Birth Mothers Happy to Reconnect

Hey Everybody, thanks for your kind posts--and the different takes on who is selfish. I had completely forgotten about adoptees being told that search and contact with their first moms was "selfish." What a crock! According to a small but rigorous study of birth/first mothers (93, some who were seekers, some were sought) in Great Britain, 94 percent of them were pleased that their son or daughter had made contact with them. Ninety percent said that the contact and reunion had been a happy and satisfying experience. After eight years, 70 percent were still in face-to-face contact, and 86 percent were still in indirect contact.

John Triseliotis, who headed the study, did an earlier work called In Search of Origins (1973) that was the first serious study to talk about the ramifications of being adopted and searching, as it was five years before The Adoption Triangle, our bible for opening records by Sorosky, Baran and Pannor.

What was fascinating in the current study was the differences Triseliotis found between the seeker birth mothers (32) and the sought birth mothers (61). Seeker mothers were found to have poorer physical and mental health, lower self-esteem; and were affected more severely by the loss of their child. Nothing surprising there. I certainly fall into that group, and to judge from what we read online, so do mothers who blog. I remember a good friend (a birth mother, but we were friends before we discovered this)always yapping at me about my low self-esteem, and how I let guys walk over me when I was dating after my first marriage (shortly after I gave Jane up) ended. Shortly after I found Jane, she paid for the same searcher and found her daughter; they remain in frequent contact and see each other regularly. Now back to the new research:

Triseliotis found that sought mothers were healthier: "on the whole and in spite of their sadness, [they] were not found to be significantly different from the general population, before contact took place." However, "79 percent of both groups reported guilt as one of a number of lasting impacts arising from the parting decision.... The guilt arose mainly from the belief that, irrespective of the circumstances, they had 'rejected' the child."

The numbers in Britain were identical to what the New Jersey Department of Human Services reported back in 2004. In a letter to a NJ senator, Dolores Helb, Adoption Registry Coordinator, wrote: "Despite the fact that the majority of parents we search for are not registered with us, 95 percent do agree to some form of contact with the adoptee. Though this percentage has not changed since 1996, newer technology has brought us greater success in the number of people we have been able to locate." (Thanks to Pam Hasegawa and Judy Foster for providing the above data.) Let me add that The Adoption Triangle and a companion book by Annette Baran are well worth reading for anyone in the triad.

And a personal note...Hi Mairaine, Aston was apologizing but I said I wanted to see him in person...and that didn't happen. Now I just wish I had had a ten-minute conversation with him on the phone and let it go. Yes, I've known him for a long time but he's not one of my closest friends. So it was time to not make a great deal out of it, talk over the phone, accept his apologies, explain a bit, and I did not do that. I kept asking for a face-to-face. He and his wife knew I was upset as soon as I sent her the email saying so. But I'm reading into my response that indeed, I was one of the seeker mothers who has deep reservoirs of grief and sorrow and am acutely sensitive about this issue.

Tomorrow I'll post about the cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine: Her Body, My Baby. Grit your teeth and read it.
Take care, y'all--lorraine

"God's Will?" I don't think so.

Just a short note here responding to a post from UnsignedMasterpiece about God's Will in this business we have unhappily found ourselves as mothers without children and children seeking first mothers:

You hear a lot of talk about God and adoption and I always wonder where "God's plan" has gone when things go wrong,...You never hear anyone referring to how God meant them to have this experience then.

I just can't buy that it was "God's will" that I got pregnant at a time and place when I had to give up my daughter to strangers...they loved her, yes, as well as they could, but both her epilepsy and her being given up put a huge traumatic burden upon her and in the end, she was not able to cope with it all. How can it possibly be "God's will" that we who have lost our children in the closed system of adoption never fully get over it? How can it be "God's will" that we are the "reproductive agents" for some other family? How can it be "God's will" that many of those same adoptees spend their lives looking for their first parents?

If there is such a God, he or she is a pretty nasty piece of work. At times when I hear people talk about God's will in relationship to losing a child to adoption, I find that I just turn away. I was raised in another time--the Forties and Fifties--and wasn't supposed to have sex when I wasn't married. Okay, you can say I sinned when I had that sex with my daughter's father, and the result was conception, but is there no reprieve from this hell on earth? If there is a God, why can he give us no solace? The Republicans talk about "making adoption easier" in their manic quest to make abortions more difficult (or impossible), but they have not walked in our shoes. If they had, they would not be talking this way, nor would web sites offer "a beautiful adoption experience." To give away your own flesh and blood is hell, plain and simple.

There is this quote from Euripedes that I think sums up what we read on this blog:

“No man lives happy to the end of his life. Or avoids his share of bad luck. We inherit grief merely by being born.” --Euripides.

Amen.

--lorraine