Diane Rehm |
Where first/birth/natural/real mothers share news & opinions. And vent.
Monday, January 30, 2012
When adoptees' Right to Know becomes a philosophical debate, adoptees lose
Holy Cow! Uncles
are shocked, children faint, husbands leave! Horrors! goes the
collective gasp from the people who see all rights as equal competing against other rights. (One wonders what they would have done during the era of slavery, but never mind.) Competing-but-equal rights regarding human identity was the opinion of the self-styled expert, Kimberly Leighton, there to discuss adopted people's right to search-and-connect after DNA matches. Leighton says near the end of the show that she is an adoptee who searched and found, something I missed on first reading of the transcript.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
High number of adoptions in the US is a national disgrace
Jane |
The data is hard to come by. According a recent report of the Children’s Bureau of the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services,* data on voluntary domestic infant
adoptions is not collected systematically. A 2003 study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention put the number at less close to 14,000, about one
percent of children born to never married women. The percentage for single white
women surrendering was 1.7 percent; for black women it is near
zero.
Monday, January 23, 2012
Open or closed: Losing a child to adoption is painful
An adoptive mother asked recently whether those of us in the Baby Scope Era would have had less pain if we had had an open adoption. (The Baby Scoop Era is the period between World War II and Roe v. Wade when a large number of single middle class white women lost their infants to adoption because of the stigmas placed on unwed mothers and their children.
When my relinquished daughter was born in 1966, I thought that it would be wonderful if I could have some continuing contact with her. I envisioned a secret child whom I would communicate with through a trusted friend. I fancied myself like the Bette Davis character, Apple Annie, in the 1961 film Pocketful of Miracles. Annie, a disheveled old woman sold apples on a street corner to support her daughter hidden in a Spanish convent.
When my relinquished daughter was born in 1966, I thought that it would be wonderful if I could have some continuing contact with her. I envisioned a secret child whom I would communicate with through a trusted friend. I fancied myself like the Bette Davis character, Apple Annie, in the 1961 film Pocketful of Miracles. Annie, a disheveled old woman sold apples on a street corner to support her daughter hidden in a Spanish convent.
Friday, January 20, 2012
To understand ourselves, we must know where we came from
Maternal Grandmother Agnes |
But then I found myself telling my dinner companion more about my grandmothers. The one I did know, Agnes (photo at left), was divorced from my grandfather, a rarity and a scandal back in those days--the Forties and Fifties--and especially a scandal among Polish Catholics, who are among the most conservative and steadfast Catholics anywhere. I barely knew the man she had been married to, my grandfather, nor did I know know why my mother seemed not to like him, or why we almost never visited him. I remember that at his funeral--when I would have been about fourteen--my mother and her older sister were dry-eyed and grim, a younger sister was full of tears. I wondered why there was such disparity in how they were reacting to their father's death.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
To Tell or Not to Tell (the unvarnished truth), that is the question
A few months ago we included a notice about The Ethicist column in The New York Times in which The Ethicist (the name alone would freak me out) told a man who had fathered the girl across the street that he had no right ever to tell her he was her father, unless her mother, and her legal father (who thought he was her biological father) all agreed beforehand. The Ethicist came down on the side then of withholding the truth from the individual. You can see this probably did not sit well with First Mother.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
People say the strangest things to first mothers
Lorraine |
We tell our found or reunited children what a terrible experience giving up them was, and they listen intently, seem to comprehend our pain, but later we hear them saying or writing something to effect that that adoption is such a great institution and they are "glad" they were adopted. We hear: I am so glad you worthless, lower class, fill-in-the-blank person did not raise me. I am so relieved that you didn't get your clutches on me and I was lucky enough to escape. This attitude has found its way into more adoptee memoirs than I can count, starting with Sarah Saffian's Ithaka and continuing through The Mistress's Daughter by A. M. Holmes.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Romney urges single woman to give up her baby--or be outcast from LDS
Lorraine |
Hayes had joined the church with her mother, and knew the Romneys so well that as a teenager, Hayes baby-sat for the Romney boys in Boston. In her last year of high school, however, her mother abruptly moved with her daughter to Salt Lake City. Peggie married, moved to Los Angeles, had a daughter, divorced, and eventually moved back to the Boston area, where she made contact again with the Romneys. She stayed a member of the Mormon church.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
When "best interests of the child" violate reason and decency
Jane |
Last week Harry’s
Law presented the familiar drama of a child adopted illegally and his natural
parents suing for his return. We know from the beginning that the judge,
lacking the Wisdom of Solomon, will rule for the adopters (the most perfect of couples),
citing the best interests of the child.
The Harry’s Law segment
had a contemporary twist: the aggrieved couple is Chinese.
Their child was stolen by corrupt Chinese officials and given to an
African-American couple. The Chinese parents come to the United States and sue
for return of their child. The judge, an African-American who had been adopted
as a child by a white couple, rules for the adopters, repeating the old platitude
about how it’s not about the rights of the parents but about the rights of the
child. To overcome any lingering doubts the TV audience might have about the
correctness of the decision, the Chinese girl is shown happily singing and swaying
to Gospel music along with African-American children.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Neither a rape, nor time, erases this first mother's love
Lorraine |
Part of the story that is almost overlooked is that the child, now named Ruth Lee and the mother of a retired astronaut, was the product of what could have only been a brutal rape.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Hollywood celebs beget babies any way they can
Rickie Martin, Mathew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker, Elton John, and Nicole Kidman have all become parents in the past few years thanks to women who "donate" their eggs and women who carry the babies.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Why First Mother Forum is moderating comments. Again.
Lorraine |
Late last night, after an upsetting day, an adoptee who follows this blog--and has her own blog--emailed me and suggested that many of the comments at the previous blog post would most likely be upsetting to my granddaughter. I had a vague feeling like that myself, and was quite anxious about the blog all of yesterday as the comments veered into analyzing from assumption and were often wrong. Then I would have to answer the assumptions and presumptions and questions, and in doing so reveal more about the situation than I felt comfortable doing on a public blog. Seeing War Horse in the evening did not distract me as I love horses and this is an disquieting movie. I came home, then read the email from the adoptee, and knew I had to do something.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Dealing with an adoptee's 'no contact' request
Lorraine |
What's difficult for us birth mothers is to know when we might send them a note or an email or a card because we find it hard to believe they don't want to know, somehow, that we are still thinking of them. I've heard adoptees say that they did appreciate getting that one card on their birthday--it answered the questions: Does my birth mother think ever think of me? Is she thinking of me on my birthday? Does she even remember my birthday?
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