Second daughter brings joy to Catelynn, Tyler

Happy mom Catelynn

"I actually get to feel happy about leaving the hospital," Tyler Baltierra tweeted as he prepared to take his new daughter, Novalee, and her mother, long time girl friend, Catelynn Lowell, home from the hospital last month according to E News. "Crying happy tears instead of sad ones feels amazing! I don't have to be heart broken this time."

Tyler, you didn't have to heart-broken when you left the hospital after Catelynn gave birth to your baby five years ago. Then Tyler and Catelynn handed their daughter, Carly, to adoptive parents Brandon and Teresa Davis, an affluent couple who lived in North Carolina, far from Catelynn and Tyler's home in rural Michigan, making visits difficult and costly. Surely there were willing parents not several states away.

How does a baby feel about being a "gift"?

Lorraine and her daughter, 1982

Catelynn and Tyler continue on as stars of TV trash...or "America's sweethearts." After their star turn on Sixteen and Pregnant in which they give the "gift" of their baby to an infertile but stable and older couple in a "semi-open" adoption, they went on to be featured in Teen Mom. We saw her in labor, heard her express dismay that the adoption was not more "open," heard about the house they bought, Catelynn's weight gain and Catelynn's weight loss, their shilling for Bethany Adoption Services and promoting adoption at high schools and colleges around the country, and now--weeks away from their July 15 wedding, they are in another reality TV series, Couples Therapy on VH1.

Well, last night in the opening moments of the show Catelynn and Tyler came smack up against some hard reality from one of the other people on this show, Flava Flav, whose own really tacky reality show seemed to be about him finding a girlfriend. Now here he is with his own real life girlfriend, the mother of his son, who has been there all the time. What happened when Flava Flav and Catelynn and Tyler meet is priceless. He wonders why they could be in couple therapy--they are young and in love, right?

The Lost Post regarding the issues of Tyler and Catelynn, reconstructed

Carly, Brandon and Teresa Davis and new baby in Bethany ad

In a series of unfortunate events last night I inadvertently erased the whole post here. I had wrapped up the current commotion with Tyler Baltierra of Tyler and Catelynn of 16 and Pregnant and of late, Teen Mom. Having relinquished their daughter, they have become spokesteens for Bethany Christian Services. They give talks at colleges and high schools, showing how well their "adoption plan" worked out for them. Talks, in other words, that can only encourage other teens to give up their babies. Tyler prefers that I use the language, "made an adoption plan" in reference to them, as if that made a difference to what happens to a child borne of one mother and given to another woman to raise.

I am recreating some of what was lost with new material.

Not being a frequent watcher of Teen Mom, yet trying to keep up with the breathless adventures of this couple--he's sleeping outside overnight to raise money for charity, she's gone to the East Coast to

Open or closed: Losing a child to adoption is painful

An adoptive mother asked recently whether those of us in the Baby Scope Era would have had less pain if we had had an open adoption. (The Baby Scoop Era is the period between World War II and Roe v. Wade when a large number of single middle class white women lost their infants to adoption because of the stigmas placed on unwed mothers and their children.

When my relinquished daughter was born in 1966, I thought that it would be wonderful if  I could have some continuing contact with her. I envisioned a secret child whom I would communicate with through a trusted friend.  I fancied myself like the Bette Davis character, Apple Annie, in the 1961 film Pocketful of Miracles. Annie, a disheveled old woman sold apples on a street corner  to support her daughter hidden in a Spanish convent.