How to F--- up adoptee 'rights'

the Mad Hatter Lorraine

So again this year we in search of justice for the adopted are going down in ashes in Albany. Another year in which thousands of adoptees born in New York state like my daughter will be denied their original birth certificates which would have the er, real, parents in the lines where one's real mother and father are to be named. 

Today I am too riled up to not use Real because first mothers are the er, real biological mothers in the minds of real people, so though we understand all parents are in a sense, real, go with this today. We mothers not in the closet are the oppressed today, and yesterday, and just as native Americans do not want to be called Redskins, we do not want to be called anything other than real mothers today. 

The bills in New York that we had so much hope for were amended way beyond reasonable. It includes a birth parent veto. Period. Before anything at all is released, the birth parents must be found (within four months) and give their notarized permission. If the birth parents can't be found to give their permission for their names to be released, or they do not respond, a judge can decide that doing so would be detrimental to the "welfare" of the "birth or adoptive parents." 

Feelin' Blue about Mother's Day

Whoa! The other day I thought I was going to sail through this Mother's Day with nary a problem...my daughter took her life two years ago--I might as well put it out there rather than not, that's what happened--and my mother died eleven years ago on the first of May, and so, I stupidly, thought, well, Mother's Day and all it's friggen' reminders will just sail over me, just as Linda remarked about her own feelings in her comment to the last post, To Search or Not: That is the question for adoptees/birth mothers.

What's Mother's Day got to do with me this year?  I am neither the daughter of a living mother or the mother of a living daughter, though I have been both. I'm cool, right?

Fool that I am.

Yesterday afternoon I got stomped on somewhat by an angry adoptee over at Facebook for posting a comment on the site You Know You're Adopted When...and that led to a group of adoptees who have read the blog remarking on what they do not like about BirthMother, First Mother Forum....including the name, because if we are first mothers, what does that make their other mothers? And that depressed me because I'm thinking, damn, I picked the name because I thought it would be easy to remember, and because, well, I'm not crazy about the appellation "birth mother," whether one word or two, but I will live with it because it's become part of the nomenclature. Hell, all of us, first/birth/natural/and adoptive: we all prefer just plain old "mother," no qualifiers.

But they do have a right to say, stay away, as there is also a Facebook page started that is You Know You are a First Mother When....It was the accusatory tone of the discourse, except for one of our regular readers who was sweet in her responses and saved my spirits, somewhat. But the incident put a black cloud over my feelings about continuing FirstMotherForum at all, and though you think these things do not bother you, there they are, gnawing at you, and then the Mother's Day !@#$. Ads on television. Ads in the New York Times this morning. Ads on the car radio--Shop at this local pharmacy, and we have a complete line of bath and grooming products for MOTHER'S DAY! Brunch special for MOM this coming Sunday! Et cetera, et cetera et cetera, as Yul Brunner so famously said as the King of Siam. 

No matter who much I've tried to tune out the drumbeat for Mother's Day, apparently I'm not doing so well. This morning I snapped at the clerk at the cable outlet when I picked up a new cable box. I was nice to the technician who gave me a mammogram later that morning, but when she asked if anyone in my immediate family ever had breast cancer, I thought of all those adopted people who can't answer that question, and asked her how that goes. She said it was sad, that they had to be super vigilant about their health, and get a lot of checkups and tests. I told her that it was the legislators' fault that it was that way. Probably I should have added it was the fault of adoptive-parent legislators (at least in New York) such as convicted felon Joe Bruno, long-time open-records opponent Steve Saland, and always nasty adoptive uncle Danny O'Donnell, New York past and present legislators, but I didn't think of that fast enough. (To all adoptive parents reading this, don't go bananas here, I know many of you are for giving adoptees their original birth certificates, and if that's the case, will you please write your legislator in whatever state you are and let him know? Hell, you might as well write President Obama, while you're at it. You spent enough time and money getting your child, spend some time to give him or her the right to know their true and complete identities and be equal to the rest of us.)

And now...now I just am feeling the tears inside me bubbling up and over and out. In the past, since all restaurants are jammed with mothers and daughters and mothers and sons come Mother's Day, I have invited people over for brunch myself. I have one friend whose mother was truly wretched and abusive and is now in a funny farm, and she and her husband are childless, and having them over on Sunday has worked in the past, but I'm thinking I'm just not up to that today. Maybe I will be by tomorrow.

For now, this birth mother says "Mother's Day" feels like hell.--lorraine

PS: And then...the mail arrives and it's a card from my step-son., Evan...and I say to his Dad, the indubitable Tony, I hope it's funny. I slide it out of the envelope and I see a vase with pink hydrangea: not funny. Then I read the greeting: Myslac z mitoscia o Tobie...it's in Polish from my Scottish/English/Welsh American step-son. And neither he or I have any idea what it says....I laugh. The inside message: w Dniu Matki i zawsze. Pozostan w mojej pamiece, i bada szczexliwa przez caty rok. 

And hand written in is Drogi Babci 'Raine, which I know means, Dear Grandma Raine...and it's signed: Fortunny Dzien od matka! Kochajacy...which I will have to have translated, but I know the root koch is love. (I am not doing the Polish justice because some of the letters have extras marks.)

Translation anyone? Maryanne?

Good job, Evan and Karen and Dylan!   

Adopted People Are Not Allowed Ancestry Because It Might Upset Somebody

There's always a wealth of adoption-related vibrations in the air (Find My Family is on tonight, Ethiopian adoption, in an email) but today I can't stop thinking about a story that was in The Stamford (CT) Advocate the other day written by an adopted woman who just received non-identifying information about her birth family, just the kind of information that we now know is fabricated by some agencies.

The writer, Terri S. Vanech, was informed that she is the daughter of a blond, blue-eyed teenager who was considered "pretty," that she, Terri, is German and English, that her father left school to become a machinist apprentice and that her mother was planning to go to college to "work in the data processing field," and that her (birth) mother had "an upturned nose and an engaging smile."

I guess it's that last bit that would kill me if I were on the adopted side of this painful process called adoption. Upturned nose? Pretty? Engaging smile? I think I would start looking at every face in the supermarket all over again, trying to figure out if upturned noses fall with age (they do) and wonder how "pretty" looks at say, sixty, seventy, or so, to judge from the career choice of her first mother--data processing, the precursor to computers.

It would drive me nuts. Just the way I would look longingly--looking for clues--at every girl in the damn room everywhere I went before I found my daughter. Or rather, paid The Searcher $1,200 in 1981 to give me the name and address he already had on file after he used the clues in Birthmark to locate my daughter. But that's another story. Though adoptee Vanech doesn't talk about how unsatisfying and tantalizing it is to have half a glass full of information, she does add that with the "blessings of my parents and her husband" she is beginning the next leg of this journey of self-discovery. I assume that means she will commence a search for her (birth) mother.

Oh, give this woman her records, would someone please? Slip them to her on a piece of paper, call her up, send her an email, whatever, but what is the damn point of this anonymity, of non-identifying information which her mother most likely does not want, as we have learned from study after study?

But there is something else that bugged me about Vanech's rather touching essay. The overwhelming sense that she must tread lightly in order not to offend her adoptive parents. I know that everyone who has had what he or she considers a "good" adoption is deeply imbued with this sensibility, and I know it's not possible to understand what it means to be adopted, but sometime I would like a simple acknowledgment that adopted people who stripped of their rights have an undisputed right to simply find out who they are, why they were born...without the overblown sense that they can only do this with their parents' permission. Are the adoptive parents just as grateful to you for being a good son or daughter? Don't they owe you some gratitude? For being the person they "chose"?

Maybe this set me off because the other day we got an email from the wife of someone adopted who was searching--"with the permission of his parents" for her husband's first mother and father; the permission was mentioned more than once and that is what got on my nerves. I am afraid that I was a bit harsh in my response because the woman who wrote to us--who was not adopted, she was searching for her husband's (first/birth/you-name-it) mother--was so full of supplication and consideration for the adoptive parents that it seemed that the man in question had never been allowed to get past the "adopted child" syndrome. Had he asked his parents permission to take a toke, have sex, get married, have children, vote, go to war? Was there any other issue, I asked, in which he felt it necessary to ask for their "permission"?

I have an old bumper sticker that says: Adopted People Are Not Allowed Ancestry Because It Might Upset Somebody. I've had it for years, it has an "Orphan Voyage" copyright on it, and I don't remember when or how I acquired it. I used to think that the words referred to (birth) mothers in hiding; but today I read it a different way: those who might be upset if adoptees search are adoptive parents. If you look at the history of sealed records in, say, New York State, you find that adoptive parents were the ones behind the 1935 legislation that sealed the records: Governor Herbert H. Lehman,* adoptive father of two, was the motivating force behind the legislation that slammed shut the records in New York State; the late adoptive father John Tower in the Senate made sure that the open-records provision of changes to the adoption laws was summarily dropped in the early Eighties; and former majority leader of the New York Senate, adoptive father Joe Bruno, now on trial in federal court for corruption of the most flagrant sort. He never met with us, never signaled that he was in the least interested in the Adoptee Bill of Rights.
 Joseph L. Bruno

What do I remember about going to Albany to lobby the last time? One image that ranks high in the memory bank is three or four of us patiently sitting and earnestly lobbying for three-quarters of an hour with two of Bruno's staff people who took copious notes. Bruno probably never looked at those notes, or their report, because he was too busy introducing possible clients in the state to his business partners who were filling his pockets with dollars because of his vaulted position in the Senate. Off with his head!  Err--just find him guilty and send him to jail.**

I know it's a tall order, but maybe with enough education, maybe without adoptive parents who freak out when they hear "real" parent not referring to them, maybe with enough encouragement, we can change the world. Maybe some of this new attitude will even reach the despicable Drexler, she of Cornell and the Huffington Post. But I doubt it.

I am reminded once again of a note posted anonymously on a wall in New York City: I'm sad I'm adopted but I'm also grateful.

It seems to be those words sum up everything about being adopted. Sad and grateful.
________________
*Until my computer coughed, I had a link to the typed version of the 1935 legislation, as well as a letter from the nun who was the head of Catholic Charities opposing the legislation--it's on line somewhere. If anyone can find it again, I would sorely appreciate it.

** To all the adoptive parents reading this who are in favor of open records, to all the adoptive parents who are not like the above--I know it's not all of you. But adoptive parents and agencies, who support agencies such as Gladney, a prime mover in the National Council for Adoption, have been our biggest stumbling blocks towards open records, and so allow me my righteous anger today.