While Big Love, HBO show on Mormonism and plural marriage, got it right in their final episode of the season, hospital drama ER ended with a big fat ugly "adoption is the holy grail" thud last night (3/26/09). Fellow Blogger Linda sends this report from the trenches of ER:
High school mom who left infant at hospital returns two weeks later and says she made a mistake. Her mom will help her with the baby, and besides, she has welfare. Angela Bassett, the black physician who has become the infant's temporary custodian and has been trying to adopt for seven years (why don't we feel much sympathy?), is heartbroken, asks the girl, Are you sure, all the usual platitudes.
The teen spends hours hanging out in ER waiting for social worker, and sees the great doctor saving lives, doing good. By the end of the show the teen mom, who incidentally is white, the baby bi-racial, decides it'll be too much to go to school, make something of herself, and be a mom all at once. She wants her son to be look up to her. Bassett chokes back tears; teen mom says something about not being able to know her kid if he's adopted...Bassett says it doesn't have to be that way, there's "open adoption," the teen would know her child, be a part of his life. Wow! The perfect answer for everyone!
Yet another: Gee, adoption is soooo great plot line, see how much better this will be for the teen mother and the lovely, hard-working doctor gets what she wants, a baby. Tidy, that. A couple of weeks ago adoption was the theme at the noxious Brothers and Sisters, (see earlier post) in which another black mom, this one also a doctor (How unreal is this plot line--the woman is a doctor and she's going to give away her child?) Not only does she do that, she does it without drama, no tears, no regrets. She has the baby, and she is outta there. No, she is not open to having the adoption being more "open" than previously agreed. Pictures. That's it.
Big Love, on the other hand, had a different twist on the mother-and-daughter reunion. It is revealed that one of main wives, Nicki (Chloe Svigney) had an earlier marriage or "sealing" to another man when she was very young and lived among the way-out Mormon fanatics (long dresses, big hair). She had a daughter then, and no one else on the show knew about it, as she up and left the cult and married into a middle-class plural marriage (if there is such a thing, but bear with us) in Salt Lake City. We will pick up the story here. This is at least a close facsimile of what was said between Nicki and her sister wife, Barb:
Nicki: I did the worst thing a person can do. I left my daughter.
Barb: (Incredulously) You had a daughter?
Nicki: I have a daughter.
Barb: (Still incredulous) You left a child?
Nicki: It was the only way I could get out. It was an impossible choice but I made it. Now she's here and she knows who I am and she wants answers. Everybody has tears in their eyes. (Including me.)
The show ends with the daughter being brought into Nicki's life, and her new marriage. I was cheering at how this revelation and the ending was handled, as the girl is now going to be a part of Nicki's life. At least these writers understood that leaving a child...is not a good thing. Other script writers seem to feel as if it is god's gift to the plot lines, as in ER, Brothers and Sisters, countless soaps, the despicable Juno, ad nauseam.
But it's not always simply adoption that seems to stalk us birth mothers. Linda and I went into Manhattan the other night as she got free tickets to August Wilson's play, Joe Turner's Come and Gone. The play is set in 1911; the characters are descendants of slaves, or in one case, a free man. It's a strong drama involving a man searching for the wife who left when he was taken away for reasons unknown and gone for seven years. Now he and his daughter, who was left in the care of her grandmother, are searching for his wife, the girl's mother. Near the end of the second act, Bam! there it is, the denouement, an emotional mother-and-child reunion.
For Linda and me, two birth mothers sitting there enjoying a night supposedly away from all adoption/separation-related things...it was indeed black humor. Linda gasped, I put my hand on her knee. I wanted to chuckle, and might have if we'd been watching this together on television. Adoption, mother-and-child separations and reunions, they follow us everywhere.
Check in tomorrow. We will have a heartbreaking post from a woman who agreed to an "open adoption." That wasn't.
Showing posts with label Tom Junod. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tom Junod. Show all posts
Friday, March 27, 2009
Sunday, August 3, 2008
The Things That Take You Back
Ah well, sometimes you come face to face with the devil. As I did last night at a party on Shelter Island. I heard someone introduce someone as "Tom Junod" and immediately the wretched thing he "allegedly" did a number of years ago to the late Carole Anderson came roaring in. Carole, as some of you remember, was a leader in our adoption reform and a vice president of Concerned United Birthparents (CUB). While Junod was considering adopting, he wrote a piece for Esquire or GQ about all of us crazy natural mothers who go looking for our children, and egads, sometimes finding them and reuniting, having a relationship!
Carole told me she spent quite a bit of time with him, tried to make him aware and sensitive...as long as he agreed not to include in his story her personal saga--that although she had reunited with her son, he had not yet told his adoptive parents. He was an adult at the time, married with kids. Yet he couldn't bring himself to tell his adoptive parents.
When I hear about the "kinning" (a word I heard a the Pitt Conference last fall, there was much talk about how the adopted person becomes one with the new family, never mind the old) that goes on between people who adopt and their children, I can not help but think about the lack of honesty regarding the adoption process that still goes on between many an adoptee and many an adopter, even in our supposedly enlightened era when...it is not supposed to be that way.
On my bulletin board in front of my I have an old bumper sticker that says: Adopted People Are Not Allowed Ancestry Because It Might Upset Somebody. Now I suspect that initially the sentiment was to counteract the idea of the firstmoms in the closet, but it can also be read the other way, now can't it? Adoptees are not allowed to speak of that relationship...that will hurt the adopters' feelings.
I digress. When Tom Junod's story came out--I've been trying to find it on the web without success, help anybody?--it put Carole in a precarious position with her son as well as made birthmothers who simply don't walk away look like loons. Though she was devastated, Carole, a lawyer who worked in Des Moines, considered legal action but ultimately decided against it. I remember a long, long conversation we had about the story. To add insult to injury, the piece was one of the finalists (all of which get a certain amount of publicity, I know because I was a finalist once) for one of the big prizes in magazine journalism, the National Magazine Award. There's a big lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the winners are listed in the New York Times, the editor and the writer go home that day very happy with the bragging rights that come with winning. Before the winners were announced, I wrote an outraged letter to the head of the organization, ccd. the editor in chief of Esquire (who is still there, incidentally) but to no avail. I received no response. At least I let a few people know that he had gone back on his word. As least Mr. Junod did not win that year. Shortly afterward I heard that he and his wife adopted. Hmm, I wonder how open their adoption is?
So...last night on a crowded deck, ice cubes clinking against the plastic tumblers, I hear his name, and BAM! I'm right there, looking to see who he is, and he's chatting it up with other journalists/producers I know. At some point in the evening, we caught each other's eyes they way eyes do, but that was it. Fortunately, the party was big enough that I did not have to meet him. I think I might have at least said: I was a friend of Carole Anderson, and see his reaction.
I am not railing here against journalism or journalists because I've been a newspaper reporter or a journalist, and an editor, most of my life. It's just that when you promise someone you will not include certain information, that's it. If you are an honorable person, you do not go back on your word--no matter how much pressure the editor gives you, or how much better you think the story will be if you do.
Lord, the simplest things take you back. I think that the mothers who really put the children out of their minds, who really do find a way to exit the stage, are better off than we are, but then--they must be the cruel ones, who do not meet their children when the children come calling.
Carole told me she spent quite a bit of time with him, tried to make him aware and sensitive...as long as he agreed not to include in his story her personal saga--that although she had reunited with her son, he had not yet told his adoptive parents. He was an adult at the time, married with kids. Yet he couldn't bring himself to tell his adoptive parents.
When I hear about the "kinning" (a word I heard a the Pitt Conference last fall, there was much talk about how the adopted person becomes one with the new family, never mind the old) that goes on between people who adopt and their children, I can not help but think about the lack of honesty regarding the adoption process that still goes on between many an adoptee and many an adopter, even in our supposedly enlightened era when...it is not supposed to be that way.
On my bulletin board in front of my I have an old bumper sticker that says: Adopted People Are Not Allowed Ancestry Because It Might Upset Somebody. Now I suspect that initially the sentiment was to counteract the idea of the firstmoms in the closet, but it can also be read the other way, now can't it? Adoptees are not allowed to speak of that relationship...that will hurt the adopters' feelings.
I digress. When Tom Junod's story came out--I've been trying to find it on the web without success, help anybody?--it put Carole in a precarious position with her son as well as made birthmothers who simply don't walk away look like loons. Though she was devastated, Carole, a lawyer who worked in Des Moines, considered legal action but ultimately decided against it. I remember a long, long conversation we had about the story. To add insult to injury, the piece was one of the finalists (all of which get a certain amount of publicity, I know because I was a finalist once) for one of the big prizes in magazine journalism, the National Magazine Award. There's a big lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the winners are listed in the New York Times, the editor and the writer go home that day very happy with the bragging rights that come with winning. Before the winners were announced, I wrote an outraged letter to the head of the organization, ccd. the editor in chief of Esquire (who is still there, incidentally) but to no avail. I received no response. At least I let a few people know that he had gone back on his word. As least Mr. Junod did not win that year. Shortly afterward I heard that he and his wife adopted. Hmm, I wonder how open their adoption is?
So...last night on a crowded deck, ice cubes clinking against the plastic tumblers, I hear his name, and BAM! I'm right there, looking to see who he is, and he's chatting it up with other journalists/producers I know. At some point in the evening, we caught each other's eyes they way eyes do, but that was it. Fortunately, the party was big enough that I did not have to meet him. I think I might have at least said: I was a friend of Carole Anderson, and see his reaction.
I am not railing here against journalism or journalists because I've been a newspaper reporter or a journalist, and an editor, most of my life. It's just that when you promise someone you will not include certain information, that's it. If you are an honorable person, you do not go back on your word--no matter how much pressure the editor gives you, or how much better you think the story will be if you do.
Lord, the simplest things take you back. I think that the mothers who really put the children out of their minds, who really do find a way to exit the stage, are better off than we are, but then--they must be the cruel ones, who do not meet their children when the children come calling.
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