' [Birth Mother] First Mother Forum: April 2014

Wednesday, April 30, 2014

What did this first mother do wrong now? Cont.

Lorraine
Continuing the story of my daughter's strange and hurtful behavior, when we had been close and she suddenly pulled back and wasn't talking to me, answering the phone, or emailing. I was dead meat to her.

April, same year, 2003. At American Adoption Congress’s 25th anniversary convention in Atlanta, I am one of the keynote speakers. The AAC is comprised of adoptees and both first parents and adoptive parents, and stands for openness in adoption, including taking down the sealed-records statutes. I talk about the early days of this movement, and how far we still have to go. I do not gloss over the rabid opposition we faced then, and still do.

Monday, April 28, 2014

UPDATED: NJ adoptees to get birth certificates in 2017

Pam Hasegawa 
UPDATED ON 4/29

New Jersey will soon join the list of states giving adopted people their birth certificates. In a compromise worked out with Gov. Chris Christie, first mothers will have until the end of 2016 to have their names redacted from the original birth certificate (OBC).   After that date, adopted individuals at 18 may request their original birth certificates.

Yes, this is not a perfect bill. Yes, it unfairly gives a few birth mothers the opportunity to deny their children the truth of their origins. But given that the choice was either this--or nothing--as long as Christie was governor, the New Jersey Care people, after fighting for change for more than three decades, agreed to this compromise. FMF salutes them for making the wise choice.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

First Mother to (reunited) daughter: What did I do wrong now?

Lorraine and Jane, 1982 
I may have published this excerpt from my memoir, hole in my heart, earlier but last week another first mother was suffering the pangs of have her daughter leave her inexplicably once again, and at the same time I was going over the section below about just that. So for my sister first mother, and all of us who have suffered through this, I am repeating this section here. For new readers, I relinquished my daughter in 1966 in a closed adoption, and we reunited in 1981. So we had a lengthy relationship by the time we step into my life here in 2002.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

Attachment disorder in adoption--and parents who don't recognize it

Jane
John Brooks has a message for those who have adopted or are thinking of adopting an older child or a child from another country. It is NOT like adopting a pet. A child--any child--but especially those who have been traumatized need love and acceptance, not harshness and punishment.

The Girl Behind the Door is John Brooks's memoir about the 18 month old girl he and his wife, Erika, adopted from a Polish orphanage in 1991, and who killed herself at age 17. Like many couples whose fertility treatments fail, the Brookses turned to adoption. They rejected domestic adoption because of the risk that the mother-to-be would change their mind. The foreign adoption scene looked bleak, long waits, countries closing their doors. Then they learned that a few children were available in Polish orphanages. Since Erika's parents had immigrated from Poland and she spoke Polish, it seemed a perfect fit.

Monday, April 21, 2014

The post-Easter reminiscence: Everybody's Got Something

Before we began
I meant to write a post for Easter but I was so busy with cooking for 12 on Friday and Saturday, time got away. And then Sunday was taken up with the more-or-less annual Easter lunch. Here I am today, Monday afternoon.

Holidays can be depressing for anyone whose family is far-flung--whether or not there is a relinquished child in the past--and it certainly has been that way for me. It took some years but eventually I learned that as a transplant from the Midwest I needed to recreate the kinds of holiday events that I grew up with. As for Easter? In the Polish household is is not a holiday to be sneezed at!

My earliest memories surrounding the day include getting up shortly after six on Holy Saturday and coming downstairs to find my mother making bread--something she only did on this day. As soon as I was able she let me knead the dough. Push down with the heel of your hands, fold it over and do it again.

Friday, April 18, 2014

How to influence lawmakers to reform adoption law

Jane
I played hooky during the recent American Adoption Congress conference and spent time with my youngest daughter Julie who lives in San Francisco and my husband Jay. Julie works in politics, helping solid Democrat candidates get elected.  Here's her advice with some of my own thoughts about getting legislators to support adoption reform.

The average legislator likely knows nothing about adopt reform. Ask him what he thinks about adoption and he's likely to say "It's unfair to mothers who were promised confidentiality to open records. Adoption needs to be easier and quicker so that deserving couples can get babies."

Thursday, April 17, 2014

A whopping YES to the question: Should adoptees have their birth certificates?

Lorraine
Ninety-five percent of the people who voted in the poll sponsored by New York NOW , a NPR affiliate from Albany, were in favor of adoptees having unrestricted access to their original birth certificates at age 18. The voting is closed.

Yes, we know this is not a scientific poll. But it is a no-brainer that adults--who have every other right and obligation of society--should unequivocally have the right to his or her original birth certificate, the official record of an individual. The amended "birth" certificate is a lie. It is not a record of a birth; it is a record of a legal adoption. Yet in all but eight states some restrictions prevent all adopted people from having the right to own this piece of paper--about themselves.

Tuesday, April 15, 2014

Do adoptees have a right to their birth certificates? VOTE NOW.

UPDATE: LINK TO VIDEO

Bill of Rights for adoptees pushed in Albany

Lorraine at public hearing on adoptee bill
Do you believe adopted individuals should have the right to access their original birth certificates at age 18? A controversial bill in New York would allow just that.  (Several other states are trying to also do the right thing.) Vote here!

The question 160 years ago would have been: Do you believe that people brought here from Africa should be freed from slavery? A controversial bill in Washington would allow just that. Vote here!

The battle is on again in New York to allow adopted people the same rights as the rest of us who are not adopted--the right to know who we were when we were born, who our real* parents are.

Friday, April 11, 2014

At AAC: Transracial adoption from those who live it

Jane & Julie at Chinatown Gate
Jane here. I'm at the American Adoption Conference in San Francisco with my husband, Jay. Along with hearing some great speakers, I'm spending some time with my youngest daughter, Julie, who moved here from Washington DC last year. Last night the three of us went to Chinatown for dinner.

San Francisco always has special meaning for me because my first daughter, Rebecca, who I surrendered, was born here. While awaiting her birth, I lived only a few blocks from the hotel hosting the Conference. I don't find myself stressed out over this, no grief, no sighs of sorrow. I am happily living in the present, at least now.

My experience at this conference is totally different from my first AAC conference in 1998, a few months after Rebecca and I connected. Then my long held secrets were exploding, bursting to come free. I found myself telling strangers things I had never told anyone. I was so excited to hear others say what I had only thought and was never sure if my thoughts reflected truth or

Thursday, April 10, 2014

'Burger King Baby' is thrilled to meet her 'birth mom'

Lorraine
In contrast to the situation we have been discussing at the last post*--about a woman who wrote to us stating that she does not want to meet her first mother--is the Burger King Baby who actively searched for her mother, and was thrilled to meet her.

Katheryn Deprill, 27, who was left as a  newborn in the bathroom of a Burger King in Allentown, Pennsylvania, teared up this morning on the Today show as she recalled meeting her biological mother, Cathy Pochek, for the first time two weeks ago. 

“It’s so surreal; never in a million years did I think this was going to happen,” Deprill said.

Monday, April 7, 2014

An adoptee doesn't want to meet her first/birth mother

Lorraine
The other day we received this comment at the bottom of our permanent page of tips on how to write to your first mother the first time.
I truly mean no harm, but I find these dos/don't to be offensive. I am 26 years old and I was adopted when I was 5. I have little memory of the events that led up to it.  
Forgive me if I am being insensitive, but I feel as though these given rules are all placed to protect the birth mothers. Regardless of what when on, the fact remains that if we were not raised by these women, they are not our mothers, they are our birth mothers. 
If you choose to give your child up, you have to live with that. I don't think it's fair to refer to the people who chose to raise us as their own to be referred to as anything but a mother/father.

Friday, April 4, 2014

Nashville confronts real-life issues: When a girl takes after her daddy

Lorraine
Nashville, the ABC nighttime drama, plunged head first the other night into the complex issue of when to tell someone the truth about biology--as in, that baby is yours. Before we get to the heart of the matter, a recap is in order here for those who aren't regular watchers

Guitar player, singer, all-around-cool-but-troubled guy Deacon Claybourne is the biological father of superstar country singer Rayna Jaynes's oldest daughter, Maddie. She discovered this amazing fact about herself when she was 12 or so, and found her birth certificate. Now Maddie, after a growing relationship with her natural father, has posted video of herself singing a song she says she wrote with her "dad"--and then uses the name "Maddie Claybourne" (not her legal name). Her legal name is that of the man Rayna has been married to since before she was born, and whom she thought was her daddy in every sense of the word. All hell breaks loose.

Wednesday, April 2, 2014

Jean Paton: A reformer ahead of her time

Jean Paton, the pioneer of adoption reform was not an activist; that was left to adoptee Florence Fisher, as well as our own first mother Lorraine Dusky, and many others. Although Paton was convinced that adoptees needed to reunite with their birth family to become whole, she eschewed behavioral scientists, she left it to adoptee Betty Jean Lifton and others to frame adoption separation in psychological terms. Paton was a visionary who saw beyond opening records and psychological cures for primal wounds, arguing for replacing adoption with guardianship, allowing children to keep their original identities and connection to their birth families. She was brilliant and courageous but also disagreeable and argumentative; her writings were often obtuse and verbose. In his excellent, lengthy biography, Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption, historian E. Wayne Carp uses her own words--she gave him access to all her papers--to tell her story.