I had a daughter I gave up for adoption. She had two daughters, one she gave up for adoption, one she was able to keep. I was not able to talk her into an open adoption in 1986 from the distance of my home. All this happened at a time when she was not speaking to me--one of those maddening silences of several months that happened a couple of times throughout the quarter-of-a-century relationship we had. Until she committed suicide in 2007.
Many of you already know the bones of this story but for newer readers background seems imperative: Adoption in 1966; reunion when my daughter, Jane, was fifteen; learning she had epilepsy; a sometimes rocky relationship: and then she repeats history by giving up a daughter for adoption almost exactly 20 years to the day later she was born.
You think one adoption is bad enough, you find that she is being raised in a middle-class family in hip, liberal Madison, Wisconsin...and then you learn she is giving up a child of her own. It was the worst news I could imagine. We had not been speaking but when her birthday came around, but I thought, What the hell, I'm going to call her anyway, I can't let her think I'm not thinking of her on this day. It was April 5, 1986. Her father answered the phone, sounded a little strange and said she was not there but he would tell her I called.
When Jane called a few hours later she told me she had been at the hospital feeding her daughter....
I remember the first time I heard that adoptees are likely to repeat history. I had been testifying for a group of adoptees in New Jersey in Vineland, so that they could get to know the truth of their origins,and during a break in the trial I ran into one of the plaintiffs in the ladies room. She was weeping profusely and I asked why--she said when she heard me stay how I always wanted to know my child, she lost it because...she had given up a child herself.
I could hardly believe it--that someone who was adopted would somehow fall into the same awful situation I had, but she had. I felt as if she had needed somehow to repeat history, to understand what it had been like for me, but that day when Jane told me that she had a daughter, all I could think was: what have I done? Started a whole chain of lives that will be marked by adoption?
Later I'd read about the phenomenon elsewhere, read Jean Strauss's book, Beneath a Tall Tree, about her mother and her mother's mother all being adopted, if I remember correctly. Because any kind of records about adoption on a national scale are hard to track--adoptive parents don't even want to tell the census takers if their children are adopted--numbers about how many adoptees also have children given up for adoption are going to be impossible to compile.
But this story is far from over, and I'll be telling it over the next several days. Right now it's Sunday, the husband wants to take a ride and go antiquing. I haven't been writing as much as I'd like because I am doing other work, and this morning one of the windows that needs replacing and is held up by a stick fell on my hand! Need ibuprofen. Need painkillers for my life sometimes. But today, sun's out, life is fine.--lorraine
As I heard that the blog today was a jumble of symbols--while I saw it read clean--I am trying again with the same post. To those of you who read it yesterday, please excuse the confusion...Mercury is still making retrograde mischief.
By Lorraine Dusky (c) 2009
It was Jane’s birthday, 1986. She would be twenty years old. I’d never not been in touch with her on April Fifth since we had been reunited, and despite our falling out, I could not ignore the day. Our day. That was inconceivable. For a first mother, the birthday of one’s relinquished child is reason for a day of quiet mourning, laden with grief that most likely will be internalized. Do we tell co-workers or college roommates why we are blue? A husband why we are snappish? Our other children why we need to be alone? Maybe not. You just go on, and if you are lucky, are able to get by with the knowledge that tomorrow will be another day, the sun will come up just as it did the day before, sunset will happen on schedule, the day will be behind you for another year.
I admit that some years before I found Jane, the day would pass without me consciously noting it, and then, the next day, or the day after that, I’d catch myself, remembering, Oh my god, it was her birthday, how did I forget? Of course I’d feel guilty. Not that I could have sent her flowers or anything. But still.
Because her birthday was so close to Easter and spring vacation from school, we had been able to celebrate together on the actual day, close enough. I’d make a cake, ice it with my mother’s recipe for no-fail butter cream frosting, buy her as many presents as we could afford.
This time—five years after our reunion when she was fifteen--there had been the great divide between us. Though her departure had been stony, I was not going to let her think that I had forgotten her. I phoned.
Her father answered. Jane, he said, Jane was not there, but Gary seemed to be stumbling over his words, not sure what to say even though I was not asking anything complicated. Just tell her I called to wish her a happy birthday, I said. I hope she’ll call me back.
She did, and with that call came the saddest news a first mother can ever hear: She had had a daughter three days earlier, a daughter she was not going to keep. The father—someone she’d met at Burger King, where she had been working again—was pretty much already out of her life. When I called, she had been at the hospital, feeding her baby—I named her Lisa, she said, Lisa Marie—which explained her father’s confusion over what to say. There were no tears from her, just a straight-forward explanation in a voice that was half dead.
Oh god Jane, No, no no, I am thinking. What have I unleashed in the world? A chain of adopted children?Jane and now Lisa and who knows after that? All the guilt that giving up a child infects in one’s life—all this would be hers too?
Knife in my heart.
Over the next few days the story spilled out. When she went back to Wisconsin, she went to work again at Burger King and again worked the last shift. Eventually she got to know someone, an African-American named Oscar who came in often. Oscar paid attention, he became her boyfriend, she got pregnant, they broke up.
Why didn’t you use birth control, I asked.
Because I was going to kill myself before I had the baby, she said.
There’s no possibility of keeping her? I asked.
Let’s not go there, she said.
Wisconsin has something called “open adoption” now Jane, you could be involved in the choosing of the people and even…know who they are, keep track of her, I said. You don't want to go through what I have, I was implying.
Silence.
His mother wants to take the baby to Michigan—someplace called Inkster, she said, ever heard of it?
Inkster! It’s the predominately African-American community right next door to west Dearborn, a few miles away from the motel my parents owned when I was in high school, where I grew up. How coincidental is that? And Great! I’m thinking, then Lisa wouldn’t have to be adopted, Wow, I might be able to visit when I was in Michigan, this is totally amazing! Sounds like a plan, Jane, what do you think?
No way. I’m not even considering it. I’m not going to give her my baby. Not if I can help it. I don’t like the sound of it.
But that might not be such a bad idea, I said…then…then you could someday know where she was, you wouldn’t have to go through what I have…then she would not have to be adopted, I did not say.
There was so much certainty in her voice, so much resignation, she was not asking for advice, not going to hear my words no matter how I pleaded my case. Please other family of Lisa, I was thinking, fight my daughter and keep this baby. Jane will soften in time, she just can’t handle this now, or is she too much her father, will she just walk away because emotionally she can not cope? Please don’t let her do what I did, the times are different now, it doesn’t have to be this way. Or is this some demented way of repeating history, of saying, Well, my mother did it to me, and it wasn't so bad, look I’m fine, and so my daughter will be too? Being adopted isn’t so bad.
More silence.
So do you want me to find out anything about open adoptions for you? I asked.In 1986 there where not yet common, but they were possible. All that it would require is for Jane to ask for one. Wisconsin was even in the forefront of open adoptions.
She would not even hear of it. Nothing I said about open adoptions, about letting the young man’s mother take the girl, reached her. All I could think was that she was determined to repeat history, to end up, as a Park Avenue psychiatrist once told a girl friend of mine he was dating when she got pregnant—You don’t want to end up like Lorraine, do you?
I was an senior editor at Town & Country when he said that, and if you did not know me, and you saw that I had on a good suit and a thrift-shop Gucci scarf, you would have imagined that I was some society girl working until, well, I didn’t any more, because who else would be an editor at Town & Country? Yet he could say: You don't want to end up like Lorraine. You only say that about someone who is pathetic. Someone with a drug habit. Someone in jail. Or someone who has given up a child. I was mortified when I’d heard what he said, but he got it right. You don't want to end up like Lorraine.
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, about her mother and her mother's mother all being adopted, if I remember correctly. Because any kind of records about adoption on a national scale are hard to track--adoptive parents don't even want to tell the census takers if their children are adopted--numbers about how many adoptees also have children given up for adoption are going to be impossible to compile. 
