed being adopted was the problem, or at least a part of it. “The fantasies, reflected in projective personality tests, were usually spun around two sets of parents, one being viewed as the good parents, the other the bad. There were also elaborate themes of loss, abandonment, and rejection; and the child’s behavior problems often included lying, as they felt they had been lied to; stealing, to compensate for the theft of their identity; and truancy or running away, a symbolic effort to find their biologic roots and an environment in which they felt they fit and belonged.” He emphasizes that while this is not true for all adopted people, it does affect a subgroup where the process of forging a clear and healthy sense of self, “an integrated identity that is consistent with reality” goes haywire.

After a while, I did not bother to dispute Jane’s claims about—well, almost about anything. Tony and I took everything she said with a grain of salt. Maybe it was true. Maybe not. Of course this characteristic built a wall around her, and it was one that neither I or her other parents were ever able to climb. Yes, the four of us shared our frustration about Jane’s lack of truth-telling, but nothing any of us said made the slightest difference. The behavior was as automatic as a facial tic.

Yet there were moments when I was sure all pretense was discarded, no fabrications constructed, and that is I what I remember about that pristine afternoon after our Loehmann’s excursion, the late lunch at Pizza Hut, just the two of us with our Pepsis and slices. There were no lies, no fantasy stories, no crazy tangents about anything. Just for that few hours, this mother and daughter. These moments would always be all to rare.

[1] B.J. Lifton is the author of three books about adoption: Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter; (McGraw Hill) 1975; Journey of the Adopted Self (Basic Books) 1994; Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience (Third ed. Univ. of Michigan Press) 2009.

[2] David Kirschner, Ph.D., Adoption: Uncharted Waters (Juneau Press, 2006), Baltimore. Kirschner’s practice led him to notice that many serial killers were adopted, and this controversial connection raises hackles, to say the least, among adoptees and adoptive parents. But Kirshner’s work is diligent and the statistics irrefutable; any list of serial killers includes a hugely disproportionate number of adoptees. He has testified in more than 20 homicide cases in which the accused was an adoptee. When I wrote about his work in an opinion piece in Newsday, I received a threatening and disturbing phone call laden with numerous cuss words around midnight from someone who did not leave his name. I looked behind my back for the next couple of days.

Rowe says she is adopted....What more can this tale reveal?

The story continues to get more bizarro: In an interview with a British paper it states that Debbie Rowe says she is the "adopted daughter of a millionaire couple from Malibu."

She continues to claim that she is the biological mother but Wendy Murphy, feminist lawyer and commentator, writes otherwise:

"Latest claims are that although Rowe gestated Prince and Paris, she used an egg and sperm donor. Rowe denies the claim and says they are HER biological children - but not Jackson’s. It’s an interesting legal dilemma in theory because neither Rowe nor Jackson formally "adopted" the kids, which is the typical way parenthood is established in situations where children are born at the request, but without the genetic material, of mom and dad. But it's a moot point because a court long ago declared Rowe and Jackson the legal parents of Prince and Paris.

The more curious issue is the way Rowe has described her children as a "gift" to Jackson. Most people who give “gifts” don’t demand millions of dollars as a quid pro quo. Oh, and then there’s that quirky problem in law that says you can’t sell your children.

In fact, it’s a felony.

Ironically, however, Rowe has priority seating in the current custody dispute because a few years ago, a judge refused to enforce Rowe's “kids for cash” deal, which means she automatically regained her parental rights – though she got to keep all the money."

sick sick sick

Why is FMF fascinated by this weird tale? Because it is what happens when money outweighs common sense, natural law, reproductive ethics. What of these children? Not only is Jackson's mother 79, she is apparently in failing health. The woman with whom the children have the longest relationship is Grace Rwaramba, who has literally raised the children for more than a decade. The kids have reportedly been asking for her and would probably choose Grace to be their guardian.

The only good that could possibly come out of this would be for tough legislation that would somehow put the brakes on making babies in petrie dishes and then going to Rent-A-Womb for gestation. --lorraine

The Continuing Saga of Debbie Rowe....

The Debbie Rowe/Michael Jackson story continues to change, hour to hour. Last night Rev. Al Sharpton was on the tube talking about how Rowe, the mother of his children, does not deserve to get them because Michael wanted his 79-year-old mother, or 63-year-old Diana Ross to be their guardian, and that Ms. Rowe really is hardly worth considering.

This morning one "legal expert" on one channel was saying that she has almost no chance of getting the two oldest children--her children--while on another the legal expert was announcing that under California law, she has a very good claim indeed. Jackson's spokesman said that the children did not even know she was their mother [so who did they think was?], and dismissed Rowe as if she were no more than the "reproductive agent" that we at Birth Mother, First Mother Forum have in fact been accused of being to the children we surrendered to adoption. How involved Rowe has been in their lives appears to be little, especially after the divorce six or eight years ago. (FMF blogger does not pretend to be a celebrity hound, so that the exact number of years since the divorce escapes us.)

And then this morning, Rowe's lawyer was saying that she had not yet decided whether or not she will sue for custody. We do not know what kind of mother Ms. Rowe has been, or if, as it has been suggested, she is making noise now to get a better stake of Jackson's assets. But what is making us crazy is that some of Jackson's supporters and others are beginning to slime her. Jackson's former and current PR spokesman dismisses her as if she were not related to the children. He did admit that Jackson restricted visitation to the degree that it "irked" her. One legal expert said that her getting the children were "certainly not in their best interests."

Wait a moment--did anybody notice that Jackson's sainted mother is 79? That Diana Ross may not want to be their guardian-mother? Again, we are not saying that Rowe is a saint, but we do know that a child's real mother (and now we do think that Ms. Rowe supplied more than the womb) has a connection to that child that no one else has. Whether she is the right person to raise them we are not going to say, but we take this moment to speak up for her. As a final note: the two children she is the mother of are 12 and 11, and will almost certainly be asked by the judge in the case whom they would prefer to live with. Their preference will not necessarily decide the case, but should have an impact. The third child, Prince Michael, known as Blanket, has a murkier future, to our mind, as no mother is listed anywhere. Ah, the glories of the new reproductive technologies: a child without a mother! And now, no father!

What comes to FMF's mind is a case that involved two children adopted from Russia by a very wealthy couple who lived in the fabled Hamptons in a multimillion dollar house. The adoptive mother had an affair with one of the contractors working one the house and the couple divorced; the father stayed involved, but the mother had day-to-day custody. The father was apparently killed by the contractor...(he is in jail for the murder), and about a year or two later, the mother died of breast cancer.

The children--twins as I recall, a boy and a girl--were left in the guardianship of their English nanny, whom, as the story went in Vanity Fair, did not treat them well. And what did she do when all was said and done? Send the kids--who were 12 or so by then--to separate boarding schools. This sordid story eventually became a Lifetime movie, but FMF has no idea what happened to the kids, who must be in their late teens by now. Very wealthy, but probably very screwed up.

Yet another happy adoption story. Soon, very soon, FMF will leave this story and return to normal. FMF seems to have a case of Jacksonitis, which is quite surprising as we were never huge fans....as we were the wrong age group to be his groupies.

Breaking News on the Jackson kids is not for First Mother Forum

Let me eat my words before anything else: Debbie Rowe, the purported mother of Michael Jackson's two oldest children was announcing that she was going to ask for custody of the two children she bore at the very time we were posting our last blog. She added that she did not think she would get custody of the third child, Prince Michael, or "Blanket," but would make the case that keeping the siblings together would be best for their mental health. So.......we were wrong.

And in a further reassessment of the situation: checking out her picture, she does have that cute upturned nose that the other children have. So.........we were likely to be found wrong.

What can I say? Mea culpa.

I understand Perez Hilton, who does this kind of up-to-the minute blogging, gets very little shuteye during the night. That is not how we first mothers are going to run this little blog that we do for fun? because we certainly are not doing it for profit....

Anyway, good night all. I think I will leave the Jackson journey to other blogs. The Fourth of July is upon us. I've sent my draft of Hole in My Heart to my agent (as of Sunday evening) and am waiting to here what she has to say. And I'm going to enjoy the Fourth with friends. --lorraine

PS: That's me and my granddaughter, who was ten or eleven at the time.