A Neighbor Condemns Searching for our Children Lost to Adoption, a friendship ends

How do you educate a neighbor whose own mother more or less abandoned her to the realities of adoption today? In my case, you try, but you end up...where you started.

Some background here: A neighbor I'll call Yvonne is older than I (she is 80) and over the years we have become quite close. We've done countless favors for each other and she has called me her "youngest sister." But there was always this big black cloud in the room on a subject that, hmm, dare not speak its name: adoption. I've written before about what occurred between us, but I'll summarize here.

Although I knew adoption was a subject that I knew one had to tread lightly--Yvonne never met an adoptee who wasn't totally happy to be adopted, completely integrated into the family, etc.--I still did not know that we were a gazillion miles apart on the issue. When the hated movie Juno came out, I gave her a copy of my memoir, Birthmark, to read, hoping that she would understand the point of view of a first/birth mother more than she had seemed willing to in the past.

My POV: That I, a woman who surrendered her daughter to adoption, felt it necessary for my mental health to find that daughter. That I, as her biological/birth/first mother, did not want to interrupt her life with her other, adoptive, family. That I wanted her to be a part of my life too, in some fashion, but that did not mean she would turn away from her adoptive family. That in doing this, everyone recognized that Jane, my/our daughter was an integrated human being with a past that began before adoption.

Jane had been to our house many times for extended stays of several months, but Yvonne and I were not more than nodding acquaintances then, and she had not met Jane until a couple years before she committed suicide; Yvonne knew one of Jane's daughters (one relinquished for adoption, one not) because she had spent several weeks here each summer when she was a child. So, Yvonne had some inkling of how our situation had worked out. She was kind to Jane's daughter.

Anyway, Yvonne said she could not stop reading Birthmark until she finished, wanted to get copies for her children, all now grown, and all of whom I know and like. Incidentally, none of them live nearby--the closest is about a three-to-four-hour drive away, the others several states away or across the country. When Yvonne became ill in the last couple of years, it was my husband and I who were the helpers on the spot, the visitors in the hospital, before anyone else got here. But understand our friendship was a two-way street; she has done many favors for us also. I took care of her cats when Yvonne went away; when we had a dog, she took care of him. We gave her books to read; she's wealthy; she's been generous to us. Her children seemed somewhat relieved that she had a good friend and neighbor a few doors away. It was a reciprocal relationship.  

Yet, adoption lay between us like a roaring brook we all agreed to step around without comment.

But there were times when that became impossible. Yvonne's very good friend from boarding school (who coincidentally lives a few blocks away) became an adoptive grandmother, twice over. Her husband once told me--after I told him I was a birth mother whose daughter had lived her for some summers, worked downtown at the ice cream parlor--that I was "their greatest nightmare." I said nothing.

One day, Yvonne, in a pique generated I think by a small amount of wine in her 110-pound frame, called me..."no more than a reproductive agent." I can only think she heard that phrase from the people who think I am "their greatest nightmare." (Read more here.)

Trouble ensued. Eventually we talked and I brought up how she might feel about her own mother who left Yvonne and her two sisters in the care of their American father in the states while she, the mother, went back to France and continued to be the aristocratic courtesan of the literati and social set there. (Her mother is actually quite well known in France, even today, as much for her sexual exploits and conquests as her writing.) For several years Yvonne did not even see her mother, and when she finally did, after boarding school days were over, I came to understand it was not a warm and loving relationship. Yvonne felt that it would have been different had the three sisters been boys. Though she won't really talk about those feelings, it's clear that her mother did more or less physically abandon the girls; Yvonne's older sister did not even see her mother for 17 years.

Anyway, a whole year passed in which we somehow avoided adoption. Until a few days before Mother's Day when she expressed the hope (by crossing her fingers and widening her eyes) that the couple who live between us, who must be in their late thirties to mid forties, are able to adopt, as she heard they hope to. Maybe it was the timing, maybe I have been quietly seething for the whole last year since her "reproductive agent" eruption (which she denies she ever said such words! The very idea!), maybe it was at last a recognition that we could not really be friends, but I said a few angry semi-incoherent words about how she did not understand anything about me, how international adoption was a hotbed of corruption and child-stealing, and I stormed out. I wouldn't say I had sleepless nights, but more than once when I woke up at three or four, I could not get back to sleep replaying over in my mind what I'd like to say to her. My husband, Tony, had the same reaction.

She called a few days later, as if nothing had happened. One time--on Mother's Day, no less--I was actually talking to adoption-reform pioneer Florence Fisher and took the call before I saw on Caller ID that it was Yvonne. Basically she had a message for Tony which I passed on. He did not call her back. The next time she called did not take the call,--she left a message as if nothing had happened.
One has choices, one usually has choices. This time I decided to try to say in a single-spaced two-page letter what I could never get out if we actually spoke. I also thought it would make more of an impression, she would be able to read and reread what I had to say. A few days later, she wrote back, seemingly not quite accepting what I said. I wrote back again, explaining further. Asked her to watch a few videos that I sent to her email address.

In short, while she agrees there may be the very rare (one) corrupt adoption agency, she can not believe that corruption is rampant. But then she wrote what it at the heart of today's birth-mother dilemma: that while she believes that "if and when a child is old enough it wishes to know its heritage her or she should have easy access to that information," she does not believe "that the birth parent should have the right to disturb and upset my family in search of their child or have a say in the way I bring up MY [her emphasis] child. In my opinion it is a one way street."

She goes on to say that this is the last time we should discuss this adding: "You have a right to your opinion, which by the way I understand, but I also have a right to mine." She ends by adding that one of her daughters and husband is coming for the weekend, and she knows they would love to see us. While I was writing this, she called and I did not answer; her message was: Could we come over for a drink at six?

I give up. Though she knows--and I have reminded her in this last go-round--that I found Jane and was reunited with her when she was fifteen with her adoptive parent's blessing--an action Yvonne condemns, she seems to think we can go on as before. We can not. I feel like while, say, someone freely admits she is say, a racist, she wants to invite me (not of her race) to dine at her table because I am somehow "not like the rest of them."

Her attitude is pervasive in society and more so, here in America, I believe, than elsewhere because we are a culture are tied into the myth that the past is of little consequence, that we can make and remake ourselves into whatever and whomever we want. It's why I feel so hopeless in combating attitudes like hers and that of another "friend" who attacked me over a year ago for searching for Jane. Attitudes about openness have changed on one level, but in many quarters, and by many adoptive parents, not towards us birth/first mothers. We gave the children up; it does not matter that the anonymity was coerced (which I painstakingly explained to Yvonne); we signed the fucking papers and so there it lies. We can live lives of misery and yearning, that's too effing bad--as Yvonne put it, it is a one-way street.

I do know I do not want to be around her anymore. I do not want to be the pariah among her thoughts. Our friendship is over and out. Eventually, I'll stop being upset.

The evening calls. I have a cous-cous salad (healthy and delicious!) to make to take to an afternoon croquet game and barbecue with friends; my husband's nephew by marriage, a tree guy, is coming tonight with his wife and two toddlers to take down a dead tree in the back yard tomorrow, and I'll make them a splendid lunch, with shrimp and clams. Life continues. And the next blog will be about good news from my other granddaughter, Lisa. There is a silver lining.--lorraine

When death reveals a secret child

Full moon.

Thursday and Friday I helped clean out the home of a neighbor and friend who died in December.

With the emptying of the house, my husband and I are also losing a family that became a stand-in for my own distant family, and for Tony's too. And the neighbor--the grande dame of her family--was my friend, but a friend who I discovered shortly before she died, was a mother like me. A mother who gave up a child.

I've written about Yvonne several times before, for we had legendary arguments about whether someone who is relinquished and adopted should find their biological family. We wrote

How relinquishing a child affected my friendships

Lorraine

Friendship has been on my mind lately as it relates to how my friends have changed because of being someone who relinquished a child for adoption during a far different era, found at fifteen in 1981, and wrote about the experience and talked about it in the media and to legislators, always hoping to effect a change. That records for all would be open. That there would be far fewer adoptions. That mothers--if they chose to give birth--would keep their children.

Along the way, some friends and men in my life understood why I was so committed, but others fell away. But it's not about the men in my life that's on my mind, it's the female friends. Now my connection to adoption has been pretty intense, I'll grant you that, so it goes without saying that friends had to understand me and accept that part of me if we were going to be close.

Reproductive Agents!!! Not Mothers. Of any sort.

Hi folks, just when you think there is nothing new under the sun...there is! I have--maybe had is the operative word here-- a good friend named Yvonne. She is 77, comes from an aristocratic French/American family, educated both here and there, and there have been times when she called me her "youngest sister" and I called her "the sister I never had." She is a neighbor who lives three doors down from us. We do all kinds of favors for each other.

But there was always one huge gulf between us: adoption. Yvonne never met an adoption that wasn't happy. Though she knew my granddaughter--who even stayed in her house with my nieces (when ours was overwhelmed with relatives) she always needed to make clear to me that she always sided with the adoptive parents and that...she was not in favor of reunions, searching, every adoptee she knew fit in just perfect with her adoptive family, you name it. I always managed to change the subject ASAP, and I knew she was a woman of adamant opinions that offered little room for negotiation.

When Juno came out, I gave her Birthmark to read, thinking that she might at least see my point of view. She did, for about fifteen minutes, apparently. She does know one adoptee who searched, found and became good friends with her mother. According to Yvonne, that is all right. That is the only thing that is all right. But birth mothers' searching: Non, nyet, no, nien!

Sunday, I stopped by her house for a late afternoon visit. On her coffee table is a new book from the point of view of the adoptive father, The Brotherhood of Joseph (the original Biblical adopter), by Brooks Hansen, the son of her old boarding school chum and who lives, as fate would have it, only a few blocks away from us both. You get the picture. Aristocratic also--Brooks? He couldn't have kids with wife (don't know the ages at which they got around to thinking about that) so they adopted a child from Siberia, and a second from Kazakhstan. Which Mirah Riben devotes a small section to in The Stork Market.

Here is a snippet of the description on amazon:

Brooks Hansen vividly captures the emotional turmoil he and his wife, Elizabeth, endured as they tried to concieve, (sic) the years their lives were put on hold, and the excruciating sense of loss. He writes too of the couple’s journey through the bewildering world of adoption—a path to parenthood fraught with financial, legal, and emotional risks of its own.

I first heard of the first adoption at dinner one night at Yvonne's house and when she was getting dessert from the kitchen, and the adoptive grandfather said his son and wife were adopting from Russia so they wouldn't have to deal with "that birthmother business"--he had no idea he was speaking to one--I thought, what the hell, I'm going to burst his smug bubble, and told him...I'm a birthmother, my daughter has lived with us for summers, worked downtown at the ice cream place one summer, her parents have been great, etc.

Well, frankly that's just what we want to avoid, he said just as Yvonne returned with an apple tart and we changed the subject.

Anyway, maybe Yvonne is in her cups a bit last Sunday--she has poured herself a second tumbler of red wine with ice--but this time she will not quit. Showed me Brooks's book on her coffee table, that maybe it's something I ought to check into later when I have the time (she knows I am writing a memoir about my daughter Jane), and somehow and before I know it, she is yelling at me that ... women like me are wrong, we have no understanding of what it really means to be a mother, we are not mothers...the only feelings that count are those of the adoptive parents, WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO INTERFERE, because...we are nothing more than "reproductive agents." We can only give up our children for whatever reasons and pray for them. That is it. Searching? On our own? NEVER.

I argued for a few more moments but tears just started spurting out of me and I said, I can't talk to you about this. As I ran out for the door, she was grabbing my arm, saying, but I love you, dear, let's have dinner this week.

I was sorry that her opinions were so cemented in hardness. I was sad this friendship had come to this. But there is a point at which we can not be doormats to outmoded opinions.

to be continued....

Reproductive Agent, continued...

To add to the story--In writing about Yvonne to my blogging pal Linda, I believe I hit upon what bothered Yvonne about me searching so much: her own feelings of abandonment.

Her famous French mother was basically a high falutin' courtesan, and after she divorced Yvonne's father, had numerous affairs and a couple more marriages to wealthy European playboys, and left the raising of the children to their father. So Yvonne was raised in boarding schools with her sisters, both in France, until the divorce and the war, and then in this country. She says she hardly knew her mother when she went to live with her outside of Paris when she was seventeen. Her older sister did not see her mother for nearly two decades....

I've been attacked before by people who really hate that I am a mother who searched, that I am not against first mothers searching, that adoptees have the right to search, but unquestionably, the ones who are the most angry/upset are those who were abandoned by their own mothers. And that's what I think has happened here.

This is the letter I sent to Yvonne yesterday:

I am still quite distraught about what happened Sunday, but the white flowers seemed to say that you feel that we are only having a "disagreement" that could be easily patched up. It left the ball in my court to call you and say, Oh gee, let's forget it, let's be friends. I didn't accept the flowers because they would have only been a reminder that to you, I am, at the most basic level, a "reproductive agent." Without any rights except to mourn the loss of my child all my life. Instead of flowers, I would have welcomed a phone call to talk. I still would.

I don't know if the wine loosened your tongue, but if it did, it certainly only brought out how you really feel about women like me. I can not be separated from other women like me, anymore than you, in your mind, can not be separated from the French who did not stand up stronger against the Germans. That is a subject I have certainly not broached with you--for what purpose?--and I recall your angry reaction when Cocteau was criticized for collaborating with the Nazis. YOU WEREN'T THERE AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO SAY ANYTHING was your hot and instantaneously emotional reaction when the comment was made at our dinner table. Yet you can tell me--no, insist with anger and certainty --how I, and the other women like me, had no basic human need/instinct/right to ever find out what happened to the children we gave up for adoption. Yet you have not lain in my bed. You have no idea with the experience is like. Yet you make ironclad judgments about it as if you had lived through it yourself.

Would it surprise you to know that in 1980, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, after holding numerous hearings around the country (for which I testified) issued a Model Adoption Act that included these words:

"There can be no legally protected interest in keeping one's identity secrete from one's biological offspring; parents and children are considered co-owners of this information regarding the event of birth.... " The Act would have given both adoptees and birth parents the access to the information. It also included this phrase: "modern attitudes and realities of adoption no longer support the cloak of secrecy upon which sealed records laws were based." But adoptive parents, and the financial backing of the Mormon church (for their own reasons of "family" in the afterlife) have fought this tooth and nail. Most other countries today do not seal birth records of adoptees. Adoptions from places like Siberia and Kazakhstan are suspect because there are several known cases of stolen babies, forged relinquishment papers, and the like.

People like Brooks Hansen go overseas, it appears, to get babies so they can have babies without an identity other than the one they give them. Most adoptions in this country today are some form of "open adoption," in which the parties know each other. These natural mothers--i.e. reproductive agents--apparently have a much less difficult time in their lives reconciling with the fact that their children are adopted. Let me ask this--and I don't know the answer--how old was Brooks and his wife when they decided to have children? In their most fecund reproductive years? Their twenties? Later? Much later? It is always sad when someone who wants to have children can not, but that does not entitle them ipso facto to someone else's child.

Your vituperative attack on me--and referring to us as "reproductive agents" is an attack on me-- went to the very core of who I am and what I have been about for most of my adult life. I have, over the years, received hundreds of letters from grateful adoptees, and other natural mothers, aka "reproductive agents", for the work I have devoted a large part of my life to. The letters are full of tears and thank yous. And of course there are always a few from adoptive parents who want to kill me. I have tried not to talk about this to you--though it is basic to who I am--because I know how you feel, and that nothing I ever said would open a crack in your feelings that I am wrong, and should shut up and sit down. Your mind was made up.

But know this: All adoptions do not work out well, no matter that the few that you know of have. Kids get returned; one parents dies, or they divorce and the new partner often doesn't want the kid and he's shuttled off to boarding schools and summer camps with little affection the week they are home in between; adoptees end up back in the care of the state; the statistics that I can show you prove that more adoptees end up in therapy, special schools, on drugs, both prescribed and illicit, have other children out of wedlock, are prone to pathological lying, etc. than the general population. Some adoptees can not search for any number of reasons--they may not have a birth certificate with the right date on it, or even the place--and only the natural mother can reconnect, because only she has access to the accurate facts of that birth.

Adoption is way more complicated than your experience has shown it to be. This is not just from my own experience, or from a few friends; I have a small library of books/academic papers/reports about this. I have testified in Albany to a joint Senate-Assembly committee, in Washington to a Senate committee, and in court for adoptees who want their records, been on television more than a dozen times talking about adoption reform. This is the subject of my life.

What I feel from you is a basic rejection/repugnance of all women who have surrendered children ("reproductive agent" says that), or at least all women who want to do more than say a million rosaries for those children. And that has to include me. So where does that leave us? I don' t know, but if you like, I would welcome you to come over and talk. If you want to do that, please give me a call so we can set up a time. I have been so very upset by this break. I hope we can repair this, but you have to understand that I can not erase from memory the words I heard you say with such vehemence. I am writing all this because I feel I could never get it all out if we talk. And I feel I not only owe you an insight into my feelings, but also would like you to know what the extensive literature on adoption says.

This break has hurt me deeply because I have been so very fond of you. I have often thought of you as the sister I never had. Our closeness has only made this worse. It is as if my sister told me I was worthless, and that how I have lived my life was a mistake.

lorraine

I'll let you readers know what comes of this. She does not read her email everyday. I know some of you may not understand, but I do hope there is a way we can come to some sort of understanding and have a relationship. None of us are perfect, all of us have glitches, and there is much about her that I like. Coming to the realization about her mother was liberating, and made me think more predisposed to excuse her. Though I don't know if my analysis will have any bearing on the outcome.
lorraine

Does surrender (for the birth/first mother) and adoption (for the child) lead to PTSD?

One adoptee Facebook friend, Robert Wilson Harrington McCullough, wrote a note a couple of weeks ago that I want to share with readers all--natural moms, nurturing moms (to use his phraseology), and adoptees because he discusses the brain wiring that makes some of us so sensitive to all matters adoption.

For instance, the other day, my neighbor and friend, Yvonne, whom I've written about before, and who has never heard of an adoption that wasn't peachy-keen and the adoptee just happy as a pig in a sty to be raised in a family not their own and original, told me that she heard that another neighbor, a young man whom we both like tremendously, and the girl friend who moved in with him a couple of months ago are now looking into adoption. I say young, because I'm in my sixties; he's probably either late thirties, most likely forties, and the age of his girl friend is probably the same. In other words, they are  like a lot of young people today...waiting and waiting and waiting to settle down with a partner until the time when conception comes easy is long over. I suppose we do have The Pill thank for this...the 50th anniversary of The Pill, incidently was...Mother's Day.* But I digress.

Their answer to the age old dilemma of fecundity decreasing with the onset of the forties and perhaps, peri-menopause? Adoption. If Sandra Bullock, Angelina, Madonna, Meg Ryan, Sharon Stone, Katherine Heigl, Michelle Pheiffer, Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, Hugh Jackman, Senator (TX, R) Kay Bailey Hutchinson,** and the lady down the block all have adopted children, why can't we?

Yvonne then held up two fingers entwined, opened her eyes widely, and nodded her head in approval and hope. Not exactly the f!@#ing reaction I was having. I said a few things nearly incoherent words about stealing babies in China and India to feed the market here, that adoption screws up people way more than she's ever acknowledged, that why didn't they support the poor woman who couldn't keep her child, and that she had no idea what she was talking about before I left. Grrr...that was part of my buildup to Mother's Day.*

You wonder why this birth/first/natural mother went into a funk in the middle of the week? That did not help. I am not really sure what I am going to do about our "friendship." Our lives have been somewhat entwined for several years, and Yvonne is 80 and needs some assistance from a neighbor; there is much else about her that is worthy. She has called me "her youngest sister." It was only about a year ago I realized how truly far apart we are about the realities of adoption, and how much that would lead to such a split in our relationship. I asked her to read my memoir, Birthmark, and she did, and she was moved, she said...but that did not change her thinking. One of her oldest friends is an adoptive grandmother to a child or two from Siberia, and that woman's husband has called me: our greatest nightmare. Cool. They are my greatest nightmare.

Now I am not sure I even want to be around Yvonne. I spoke to my old-pal-in-arms Florence Fisher yesterday, and her advice is to simply stay away. I know that for the immediate future, I sure as hell need to do that. She may be one of those toxic people in my life that therapists talk about today.  But it's not going to be easy, she lives too close; we've been too close. She's like family, only she's not. Family.

But my reaction to Yvonne, while I do not think it was an over-reaction, led me back to the essay that Wilson Harrington McCullough wrote. We have written about the after effects of surrendering a child to adoption before: Does giving up a child for adoption make you sick? I maintain the effects of the trauma of relinquishing a child are real and lasting and can not help but be detrimental to one's health. A primal wound, in other words. And I doubt many women can somehow bury thoughts of the baby who is lost once they sign the surrender papers and move on without examining what has happened to them, and the child.There must be a group of them, and many of them are the women who reject a reunion with their surrendered "birth" children.

Anyway, all  of this is by way of a buildup to Robert Wilson Harrington McCullough's piece, which I found enlightening. Some of you on Facebook may have read it already, but I wanted to share it here:

An article in this month's Scientific American triggered some musings in my cabeza. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circuits The premise is that neuroscience is now using imaging to map what actually occurs in the brain in realtime for patients suffering depression, OCD, ADHD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other mental health disorders.

The human brain is a complex mechanism which is constantly evolving, building new pathways along prewired inherited structures. I was particularly interested in their findings on PTSD, because many of the effects common to adoptees are similar to PTSD.

I believe Nancy Verrier's assesment of the Primal Wound as a trauma is essentially correct. The separation of an infant from the only environment he has known since quickening in his mother's womb has deep emotional effects at the beginning of life. Surrender of a child is likewise a trauma; though relinquishment usually occurs at a later age than adoption, a huge loss like this is no less a severe interruption of a person's personality than "battle fatigue".

What the article pointed out was that the brain has normal processes (called extinction) to gradually diminish the effects of trauma which under normal circumstances make the memory recede in significance. In PTSD, however, the person becomes stuck in a loop which bypasses the parts of the brain which normally reduce the pain; in fact, the brain rewires itself to the point where slight triggers can cause anxiety and stress equal or even more crippling than the original trauma.

The implications are that there are ways to rewire the pathways and learned responses to overcome this, by therapy and targeted medications. I agree with this; the way to overcome irrational fear is to expose oneself to the causes of fear in a controlled, nonthreatening environment, and gradually reinforce new responses instead of falling back into the old pattern of trigger/response.

While I was pondering that, I heard a segment on NPR dealing with foster children who age out of the system at 18. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125729965

What struck me from this was the similarity to adoptee experiences; the feeling of not fitting in, of high rates of involvement with criminal justice system, of becoming single parents at an early age, and of abandonment issues. The defining factor between success and failure seemed to often depend upon the parenting they received; most of them say had it not been for a good home placement, they would have had real problems like many of their peers.

This led me to recall an Ira Glass segment on This American Life I heard several years ago: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/360/Switched-At-Birth

It is about two girls in Wisconsin who were accidentally switched at birth, and the struggles they had fitting into their families; it's hard to grow up the only extrovert in an introverted family, and vice versa! This story pointed out that it is not adoption per se which causes the feelings of incomplete identity, but the transferrence from one's genetic family to a nonrelated family.

Mulling over all these topics led to this thought; Normal personal and social development involves building the mental pathways, control mechanisms and coping strategies necessary to become a functional, happy member of society. This development, training and education normally begins within a family setting. Much of this occurs through observing and interacting with family members - People who are genetically similar! It is no secret that physical traits (hair color, stature, features) are shared in families; I can attest in my own biological children and family that intellectual and emotional traits also run in families.

My insight is this; most people develop coping mechanisms to compensate for neurologically based behaviors whether they be good or bad. They pass physical traits as well as behaviors along to their children, through both nature and nurture. For example, a biochemical tendency toward depression because of an imbalance in serotonin reuptake, or to ADHD because of similar imbalances, can be inherited - but successful strategies the parent learned to compensate can also be taught, and indeed are observed from infancy by the child. That is the normal course of human development over most of our history. However, it works best when parents and children share DNA. (Of course, unsuccessful behavior can also be taught - not every family is functional. Some families keep the "fun" in "dysfunctional" from generation to generation!)

When a child is transferred to a different biological family, the strategies may be inappropriate. Indeed, they may even aggravate the problem, by using the wrong methods, or disciplining incorrectly. For example, a non-musical family cannot understand why their non-biological child is always whistling or singing or beating time with their hands; not understanding it themselves, they decide the child is inattentive or preoccupied so they may even punish them for behavior which would be encouraged and developed in the correct biological family! It's like trying to read a Russian novel without a Russian/English dictionary. My point is that half the resources available to the biological child are missing in nongenetic families.

I believe this is at the heart of why so many adopted children, foster children and even children of divorce sometimes have social adjustment problems; they lack the appropriate compensating mechanisms which children raised in their biological families gain by proximity to those who share their emotional and intellectual hardwiring!

Certainly there were behaviors of my daughter that she was "corrected" for. In some ways she did fit into her new family of genetic strangers; in so many other ways, she did not, and the more I learned about them, the more difficult it became for me to accept what her being adopted meant to her sad life.
______________________
*For those who follow astrology even a bit, this year Mother's Day came during Mercury in retrograde when all kinds of communication and travel gets screwed up: Ergo the Greenland volcano erupting and disrupting traffic, the Times Square would-be bomber, the eruptions of anger that various comments have unleashed in the blogosphere, dishes sent from Michigan that were largely broken because the UPS guy did not mark them "Fragile"[a personal reference], flowers not delivered [ditto], flashes of anger when I spoke to my husband, and there's more. The good news is that Mercury goes out of retrograde on Tuesday (tomorrow), though it will take a while--a couple of weeks--for everything and everyone to calm down.

** If you know any more celebrity adoptions, please add them in comments. Thanks.  

Should I tell my sister she's adopted?

Lorraine

Hell,  yes!

"Should I tell my sister she's adopted?" was the headline of The Ethicist column in The New York Times Magazine on Sunday. Yikes, I thought this kind of lying by omission was long over, to judge from all we hear about open adoption and such. But apparently not. Not at all.

The man consulting the ethical experts writes:

"My parents never told her that she was adopted, and they asked me not to say anything. They planned on telling her when she was old enough to understand, but they kept putting it off. They know that I believe they have done her a serious disservice."

Open Adoption is "one free baby-sitting scam"....

Last night I couldn't help myself, I delved into that book that started the terrible argument with my friend Yvonne over whether or not the givers of life have any rights--any rights at all--to find out what happened to that life. And I read enough into The Brotherhood of Joseph by Brooks Hansen to realize how far--how incredibly far--we have to go before we are going to change hearts and minds among adopters. I know that word--adopters--invokes revulsion in many and I'll grant that it does seem like a cruel term, but Mr. Hansen says that when he hears a kid on the bus ask a girl if she's ever going to look for her "real" parents, the word evokes in him the same feelings as if he had heard "nigger" or "cunt." So for the moment, let me call him and his wife Elizabeth, ADOPTERS. Because that's what they are; for the record, he prefers "actual parents." He never says what he would prefer we first parents would be called. Actually, he would prefer us dead, though he doesn't say that. He doesn't need to.

A brief rundown of the story. He and his wife, age 36, want to be parents. Are desperate to be parents. Somewhere between the wife's age of 36 and 37 they hop on the fertility-industry train. Apparently they missed the biology lesson that says that after age 29 a woman's fertility starts to decline and .... keeps going down. After four years of the awful business--and it is pretty grim--and going into debt, they try a donor egg from a relative of the wife's That fails also. He admits freely that they wanted their own kid: "...we are a species, 'let's face it--that prizes the blood-bond uber Alles. And the law makes that pretty clear...Even distant grandparents can wedge a child from the arms of adopted parents just by showing up in court." (As if, but that's another story.)

He then explains why an open adoption is repugnant: "Just because we'd been through the IVF wars and lost, that didn't mean that Elizabeth should always have to save an extra seat at the dance recital." He's incensed that prospective adopters could pay for the care and "late-night Whopper runs" of a pregnant woman who was considering giving them her child and then "change her mind, keep the baby, and not have to pay back the prospective couple one red cent..." He calls open adoption with its "update letters, report cards, scheduled visits, etc., "seem like one giant free baby-sitting scam."

So it's off to Russia to adopt where they get Ilya or Theo, I can't quite tell. And though the book seems to end there, I'm aware--remember, he's the son of friends of Yvonne, the adopting grandparents live in my little town and are people I occasionally run into at the supermarket or the ATM--they get a second child from Kazakhstan. Apparently the well-educated Mr. Hansen and his wife never read Cicero:

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live forever as a child.

They want a kid that will never be able to have a relationship with any kin, or most likely, never be able to learn more about his ancestry than the adopters know and tell him. By choosing this kind of adoption, they are choosing to form person that can never know, never have a history other than the one they create.

I awoke early this morning in one of those aggravating mind frenzies, thinking, if this is what Yvonne ( see earlier blogs) thinks is not only possible, but preferred, if this is what informs the opinions of people like Aston (the moneyed class, let's be clear), if there are people like Brooks and Elizabeth Hansen, we have so much further to go than we thought. I try to be sympathetic to people who adopt, but lord, since there is no reciprocity evident in so many of them towards the women who gave their children life, it's kinda hard to be understanding of their plight. And feelings. (To make the book even more in my face, it's blurbed on the back by another friend, this one a writer and the adoptive father of a darling Chinese girl. She really is darling, I'm not being sarcastic.)

Which brings me back to The Locator. I've seen all four episodes and they have all been adoption-reunion stories, and no matter how much Troy Dunn charges for people who aren't his pro bono cases, these stories pack a wallop in a half hour, and the more people that see them the more we are going to change public opinion about open adoption, and open records for adoptees and birth parents.

The other day I got an email from a compatriot in the fight to open records and the basic gist of it was--tell stories. Tell stories about separation and reunion. Get to people on a gut level. You can quote statistics about "unresolved grief" from the Donaldson report on birth mothers, but that doesn't do as much good as one heart-breaking story of loss and reunion. So let me encourage all of your nay-sayers about The Locator, and its media commercialization of one of life's most basic stories--mother and child separation--to think about it in a different light. The more people who see it, the more we are going to be able to reach the hearts and minds of legislators, and people like Yvonne and Aston and their friends.

The Locator website at WE has a silly mind game, Troy Dunn's blog, a reunion registry (yeah, really), summaries of the episodes, but in the end, the television show reminds the audience that life does not begin with adoption, that the need to know one's past is universal, and only those who have been brain-washed not to think about the past, or have been too hurt to let themselves wonder, shut off this curiosity.

It's on in back-to-back episodes on Saturday evening, starting at nine p.m.

Birth Mothers Attacked as Usual...or, Maybe I Need New Friends

I seem to be attracting fireballs lately--mainly because a) I'm writing about my daughter and telling people, so that brings up the whole idea that I found her, not the other way around; and b) I live in a world where adoptions are plentiful--everybody knows at least three people who have adopted and so far, so good. The kids are generally doing fine and so...the elephant in the room is the specter of the birth mother coming back.

That would be me.

So after just having had that horrible eruption with my close friend and neighbor, Yvonne, I got gob-smacked the other night by childless successful corporate attorney, also a friend. Call him Aston. He is godfather to one Chinese adoptee, who lives down the street from us, she's now fifteen; friend to another women who also has a Chinese girl, now fourteen; and one of his very best friends has a white son...from Gladney in Texas, one of the agencies that supports the National Council for Adoption.

Anyway, those are only the adoptions we know about that Aston is close to. God knows what started it, but he went on a long nasty harangue about how any birth mother coming back is always interfering, always upsetting this nice family, and after the parents have "invested" so much, both financially and emotionally, this WOMAN HAS NO RIGHT TO DO THAT!!!!

After I tried to make a case for the agony of not knowing, and gave him a brief history of sealed adoptions (Kansas and Alaska didn't count because they weren't big enough states) he came up with this question: What part of the pie chart of a birth mother who searches can be ascribed to self-interest? ....

Tell me, how do you answer that?

My husband Tony was there throughout and took Aston on as much as I did because that question left me speechless. The "discussion" might have taken place in a courtroom. Aston didn't know (why would he?) there was any research about birth mothers. Or the great mystery in the life of an adoptee. I did have him leave with both a copy of The Adoption Triangle and the Donaldson adoptee report. He's never had kids, when he and he wife wanted to adopt, his mother talked them out of it.

Damn, I can't even write about this without crying. All I know is that birth others are really seen as the pariahs by the elite class of adopters who have never been in the position of being poor, or feeling they had no options. Yvonne is one, Aston is another. Aston's wife, who did want to adopt quite badly, it came out, mostly said nothing but she at least got it that birth mothers would feel ...what is the word? Aston and I ended up using agony to refer to the pain birth mothers feel.

Here is what I emailed him the next day:

What I never got around to saying during your prosecutorial attack--the pie chart question seemed only designed to make birth mothers look bad and in doing so denigrate me--was that adoptees often want to be found because it indicates that their mothers do think about them, want to know them, want to know what happened, that the baby wasn't just dropped off and the woman/teenager went on with her life as if the child was a mere temporary inconvenience.

I'm just one person but I have had stacks of letters over the years thanking me for what I do from adopted people; what they want is for their mothers to find them. Adoption is painful, and keeping everything locked up--no matter who does the searching--does not make it less so. Only in the minds of people who have never walked the walk. Since you have such strong opinions that I'm in the wrong in such a major way, I hope you will take the time to read some of the material, including the birth mother survey that is at the site I sent yesterday. (you don't need to read it all, you can find the relevant sections from the TOC.

Unless you walked in my shoes, I don't think you can understand the depth of feeling that goes toward one's one flesh and blood. As someone one said, we can be casual about our own parents, but our kids always have us by the balls.

lorraine

In a message dated 09/07/08 10:10:49 Eastern Daylight Time, nccar@mindspring.com writes:

Lorraine,

I have given the following young lady your email and asked her to contact you, as her adoption was handled in New York. Please if you can pass her along to anyone who might be of assistance to her. She contacted me through the Care2 network.

Hello Ms. Roberta,

Thank you for responding to my inquiry. The main dilemma that I have been encountering is that I was born in Miami FL, but taken away from my mothers arms (when she moved up to NYC I might have been 1 yrs old) and put into foster care in Bronx, NY and that eventually led into an adoption by a family that was not well receiving of me as the adoptee. I somehow remembered from the time I was 4 1/2 yrs old that the foster care agency was located on 349 East 149th Street; Bronx, NY 10451 because of the building structure and the CitiBank logo on there; however, nobody knew the name of the agency that was once in the basement area of CitiBank back in 1984-1990's. I was told by CitiBank reps that that organization left during the 90's. This is the only detail I could recall of that has made me continue asking people if there's a way to get the agency's name during 1984. I even wrote Governor Pataki to please help me in this search and he replied with several agency's names in the Bronx and they claimed that I don't exist on their system.

I greatly appreciate your interest to assist me in any way, I hope to receive guidance if that's possible so that my life mystery can come to an end. Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Christina

Do you think this woman would feel that her birth mother was causing an unnecessary conflict in her life if she were to call upon her daughter?

One more thing, that I did not bring up that night: Aston's father was the guardian ad litem for the Schmidt/DeBoer child, Baby Anna/Jessica. Who argued in the Michigan court that the baby's best interests were with staying with the DeBoers....Who in my mind were nothing but baby snatchers as the real mother asked for the child back within the time limit but fought her for two years in the courts. Incidentally, the DeBoers later divorced.

Oh yeah, where did all this take place? At my dinner table, just the cozy four of us. I'd love to hear from other birth mothers about the reactions they get when it becomes clear they were the ones who did the searching.
--lorraine

In Plain Sight**** Gets Adoption Reunion Right

So after watching the documentary Google Baby on HBO2 and brushing my teeth to get the bad taste out of my mouth about how these babies-to-order are being put together like clam chowder and gestated by poor Indian women, I saw that one of my favorite crime dramas, In Plain Sight, is on. The show is not so much about solving a crime, but dealing with the lives of the people who will go into the witness protection program after they testify against the bad guys.

Whaddaya know? The episode, The Born Identity (get it?), is about a man who is adopted and...before he goes into the witness protection somewhere he wonders if these people running the program (Mary and Marshall, the leads), can find his birth mother. He'd been living in the basement of the public library, and we already know he left his other family at 15 and moved to Seattle and lived off the grid since. He's a well-read genius with an IQ of 142 who discovers a bomb in a garbage can and can identity the two men/terrorists who left it. He's been looking for his (first/birth) mother for oh...ever since he left his adoptive home...some twenty years ago. Said he didn't fit in. 

Well, the show got it RIGHT; the male lead, Marshall Mann, is knowledgeable about Primal Wound theory and says they need to find his mother for the guy before he disappears into the witness-protection anonymity; Mary Shannon, whose father walked out on the family and she does not know his whereabouts is cynical and against it; but they get someone to check the record for the guy and  Presto! locate his first mother. Trouble is, she's dying. All the dialogue was spot on, and they locate his mother in a hospice in California. They race there but she's already gone, and the after gathering is taking place.

The son speaks to her last husband (she'd had four, but spent the last 12 years with this one) without saying who he is. Then Mary notices a picture of the dead woman and the husband at a very young age and says, Who is this?

Husband: That's me--we were together when we were seventeen.

Mary Shannon: What happened to the son she had?

Husband: How did you know? Etc. There was never a day gone by that she did not think of our son. Our parents went crazy and there was no way we could have kept him. We drifted apart after that....

So by now I'm frigging weeping as father and son reconnect.

At the end, the man in the witness protection program will be transferred to the same city where his father is, and the last scene is of them going off on a camping trip. Blown away, I was. A really warm ending to the horror of Google Baby. Sometimes the media gets it right. Yeah, I know reunions are hard, but some of them do work out as we'd like all of them too.

In Plain Sight is one of the best dramas on cable, 10 p.m. EST, 9 CST Wednesday evenings. I think there is only one left in the current season--reruns over the summer? You can watch full episodes here, but as of this morning, The Born Identity from last night was not up. It should be #311.--lorraine
__________________
I've been under the weather lately, my eyes have been killing me from too much time at the computer, trying to keep the blog fresh and work on my book. Our house is being reshingled, we are looking for new deck furniture as yard sales are not coughing it up (so we are looking on line), the episode of my once-close friend, Yvonne, appears not to be over...now she's in the hospital and I got a call last night from a friend who apparently knew nothing of our current contretemps and how Yvonne wants to get together and celebrate my birthday. Life is strange as the Moody Blues sang. It was The Moody Blues, right? And yes, I promise everyone the ending to the story of my missing granddaughter is coming soon.

What's wrong with creating children with Sperm from Column A and Egg from Column B? Just about everything.

Today just a link to a New York Times columnist, Ross Douthat, about the perils of creating children-for-hire. It's a good read: The Birds and the Bees (via the Fertility Clinic) and do leave a comment.

And if you have been away from the blog over the weekend (and why not?) yesterday's post is about the end of a friendship with a friend whose opinion is that birth/first mothers who search are wrong, wrong, wrong. I think she would like to stone us because we are "disturbing" the  happy, non-troubled adoption that she is sure is in place.

This morning with family my husband and I went downtown for the annual Memorial Day parade in Sag Harbor and ran into one of Yvonne's friends, with whom we are also friendly. My husband (when I was not around) told her that Yvonne and I had a huge falling out and it was not going to be breached. I'm no longer even sad that the friendship ended; I am disturbed that so many people feel that it is all right to trample the feelings and sensibilities of birth/first mothers because after all, we did it! We got pregnant! We surrendered a child! We signed a paper that insisted on anonymity because we had no choice! Therefore, we ought to go quietly to our emotional graves.

Screw 'em.--lorraine

That's my niece (by marriage) and her two kids, Charlie with the flag and Anna peering from behind it.

Bristol Palin will be more than a firstmother.

Sarah Palin. Bristol. Five months pregnant. It might be a personal tragedy in their family, but given the background, maybe not. It's not clear that Bristol is giving up college for baby and marriage to the hockey hunk Levi. She is following in her mother's footsteps, who was pregnant when she got married. In terms of marriage, that has worked out.

Linda, one of the other bloggers on Firstmother Forum, has been upset about this and the girl's life going forward, but perhaps I'm more jaded. I just see the pregnancy as the typical response to having abstinence-only sex education classes, which is what Ms. Palin advocates. And I would assume, she would work to further abstinence-only sex education should she end up as vice president. Here's a snippet of a column I wrote for a local newspaper a year ago:

Everyone can agree that abstinence will prevent pregnancies as well as sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence-only programs have been promoted by every GOP Congress and president since Ronald Reagan, who instituted them in 1981. In 1996, a GOP Congress mandated that $50 million each year go to abstinence-only programs, with another $37.5 million coming from the states in matching grants.[Obviously they had no trouble getting this money in Alaska.] Since then the government has spent $1.5 billion on such abstinence-only sex education, despite plenty of evidence that they are simply bogus.

They don't work in the long run--heck, they don't even work in the short run. The studies are numerous, but a favorite of mine is one done jointly by Columbia and Yale universities. It found that while "virginity pledges" seem to encourages teenagers to delay sex the effect was short lived. Eighty-eight percent--call it an overwhelming majority--of those who signed such a pledge ended up having sex not only before they married, but--equally fascinating, before the study ended. Hmm...sounds like most of the virgins stuck to the pledge when it was convenient, but not once they found someone to love.

Two other bits of data from that study stand out: Those taking the pledge had the same rate of sexually transmitted disease as those who did not. (Zero gain.) And they were less likely to use a contraceptive when they put their booties under someone else's bed. (Negative loss.)

And if those same teenagers are having unprotected sex, they are more likely to have unintended pregnancies. [I'm going to assume Bristol's pregnancy is unintended.] Which brings us back to that nagging abortion rate that's been stuck in neutral under Bush's watch, this is, not going down as it had under Clinton. In short, abstinence-only programs lead to more unintended pregnancies. According to the Guttmacher Institute, half of the 6.4 million pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unintended. Half of them are carried to term.

In April of 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services quietly released a long-awaited, Congressionally mandated evaluation of Title V-abstinence-only programs. The conclusion: "Youth in the program group were no more likely than the control-group youth to have abstained from sex, and among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age."

The good news was the the Democrats finally pulled the plug on such an inane and failed program. They planned to let a $50 million grant expire in June, 2000. Conservatives were outraged.

Along with their outrage, I would assume conservatives had more unplanned pregnancies in their teen population. I am a old-timer who went to Catholic schools and had sex at the time when guys who said that they didn't like using condoms got away with it. (Yes, my daughter's father did say that.) Today, more teens are having sex than they were in my day, but in a sane world they are given the education, and easy access to contraception, they need to have sex that is not only safe, but does not lead to an unplanned conception.

No matter how we feel about this family personally and politically, no matter how we feel about abortion, what I applaud and feel good about is that this child will not be given up for adoption. That would be the real tragedy. And we might not hear, as both the Bush presidents have been want to spout--"adoption not abortion."

Bristol's road will not be an easy one, but she will have her baby. And keep it.

--lorraine

PS: For those of you who listened to my lament about Yvonne, we spoke. She denies, denies that she could have ever called women who give up babies "reproductive agents." I believe she believes that she did not say that. She sat quietly and listened while I tried to educate her and open her mind somewhat. I may have succeeded. Or maybe not.

Yvonne is not/never was against adoptees searching, and thank god, her hairdresser (who eventually married the father) has had a successful reunion with the daughter the couple lost to adoption. Among the many things I said was that sometimes the adopted person is not able to do the search because the original birth certificate has been altered, or for other reasons. She was aware that in France the OBCs were never sealed. Can we be friends again? I hope so, in time. Right now I'm still internally reeling from her outburst.

Sealed adoptee birth record laws: Protecting patriarchy

"Laws written by men to protect women deserve scrutiny" argued the plaintiffs in a case before the U. S. Supreme Court, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, to over turn a Texas law that restricts women's access to abortion by targeting doctors and clinics that provide abortions. The law requires physicians who provide abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of their clinic. A separate provision, which has not yet gone into effect, would mandate that abortion clinics must meet standards for "ambulatory surgical centers," which includes, for instance, having hallways wide enough to have two gurneys pass, a totally unnecessary demand and a costly renovation for most clinics.

Wanted: Birthmothers to Say a Few Words

maryanne’s comment on our recent post O Lord how long must birth mothers be punished about the need to tell our stories through books and postings on Origins-USA reminded of an anecdote about Abraham Lincoln. When he met Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lincoln said “So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”

It is axiomatic in the world of charitable fund raising – tell potential donors about a million children starving and their eyes glaze over. Show them a picture of one child with a distended stomach and they rush to open their wallets.

We need a picture of birthmothers that is so bold, so true, that it cannot be ignored. In addition to books and Origins posts, perhaps someone could create an internet Pain Poster where birthmothers can describe their experience in a few words. More about that later.

****

At our tri-annual Family Reunion in 2002, my niece Janice approached me. Her fifteen year old daughter Beth was pregnant. Would I tell Beth about the benefits of placing her child for adoption?

“No”, I said. “Adoption is pain, grief for both mother and child.” Taken aback, Janice countered “You’re the only person I’ve ever heard say that. I know several women who have given up a child. None of them ever said it was painful. You’ve done fine. You’re married, have other children, a good career. How can you say you’ve suffered?”

I talked with Beth the next day. She was troubled, confused. She wanted it all to go away but she did not want an abortion. She could not comprehend that giving up the baby “did not make it all go away.”

To my sorrow Megan, my surrendered daughter, joined the pro-adoption chorus, telling Janice and Beth that she was raised in the family in which she belonged. (This, I suspect, was her Mormon faith kicking in; Megan believed her adoption had been God’s plan.) I note the irony of Janice and Megan conspiring at a family reunion to exile the newest family member.

When I returned home, I sent Janice a VHS tape of the film made from Carol Schafer’s The Other Mother. Proof, I thought, that losing a child to adoption was painful.

Janice called me: “Okay so it’s not just you; there is one other birthmother who found giving up her child painful.

Janice and I talked back and forth over the next several months. (She would not allow me to contact Beth.) Janice repeated over and over, Beth doesn’t want to be a mother. If she keeps her baby, her life will be hard. If she gives up the baby, she will go on to great things.

I repeated over and over. “Beth will be a mother whether she keeps her baby or not. The sorrow of losing a baby to adoption lasts a lifetime. Many single mothers do fine. If I had kept Megan, my life would have been immeasurably better.

I need to point out that Janice had the resources to help Beth. Janice did not work outside the home. Her second husband, Beth’s step father, was a successful professional. He did not oppose Beth bringing the baby home. Other family members offered to help.

My arguments went nowhere so I changed course. “If Beth gives up her baby, make sure it’s an open adoption.”

“No way” responded Janice. “Beth needs a clean break. The adoption must be closed. Beth can start over as though it never happened.”

Beth gave up her son in January, 2003. She has not seen him.

I did not go to the 2005 Family Reunion because I was so angry with Janice.

Since I was responsible for putting on the 2008 reunion, I could not avoid attending. My anger had turned to disgust which made seeing Janice tolerable. I managed to spend a few minutes alone with Beth. She looked down, never making eye contact. I gave her my card and asked to call me when she got home. She has not done so.

On a happier note, another niece became pregnant a few years later. Recently separated from her husband and having little money, she considered adoption. Recalling my words over the years, she decided to keep her daughter and, of course, has never regretted it.

Those of us who have lived with adoption loss for many years may find it hard to believe that anyone would doubt that losing a baby was painful. Yet, I think Janice spoke truthfully when she said she had never heard that.

There are hundreds of thousands of birthmothers in the US. If just a fraction of these women, perhaps, 10,000, posted just a few words on a wall of remembrance website, Americans would learn the truth. More women would keep their babies. And perhaps, just perhaps, Linda’s sister Judasina, Lorraine’s neighbor Yvonne, and my niece Janice might finally get it.

Which Pain Is Greater? And it matters because?

I do not understand this need to denigrate how another person feels about giving up a child for adoption, which is what some of the posts have done. Which is what I expect from people who are all for sealed records--throw away the key, never, non, nyet do you deserve to heal this sore inside.

For me, giving up my baby daughter was like a death inside, though I went on living.

For me, now knowing her for fifteen years was an emotional hell the likes of which I have nothing in my life to compare.

For me, her death, by her own hand, was a further personal disaster that I can not relate on a scale of one to ten anything else that has happened.

For me, the Christmas after her death was not as harrowing, as agonizing, as torturous as the years when I did not know if she were dead or alive. If she had been returned like used goods. If she were institutionalized. If she languished at boarding school because her adoptive mother had died and the new wife didn't want her around. If she were abused like Lisa Steinberg.

The holocaust was indeed one of the worst tragedies of life in the last century, but those who suffered did it because of a madman; they did not bring it on themselves. They did not sign papers. The Jews do not apologize for being in Auschwitz, because they have nothing to apologize for. In some circumstances they sent away their children to save their lives. The Jews were, and are, blameless. And therein lies the great difference between enduring the Holocaust and giving up a child.

In relinquishing our children--which we did, no matter what we signed the damn surrender papers, so we have no one to blame but ourselves, even if we felt overwhelming pressures to do so. The source of our deep grieving is that we knowingly participated in an unnatural act. And that is the reason our tears, our pain, our prostrations of grief often fail to induce sympathy in others.

If not for that, we would be able to argue that we too should have the right to find out what happened to our children. Yet lobby for open records for an hour and you understand why we arouse little to no sympathy in those who are the gatekeepers of the records. Because we signed the papers. We did it. No matter how we try to invoke "circumstances" of the day, we ultimately caved in and did the deed. Willingly or not, we gave up our children. The public knows it. My acquaintance Aston, my friend Yvonne knows it. We know it.

But to quibble over whether my feelings--and those of others who have endured the loss of our children twice--are valid or if we deserve to be dismissed and denigrated strikes me as, well--you fill in whatever word you think is appropriate.
--lorraine

Silver Linings come to this first mother

Dear Readers:

Lorraine

Ten days ago my husband Tony and I were in Marquette, Michigan for a granddaughter's graduation from Northern Michigan University. First, I'll get the bragging out of the way: Granddaughter Britt was magna cum laude, with an added plus: the Secondary Teacher Education Award. Her name will be on a permanent plaque at the school.

You can imagine the pride I felt. Well, it wasn't just pride, because there were moments during the graduation I couldn't help think back of...where I came from in this journey to get there. Losing her mother to adoption in 1966. YEARS of feeling devastated and desolate, wondering if I could ever climb out of this deep dark hole in my life, my heart, my soul. Giving up a child to adoption is something you never ever get over, not really, but there my husband and I were, in far northern Michigan, nearly as far North in the state as you can go, on the shores of Lake Superior, watching my daughter's tall, lovely blonde daughter graduate from college. And I've known her since the beginning.

Part 5: A (birth) granddaughter's rejection turns into a YES!

So, continuing the story of my other granddaughter, the one who was relinquished to adoption. The story so far in brief is this: My daughter, Jane, whom I gave up for adoption, had a daughter almost twenty years to the day she was born (see Learning my daughter had given up a daughter for adoption) and relinquished her to a closed adoption (Part 2: The daughter I gave up for adoption had a daughter she gave up for adoption. As the years passed, she did not want to talk about this daughter, her first, see Part 3: A granddaugher adopted by strangers, the years tick by. Her name is X and the last installment is about how I had reached out to her through the Wisconsin Adoption Search Registry, but got the word back from the state-appointed searcher, Jacy Boldebuck, that she was not interested in meeting me. Part 4: Reaching out to my missing (birth) granddaughter but being rejected....

I failed to note in the last post that I had also made one step in finding her: I listed her birth information that I recalled on the International Soundex Reunion Registry (ISRR) even though I was not sure if her birthday was April 2nd or 3rd, 1986. Shortly after that I got an email from a Mary Wielding, saying that she could find her for me. But it was not my granddaughter herself, and so something pulled me back from telling Mary to go ahead. So I let it be. I understand so completely how it feels to have a fear of searching, thinking that rejection may be at the end of the line, and perhaps I was still raw over the loss of my daughter, who died by her own hand, in 2007. If Lisa was not searching for me, I was not ready to search for her.

And I will add that the need to find my granddaughter was not as emotionally pressing as it was to find the daughter I had surrendered to adoption. That was a killer, and I would have climbed over any legislator's body to get her records, if necessary. I had put all the clues about her birth and relinquishment (date and place, etc.) in my memoir, Birthmark, and hoped that she would find me that way, but it did not happen. I did hear from one young woman who hoped I was her mother, but I was not; an adoptive mother also called me thinking I was her daughter's other mother, but I was not. Time passed. Actually a few years went by, as my daughter was in her early teens in 1979 when I published Birthmark.

With my husband-to-be's and a male friend's encouragement, I put the "order" in to find my relinquished (birth/first/only) daughter shortly before I got married in the fall of 1981. "You're never going to be able to put this to rest until you find her," my friend Peter had said. "You aren't going to go in a grab her, so what's the problem?" The fee was $1,200, which I gladly paid.

But as I said, finding the missing granddaughter was different, and I felt rejected--hell, I was rejected! Because of my daughter's severe PMS and suicide during an episode, she had been contacted but turned down the opportunity to know me. It stung. I retreated.

So, nothing happened for about a year. Then after I began writing about the low rate of reunions effected by the Wisconsin program, and wrote Most Birth/First Mothers Want Contact but still the secrecy lingers on with information on what other women and searchers reported, I again got an email from the same Mary who had contacted me a year earlier. She was reading the blog and wanted again to know if I had changed my mind about locating my (birth) granddaughter. Mary lived in Wisconsin. She assured me she could most likely find her. Linda and I emailed about it. Finally, I said, What the hell, I might as well take this opportunity, maybe it won't come around again. Find my granddaughter, I said, she was born in April, in Madison, in 1986, on one of two dates.

Two days later Mary called me with her name and probable whereabouts! Within the next couple of days I got pictures of her from her high school yearbook and some other basic information, including what appeared to be a current address. She was living in Minneapolis and had graduated from St. Thomas University in St. Paul. She had kept the name--Lisa Marie--that my daughter Jane gave her. I was pleased with that. Because Lisa is biracial, Mary and I were pretty sure we had the right person at her nearly all-white high school. But--now what?

Do I contact someone who has told the official state worker she does not want contact with me? Do I "interrupt" her life? Do I bother her? Am I stalking her? Do I upset her? What? A first/birth mother searching for reconnection and reunion with their "birth" children is what so many people find so upsetting, it was the cause of the recent blowup with my friend, Yvonne. What do I do here? My granddaughter has actively turned down knowing me....

Lisa Marie was on Facebook but oddly enough, neither my husband or I could see her page, or even

that she was there, though other people could. My nephew in Tampa could. My brother in Michigan could. Fellow blogger Linda could. Mary Wielding could. Had she been given the name of her mother when Jacy called her, and looked up Jane's obit? And now, had Lisa simply blocked me and my husband, whose name was also in the paper? That seemed the only logical explanation I could think of.

Nothing again. Months went by--let me see, probably five or six or seven. But Lisa was not exactly an invisible presence in the world. Of course I Goggled her and found that she tweeted, but you had to be invited; she had spoken at a conference on social work in Chicago when she was in college and her picture was on line, she had some poetry in an on-line magazine. I learned that she had supported Obama, been involved in a dance group of some sort in high school, and the theater. I'm a dancer, can't carry a tune more than three or four notes; her mom went from being terrified of speaking to joining Toastmaster's and winning at least one trophy for one of her speeches. I saw that Lisa followed Time magazine on line--hey, I'm a political junkie, to some degree, used to be a newspaper reporter; my daughter's father--her grandfather was Irish--a newspaper reporter, a political columnist and a terrific writer with real flair. All signs pointed to someone--a granddaughter--I'd really like to know. Someone who was, er, more than a bit like me.

Every now and then I'd google her again and one day I discovered she had started a blog. Well, blow me over. The kid writes! My granddaughter is a writer! So I started following the blog, 2speakease's Blog. She writes about the music scene in Minneapolis/St. Paul (her grandfather, Jane's dad was a huge jazz fan, had a collection of hundreds of early jazz records when he died), about her struggles with being an artist, her poetry. I see a link to an adoption site: Adopted & Fostered Adults of the African Diaspora...certainly a political adoption site, something her mother was never interested in except as something I was involved in. She's applying to writer's retreat; she's involved in the black writing scene in Minneapolis; she posts news about readings and publishes some of her poetry. I'm amazed, but still keeping my distance. Incidentally I have very little information about her birth father, so I can draw no parallels to him or his family.

Then on the anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's birthday, November 11 (and also my deceased father's birthday) she writes about how much she likes Vonnegut and puts in a plug for her favorite bookstore, Micawber's. Well, blow me over. Jane, her mother, worked for Kurt and his wife, Jill Krementz, for a short time one summer as a nanny taking care of...their adopted daughter, Lily. I knew both Kurt and Jill, had lunch with them several times, they came to my house; Jane and I are featured in Jill's book, How It Feels to Be Adopted. This is now getting really freaky, right?  

I left a comment just before Christmas, wishing her a Merry Christmas and adding: I've been thinking about you. It's posted there. At the end of the year, she writes about people using her blog to tell their stories...and she posts her email address. I think about contacting her for a few days, and one night before I go to bed, as I'm drifting off, I know that in the morning I will write her and tell her, in brief, her story as I know it, and about the similarities in our interests. And that is what I do in the morning.

I hit send, and wait. Four or five days later, I get an email back from her.

Dear reader, she is coming to visit in two weeks. --lorraine

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Note: Mary Wielding has been ill and is dealing with cancer. Prayers wanted. And note to Laura, I did add Mary's name in the notice about her on the right in the sidebar, but you did not leave your email that day you contacted me through the comments section.

If you are interested in transracial adoption, you might find In Their Own Voices: Transracial Adoptees Tell Their Stories thought-provoking.