Marriage after relinquishing a child--a good man helps

Celebrating our 25th anniversary 

Today is our 33rd wedding anniversary and after we did a quick stop at a church yard sale this morning and had coffee downtown outdoors--I thought about how my unknown daughter--unknown when we married--was a part of our lives from the very first time Tony and I met. Some of you know the story because I've told it before but today it's much on my mind.

We met at a Sunday brunch in February, introduced by a mutual friend, Gael McCarthy. We had both been on The Daily Collegian at Wayne State University in Detroit, and we both ended up in

Jean Paton: A reformer ahead of her time

Jean Paton, the pioneer of adoption reform was not an activist; that was left to adoptee Florence Fisher, as well as our own first mother Lorraine Dusky, and many others. Although Paton was convinced that adoptees needed to reunite with their birth family to become whole, she eschewed behavioral scientists, she left it to adoptee Betty Jean Lifton and others to frame adoption separation in psychological terms. Paton was a visionary who saw beyond opening records and psychological cures for primal wounds, arguing for replacing adoption with guardianship, allowing children to keep their original identities and connection to their birth families. She was brilliant and courageous but also disagreeable and argumentative; her writings were often obtuse and verbose. In his excellent, lengthy biography, Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption, historian E. Wayne Carp uses her own words--she gave him access to all her papers--to tell her story.

NCFA no longer opposes unsealing adoptee birth records--Yea!!

Reunited without birth certificate, Jane (l) and Lorraine

All birth certificates will be unsealed one day, William (Bill) Pierce, who founded the National Council for Adoption, once told our reform firebrand, Florence Fisher, founder of ALMA. When NCFA (pronounced Nik-FA) was opposing us regarding unsealing birth records at very opportunity, Pierce privately said this to Florence, who then told me, close to three decades ago.

Yet as the years rolled by NCFA continued to oppose us. When Florence and I testified in Washington DC in the late 70s for unsealing birth certificates at a Senate hearing in Washington, DC, NCFA handlers literally held up a weeping natural mother who was testifying for keeping records sealed. Forever.

She spoke before I did. By the time I was called to testify I was livid. I started out by saying said something to the effect of her anonymity disqualified her from being taken seriously--as it would on any other issue--but I might have well been

Meeting anger over coming out as a birth mother head on

Lorraine

The conversation about the previous post led to me saying that it could best be answered by posting what preceded that in the memoir I'm working on, Hole in My Heart. This segment is about what happened before I found a publisher for Birthmark, the memoir I wrote in the late Seventies. It was published in 1979; the first scene below would be in the summer of 1978. Plus, as I am trying to finish this draft ASAP, I do not have the time to post much original material, so I hope in this next month you bear with me.

(Copyright, Lorraine Dusky 2013. May not be reprinted, copied, etc in any media with  permission)

The guy is red in the face and so angry he is practically spitting at me as he talks, his voice getting loud enough to attract attention from nearby tables. He’s just found out that I am one of them—a mother who gave away a child—and furthermore that is the topic of the manuscript his boss, Don Fine, an editor who

The Continuing Adventures of Being Out as a Birth Mother

Lorraine, not quite incognito

Last weekend at a party on a backyard deck in the Hamptons, I am introduced to a man I have no recollection of knowing. He immediately says, Oh, we've met.

I say, Oh really, where, when?

He says, At a party like this. When you wrote a book about adoption...are you still involved in that?

Well of course my ears prick up like a horse on high alert and I say, Oh. Yes, I am still involved in that, but how is it that you remember me?

We adopted a daughter thirty-five years ago.

Helen Gurley Brown Gave Early Ink to Adoption Reform

Helen Gurley Brown in 1964

Helen Gurley Brown was a friend of mine. She was one of the few editors back in the day when I was "coming out" of the birth mother closet who supported me, gave me a pat on the back, and gave me an assignment. It was for Cosmopolitan with Brown as editor-in-chief I wrote my first piece about adoption reform, after reading a story in The New York Times about this woman named Florence Fisher and how she was shaking up adoption and demanding that adopted individuals be given their original birth certificates.

When Birthmark came out in 1979, I happened by the office and gave Helen an autographed copy; she wrote me a nice note later that I must have somewhere in my files. Although she was reviled by some of the feminists for her stance on using sex as a means to security and a better life, Helen went her own way and was certainly a feminist in the Madonna mold.

When adoptees change their names back to their birth names

Jane

Thanks to one of our readers, we saw this gem of misinformation in Dear Abby’s column of June 27.

ADOPTED SON'S NAME CHANGE CUTS REAL DAD TO THE QUICK

“DEAR ABBY: My wife had an unhappy five-year marriage to her high school boyfriend. They divorced when their son, "Noah," was 20 months old. Then she met me, and we have been married for 34 happy years.

When "Adoption" Can't Be the Problem...But It Is

Jane

Sometime ago, I played duplicate bridge every week with an older woman, Nellie. Over the course of several years, my bridge partner told me about her daughter, Denise, who with her sixty-year-old husband, had adopted two American boys at birth and a Chinese girl. I heard that the boys were terrors; they lied, stole, and broke things. The girl was a doll.

A Conversation about Open Records for Adopted People

Why has it been so damn difficult to give adopted people their original birth certificates? To do away with the noxious sealed-record laws and give adopted people the same rights as the rest of us, that is, to know whom they were at birth? You'd think we were asking for the gold of Fort Knox to spend on Manolos. A licensed private investigator, Dennis McCarthy of Auburn, New York , has some ideas and we've been having a lively dialogue.

Dennis: First, not all of the 1.5 million children put up for adoption during the Adoption Holocaust (1945-1973) were the result of a couple of teenagers getting themselves into a situation society wouldn't let them get out of. No, some of those children were the result of powerful "important" men who either betrayed their marriage vows, or were intimate with the "wrong kind" of woman, or who raped a female relative. Men who wield social power don't want their wrongdoing revealed, and I guarantee you, the names of many such men are right there in the adoption files along with the teenagers' names. Whatever power they held 30 or more years ago has likely only increased; if they're dead, they doubtless have left behind powerful families who will only perpetuate the secret. Thus, the records will remain closed on that account.

Lorraine: Yep, we know that a lot of men don't want their unacknowledged children to come out of the woodwork. We also are quite certain that the staunch opposition we run into in some instances from the Catholic church--such as in New Jersey--is at least partly the result of priests who fathered children. But in Albany, the bishop has come out in favor of giving adopted people their original birth certificates. But I'd like to know what it is with the American Civil Liberties Union, which generally is hell-bent on preserving the anonymity of birth mothers. I got into a public argument on a radio show once with the ACLU director in Miami, and he was surprised to hear the other side of the story. I'm not sure I turned him completely around, but he was expressing doubt about the ACLU's position by the time we finished talking.

Yet the ACLU in general, and at the national level, has certainly not been on the side of adopted people, which makes me nuts. Adopted people are the ones whose cause the ACLU ought to be supporting--instead of opposing them. Somehow I feel that the ACLU's support of sealed records--sealed from the people they concern the most--is simply corrupt. Like, maybe they have been co-opted by some of those big-shots you mention. Somehow the ACLU is largely convinced that birth/first mothers do not want the records opened, when the opposite is true. But their position is, We gotta protect those first/birth mothers in hiding.

Now, let's talk about the infamous "Searcher," whom I paid $1,200 in 1981 to locate my daughter. Those of us who knew of him feel that he must have been someone in a position to look at records at will and have contacts in all 50 states, as nothing seemed to deter him from a successful search. Later, I found out that he figured out who my daughter was by reading my memoir, Birthmark (her particulars were purposely included), and tracking her down, but he did not pass on the information until I forked over $1,200. In later years, his fee went up. I don't know when he stopped operating.

I have to say I would have paid more, and did not mind at all that I might have been breaking a law to locate my daughter. I have often felt that blood on the steps of Albany and other state capitals--or a publicized break-in similar to Watergate--is the only way we are going to convince some legislators that keeping the records sealed is as criminal and as wrong as slavery. As for first mothers being given the information about who got their children, forget about it. That was part of the proposed Model Adoption Act that made it to Washington in 1980--much to our amazement--but now it's such a hot potato no one will even consider it.

Dennis: Second, there is the likelihood that if The Searcher and "God" and others like him got caught, and their crimes were revealed, the scope of what they did was so enormous that the State would hush it up and simply fire them rather than doing the right thing and prosecute them, instead of risking a public scandal involving government criminality. No state wants a black eye like that, and if the records are unsealed, the crimes of people like The Searcher might come to light. Thus, the records will remain closed on that account, too.

Lorraine: I don't know if I agree the sins of The Searcher are important today. When you lobby in Albany, as I have, what you hear like a mantra is: The Privacy of the Birth Mother. Hosanna....they must be protected. Protected from whom, I'd like to know. That is all BS, but I'm repeating myself. I think most of the people I've met in Albany do not even know the Searcher operated. Behind enemy lines, as far as I'm concerned. This is war.

Dennis: Third, there is too much free-floating, unrequited anger among searching parents and adoptees whose posts I've read on the Internet. There is far too much public venting. It isn't that venting is wrong; indeed, venting is necessary. But when you memorialize your venting online, it will remain there for the world to see until the end of time, and when a political showdown happens between parents/adoptees and the politicians who control our lives, the politicians are simply not going to listen to people whose distinguishing characteristic appears to be anger. And on that account, the records will remain closed as well.

Anger has only one use, as a stepping stone to positive action. However, I see too many people who have decided to embrace their anger and never let it go. These are people who truly have been victimized, but they've made the useless decision to remain victims, and in so doing, they're robbing themselves of the opportunity to be listened to and to make something happen. Embracing victimhood gives one a sense of entitlement; victimhood makes people sit and wait for society to magically pay them back, to set everything right. And those are the people who will spend the rest of their lives in the hole society dug for them.

But this is what society wants and expects of its victims – society wants its victims to stay in the hole, to stay there and sit and wait for someone or something else to pull them out. It's a war of attrition in which no one accepts responsibility for anything. It's a war of attrition which society always wins, has always won, and will always win.

Lorraine: Wow. That's a very bleak way of looking at the situation. I agree that there is a lot of anger--I have some myself--because I felt when I surrendered my daughter I had no choice. I argued with my social worker over the sealed-in-perpetuity of the sealed records for I had been going along on the assumption that when she turned 18 or 21, both of us would be given the other's identity. That seemed like the natural thing, the moral way, the right way. I was shocked when I found out that was not the case. Finally, the social worker--Mrs. Helen Mura--said that if I would not agree to a closed-forever-adoption, the agency--Northaven Terrace in Rochester, New York--could not help me with the adoption. Incidentally, the agency no longer exists.

So as for "breaking a law" and paying some clerk or official who could make a phone call--he did his work before the Internet, remember--and get the information I would have walked over hot coals for, I did not give a damn. I was participating in a social revolution, and I'd do it again. Wait--I still am participating in a social revolution. Eventually, we will win. Even the Prince of Darkness, the late Bill Pierce of the National Council for Adoption, the scourge of open records, said that we would win one day, that open records were the wave of the future. He told that to Florence Fisher, one of the real pioneers of this movement, and the founder ALMA, an early organization that did much to move adoption reform forward, and is still around today. I'm going with that. That open records will be a reality in my lifetime.

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Dennis McCarthy is a private detective bonded and licensed by the State of New York. "For 34 years, I have been an investigator/detective of one kind or another, but since 1983 I've worked as private detective and/or lawyer's investigator."