' [Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: December 2013

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

A Joyous New Year---Some good news in adoption reform

I'm feeling really upbeat today, the last day of 2013. It's my 45th wedding anniversary, 45 years with a wonderful patient, kind man. We may just go out for Chinese tonight as we did when our three daughters were young and we had little time or money. Last night we and a couple of friends had a great dinner and went to a fantastic concert by the Oregon Symphony. It culminated with Beethoven's Ninth and its rousing finale Ode to Joy.

I feel joyous and optimistic for 2014: my family is doing well, I've got great friends, and there's progress on adoption reform.

Sunday, December 29, 2013

Whatever happened to Carlina White?

Father, daughter and mother reunited 
Remember Carlina White? The girl who was abducted in 1987 from a New York City hospital and raised by another woman as her own in Connecticut? After "Nejdra Nance"--the name she grew up with--was pregnant herself at sixteen, she needed her birth certificate to get aid for pre-natal care, but her mother was elusive about it. Netty--the name she went by--eventually found a paper she thought was her birth certificate, but it turned out to be false. She knew something was wrong but when Netty confronted Ann Pettway, the woman who raised her, Pettway told her that her mother was a crack addict who deserted her and never came back. It was a lie, a lie that would take years to unravel.

Friday, December 27, 2013

Capobiancos register at Target for new adopted baby

Lorraine
UPDATE (Nov. 28, 2017)
Apparently Matt and Melanie Capobianco did adopt another child, a daughter named Stella, as I originally surmised in this 2013 post, soon after Veronica Brown was taken from her natural father by court order. An obituary for Melanie's mother lists among her descendants (which they are actually not) the two children of Melanie as Veronica and Stella. The obit says this:

Dr. Duncan is survived by her daughter, Melanie Duncan and her husband, Matthew Capobianco of Charleston, SC; her granddaughters, Veronica and Stella Capobianco; her brother Joseph B. Fabin Jr. and his wife Lisa Fabin and her nephew Timothy Fabin all of Minerva, N.Y. 

Just a news brief today: Matt and Melanie Capobianco have apparently adopted a second child, and have registered for gifts at Target. To those who do not know, the Capobiancos of Charleston, South Carolina prevailed in their battle to remove four-year-old Veronica Brown from the home of Dusten Brown, her biological father--where she was thriving--at the end of September. Regarding the adoption of a second child--from where I do not know--I really have no words to add, and look for our reader's reaction. I am sick at heart.--lorraine

Monday, December 23, 2013

The sisterhood of first mother loss at the holiday

Sent by my alternate universe daughter 
We had a Christmas lunch at our house yesterday--friends came by for Champagne punch and sustenance. Two guys my husband made sure to introduce to each other were both Vietnam vets. One was a journalist who was captured and briefly imprisoned; the other was a Naval officer who had spent two years in combat. After my husband made the introduction, they spent a long time talking. Later my husband said: It's the most intense experience of their lives--no one who hasn't been through it can quite understand. My husband was in the Army between conflicts, and after ROTC, only spent six months on active duty. But he understood immediately why these two men would bond.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Is giving up a child for adoption a 'loving' decision?

Jane
"Adoption is a courageous and loving decision" touts the Children's Home Society of Florida. We've heard this a zillion times although in my day it was often phrased as "think of your child, not yourself." Signing the papers on a rainy day a week before Christmas in San Francisco, and giving an adoption agency the power to select a family for my daughter Rebecca was not a courageous and loving decision. In many ways it was not a decision at all. I simply did what white middle-class singe mothers of (I hope) a bygone era did--acquiesced to social mores trumpeted in advice columns, soap operas, pulpits, and teen magazines.

Sunday, December 15, 2013

How the adoption industry convinces women they aren't 'ready to parent'

Jane
Recent first mothers often explain they gave up their babies because "I was not ready to parent," adopting the language which the adoption industry prefers to the more homey "nurture a child." "To parent" gives child rearing a kind of mystical quality beyond the skills of single mothers-to-be..

Adoption practitioners typically use close-ended questions--the kind answered "yes" or "no" on their websites and in their literature to create doubt and nudge mothers-to-be into thinking they are not ready to be mothers. American Adoptions, for example, encourages pregnant women to ask themselves: "Am I ready to be a parent? This the most important question of all....If you have aspirations to attend college, pursue a career, or simply just want to maintain your current lifestyle, you may find that you aren't ready to raise a child, when another family out there is ready to adopt and give a child the greatest life imaginable."


Thursday, December 12, 2013

Good news on bills in Ohio and Pennsylvania; Tina talks of the 'blood' connection on Survivor

files/s27_ep13_sg_014.jpg
Tina on left, daughter Katie on right 
UPDATED ON 12/16/13

"Jeff, there is something about my relationship to Katie, my daughter because I'm adopted. And I don't have those connections in my life, not until I had her had I felt a real connection in my life. It's a pure, unadulterated, pure love I have for her." --Tina Wesson, last night on Survivor.

When these pronouncements come out of the blue in places you don't expect them, they are great teaching moments for the public, a public that increasingly believes that adoption is simple and good and doesn't leave a great many adoptees with a hole in their hearts.

Sunday, December 8, 2013

The adoptee dilemma: Navigating between opposing parents

Lorraine
Secrets and lies, as well as the push-and-pull between natural and adoptive parents--with the child caught in the middle--are joined-at-the-script themes being explored weekly on Nashville, the TV nighttime drama about the music scene in that city. Maddie, the young teen at the heart of this story line, is having a difficult time negotiating between two fathers: the man who raised her, Teddy, the outwardly upstanding individual; and the man who is her biological parent, Deacon, the recovering addict, former love and lead guitar player to her famous country-singer mother, Rayna. Problem Number One.

The character Maddie is an adolescent when her parents divorce and she learns her life is not what it seems--and both her mother and the man she married when she was pregnant with Deacon's baby conspired to keep her true parentage a secret--forever. From her. Problem Number Two.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Philomena: A forced adoption, a lifetime quest, a longing that never waned

The book, the true story
Most of you already know the bare bones of the story of the film Philomena: Irish teen becomes pregnant, ends up in one of the horrid Magdalene laundries, her son is forcibly adopted when he is three by rich Americans, and a half century later his mother--Philomena Lee in real life--wants to find him and comes to Washington with a journalist who is writing her story, his newspaper paying the bills.

I made sure I had plenty of tissues with me but in fact, only needed one. True there is sadness aplenty, but served up with levity and even a few comedic moments to relax the tension. Judi Dench, as Philomena, gives a masterful, believable performance as she talks about what happened to her, seen in flashbacks, and in how she portrays the woman dealing with reality today. She says she wonders if her son ever thought about her, because she thought about him every single day. You got that right, I was thinking. Every adoptee who doesn't already know the answer to that should see this film.

Sunday, December 1, 2013

How money rules infant adoption

Jane
Lorraine and I gave up our newborn daughters because we believed we would be our child's disgrace and they would be ours. Today, though, with 40 percent of children born to single mothers, politicians and celebrities having love children a-plenty, adoption as prime time TV entertainment, shame is not part of the equation. Adoption practitioners have new ammunition in their arsenals. We'll be writing about these over the next several weeks. 

First up is the influence of money although that term is never used. Rather, Catelynn and Tyler of 16 and Pregnant fame and thousands of other parents give up their children in order to give their children and themselves "the life they deserve."