Why I Still Love Find My Family

Back to Find My Family because the show has certainly struck a nerve with lots of grumbling that it doesn't give adoptive parents the air time they deserve because they are the ones who bandaged the knees, did the late night emergency room runs, etc. We know, we have heard that before. We understand that adoptive parents did what we were not able to do: raise our children.

We know that many of the people who raise our children can't even talk about us as more than a "birth canal" and the "woman who labored my son."  We have seen those references, the first at RainbowKids.com and the second in a book called Wanting A Child (apparently anybody's child will do).

But folks, Find My Family is not about how noble it is to adopt because there are so many children who need homes, a questionable premise regular readers of FirstMotherForum are aware of. The ABC reality show is about the fact that simply obliterating a person's identity because he/she was adopted by a new family and given a second identity does not work! Thus the tears, thus the running up the hill to the family tree to meet the person or people who give back an identity that was lost, thus the emotions running high.

Reality all right.

Yes, I know, I can hear people clucking in the background that not every adoptee wants to search, and not every adoptee feels "incomplete" with knowing his or her identity, and to them I ask: Why Not? What makes them cut themselves off from their past, or the search for their past? Isn't it just a little weird to have your slate wiped clean at whatever age you were adopted and have the world tell you--what happened before doesn't matter? Isn't not wanting to know unnatural? Curiosity is normally seen as a sign of intelligence, but when an adopted persons asks Who am I? it is often interpreted as a sign of pathology.

Anybody thinking clearly realizes this is total baloney, the result of years of brain-washing by a culture that views adoption as a pure good, not complicated by the messy emotions of a grieving birth mother and a child who grows up confused. But adoption is painful. Adoption is always painful. The healing can only truly begin with full and complete knowledge of one's story, one's heritage, one's cultural and familial identity.

Yet in 42 states of the nation, it is still not legally possible for an adopted person--of any age--to say, Hey, you know, I want to know who I really am. I want to know what my story is. I want to know who my mother is and why she gave me away. And by the way, I want to know who my father is, too. Did he even know I was born? Was I given away because something is wrong with me?

Only six states allow individuals adopted as children access to their records: Alabama, Alaska, Kansas, New Hampshire, Maine, and Oregon. Delaware and Tennessee place restrictions on this information at the request of the birth parent (though only a minuscule number do this); numerous other states have various kinds of limitations that prevent individuals from freely having this information simply by asking for it. We are talking about letting adults have the same rights as the rest of us: the right to know from whence we came.

Getting the legislation passed to let the fresh wind of truth into an adopted person's life has proven incredibly difficult--and though I hate to say it because of the hackles this will raise, it's often an adopted parent who blocks the legislation. Weird, wouldn't you say? If they love their kids so much, wouldn't they want them to be free? Adoption then is more about ownership than our culture admits. The counterpoint to this is Lou D'Alessandro, the adoptive father and legislator who was the driving force behind the legislation that opened up New Hampshire and gave adopted individuals the right to have their original birth certificates.

In New Jersey right now, the Assembly Speaker Joe Roberts (see sidebar here for call to action) is sitting on legislation despite approval by the Senate in a 31-7 vote and the support of 50+ (of the 80) Assembly members. In New York The Adoptee Bill of Rights has been stalled in Codes Committee by the Speaker of the Assembly Sheldon Silver since 2006, even though it has 70 sponsors.

What will it take to move hearts and minds not only in New Jersey and New York but in every state of the nation that punishes people for the privilege of being adopted? If it is Find My Family, we are all for it. --lorraine

High Marks for Find My Family

Find My Family on ABC hit it out of the ball park last night with their half-hour reunion show. Yep, it milked the strong emotions that surround the reunion of first/original/birth/genetic/biological parents with their offspring. Yep, I got glassy eyed, and so did the co-host, Tim Green, who met with the birth parents, Sandy and Scott Steinpas, and told them their daughter had been found. "I've waited so long for this," says the mother, Sandy. "I was sure I would always look for my daughter." She was sixteen at the time she gave birth and relinquished; her boyfriend and the father, Scott, was sixteen also. The year was 1979. They married two years later and had two more daughters and a son. 

Sandy says she had been looking for her first child for nine years, only to hit a dead end. Yet our intrepid friend and search angel in Wisconsin, Mary Weilding,* found the daughter, Jenny Jones, now a 29-year-old single mother, living in the same town, Brookfield, Wisconsin, a mere eight miles away. Okay, I've seen a lot of reunion shows in my day, and the coming together, the feelings unleashed, never fail to raise a tear.

The reunion takes place--as it appears all will in Find My Family--under a huge tree on a hill. Symbolism, anyone? Family tree, roots, all that. As the parents walk towards their daughter, Tim Green, a reunited adoptee himself, says: "Every adopted person's dream is to be found."

And that's when I said: Hooray! Maybe this will be heard by legislators who are against giving adopted people their original birth records; maybe this will be heard by people who think it's wrong for a birth mother to find her child; maybe this will be heard by people who think it is unloyal somehow for a person to search out his or her roots, parents, family, when it is a most natural desire of consciousness.

Those who say they are not interested or do not wish to search for their biological parents, I think, are subverting their natural instincts, that is, to know who they are, who they were before they were adopted, who they were when they were born. And those adopted people who say, She gave me away, why should I be interested? They are only covering up a huge hurt in their heart they are afraid to acknowledge because to do so is too painful--and what if the birth mother (or father) indeed is not interested? Fear can keep you from finding the truth. I was afraid, oh so afraid, when I searched for my daughter. What if she did not want to meet me? Happily, she did and we had a relationship (that had its low points, to be sure) for more than a quarter of a century until she died in 2007.

The show continues with the entire family sitting under the tree as the first/birth/etc. parents read letters they have written to their daughter. More tears. Hugs. Later the two sets of parents--birth and adoptive--meet back in Wisconsin, and Sandy thanks the adoptive mother for taking such good care of their daughter. I know that some found this simple act irritating, but I did not. Birth mother Sandy thanks the adoptive introduced as "Mom"--from a position of strength: it is a vivid acknowledgment of all concerned that Sandy is the mother (no qualifier necessary) who gave birth to this person standing before them. And the gesture recognizes that the other mother is the Mom who raised her. When I "thanked" my daughter's adoptive parents, at least the mother brushed it aside and was visibly annoyed: What gave me the right to thank them? It was much too presumptive of me to "thank" them. Thanking them presumed that Jane was "my" daughter, that I had a "right" to thank them.

Although some people in adoption do not like these kinds of shows, I say, Bring 'em on! Every show about adoptee/birth mother/father reunions is worth doing because it illuminates the cruel and unusual punishment of adoption as practiced in most states of the union today--42 to be exact. Forty-two states still strip a person of his or her identity when he or she is adopted, and never give it back.

We at First Mother Forum rail against sealed records--for both the adopted person and the birth/first mother--but we know the general public most often thinks that the records have long been open. Every time I strike up a conversation with a stranger on a plane or train and tell them where I am going and what I am doing when it's adoption related, they are amazed that all adopted people can not get their original birth records merely for the asking. Yes, it is a miscarriage of justice at the deepest level, and the legislators who sit on their votes and do nothing are guilty of perpetuating this great and sorrowful injustice.

So I will be a huge fan of Find My Family when ABC gives it a regular time slot. Last night's program was a preview; there are five more shows ready to be aired. Yes, it appears to be a ripoff of The Locator on WEtv, but this will get a greater viewership and perhaps change more opinions about the need to reconnect with one's natural/birth parents. A quick look at the discussion boards on the ABC site shows that many people are posting about wanting to be found, as well as a lot of people kvetching mightily about the show--and the great damage it will do to adoption as we know it. In fact, Find My Family generated a lot of upset kvetching from adoptive parents over at Rainbow Kids blog, ** even before it ran, and you can be sure they will be asking ABC to not run the rest of the episodes.

We know that in the glow of reunion all is swell, and that anger, hurt and outright rejection can emerge in the aftermath. It's happened so many times it certainly is a statistical probability; but still, the questions have been answered, the gnawing doubts put to rest. Even when my daughter took a time-out and decided not to speak to me for months at a time, I was still better knowing what had happened, who she was, where she was. And then she would call and we would pick up like we had never been estranged.

Let's hope that Find My Family builds a big audience and furthers the fight to make adopted people full and complete citizens with rights just like the rest of us. If adoptive parents really cared for the well-being of their children, they would be with us, fighting for open records. Alas, their numbers are few.

If you missed last night's episode of Find My Family, here is a link to the whole episode.
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 * Contact Mary at isearch@jvlnet.com
** For more on the RainbowKids and fear of Find My Family, see Osolomama.

It's a different story over at The Huffington Post,  Read Peggy Drexler's rahrah adoption column and gag. An adoption agency worker is hardly the person to quote on the health and well-being of adopted people, but that's who Drexler, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell Medical School quotes. She ought to know better, Cornell no less. But that's a topic for tomorrow.

Have a good night y'all. Turkey day two days away. I'll be baking pies, with crust from scratch.--lorraine