What's the Use of Regret?

                                                                                        Photo by Ken Robbins

Regret is a concept, a feeling, that we first mothers deal with one way or another once we give up our babies to the unknown--or sometimes to the known--parents. We mourn, but unless we end up mad we eventually find a way to get on with our lives. My life after relinquishment included the career I always wanted, but I recognize that it came at a great cost that was unexpected and in fact, changed the course of my life. The cost was not only to my damaged psyche and altered prospects, but to my daughter's also. She would be born already fragile, subject to seizures, and so she was handed the double-barreled whammy of epilepsy as well as the sense of abandonment that being given up instills.

On Thanksgiving: Accepting reality

Lorraine

For all those from families that are separated, Thanksgiving is the beginning of the long season of remembering who is not present in our lives.

It's not easy, it's a long hard slog to the other side of tranquility sometime in January after the holidays because the lives of first mothers and the adopted are so full of what-ifs. The other life. The other mother. The missing child at the table, in the will, in the family tree. Where there should be a face, there is only a blank. Where there should be an extra person at the table, there is no one. And because families in general do not talk about the missing person, there is no glass raised in remembrance, with the added hope that he or she is having a good dinner with the adoptive family. We might raise a glass to someone who died, or is far away, but the particular etiquette of silence about lost children prevents that. Perhaps that has changed today, with openness in adoption. If that is so, it is a welcome change, a somber but realistic acknowledgment of who is missing.

A Korean mother asks her son for forgiveness

Lorraine

Adam Crapser, American-Korean adoptee but never made a citizen, has been deported to his homeland--where his original mother was waiting for him, according to recent news accounts. “I have so much to tell him, especially how sorry I am,” she said [to the New York Times writer], sitting in her bedroom, which doubles as her kitchen, in her one-floor rural home in Yeongju. “But I am at a loss, because I don’t know English and he can’t speak Korean.”

The she is Kwon Pil-ju who had been desperately trying to teach herself English before her son got there, which would have been last Thursday.

Happy Birthday to my lost daughter

Jane

Today is my lost daughter, Rebecca's, 50th birthday.  She was born on a Thursday, like today, a week before Thanksgiving. She lives half a continent away and I won't be sharing this day with her. I do share my life with her and that is a blessing.

We re-connected 19 years ago, a week after her 31st birthday, when she found me. Until then, I was left to wonder about who she was. Perhaps a celebrity, a movie star, a CEO, or in my worst thoughts, a drug addict living on the street. Sometimes she was a phantom; sometimes I thought maybe she didn't exist at all.

We met two months later in January, 1998 in Chicago where she lived at the time and coincidentally where I grew up. Until then, my life had been divided in two parts, pre-Rebecca and post-Rebecca. So while after her birth, my life went on, law school, marriage, three wonderful daughters, a career, a part of me was stuck in the events of 1966 which led to her birth. With our reunion, my life took a third turn, embarking on a new road, rocky in places, but ultimately rewarding.

Does my birth mother think of me?

Jane

Adoptees often ask us whether their natural mothers think of them, "at least on my birthday." Lorraine and I assure them that their mothers think of therm often, likely everyday. "Then why doesn't she try to find me?" they ask. "She may be thinking about searching " we tell them, but there are reason why she is hesitating. She doesn't know she can; she promised the agency she wouldn't; she had it drummed into her that she's shouldn't. She doesn't know how to search. She can't afford a searcher. She doesn't want to disrupt your life. She doesn't want to disrupt the lives of her raised children, her husband, her parents.

These thoughts coursed through my mind for years. I'll search later I told myself, when my youngest daughter graduates from high school, when I have more money, more time. Then 19 years ago my lost daughter Rebecca found me. I'll write more about this on her birthday, November 17.

It's a world wide revolution, folks

Lorraine 

Once Brexit won in Great Britain, I began to be worried. I began being very afraid that the protectionist, anti-immigration, dissatisfaction with the old would sweep our country too. I kept up a brave heart, but even as I ordered my Hillary t-shirt and Hillary buttons and stickers, I always was fearful that Hillary would not win, no matter what the polls said. There were those who were not willing to tell pollsters how they were leaning because he was embarrassing them with his misogynist, racist, and xernophobic comments--but they were going to vote for him nonetheless. And if Hillary did win--since taking the House was a mathematical impossibility, given gerrymandering--she would only face years of GOP investigation about stuff that she would eventually be cleared of. The government would be in stasis, and nothing would get done during her presidency.

Why voting for Hillary today is so emotional

Lorraine voting this morning for
HILLARY

First Mother Forum could not have taken a stand in this election, but we both strongly believe in women's rights, and a woman's right to chose, and we haven't been nonpartisan up to now. So there's no point pretending we are not rooting for Hillary to win tonight. That's me on the left at my polling place this morning, taken by my Hillary-supporting husband, Tony. Jane voted early in Oregon a week ago.

I wore white in remembrance of the suffragettes who wore white as they campaigned for the right of women to vote in the early 20th century. They were arrested and jailed, tube fed when they went on a hunger strike, spit at and lost jobs in their journey to the vote. We finally won the vote in August 18, 1920 when the youngest member of the Tennessee legislature, Harry Burn, 22, who had made his intention to vote Nay, changed his mind and voted Aye. This made Tennessee the 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, thus meeting the constitutional requirement of having three-quarters (of 48 states) pass the amendment.

Adoption Not Abortion: First mothers who never have another child

Lorraine

Someone--an adoptee--recently posted on Facebook about how she did not want to see any posts about abortion right now, which may have been triggered by our earlier posts about the presidential election this Tuesday, and our keen backing of Hillary, who supports choice for women. That includes the right to have a legal abortion.

Abortion can be difficult for adoptees to ponder because that ultimately leads to an awareness that they could have been aborted. I had to explain to my daughter how my trying to have an abortion--when it was illegal--was unrelated to any maternal feelings and the deep, consuming connection to her once she was born, and the soul-shattering sadness of losing her to the adoption that was inevitable. I changed--everything changed--beginning in the months just before birth, and then, her birth. Perhaps the worst day of

Impressions of the 2016 ASAC Conference: Good Job!

Lorraine at 2016 conference of Alliance for the Study
of Adoption and Culture in Minneapolis
Thanks to Penny Needham for photo

That adoption is not a universal good and that it is fraught for the adopted individual--and natural mothers go into a certain kind of hell--was for me the overall takeaway at the sixth biennial conference of the Alliance for Adoption and Culture (ASAC) last week in Minneapolis.

At a panel on Adoption and Social Engineering--it could have said Adoption as Social Engineering--Kori Graves of the State University of New York at Albany--spoke of how black families were carelessly, but systematically, denied the pathway to adopt black children in the past, and the movement to have white families adopt transracially began. That adoption might be better regulated with an eye to reducing the actual number of adoptions came out at another session. Overall it was refreshing to walk away knowing the conference did not present adoption as this warm and fuzzy concept that was a wonderful answer to parents who could not have "their own" children, or who adopted because "there are so many babies that need to be adopted."

Catelynn and Tyler's "semi-open" adoption closed!

When teens Catelynn and Tyler placed their newborn daughter Carly for adoption with Brandon and Teresa Davis on MTV's 16 and Pregnant in 2009, it was all that adoption was supposed to be and more. Catelynn and Tyler made the "loving" decision to give their baby a better life. Brandon and Teresa were the dream parents--attractive, professionals who wanted for nothing except a baby they could call their own. The facade began to crack early as Catelynn and Tyler continued to grieve from their loss of their daughter, and their relationship with Brandon and Teresa began to deteriorate. Last year Brandon and Teresa threatened to cut off contact because Tyler posted pictures of Carly on the internet contrary to their instructions.