Adoption Loss: Unrecognized grief that mothers endure alone

Jane

In a New York Times opinion piece, Hope Edelman's vivid  description of still grieving at the loss of her mother 38 years earlier when she was 17 (New York Times 8/25/19) brought to my mind how much losing a child to adoption is like losing a loved one to death  Edelman wrote: "At the time, I thought grieving was a five stage process that could be rushed through and aced like an easy pop quiz. When I still painfully missed my mother three and five and even 10 years later; my conclusion was that I must have gotten grieving wrong." Her words echoed what Lorraine wrote 40 years ago in Birthmark about her 13-year-old daughter adopted at birth: "Of course I knew I would always remember her, but I didn't think it would be most of the time. She pervades my being."

Why I wrote Hole in my Heart

no retouching!

One writes a book for a lot of reasons--memoirs often because you feel you must, and that is what I felt more than three decades ago when I wrote Birthmark, the first memoir about relinquishing a child to adoption. 

I needed to write about the god-awful experience of giving up my child to understand, accept and assuage my guilt--and because I knew I was strong enough to handle the criticism (that's not the word that comes to mind, but you can imagine another) that would come my way. It did. In shovelfuls.

'I know people who would like to kill you.'

Birthmark jacket photo

Continuing the story of what it was like in 1979 and after when I published Birthmark, the first memoir from a mother like me (always looking for the correct word!)...the following from the memoir I'm working on, Hole in My Heart, covers some of the up close and personal reactions that the first memoir generated: 
(Copyright, Lorraine Dusky 2013. May not be reprinted, copied, etc in any media)   

Despite the rancor surrounding mothers like me then and still today, I also met many, even in 1979, who immediately understood the poignancy of a mother and child reunion. A headline in The Detroit News read: “Unwed mom has never stopped looking.” From Vancouver, British Columbia, in The Province: "Changing her mind not enough, which was basically an interview with two adoptive mothers and proclaimed that adoptive parents received "as much medical knowledge of the child's parents as possible." The Whig-Standard in Kingston, Ontario: "Obsessed by Guilt." An excerpt of the Birthmark ran in Family Circle under these words: “I GAVE AWAY MY BABY.” Totally appropriate, I thought. No fudging with the story line or the language there. That excerpt prompted

A Call Kaepernick should make--to his birth mother

AP Photo/Patrick Cummings 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick with his adoptive parents

When I hear anything about the Superbowl that will take over America this evening, my mind wonders over to Colin Kaepernick, and his flat out refusal to meet the mother who gave him life--as well as his athletic ability--Heidi Russo. Kaepernick, for those who haven't been following this sideline drama, is adopted. Heidi Russo has tried to meet him but he has refused to, even though he has the blessing of his adoptive parents, Rick and Rae Kaepernick, to do so.

An adoptive mother asks "How can adoption be less horrific on first mothers?"

Jane

An adoptive mother wrote to First Mother Forum apologizing for “intruding” and asking a series of questions, trying to get her head around first mothers’ pain and how it might be lessened. She has a fully open adoption with her daughter's first mother, who has told this adoptive mother repeatedly she is so glad her daughter is happy and safe. She closed by saying “I just want to commend you for speaking out so courageously about your grief.”

First Mother Forum thanks Anon for writing and assures her that in no way is she intruding; FMF welcomes all readers. Her questions are excellent and FMF appreciates the opportunity to respond. 

Those who have suffered so terribly, were your adoptions closed?

Fellow blogger Lorraine and my adoptions were closed. Knowing that my child was gone irrretrievably—and that I caused it-- made the pain almost unbearable. I consoled myself by telling myself I would find her someday.

A first/birth mother remembers 'coming out' to her husband-to-be

Tony and Lorraine, at our 25th wedding anniversary party

Today is my 30th wedding anniversary, and I'm in the middle stage of a cold, so there won't be any celebrating today. That will have to wait until next week and then we'll go to the city, take in one of the major art museums, and have an extravagant lunch at some place we can't afford to have dinner. But what is on my mind today is how Tony understood everything right from the first moment he comprehended that I was telling him I'd given a child up for adoption.

It was rather quite easy to tell him because the information came in response to his question, What had my recent book been about?

Was I Destined to be a birth/first mother?

Lorraine

"Meet the Twiblings--How four women and one man conspired to make two babies" read the headline in Sunday's New York Times Magazine. Two adorable babies, bright blue eyes, and a  long essay on how to solve upper-middle class infertility: purchase eggs from an adorable young woman, rent two wombs from really nice ladies, mix eggs with husband's sperm. All right, I'm being sarcastic.

Ancestry Shows Beg the Question: Don't Adoptees have the same curiosity?

Is anybody watching NBC's Who Do You Think You Are?

Is anybody who was adopted watching through the lens of "Why doesn't the rest of the world understand we want to know where we came from? Why are we denied the right to have a background that is meaningful to us? That means something to me?" I watched and thought: surely those legislators, those adoptive parents, those adoption attorneys, anybody who works for the National Council for Adoption (NCFA), any agency associated with NCFA, anyone who opposes less that giving adoptees their original birth certificates can see that ancestry is important. And if that's the case, why are we still so far behind in opening closed records? Why are adoptees still denied the right to know who they are, where they came from, whence they came?

It makes me nuts.

Last night I watched Lisa Kudrow trace down her family's history that led her to a memorial for those Jews hunted, killed and burned in a small village called Ilya where many were slaughtered in the 1940s. A weeks ago I watched Sarah Jessica Parker learn that one of her direct ancestors was accused of being a witch in Salem, but escaped trial and punishment because the religious court that tried the Salem "witches" was disbanded before she was brought to trial. On their faces, in the emotions they display, you can see how meaningful it is to have a connection to someone whose DNA they share. It's palpable, it's real, it's haunting. Next week, somebody else, some other family ancestral history, more tears and deep feelings stirred by the truth of someone's family history.

The show originated in Britain, where ancestors are more important socially and politically than they are in the New World; but we are all one under the skin. And we are all a part of who came before us, and in some profound way that knowledge is meaningful to our sense of our place in the world. Yet by and large the world denies adoptees this piece of their own humanity. Every legislator who votes against giving adoptees their original birth certificates steals a valuable part of that person and says: You don't need your ancestral knowledge: I'm keeping it under lock and key.

Why? Because I have to protect the sanctity of your adoptive family, your new parents who went to a lot of trouble--and paid a lot of money, in many cases--to get you, and you should be grateful they did! Or they imply, with a straight face, having convinced themselves that this is the right thing to do: I have to protect your mother. Your birth mother. She has made a new life about her and maybe her family, her husband and other kids, don't even know about you! Can't have you upsetting that apple cart, you ungrateful wretch.

It makes me mad. Eons ago, shortly after I published Birthmark, and was fair game for every jerk who was shocked! shocked! that I had the temerity and gall to write such an expose, I was at a dinner party at the home of a well-known restaurant critic. (We had chili and corn bread, since you ask.) Alden Whitman, who then wrote those long essay obits of the celebrated for the New York Times, sat next to me. As the evening wore on and wine loosened his tongue, he went at me mercilessly about having come out of the closet as one-of-those-women-who-gave-away-baby. I doubt he actually read Birthmark, but he was plenty pissed at me, and made no bones about it: What right do you have to write that book! What--well, there was no other complaint, it was simply: You ought to stay in the closet: forever. What gave you the right!@!

Now, this was a guy who had quite a reputation for hitting on the young women at the Times. We'd even had lunch once years earlier before I realized what he was up to. I'm sitting there that night thinking: so...You have a kid somewhere...? And now you are afraid of his coming back? I'm not going to say anything, but trust me, I'd like to, you prick, and would--if your wife were not sitting here also and we now have the whole table of ten mesmerized.

It was his wife who came to my defense. Alden, she said heatedly after listening to his angry barrage, What were we doing in Wales a couple of weeks ago? Mucking around old cemeteries looking for the graves of your ancestors? What are you not understanding? What are you not getting?

No answer. 

Finally the host cleared his throat and put on some music, and people danced. We never spoke about this again. He's dead, the fight goes on, someday we will succeed.

But not before many who search for their roots will die without answers.

A Birth Father Refuses to Meet His Daughter

While we are talking about men's reactions to learning about a first child who had been surrendered to adoption, here is a section of the memoir I'm writing that relates to my daughter, Jane, and her biological father, Brian. This section picks up after Birthmark has been published, and I have found Jane. The year is 1983; Jane was seventeen. Jane lived in Wisconsin; her adoptive mother was a nurse, her father an insurance adjuster. At the time of this part of the story, Brian was a reporter for Newsday on Long Island, where I live.

Copyright 2009 Lorraine Dusky

Chapter 11 No-Show Dad

If the point of Birthmark had been to shine a light on the truth of adoption and the injustice of sealed birth records, as well as to show that mothers did not forget, then further publicity of our “happy ending” was a good thing. With Jane’s and her parents’ agreement, I initiated reunion stories in the media when she came back to Sag Harbor the following summer for an extended stay—most of the summer! Imagine my elation! Imagine my joy! Evan, my husband's son, was also spending the summer between college semesters with us. In two years, I’d gone from a single woman singing the blues to a wife and mother, two times over.

Sure, it happens to a lot of women, but to me? Not something I would have allowed myself to imagine. How much the changes in my life affected me was evident apparently in the lines of my face. A couple of months after I’d been reunited with Jane, someone a friend of a friend asked her if I’d had a face lift or “something done.” He said I looked “different, younger.” I was forty at the time.

Jane and I did a TV show in Boston, interviews with the local weeklies, and Long Island’s daily, Newsday, where Brian worked, sent a columnist. Her story [1] filled nearly half a page, with a picture with the two of us sitting on our back porch with our arms wrapped around each other. Ann [Jane's adoptive mother] is quoted, noting that while Jane had been curious about her biological mother, friends were against our meeting. “You never know how strong the ties are.” she said. “But we did it for Jane’s sake…. Here was this glamorous girl from New York. ‘It had to be that, didn’t it’ I thought then. I wasn't thrilled about the whole thing. I really did feel threatened.” She added that her husband was more suspicious about what I wanted, “but it was easier for him because it was a mother who came into the picture….But no, it worked out nicely.”

The writer noted that Jane was only uncomfortable with one question: What is Lorraine to you? “It’s hard to describe to other people what she is to me,” Jane answered.

Oddly enough, the writer did not ask about her father, and we offered no information. Did she know who it was? Did she even knew him? The information mill among newspaper people operates pretty well, as you might imagine; but maybe she hadn’t heard any of the gossip from Rochester, because after all, I left there in a cloud seventeen years earlier. If Jane hoped a story in Brian’s own newspaper would melt his heart, she kept it to herself, and I did not mention it. I hoped he would call. Unless he was at that moment away in detox, he had to have seen the story.

However, her father was mentioned a few weeks later, in a New York Times story, [2] that noted that he lived on Long Island, but so far had refused to meet her. The story included another mother [Alison Ward and her daughter, Holly] who had reunited with her teenage daughter. The four of us are all smiles in the accompanying photograph. “Jane, who had planned to start searching for her natural mother when she turned eighteen, views the situation this way: ‘I just feel I have two women who really care about me,’” the story read. No sweat, she seemed to be saying.

Ann was quoted in the piece, remarking that she “always wondered if [our meeting] would interfere with my relationship with Jane, but finding Lorraine has freed Jane and given her much more self-confidence. And, if anything, Jane and I are as close, if not closer, than ever.”

A spokesman for the National Council for Adoption—the opposition—was also quoted in the story, stating that the search movement could be the source of a great “potential for human sorrow” on the part of the birth mothers. “These women may have had their child through rape or incest, and a meeting could be very harmful to them.”[3] He estimated that only one to two percent of adoptees and birth parents want to meet; Florence Fisher of ALMA disputed that, and put the figure at 80 percent. Elizabeth Cole from the Child Welfare League noted that records are open in Britain and Israel and that her colleagues there “had not found the practice to be harmful.” She predicted that adoptees will eventually get their original birth records in this country. That was in 1983.

The piece ended with a zinger: “In 1979 Julie Welsh, a 33-year-old medical secretary from Fair Lawn, N.J., traced the son she had given up for adoption 12 years earlier to a family who lived only 30 minutes away. One day she summoned the courage to knock on their door. She learned that the boy’s adoptive mother had died when he was 5 and the father had married a woman who did not like him, so he was sent to a private school in New Hampshire.

“‘If you want him back you can have him back,’ Mrs. Welsh was told. She did, so the following weekend she and her husband drove up to get the boy, Jeff, who had not been allowed to come home for holidays or vacations. The Welshes, who have two other children, have legally adopted Jeff, whose first words when his mother encountered him were: ‘I’m so glad you came and found me!’”

Brian had to have seen at least one of the pieces. But he did not call. Nor had he responded to the picture and note I’d written earlier, sent to him at the office. There was no reason in making another call, only to be turned down again, but Jane had other ideas. She would get him on the phone herself—he would not turn her down if she called, right? Probably right? I admired her moxie—she was only seventeen, and she’d been the adopted kid who had seizures and wore a hockey helmet to school for four years. But what if, even then, he said, No, I won’t meet you and hung up? Was she up to this outcome? How much more pain did she have to endure? But I did not interfere; this was her call. She’s a gutsy kid, I told myself—she’s my daughter, all right.

So, from the upstairs phone in the hallway—the same one where I’d taken her name down two years before—I dialed his direct number at Newsday and handed her the receiver. Please stay, she whispered as the phone rang, I might need you. Brian answered.

But she was also his daughter, she was also a teenager afraid of rejection, and now her courage failed her. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” I could hear his voice faintly coming through the line but Jane could not make herself speak. Her eyes were shiny globes of infinite sorrow. Go ahead, say something, I urged with a nod of the head, Say something. Say Hello. Say anything.

She could not find her voice. Maybe I should have grabbed the phone out of his hands and yelled at him to be a man and just say hello to his daughter, but he’d been so clear—even irritated the last time I’d called—about not being ready, just “not now,” and maybe my intervention now might just make him angry, and that might be worse than this impasse. That might set back everything, if she were ever to meet him. Maybe.

Brian hung up after twenty seconds or so.

Jane looked me, sad and terrified and disappointed all at once, a look that broke my heart. She ran down the steps and out of the house. No, she did not want me to come. She did not want to talk about the aborted phone call, or him or anything when she got back, and what really, could there be to say? We never spoke of that phone call again.

Of course now I was really angry with Brian. This was someone who had spoken of “honor” and “character” when we had been together. He turned out to be a straw man. He didn’t even have the backbone to meet his daughter.

---

[1] Marilyn Goldstein, “ Forging A Family Bond After 17 Years, Long Island Diary, Newsday, July 21, 1983.

[2] Judy Klemesrud, “Mothers Find the Children They Gave Up,” New York Times, Aug. 29,1983.

[3] While that seems to be the great bugaboo about open records to uninformed people or those opposed to open records, there are no indications, no statistics from states with open records that these women object to meeting their children in any greater number than women who were not the victims of rape or incest. Of course last week, we had a story from New Jersey about a woman who was suing the state when she a child contacted her. For such women, I have little understanding, as the child is wholly innocent in such a circumstance.

To Tell the Truth or Not, Continued: Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't

My coming out as a birth mother happened under quite different circumstances and back in the old days of the Seventies. Once I decided to write Birthmark (after my first marriage ended), the days of not being a birth mother publicly were over, more or less. I'd previously written two magazine pieces under a pseudonym about it.

I already knew how controversial the book would be when I met a prospective publisher for a drink in Manhattan one evening in the fall of 1978, and he brought along an editor with him, a friend as well as employee. This man, Arnold, did not know anything about me but when it became clear to him, BAM! the guy became extremely agitated, red in the face, practically spitting at me. WHAT RIGHT DID I HAVE! etc. I excused myself and headed for the ladies room; when I returned he had gone. It turned out that he had been raised in an orphanage and was more than a little angry with his birth mother. I'm not sure he was ever actually adopted. I felt he would have shot me on the spot had been possible. His friend had no idea he felt this way--or that he had been raised in less than propitious circumstances.

I turned 37 the summer before the book came out in 1979, and was sharing a house in Sag Harbor, where I live now, with other writers and editors. One woman I had never seen before walked up to me at a cocktail party and handed me a hand-written note with that little poem about "you grew in my heart, not under it" or however that goes and walked away, turning to smirk and stare back angrily. I never found out who she was, or whether she was an adoptee or an adoptive parent.

Talk of the audacity of what I had done--write a book about this taboo subject, that is, say that I had not forgotten my daughter and wanted to know her one day--made the rounds and the discussion, I would later hear from a friend who had been there, often became quite heated. So-and-so, I was told, pounded the table one evening in anger: What right has she? Who in the hell does that woman think she is? And all of this was further exaggerated when I wrote my first My Turn on the subject for Newsweek, for if news of the book hadn't reached you--and it was hardly a major publishing event--the Newsweek piece got people's attention.

But my friends were all supportive (only one of them a birth mother, and we were friends before our mutual reveal), and so I was largely insulated from nasty personal attacks. I told myself I had to expect a lot of criticism, but you can never insulate yourself enough. No one has a crocodile skin. Of course I was fair game during the publicity for the book. Most interviewers were sympathetic, but now and then someone who had been civil before the camera started rolling would turn out to be Raging Arnold in another guise. One adopted radio interviewer was so upset that he wore a full face mask--the kind they wear in Venice--during our half-hour chat to show his natural mother that he was going to stay hidden from her! Yet amazingly, this man--while he was plenty angry about being adopted--was not cruel to me.

That was then. Of course things have changed somewhat since then, and naturally, I do not like to make my feelings and status as a birth mother the subject of every conversation with someone new. I dread it when I am introduced, as one adoptive mother used to do, as the birth mother who wrote that book...because then there was no other conversation possible. I hate to talk about this issue at parties because a) it's not fun, and b) you never know what you are going to unearth. Once people hear this about you, they are likely to pepper you with questions for the next hour. (I stopped seeing that adoptive mother mentioned above much.) If I have to be polite to someone because she's the sister-in-law of a friend, and the sister-in-law is crazy curious, I will go along and do my best to educate someone on a subject that seems so amazingly foreign to them. But boy, am I then glad to change the subject! To get away!

So when new people I meet ask what I have written, I typically do not mention Birthmark, the blog, or any of my adoption-reform writings. Books on health and business, lots of magazine pieces on diverse subjects, I reply. I want to talk about gardening, backyard bird watching, movies, books, the sad state of book publishing, our mutual friends, whatever. When people--even acquaintances--ask what I'm working on now, I'm very likely (and so is my husband, if he's asked) to be coy and just say, Ahem, I'm not talking about it, even thought that sounds off-putting. Regular readers of FirstmotherForum know that revealing the subject even to people I felt quite close to has led to some pretty awful attacks, as I wrote about in previous posts. There and here and elsewhere.

About a dozen years ago when friends started adopting (and it is contagious), I had a tearful telephone discussion with one woman who was unable to get pregnant, and her husband really really wanted a child. They eventually adopted from China. A year later, I was sitting with a mutual acquaintance, and she said...X did it, I'm going to adopt, I'm going to get a Chinese baby. And so she did. And so did someone else we all knew, a year after that. A college roommate of X also adopted, this time a white infant who looks Irish and is being raised Jewish. Another friend's sister got two children in the last couple of years from Rhode Island. I walk into some dinner parties and immediately count three, four, adoptive parents and pray the subject does not come up. And so it goes in my world.

Like fellow blogger birthmother Jane, I do not talk about adoption with people who say they are going to adopt. I nod and look away and change the subject. I'd have to say that many of my friends in this adoption-YES! world do not know how I really feel. Adoption-reform pioneer Florence Fisher--the woman who really furthered our fight to open records by opening up the subject for discussion--once told me that if someone wants to talk about adoption at a party, she tells them, This is a party, I'm here to enjoy myself, this is not fun for me, I don't want to talk about this now. I've kept that in mind more than once and have used the same line myself. If they don't get it, I add, "Look, this was the more horrible thing that ever happened to me, it would be like talking about what it was like to be raped." That usually stops them cold. I can't say I've made any friends that way.

One time someone I know told me his daughter in college was doing something about adoption, could she email me? Sure, I said, thinking I might be able to educate someone. It turned out that she was writing a paper supporting this thesis: Why adoption records should stay sealed.

Cute, huh?

I xeroxed and sent her loads of material and told her taking that point of view was like arguing for slavery. Ah, I thought, I might make a convert. I never found out what she ended up writing--my offering probably got looked at and thrown out. Some months later we were at a big party together, and she pulled me over to meet another woman. "You two have so much in common," said the chirpy college student. "Lorraine has written a book about giving up a child, and you've [to the other woman} wrote a book about adoption..." Turns out the "other woman" was a adoption social worker. Then the college student walked away.

I thought of Florence and told the social worker calmly that giving up my child was the worst thing that ever happened to me, and did not want to talk about it. I did check out her book--it was not written with birth mothers in mind.

Yet saying nothing to friends who are pursuing international adoption is difficult now, especially as the information about kidnapping and various other nefarious means to get children for export is becoming known. For instance, we know someone whose fiancee is trying to adopt from Nepal. We spoke up a bit at dinner (fiancee was not present) at his house, but I could see right off that he was not ready to hear because he immediately said: Well, there are all those poor people in Nepal...Meaning: obviously, we ought to be able to get some kid from a poor family. Later, my husband emailed him and sent him a link to the UNICEF report about adoption from Nepal, that we wrote about here. We did not hear back.

But sometimes it just feels right to reveal. I once told a woman I'd met twenty minutes earlier I'd given up a child for adoption, and her eyes immediately glistened. Right. Turned out, she was a birth mother too, and we had a sweet, private conversation. You just never know. I guess you have to go with your gut.

As for Linda revealing her status to a woman she did not know at work, I can only say, Good job! If she is determined, the woman will probably find a way to adopt, but at least Linda let her know that kids don't come without strings, ancestors, other mothers and fathers. And lots of them are nice people you might know.

So like my fellow bloggers and commenters, being a birth mother is something I will readily cop to when I feel it will do some good, and like Jane says, it is easier being public about the issue without having to confront it one-on-one. But I don't want to be seen as a person who drags around a soap box with me.

Though to some, I am sure that is how I seem.

So it goes. --lorraine

Are the Last Days of Adoption Really Upon Us? If true, good news

A despicable story lamenting that more women (Last days of Adoption?) don't have those babies and give them up for adoption was big in Sunday's (4/12/09) Washington Times. The overall tone was how sad this state of affairs is when there are so many willing parents (who delayed conception, but that's not mentioned, naturally) who would be oh-so-happy to take those kids in.

Quoting federal data that notes that only about 6,800 babies a year are relinquished at birth for adoption, writer Cheryl Wetzstein notes that is "a minuscule number out of nearly 3 million unwed pregnancies." Plus, it's only white women giving up their kids! Black families are keeping their babies to such a degree that those placed for adoption are "statistically zero." Legal abortion is part of the reason, of course. But what's also blamed is an anti-adoption attitude that is being pushed, and that the option that was once "no way" that is, keeping the baby, is now "OK." Yet woe to Joe and Jane Q. Public who wish to adopt:

"Meanwhile, millions of Americans remain willing, even anxious, to adopt, and this number is likely to grow because infertility among men and women is expected to rise due to the epidemic of sexual disease."

Not mentioned: the number of women who wait until 30, 35, even 40 before they try to conceive, long past their fertile time span. Implied here: My god, we had better do something for these poor people! Ladies, let's multiply and give them our babies! But it isn't going well, Wetzstein writes, for since 1973 (when the attitudes of the Sixties caught up with real life) the number of adoptions dropped to roughly 1 percent, and relinquishments are becoming so rare they are nearly impossible to study statistically. I'd call that a victory for the end of stranger-adoption. Ms Wetzstein calls it a "perfect storm" that has beset domestic infant adoption.

Those nasty anti-adoption websites

Wetzstein implies that anti-adoption websites which call adoption "barbaric" are at least partly to blame. Gee, I don't think that was moi, but we do have among our readers a variety of opinions on how sane and healthy adoption is for both the birth/first mother and her baby, and I'd have to say that we bloggers three at Birth Mother, First Mother Forum are not all that wild about stranger adoption except in cases of demonstrated and dire need. We personally might not like the Palin family body politic, but we cheer that Bristol decided to keep her baby! And if Wetzstein counted us among the "anti-adoption" websites, we would be honored. Judging from the tone of the story, I would say that anything that didn't urge young women to give up their babies to supply the huge demand for healthy white infants would be called "anti-adoption." She quotes a site (without specifying which one) that states "No mother who has lost a child [to adoption] fully recovers."

Amen!

Of course the adoption agencies weigh in on this dire state of affairs of Not Enough Babies To Supply Demand.

"We hoped we would see a 'Juno' effect, but it hasn't happened,'" said Teresa McDonough, who directs the adoption program at Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Arlington."

She adds that since previously there was no acknowledgment of the birth mother's grief--"No wonder they couldn't let it go"--but now, since some genius sociologist figured out that we do grieve our children lost to adoption, we are much more "empowered." In other words, give us some counseling and support services (an unlimited lifetime supply of Kleenex? A memory-eraser?) and Voila! we are "settled and at peace."

Giving up a child, Ms. McDonough concludes, is "really a loving option."

Okay, all together now, how many children who have been reunited with their birth mothers have thanked them for loving them so much they gave them up? How many of us have been reunited with our children to find that they had no issues with being adopted? That they were ... thrilled to be adopted? They they loved us for making that decision? That they harbor no resentment?

NCFA to the rescue...Not

An employee of the Maryland Bowie-Croft Pregnancy Clinic (and ministry) comments that a few years ago they sent about 25 volunteers for adoption training from the National Council for Adoption.* While the training improved the workers' comfort level in promoting adoption...it did not affect the number of girls choosing it! Sad, notes a NCFA spokesperson, because he estimates that there are 10 million couples who would like to adopt "an infant domestically."

At least the story quotes someone who doesn't look for more teens to be like the despicable wise-cracking birth mother in our least favorite movie of all time, Juno: (Read more here about movies.)

"Juno was a horror show, said Jessica Del Balzo, founder of the adoption-eradication advocacy group Adoption: Legalized Lies and author of Unlearning Adoption: A Guide to Family Preservation and Protection."

The story also includes interviews with two women who are at peace with their decision to have their children be adopted. One had a ritual in a Catholic church with a priest presiding over the"entrustment ceremony," after which the baby went home with the new parents, and the mother when home with her parents. (One wonders what the scene was like in the car on the drive home.) The birth/first mothers quoted, both in open adoptions that have remained open, do sound at peace with their decision to relinquish their children. Birth mother Jessica O'Connor-Petts even went from a partially open--updates without names--to a fully open one, and her relinquished son, now eleven, was the ring-bearer in both her and her sister's weddings.

While that did sound like an outcome that would be at least livable, and the adoptive parents did not go back on their words to keep the adoption an open one, Ms. O'Connor-Petts had these wise words to add:

"If you make the decision that you really believe is the best one for you and the child, you will be able to live with yourself," she said. "The only way you won't be able to live with yourself is when you make a decision that you sense is not the best decision for you or your child."

"For some people," she added, the best decision "may not be adoption. But for me, the joy of watching him grow up in his family far outweighs the grief of separating from him."

But those words at the end were so far outweighed by the overreaching attitude of the piece: Gee, why can't adoption be made more palatable to girls who have babies? As I read, I kept remembering Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. And thinking that family columnist Cheryl Wetzstein was an advance man for the society depicted therein.

________________

*For any newbies reading our blog, NCFA is a umbrella group of for-profit adoption agencies that are in the business of facilitating adoptions and fights adoption-reform tooth and nail everywhere it can. NCFA is an outspoken and wealthy lobby group against giving adopted people their original birth records, though some of their member agencies (that is, Gladney) have personally caved and now do open adoptions, as that is the only way they can stay in business.

You can read Wetzstein's latest on this story...Adoption Success a Reality.
Email the paper with your comments at yourletters@washingtontimes.com
Email Ms. Wetzstein at cwetzstein@washingtontimes.com

And a second installment, on embryo adoption, is coming on Sunday. Stay tuned.

You know, I never write about adoption without full disclosure--that I am a birth/first mother, and if I did, I would be hooted out of town on a journalistic rail. But we have no clue as to Ms.Wetzstein's connection/desires regarding this life event. It would be good to know. Let's ask the paper to inform us. All we know is that she writes a bi-weekly column called, On The Family. I think I may send her a copy of Birthmark. Yes, I'm shamelessly promoting my 1979 out-of-print memoir about the reality of giving up my daughter for adoption.

Adoptees have right to know who they are

Lorraine

Joyce Bahr of Unsealed Initiative, the force behind New York State Adoption Reform recently posted this on their blog, and so I decided to publish it here:

From the Albany Times-Union:

Adoptees have right to know who they are

By LORRAINE DUSKY
First published: Sunday, June 1, 2003

More than three decades ago, when I was a reporter at the former Knickerbocker News, I was nursing a fresh wound: Only months before I started working in Albany, I had surrendered a child to adoption. And I was bleeding all over the place.

During the day, I took uppers to dull the depression, and at night when the drugs wore off, I cried. I ate. I wallowed in my shame and secrecy. I was "making a new life for myself," just as my case worker said I should.

In time, I crawled out of the hole. Life did go on, but it did not go on without the daughter I did not have. That child is always with you. You stare too long at someone her age at the mall. You see a flower that was in bloom when she was born. You are invited to a baby shower. You don't have a child in your body for nine months and forget.

Records of birth mothers' preferences kept by states, adoption agencies and adoption reform groups indicate that the vast majority of us joyfully welcome our lost children into our lives.

Yet a mother's supposed "right to privacy" is the smoke screen trotted out in opposition to letting adults who were adopted as infants have their original birth certificates. Only six states let adoptees [as of 1/1/09, it will be eight, when Maine opens its records] have them for the asking. New York [where my daughter was adopted] is not among them.

Opponents of open records insist, in some misguided interpretation of the Bill of Rights, that a secrecy-seeking woman's right to privacy trumps an adopted person's right to know the answer to the most basic of questions: Who am I? Identity is many things, but surely it begins with the knowledge of one's own birth and heritage.

It's not just for psychological reasons that adoptees seek their origins. Genetic research is continually expanding heredity's role in shaping our well-being, for genes are turning out to be the biggest window into who we are. Medical histories from birth mothers taken at the time of surrender are by their nature incomplete. All this weakens the argument for birth parents' "right to privacy" from their own children, no matter what we were told, or what the unfortunate circumstances were 20, 30 or 40 years ago, or how deep the secret is buried today.

Short of opening up the records to adoptees, New York and several other states have set up registries that match adoptees and birth parents seeking one another. But overly restrictive provisions, underfunding and understaffing make most registries nearly useless. Since December 1983, when New York's registry was set up, more than 18,000 people have registered; 680 matches have been made. That's a "success" rate of less than 4 percent. But the low number does accomplish what those who push for registries rather than open records want to accomplish: Make it nearly impossible for adoptees to learn the truth of their origins.

Many people with no connection to adoption instinctively grasp that all individuals, adopted or not, should have an unfettered right to the knowledge of who they are, and that such knowledge begins with their original birth certificates. Assemblyman Scott M. Stringer, a Manhattan Democrat who is sponsoring legislation that would do just that at age 18, is one. [Stringer is no longer in the legislature, and today David Koon in the Assembly sponsors our bill.] Many connected to adoption agree, such as Sen. William J. Larkin (R-Orange), an adoptive grandfather who's backing the companion bill in the Senate. Yet open-records bills have died in committee for the last 11 years. [Make that 16.] Unless enlightenment strikes soon, this year will be no different.

One way to make open-records legislation palatable appears to be to tack on a provision that allows birth mothers to file a paper asking for no contact. The adopted individual could still get his original birth certificate but would be informed his mother doesn't wish to hear from him.

Fine. The news might be disheartening, but so be it. Yet some states that have opened their records have also included language that carries an implied penalty for contacting a birth parent who filed a veto, and it's possible that New York will follow suit.

The birth parents named on the birth certificate would, of course, have to inform the police that the child has broken the law by, say, phoning her or him. Punished for contacting your birth mother? We are not talking about stalking, or harassment, for which anyone can get an order of protection, but simply making "contact," however that is. How do birth mothers warrant such special protection? How is this in the state's vested interest?

The state never promised birth mothers anonymity from our own when we signed the surrender papers. Why now? Some people bury their divorces in the past and pray that their exes never return to "out" them. But the state doesn't let them file a "no contact" veto just because they might be embarrassed. Nor are fathers who are sued for paternity likewise protected.

That being the case, the state should not penalize adopted individuals who want answers that only their birth mothers can give. "No contact" vetoes are the repugnant remnants of outdated ideology. Adoptees deserve their original birth certificates as a matter of course. Penalizing them for simply contacting the person who gave them life is both unreasonable and absurd.
___________

Lorraine Dusky of Sag Harbor is the author of Birthmark, a 1979 memoir that broke the silence of birth mothers. She and her daughter have been reunited for more than two decades.

A Happy Reunion Story in the News

Mondays always bring a lot of adoption/conception related news from the weekend because there is always a lot of adoption news these days. The brightest story is that of Reese Hoffa, the world champion shot putter who didn't medal in Beijing at the Olympics on Friday, but whose story wins a medal from me.

Given up for adoption when he was four (and he and an older brother played with fire and burned their house down), he was adopted at five, but unfortunately separated from his brother, also placed for adoption. When Reese was 23, and at college, he decided to look for his other mother, and found her quickly on through an adoption website (which one, we don't know) that his mother had posted on two weeks earlier. His mother, on video, says of their separation, "It's always there, you never go on and be happy." Yep, that's exactly what she says. She also is able to tell Reese that he wasn't given up because his playing with fire wasn't the reason he was placed for adoption.

His adoptive mother turns out to be a peach, and though she admits she was somewhat apprehensive, and jealous, she wanted him to "have the answers he wanted." The reunion was seven years ago; his first mother had already found his older brother. Both mothers come off well in this story, and one is left with the impression that this reunion, seven years ago, has a happy ending.

Check out the story at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/26182939#26182939

Reunions are so fraught! Birth mothers who long for reunion want to pop those kids right back into our families, but the adoptees are thinking: not so fast--I've got this whole other family that I'm a part of now. This was certainly true with my daughter--Lordy, a couple of months after we got together, I did what a lot of clueless mothers do: have a "reunion" gathering of sorts where relatives came by the house. Of course, they were curious. I'm sure she felt like an elephant in the circus.

Fortunately the day was saved by my husband--not her father--who a lot of these relatives had never met either, as we had gotten married earlier that year in New York, and all this was happening back in Michigan, where I'm from. So most of the relatives hadn't met Tony either. He kept Jane company on the couch, and made her feel safe and less of an exhibit.

Would I do the same thing again today? Nope. I'd let her be introduced to people bit by bit. It would have been enough to meet me, and my immediate family that time.

When I read the last section of Birthmark (a letter to my daughter whom I have not yet found) at the Pitt conference last fall, about my family all waiting and praying for her, the room was very quiet. I thought, wow, I hit a nerve.

I'll say, as the room was probably three-quarters filled with adoptive mothers for whom the idea of another family "waiting" for "their" child was anathema. I remember watching one large woman...later I would listen to her describe the practice she called "kinning," by which an adoptee becomes kin to the adoptive family.

One adoptive mother did speak to me after I read. She said, you know, we feel that the child was "meant" for us...that probably...I don't remember how she finished the sentence because we both knew what she meant. Like, yeah, it's hard for us to be behind the idea that we had a child that was "meant" for another family. It makes us seem as if we are breeders, like livestock.

--lorraine

One last note today. If you live in New York, take two minutes and make a call to Sheldon Silver's office in Albany and ask that he bring the Adoptee Rights Bill to the floor for a vote. Say you are calling in support of Bill A2277. It's very simple. You'll be asked for your address, but you don't need to explain why you are calling. The number is 518-455-3791, courtesy of Joyce Bahr of Unsealed Initiative of the New York Statewide Adoption Reform.

http://www.unsealedinitiative.org/

How are they gonna know in Albany that adopted people want/need/deserve their original birth certificates, with no restrictions, unless we let them know?

In Adoptee's Search, Loss and Grief Collide

Double Header Day:

Folks, I've twice lost everything I have written and so I'm a little nuts...so as lightening strikes overhead I'm going to try one more time because it's important to get our voices heard when adoption reunion stories make news. Today's New York Times (8/11/08) has a story about an adoptee, Mark Cellura, who searched and found that his twin, seemingly an identical sibling, had died in 1987. Reporter Sarah Kershaw does a good job of highlighting the necessity of this man's search, and the long slog it is taking to change laws to give adoptees their birth rights. For us, the only really sorry note in the story is that Mark's mother has not responded to a letter from his intrepid searcher, Pam Slayton. (However, there is one adoptee mentioned in the story who has happily reunited, so all first mothers don't look like--jerks.

I know adopted people are afraid of rejection, but is it really any easier if it's done through a third party? Adopted people should make contact themselves, have the courage to make a phone call. Just by the mere fact of birth, they are entitled by the laws of nature one meeting, one day of answers, all truths revealed, nothing held back. This is the story of their lives. I know some of these women still say no, but I'll go out on a limb here and predict that the total reunion-rejection rate is probably lower than when the contact is made through a third person, via letter. The only exception I can feel good about is when a confidential searcher, as in some states, is also a birth mother, and is able to allay the fears of women deep in the closet.

See "In Adoptee's Search, Loss and Grief Collide" at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/nyregion/11twins.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin

So, let's use today's Times story to storm our version of the Bastille: Write to the Times (Letters@nytimes.com) and email a copy of the letter to your legislators, all of them: Your state senator and assemblyman, as well as your congressman and senator in Washington. Unless you let them know what you want, they're not going to know. Urge them to get behind a clean bill--one that gives adoptees the rights that should be theirs as a matter of course. Read about the good New York bill at: http://www.unsealedinitiative.org/

You don't have to be brilliant, you just have to voice your opinion. The more letters the Times gets, the more ink we will get in the paper. You do have to remember to include your name, address, and phone number. Be brief, but be quick. Allow yourself to get angry! Me, I'm angry at all those women in the closet. I'd like to pull them out by the short hairs and give them 40 whacks. But how do we reach them? Aye, that is the question. How do we reach them, how do we change their minds and open their hearts? Through my high school grapevine, I know of one woman from Sacred Heart High School in Dearborn, Michigan who apparently is not curious, and never looked back. How do I reach her?

Dunno.

But remember, Well-behaved women seldom make history.