Read All About It...in The New York Times

The story of Lisa and Lorraine appears in today's New York Times.
Click on link below:
Adoption, Reunion, Connection

Writer Sue Dominus, an old friend, was meticulous in getting the language right and the story straight. She did a great job in cramming in a long story in the amount of space she had. We spoke last night as the story went to bed. To keep adoption reform in the news: write to Letters@nytimes.com

The sun is shining. Have a great day. --lorraine
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Those of you who have followed FirstMother Forum know I've written in detail about finding my granddaughter, Lisa, who was adopted. (The link will connect to others with the full story.)

Grieving for my daughter's adoptive mother

But if all unhappy families are the same, every adoption is quite different. Consider this one between first mother Alison Ward and her daughter's other mother, Sandra. Last week Alison, who now resides in Fort Myers, Florida, wrote to me after her daughter's adoptive mother died. Alison and I both searched for minor children (she ahead of me) in the early Eighties, when most of the adoption reform movement disapproved of that. Alison spent several years on the board of Concerned United Birthparents (CUB), was a co-founder of Origins in New Jersey, and was involved with the defense of Mary Beth Whitehead in the Baby M case (which resulted in a surrogacy ban in NJ). Alison and I, and our daughters, Holly and Jane, were featured in a New York Times story, "Mothers Find the Children They Gave Up," by Judy Klemesrud on August, 29, 1983. (Yes, we do go back.) We were also in the Jill Krementz book How It Feels To Be Adopted. Holly's adoptive family is also pictured there.

by Alison Ward

When we all searched so long ago to reunite with our children, I don't think we ever gave much thought back then to anything but the early years, the ones following the loss, and the present. We were so much younger than the adoptive parents. Now, all our children are grown, the ones we lost and any whom we raised. We are all grandmothers now, although sometimes are not recognized as "real" ones.

My daughter, Holly, had adoptive parents who raised her and loved her. They invited me for a weekend at their home several months after I made that first phone call to a 14-year-old. They asked me to stay with Holly when they went away to horse show when she was 15, which was when Jill Krementz came to tiny Dacula, Georgia to interview Holly, Sandra, and me. Sandra allowed the picture of the three of us to be in People magazine way back when, and we were later all on Oprah Winfrey's show in Baltimore (before Oprah went to Chicago) with the late Bill Pierce of the National Council for Adoption and a sworn opponent of openness in adoption. I doubt if Sandra and Holly's adoptive father, Allan, received much support from their friends when they allowed Holly to spend Christmas breaks and summer vacations with me when she was a teenager.

Certainly it was difficult for Sandra and Allen when Holly lived with me and my second child, Daniel, whom I had when I was 36 and was raising as a single mother in New Jersey. Holly was going to college in nearby, and things seemed to be going well when one day she simply walked out and left. She was 24 at the time; we had known each other for nearly a decade. Letters went unanswered and the years rolled by.

After Holly withdrew from our relationship, any letter or package I sent her went c/o Allan and Sandra. Although I never received any response from Holly, Sandra reassured me that she gave everything to Holly and I believed her.

I did not hear from Holly for 17 years. Four years ago when Holly was 41, she wrote me, told me about her life and her son, Matthew, enclosed a picture, and asked for medical information. I responded and sent a baby gift, but did not hear from her again for a couple of years. Then, in 2007, she mailed me a wonderful album full of photos of Matthew, in kind of time lapse photography fashion. It was then that I knew we would meet again. Matthew is Holly's only child. He was born when she was 36, the same age I was when I had Daniel.

Sandra and Allen knew that Holly met me again on Sanibel over a year ago. She knew I met Matthew, who was four at the time, and her husband, Phil. Last October, when Holly told me that Sandra's health was rapidly declining, I wrote Sandra a note to wish her well and to thank her for all she had done for Holly and for me. She wasn't a perfect mother and, God knows, I'm far from it.

I'm not exactly sure why I have been affected so much by Sandra's death, but we were connected for the last 42 years (even the first 14 when we didn't know each other). While Sandra's obituary won't mention me, she leaves me behind as well as her family. I know that, while she could never replace me, I can never replace her.

One Messy Minefield: A birth mother's relationship with her child's adoptive mother

(c) Lorraine Dusky, 2009

Our relationships with the adoptive parents, especially the mothers, is fraught right from the first moment of adoption. And if one's child has had a good relationship with her adoptive mother, we are the outsiders looking in on a close bond. How the adoptive mother reacts to us--whether they fear us, are resentful that the adoptee is curious, are angry that a search was completed, and so on--determines to a large degree what kind of relationship the adoptee will maintain with her first mother.

In my last post about my daughter Jane's pulling away from me for well over a year, and it had everything to do with Jane's other mother, to wit:

As I wrote the other day, even after I "apologized" without caveats, Jane kept her distance for several more months--maybe up to another year. And then one day she simply started calling me again and we went on as if a break had not occurred. She did not want to talk about what caused her behavior, and I did not press the issue, but eventually I did understand it.

When one of Jane's brothers (a biological son of her parents) died in a tragic skiing accident when he went off a cliff on a Double Diamond run. Jane called me, still crying, with the news almost as soon as she heard. The memorial service was to be out west, where her brother had lived at a ski resort. Jane and her parents, as well as another biological son, lived in Wisconsin. Initially the parents only wanted their other biological son to go to the memorial service, and offered him and him alone airplane fare. Jane's adopted brother lived near the ski resort and would be there. Jane was understandably very upset, and only after she made this clear to her parents did they invite Jane to come west with them.

At the memorial service, her mother uttered these fateful words about her dead son: He was my favorite.

Now that's tough to hear when you are a biological sibling, but if you are adopted, it brings home how immense the difference is between you and the blood siblings in the hearts and minds of your parents. While books and movies sometimes like to play up the good-for-nothing biological son in contrast to the upright and stalwart adopted son, or son-in-law, who is favored by the patriarch of the family, this is rarely the case in real life. At the service where the unspeakable was spoken, Jane's adopted brother apparently said something unprintable to their mother, and didn't talk to her for about a year. Jane's reaction was to retreat almost completely from me in an effort to prove that she was A Good Daughter, worthy of her adoptive mother's love. There is no way around this harsh reality: Being adopted into a family is not the same as being born into it. DNA counts.

One issue that certainly came into play with my relationship with Jane's adoptive mother is how long Jane and I had our own relationship. Though it had its off times--as well as on--her mother came to deeply resent my continuing presence in Jane's life, especially it seemed, after Jane had a "perfect" daughter who did not have the physical and emotional problems that encumbered Jane. If I had been tolerated before as Jane's other mother, now I was actively disliked. What right had I to be Gramma? Furthermore, she felt angry because the golden granddaughter began living with the adoptive grandparents when she was six as Jane was unable to provide a stable home for her. (Yes, my story is complicated.) So there were reasons for her resentment.

And along the way, Jane's mother instilled a sense of guilt into my granddaughter about our relationship, the same way adoptees have guilt over searching, reunion, a relationship with their first mothers. That seems to be dissipating, but not before it hurt me deeply. I had hoped my granddaughter would be spared that.

But not all adoptive families are the same. Tomorrow Firstmother Forum will have a post from Alison Ward, who, like me, searched for and found a daughter when they were minors. Alison reflects upon the death of her daughter's adoptive mother, with whom she had a different kind of relationship. --lorraine