Adoption is Always Painful

This is for all the birth mothers who are afraid to tell her families about their first child....

This is for all adoptive parents who do not want to talk about the biggest thing in their adopted child's life: being relinquished by one mother and adopted by another....

This is for every prospective adoptive parent who reads the ads directed at pregnant women and urging them to make a nifty adoption plan for their babies....

This is for every prospective adoptive parent who thinks adopting a child will make their families "complete" and only think about how much they want a baby--anybody's baby....

This is for the commenter the other day who said that against the will of many people around her, she was beginning a search for her daughter's natural mother....

And most of all, this is for the young teen who left a comment recently at Birth Mother/First Mother Forum. She said she was crying inside because she doesn't know who she is. "I want to know if I have my dad's eyes and my mother's nose," she wrote. "Can anyone help me to start to search? My parents can't--actually won't...."

Breaks your heart, doesn't it?

She asked us to keep this confidential--but I think she thought we could reach her by email. We have no way to reach her because when someone posts a comment, we can not respond to her or him because we do not have access to his or her email address. So I'll leave her name off here, and no one will ever connect it to the young writer, whom I hope has come back to find this. We are thinking about you and we send you all the love we can through the air. And we wish from the bottom of our hearts that we could reach across the nether and somehow find your first mother for you.

But what can we say to stop the hurt, what can we realistically do to fix the problem? Though we have the power of the word and the communication offered by the Internet, we can't go in and shake up those adoptive parents, like we would like to, and tell them how much their daughter is pain, and how much they could help by simply opening up the conversation. Nor can we do a search for the girl.

Maybe, we think, maybe she's lucky and lives in a state where the records will be open to her when she turns eighteen. Maybe she lives in Alabama, Alaska, Oregon, Maine, New Hampshire, or Kansas where she would have the unfettered right to her birth records when she grows up; maybe she lives in Tennessee or Delaware where unless her first/birth mother has filed a "no-contact" veto, the girl will get her original birth certificate. Or maybe she lives in one of the other states where a crazy quilt of various degrees of openness will work for her.

Or maybe not. That leaves a lot of states where searching for one's original/natural/genetic/real/biological parents is like walking through a maze blindfolded and being beset with trap doors that lead nowhere at every turn.

What can we do for her, and the millions of other people like her? We can start by fighting for open records for all adopted people. If we live in a close-record state--and that includes most states--we can join the campaign there to open records. (Learn how at American Adoption Congress and join us. There is strength in numbers, and AAC is not only for adoptees and birth parents, but also adoptive parents.)

If you are a birth mother who haven't told your family about your first child, and fear that knock on the day from a stranger who looks like you, dig down deep and find the courage to do so. Fellow blogger Jane admitted recently how difficult it was her for to tell her three other daughters about her first, and her recent posts here and here should be encouraging. Once the cat is out of the bag, then you won't be afraid when your son or daughter comes back. Then you won't be afraid, may be even able to start the search yourself. Maybe you will find your son or daughter is looking for you. Maybe your daughter is the one who wrote to us.

Adoptive parents can begin the conversation with their children about what it feels like to be adopted. The other day, Blogger Malinda (one of our followers, I'm pleased to say), wrote a wonderful, enlightened post over at her blog, adoptiontalk, about the importance of talking about adoption to your adopted child. It's something that every adoptive parent ought to read. It's about recognizing that your child thinks about adoption, whether or not he or she lets you know.

I think back about 30 years--when I was working in Manhattan and had a business lunch with some PR guy, and I knew I was going to quit my magazine job and finish Birthmark--I thought, what the hell, and told him I was a birth mother (though I probably didn't use those words back then). This was quite a shocking revelation back in the mid-Seventies. I'm not even sure I had told my mother yet. Do you know what he told me? That he was an adoptive father, that their daughter was at college and in her twenties, and that a couple of years ago they got a call from the girl's birth mother...and decided NOT TO TELL HER.

She's never asked about her, he said, she's never talked about it....God, I wanted to scream at him: What right did you have to make that decision on your own, you @#%head. It's her mother, it's her information, it's her right.

And to those people considering adoption, think deep and long and hard about what you are doing. While you are thinking about your happiness--and worrying that the mother of your child is eating junk food or vegging out on soap operas rather than listening to Mozart--ask yourself whom you are doing this for....the child, or yourself, your husband? One adoptive mother I know said that if she had to do it again, she would adopt both the teenager who had her baby, and the baby. She would, in other words, keep mother and child together.

While it is sad to want a child and be unable to have one of your own, that does not entitle you to someone else's.

Remember: Adoption is always painful.
--lorraine
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And Joyce Bahr has a good essay worth reading. Joyce was in Philadelphia yesterday at the adoptee-right demonstration.

We may be a little slower with the posts around here....we need a vacation. First Mother Forum was a year old on July 18.