' [Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: April 2013

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

A First Mother recalls meeting her daughter for the 'first' time


in my driveway this morning
Continuing excerpts from my memoir, Hole in My Heart, the sequel to Birthmark, which came out in 1979--when "birth mother" was not a phrase anyone knew. We were natural mothers, biological mothers, one of "those women." Actually in 1979, we were not supposed to be anywhere but the closet!

The following except from the new book is about the time I was going to meet my daughter, in 1981. I know

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Getting to Know You: Good Times with first mother leads to guilt about (adoptive) Mom

Lorraine and Jane at Rockefeller Center, 1982

Continuing the story. After our visit our Detroit over Christmas/New Year's break (link below), my found daughter, Jane came to visit me on Long Island. She arrived a day after her birthday, and would be visiting for more than a week. From Hole In My Heart, my memoir in progress.

Copyright Lorraine Dusky 2013
She’s never been to New York City, and so off we go. For three days and nights we are enthusiastic tourists, racing from the Empire State Building to the United Nations to Chinatown to the Statue of Liberty. We sprint off the first boat of the day from Battery

Friday, April 26, 2013

A first mother brings her daughter 'home' to meet 'Grandma'

Lorraine
Following is an excerpt from Hole In My Heart, my memoir in progress. Right now I have little time to pay attention to other events and so I thought I'd share snippets of it with you over the next week or so. The following is about the second time I see my daughter. The first had been at her home with her parents in Wisconsin. She was fifteen at the time. Her parents' name has been changed.--lorraine

Copyright Lorraine Dusky 2013. May not be copied or quoted.

Three weeks later, Jane flies to Detroit the day after Christmas to meet my mother and my husband. Jane, bubbling with excitement—her first airplane flight! an adventure of her own!—glides through the gate beaming. Since this

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Opening birth records: States of fame (OR, OH) and shame (WA)


Bills in three states, Oregon, Ohio and Washington, open the door to greater adoptee--and in Oregon, first parent--access to adoption records. 

FAMOUS--OREGON
Oregon is leading the way with a bill that will allow adult adoptees to see their entire court file, other than the home study. The Senate passed the bill, SB 623, unanimously on Tuesday, April 23. If this becomes law, adoptees will no longer need a

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

'I know my parents must be dead, but...'

Sandy Musser
First Mother Sandy Musser, one of the early pioneers of the adoption reform movement, has worked tirelessly to reunite parents and children separated by the laws governing adoption. She was convicted of a federal offense related to her work in 1993--she claims she was not guilty--and spent 11 months in a federal prison. Sandy continues to fight against the unjust laws still standing in the majority of states that keep original birth certificates sealed. 

The vast majority of us did NOT have a voice as to whether adoptees' birth certificates should be sealed. It was The Law: When adopted, a child's original birth certificate would be sealed for all time, denying her and her descendents the right to ever know their true ancestry. Sandy is urging us all to flood President Obama with letters this week to undue this terrible injustice and violation of human rights. If the President gets enough letters, he will take notice, and notice may lead to action. Along with most of the country, he did change his mind on gay marriage. First Mother Forum

Saturday, April 20, 2013

Paris Jackson reunites with her mother--why not everybody else?

Lorraine and daughter, a week after her 16th birthday in NYC
Michael Jackson's daughter has reunited with her mother--the second child of the late pop singer spent her 15th birthday earlier this month with her mother, Debbie Rowe. According to one pop website, "a source close to the family said: “The two just hung out. They’ve gotten really tight.”

Another site puts it this way: 
"Technically, Debbie is her mom, although I wonder how maternal she could possibly be. Still, I don’t know that story. I have no idea what went down between Debbie and Michael so I always try not to judge her too harshly. [Thank you for that, I thought.] If she

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

A father's right to raise his own daughter hinges on 'Indian Act'

Lorraine
At least two influential newspapers this morning are urging that the Supreme Court return a little girl who has been living with her natural father for the past 15 months to her adoptive parents. We write about "Baby Veronica," the three-and-half year old girl the South Carolina family court returned to her biological father, Dusten Brown, after he contested her adoption. When Brown agreed to give up his rights of the child to the mother--also signing a notice of adoption which he says he did not understand--he was being shipped off to Iraq. He assumed, he says, that the girl's mother she was planning to raise her.

As soon as he learned that the girl was being put up for adoption, he began fighting to raise her. He has another child; no one doubts he is a good father.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

Opening court records to adoptees and first parents

Oregon Capitol Building, Salem
While legislators elsewhere debate whether to allow adoptees access to their original birth certificates (OBC), Oregon is moving ahead with legislation which would allow adult adoptees to learn the details of their adoption and make it easier for first parents to learn the adoptive name of their child and the names of the adoptive parents.

This is a first in the country. While Washington State, New York, Ohio consider bills to give adoptees their original birth certificates, this goes farther in giving both adoptees and birth parents information about one of the most pivotal and life-altering events, information that the state previously deemed off-limits, even though it was about one's self. 

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Adoptive parents encourage daughters to give up their babies

Lori
Tuesday night I watched two 2010 episodes of 16 & Pregnant. Lori and Valeria, both adopted and pregnant, must decide whether to keep their babies.

Seventeen-year-old Lori's adoptive parents push adoption relentlessly. While the baby's father, Cory, opposes adoption, he offers little real support. Lori knows adoption as only an adopted person can know. "I always wondered about my birth mother. Where is she and why she couldn't raise me.... I don't have any other biologically, blood-related family right now," she tells her friend. " Like I think that plays in the whole putting him up for adoption thing. For the first tine I have actual family--and just give it away?"

Sunday, April 7, 2013

How to Answer: Do you have any children?

Lorraine
Do you have children? Or, how many children do you have?

Simple enough, unless you are a first mother. The person asking obviously doesn't know you well, so even if you are Out as a first mother, do you really want to go into it right then and there? You may be at the bridge club. You may be meeting someone in an airplane. You may be at a cocktail party and getting along like a house afire with the woman you met over the canapes. You may be with friends of yours having lunch and somebody has brought along a new person, and she is getting to know you and the question looms, and you know the whole answer but geeze, you think, Do I have to go into it right now? 

Of course not. Pick your moment. Talking about relinquishing a child is not light party patter.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Equality begins with the right to know who you are

Lorraine
Soon the Washington legislature will vote on whether give individuals adopted in the state the right to their own unamended birth certificates, the one with the true information of their birth--unless one of the parents named on the original birth certificate objects. 

How such a cockamamie veto power came to be tacked onto this legislation--with the assistance of a first mother! and an adoptee--is a story that Jane has told in previous blogs. In the past, we did say that a bad bill--with a veto--is better than nothing at all for nearly all individuals who wish to obtain their original birth certificates (OBCs) will be able to do so. Only a very small minority of first parents will object and file a veto.

But now the thought of such bad legislation makes us angry to contemplate. We have heard from adoptees who have been denied; we have heard from those who

Monday, April 1, 2013

Why adoption reform frustrates me

Daughter Jane and Lorraine, 1983
Because I have been part of the adoption reform movement since the mid-Seventies, and see how little progress has been made in the decades since, I am frustrated. In the Seventies, adopted individuals had full access to their original birth records in Kansas, Alabama* and I believe, Alaska. Oregon, New Hampshire, Maine, and, last year, Rhode Island followed suit. Several states in the meantime passed various legislation that still allowed another party--the biological parent--the right to control whether an adopted person may obtain his most vital document: proof of existence and parentage at the time of birth. Some states still even have adoptive parent right-of-refusal to grant this document to the individual to whom it pertains: the adopted person.

Amended birth certificates are basically falsified legal documents that perpetuate a lie for they are not a record of birth, they are a record of a "pretend" birth of a child to two people that child was not born to. When the laws that legalized such falsification were passed, from the Thirties and even into the Eighties, the claim was that it was done to "protect the integrity" of the adoptive family. If the