Megan's story: An adoptee fills in the pieces

Megan and Jane at the old Courthouse in Bloomington, Ill 2018

For adoptees in closed adoptions like my daughter Megan, life is a puzzle. "Where did I come from? How did I land here? In a recent blog post, Megan, referred to in FMF posts as Rebecca the name I gave her when she was born, tells of assembling the pieces of her origins. These pieces constitute the borders, the frame for our relationship. We're still filling in the middle.

After searching for over ten years, she connected with me in 1997 when she was 31. Despite an ecstatic beginning, our relationship like so many others--including Lorraine's with her daughter--has been rocky at times. Like other first mothers newly in reunion, I asked myself over and over "Where do I fit in? What does she want." "Not a new family," I was assured. She told me she needed "to know" but surely I told myself it had to be more than that.

Adoptee and birth family synchronicity: Quirks run in families

Jane, Julie, Lucy

A couple of weeks ago I took a cruise with my two sisters, Lucy and Kate along the California coast. We live in different parts of the country--Lucy in Orange County, CA, Kate in Central Illinois, and me in Oregon. During a stop in San Francisco, we met up with my youngest daughter Julie for a dinner in Chinatown. While showing off our deftness at manipulating chopsticks, Julie noticed that she, Lucy, and I had identical nail polish, a sort of shell pink. We hadn't planned this, didn't discuss getting a mani before our trip; still out of the scores of colors at Vietnamese nail salons in different cities, all of us picked the same color.  (Kate's nails were natural.)

96-year-old mother meets adopted daughter--after 82 years!

Lorraine at work

Reunion stories are becoming more and more common, the news media loves them, and each one should be celebrated because each is another nail in the coffin of sealed records as A Good Thing. Instead of that, sealed birth records represent social engineering run amuck.

We don't write about them often at FMF, but every now and then one tugs at one's heart strings more than usual, or has a message beyond simple reunion relief. That is the case today.

An 96-year-old mother was found and reunited with her daughter of 82! And in the Very Sealed Records State of New York.

Lena Pierce was only 14 when she had a child in 1933 in Utica. She cared for her baby, whom she named Eva May, for six months until the state of New York intervened,

High Marks for Find My Family

Find My Family on ABC hit it out of the ball park last night with their half-hour reunion show. Yep, it milked the strong emotions that surround the reunion of first/original/birth/genetic/biological parents with their offspring. Yep, I got glassy eyed, and so did the co-host, Tim Green, who met with the birth parents, Sandy and Scott Steinpas, and told them their daughter had been found. "I've waited so long for this," says the mother, Sandy. "I was sure I would always look for my daughter." She was sixteen at the time she gave birth and relinquished; her boyfriend and the father, Scott, was sixteen also. The year was 1979. They married two years later and had two more daughters and a son. 

Sandy says she had been looking for her first child for nine years, only to hit a dead end. Yet our intrepid friend and search angel in Wisconsin, Mary Weilding,* found the daughter, Jenny Jones, now a 29-year-old single mother, living in the same town, Brookfield, Wisconsin, a mere eight miles away. Okay, I've seen a lot of reunion shows in my day, and the coming together, the feelings unleashed, never fail to raise a tear.

The reunion takes place--as it appears all will in Find My Family--under a huge tree on a hill. Symbolism, anyone? Family tree, roots, all that. As the parents walk towards their daughter, Tim Green, a reunited adoptee himself, says: "Every adopted person's dream is to be found."

And that's when I said: Hooray! Maybe this will be heard by legislators who are against giving adopted people their original birth records; maybe this will be heard by people who think it's wrong for a birth mother to find her child; maybe this will be heard by people who think it is unloyal somehow for a person to search out his or her roots, parents, family, when it is a most natural desire of consciousness.

Those who say they are not interested or do not wish to search for their biological parents, I think, are subverting their natural instincts, that is, to know who they are, who they were before they were adopted, who they were when they were born. And those adopted people who say, She gave me away, why should I be interested? They are only covering up a huge hurt in their heart they are afraid to acknowledge because to do so is too painful--and what if the birth mother (or father) indeed is not interested? Fear can keep you from finding the truth. I was afraid, oh so afraid, when I searched for my daughter. What if she did not want to meet me? Happily, she did and we had a relationship (that had its low points, to be sure) for more than a quarter of a century until she died in 2007.

The show continues with the entire family sitting under the tree as the first/birth/etc. parents read letters they have written to their daughter. More tears. Hugs. Later the two sets of parents--birth and adoptive--meet back in Wisconsin, and Sandy thanks the adoptive mother for taking such good care of their daughter. I know that some found this simple act irritating, but I did not. Birth mother Sandy thanks the adoptive introduced as "Mom"--from a position of strength: it is a vivid acknowledgment of all concerned that Sandy is the mother (no qualifier necessary) who gave birth to this person standing before them. And the gesture recognizes that the other mother is the Mom who raised her. When I "thanked" my daughter's adoptive parents, at least the mother brushed it aside and was visibly annoyed: What gave me the right to thank them? It was much too presumptive of me to "thank" them. Thanking them presumed that Jane was "my" daughter, that I had a "right" to thank them.

Although some people in adoption do not like these kinds of shows, I say, Bring 'em on! Every show about adoptee/birth mother/father reunions is worth doing because it illuminates the cruel and unusual punishment of adoption as practiced in most states of the union today--42 to be exact. Forty-two states still strip a person of his or her identity when he or she is adopted, and never give it back.

We at First Mother Forum rail against sealed records--for both the adopted person and the birth/first mother--but we know the general public most often thinks that the records have long been open. Every time I strike up a conversation with a stranger on a plane or train and tell them where I am going and what I am doing when it's adoption related, they are amazed that all adopted people can not get their original birth records merely for the asking. Yes, it is a miscarriage of justice at the deepest level, and the legislators who sit on their votes and do nothing are guilty of perpetuating this great and sorrowful injustice.

So I will be a huge fan of Find My Family when ABC gives it a regular time slot. Last night's program was a preview; there are five more shows ready to be aired. Yes, it appears to be a ripoff of The Locator on WEtv, but this will get a greater viewership and perhaps change more opinions about the need to reconnect with one's natural/birth parents. A quick look at the discussion boards on the ABC site shows that many people are posting about wanting to be found, as well as a lot of people kvetching mightily about the show--and the great damage it will do to adoption as we know it. In fact, Find My Family generated a lot of upset kvetching from adoptive parents over at Rainbow Kids blog, ** even before it ran, and you can be sure they will be asking ABC to not run the rest of the episodes.

We know that in the glow of reunion all is swell, and that anger, hurt and outright rejection can emerge in the aftermath. It's happened so many times it certainly is a statistical probability; but still, the questions have been answered, the gnawing doubts put to rest. Even when my daughter took a time-out and decided not to speak to me for months at a time, I was still better knowing what had happened, who she was, where she was. And then she would call and we would pick up like we had never been estranged.

Let's hope that Find My Family builds a big audience and furthers the fight to make adopted people full and complete citizens with rights just like the rest of us. If adoptive parents really cared for the well-being of their children, they would be with us, fighting for open records. Alas, their numbers are few.

If you missed last night's episode of Find My Family, here is a link to the whole episode.
__________________
 * Contact Mary at isearch@jvlnet.com
** For more on the RainbowKids and fear of Find My Family, see Osolomama.

It's a different story over at The Huffington Post,  Read Peggy Drexler's rahrah adoption column and gag. An adoption agency worker is hardly the person to quote on the health and well-being of adopted people, but that's who Drexler, an assistant professor of psychology at Cornell Medical School quotes. She ought to know better, Cornell no less. But that's a topic for tomorrow.

Have a good night y'all. Turkey day two days away. I'll be baking pies, with crust from scratch.--lorraine

Search Angel reports nearly 100% success

Since the statistics--that specious 50 percent refusal rate coming out of Wisconsin--continues to baffle us, today we have a report from a birth mother who became a search angel, Linda Burns of Red Rock, 30 miles from Austin. She has reunited approximately a thousand adoptees and their first/birth/natural/biological mothers. She led the demonstration at the state capitol there that is featured on the blog to your right. Linda's story is including in Ann Fessler's The Girls Who Went Away. Linda's refusal rate is exactly two women, and that is seemingly because of missteps made by members of the adoptive families. But hey! Two women represent--two tenths of one percent. That's right, .2 percent.

Even if she has done fewer than a thousand, say only eight or nine hundred reunions, her success rate is fabulous and what we expect, compared with other statistics. So exactly what is going on in Wisconsin? I hate to say it but it could very well be that many mothers need to be brought along to resurrect the pain of surrender of their children, and be willing to tell their families, deal with the fall out, and face a reunion. And birth/first mothers are of course the best to counsel and encourage them on this difficult emotional journey. As of this morning (2/6/09) I do have not have an answer from my request for further information from the Wisconsin Adoption Records Search Program. Here is Linda's excellent report:

I learned how to search from those helping me reunite with my daughter and I promised that I would help others with the knowledge that I gained. I have helped reunite about 1,000 families. There are several of us that work together so we can solve cases that are very difficult. Lately, we have been aging and not able to work as we did in the past. Living on social security makes travel a little difficult these days so we try to limit cases to our own areas.

Out of these 1,000 or so families, only two mothers have refused contact. I always ask the client (whether adoptee or birth parent) to let me or someone working with me to make initial contact. If I am working for an adoptee, then I can call the mother and hopefully bond with her. If my client is the mother, I make the call to the adoptee to protect the mother--in case there is a refusal. Also, I don't want anyone, mother or child, to say the other "tracked me down." If the adoptee refuses contact, it will be easier for the mother to hear the news from me, rather than her child. However, I have never had an adoptee not want contact.

Adoptive families are often very unkind, trying to keep the adoptee away from any of the first family. However, sometimes the enthusiasm of some family member gets the better of them and they make the call instead of waiting. Twice recently I have had son-in-laws make the call before I was able to find the correct phone number for the mother. These are the only two mothers who refused contact. I have had a few adoptees make the call to mothers, but everything turned out okay there.

One of the mothers who refused contact said to "just let it go". I am still upset about the use of those words--her child is not an it. I have emailed her, but we have not been able to speak. The husband of the adoptee made the initial call, and the adoptee then got on the phone. After being rebuffed by her first mother, the adoptee no longer desires further contact with her. Now I am working on her genealogy--she has two siblings and a lot of cousins, but does not want to cause problems by calling them. In the other case, the adoptee's husband only spoke to the adoptee's mother--it was exactly the same story. I sent this mother a copy of The Girls Who Went Away, wrote her a letter, and asked if I could visit. The mother was in her seventies, and ill, and died shortly afterward.

I did have a first mother once tell me she was not the mother of her daughter. She told me she was a mother, but that I had the "wrong mother." I thought she was lying. Later, she called me back, and asked for more details. She started crying and said, "They told me my daughter had died at birth. I am so glad she is alive!"

I have never spoken to a mother who has not reunited, joyfully, with their children. I believe it is because I am open about my daughter's adoption. I begin the conversation with, "My name is Linda Burns and I am working on your "maiden name" genealogy and I would like to ask you just a couple of questions if you don't mind. I will be glad to give you a copy of the work that I am doing if you are interested in genealogy. It's free!"

Then, I tell them that I am working for "adoptee's name", who is related to someone in the family. I explain I help people who are searching for their roots because someone helped me once, as I am a mother who had to surrender a child for adoption in 1966. Since we have been reunited, we both help others all we can, to show God how thankful we are for all He has done for us. Then the mother and I usually get to chatting, and each and every mother I have spoken to has a special place in my heart for her relinquished child. No one can possibly understand how that feels except another mother who had to surrender a child. I have never spoken to a mother that I did not feel closely connected to, and by the time we get off the phone, I always feel that she is a friend.

I helped an adoptee who had a court intermediary locate his mother. The mother refused contact. Oddly enough, I knew the mother as I was with her at the maternity home. Her son asked me not to contact her as she told the intermediary that she was not ready at this time, and he wants to respect her wishes. I believe this mother has suffered a lifetime from surrendering her son. I know my husband and I could help her, but we always follow the rules that are set out by the one searching.

Linda Burns and her husband Tommy. "Tommy says I must learn to say 'our daughter' and not 'my daughter'. He is not her biological father, but he is a father to her and loves her with all his heart."

To be continued on Sunday, 2/8/09.

Are the birth fathers pushing this depressing statistic?

Thanks to Reader Kippa for this link to Today's Wisconsin Woman where I found this: "According to the Wisconsin DCF, “Identity and location of birth parent(s) will not be disclosed unless an affidavit of consent has been signed by birth parent(s). If a court has legally determined paternity, or the father’s name appears on the impounded birth certificate, (italics, mine) affidavits usually will be needed from both birth parents.”

That may explain how the Adoption Search and Reunion team in Madison come up with that disappointing 50 percent reunion rate--the fathers are not agreeing. And my guess is that though Ms. Boldebuck and her team are sympathetic to the adopted person, it may well be beyond their legal purview, as well as how they see their jobs, to encourage the reluctant mothers and fathers to meet the adoptee.

Breaks my heart, this does. Everyone needs to remember that the adopted person never asked to be born, or adopted, and they should have the right of refusal, I guess, but writing that also breaks me heart. I don't know how I could have accepted my daughter not wanting to meet me. It would have been totally devastating, as it surely must be to adoptees who confront this personal tragedy. And I must add, that though my late daughter Jane professed not to want to be reminded of the daughter she gave up, whom she named Lisa, we found a baby picture of Lisa taped to the pull-out shelf on her desk--ya know, that thingie that used to be for typewriters. Kim, her daughter, found it when I was there a few days after her suicide, and Kim was surprised...but at least she knew who the baby was. Given that she kept the baby picture near her, I believe Jane would not have rejected meeting her.

I did hear from one search angel and confidential intermediary (who happens to be a birth mother) and said that in the thousand or so reunions she facilitated, only two led to rejections, and that was when the adoptive families were so eager to make contact they made the calls. Which is, to say the least, kind of freakin' nuts. But then, so is this whole anonymity-secrecy business.

I do hope that Ms. Boldebuck responds to my query. That number is just too high and out of kilter with what we know from other sources. In Oregon, the number of "no contact" preferences still stands at 84, while more than 9500 original birth certificates have been requested.

Incidentally, those I have heard from who went through Ms. Boldebuck have only good things to say about the experience, and she certainly was sensitive and prompt to my request that my name be on file for my granddaughter who was adopted in 1986. (Birth date, April 3rd, I think, in case, Lisa, you are reading this.)

Stay tuned. I hope to have the search angel write a blog for FirstmotherForum.--lorraine

First Mothers who reject a reunion? How many are there??

Reading through the Adoption News Service this morning I came upon a disturbing statistic in a story out of Wisconsin. Mention Wisconsin and I take notice right away because that is where my daughter was raised, and had a daughter she surrendered twenty years ago.

In the Wausau Daily Herald on January 11, 2009, the piece I refer to is a sweet reunion story: Fifty years later, daughter finds her mother. The writer, Robert Mentzer does not even use the word "birth mother," which is amazing enough in itself.

The daughter who searched, Chris Barrington, finds her mother through the Wisconsin Adoption Records Search Program and for seemingly only a $25 registration fee gets her mother's name and current address, and they have a great reunion. Chris's adoptive mother and father are both deceased. Chris is photographed sitting next to her daughter, who looks like her mother's spitting image. The first mother is not photographed or named, seeking privacy.

Jacy Boldebuck, the adoption social worker who is quoted, says that her office gets between 600 and 700 requests a year, and she and her three colleagues can clear most of their requests within a month. "Locating the birth parents is not difficult," she says. "We average less than 30 days to open and close a case. The law gives us six months." Whoopee! Sounds fabulous.

Boldebuck notes that although adoptees can request their records at eighteen, most do not come in until they are in their thirties. She adds that approximately a quarter are only seeking updated medical information; some want merely to let their mothers know that they are okay and that they were raised in a loving family. "A lot of time the gift is really just saying, 'Forgive yourself. I turned out fine,'" Boldebuck comments.

So far, so good, but then: "About half of the parents Boldebuck contacts say No to contact. That could be because a birth parent 'was hidden away in the home and shamed,' Boldebuck said. Sometimes the adoption file reveals the child was conceived as the result of a rape."

Half of the parents say NO? Are we talking mothers only? Are fathers included in this statistic? How many rapes are we talking about?

We don't find out.

The story goes on: "Boldebuck makes calls and has conversations with both parent and child. The agency requests an 'outreach statement' from adoptees that tells the birth parents why they want to get in contact, what they are seeking. And as much as she works to smooth the reunion process, she said each one comes with an emotional weight.

'It's almost always emotional, and it always changes the people,' Boldebuck said. 'The adoptee is never the same.'"

Now sometimes I think from reading various blogs that there are, indeed, a great many mothers who don't want to meet their children. As readers of FirstMotherForum know, my late daughter sadly was one of them. All I was able to extract from her was an unenthusiastic promise to tell her daughter, my granddaughter, how to contact me and that I was willing, should "Lisa" ever return. My daughter seemed to have inherited this attitude from her father, whom she never met because he refused to, and then he died. He could not handle emotionally difficult issues, and for her own reasons my daughter had buried her daughter so deeply that nothing--and I mean nothing--seemed to be able to open that door. Also, she had at least two siblings who I know were aware of her existence but made no contact. And I am not exactly hard to find. So maybe all this played a part in her sensibility.

But about that statistic-- half of the parents do not want contact. I have a copy of a letter from Dolores Helb, the adoption registry coordinator in New Jersey, dated Dec. 13, 2004, that states: "Despite the face that the majority of parents we search for are not registered with us, 95% 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."

And in a 2000 study from Britain, The Adoption Triangle Revisited), John Triseliotis, Julia Feast, and Fiona Kyle found that in their sample of both sought and seeker mothers, 94 percent of them were pleased that their son or daughter had made contact with them. Ninety percent said the contact and reunion experience had been a happy and satisfying experience.

What is going on here? How can these statistics from Wisconsin be so wildly different? A fifty percent refusal rate? Versus a three to six percent?

I once was in contact with a confidential intermediary in Michigan, who was also a first mother, and she said that she was able to talk to reluctant birth mothers and bring them along. Does that account for the difference in the statistic? If someone is a Michigan intermediary, or an intermediary anywhere, please contact me. I'd like to explore this further.

Note: Though the newspaper story does not mention it, a sidebar on the webpage says that birth parents can file an affidavit stating their preference, the search service is not available to us poor wretches who had to agree to closed adoptions. The phone number is included. As for myself, I contacted Jacy Boldebuck and left word that I was more than willing to be known to my granddaughter, and she promised that it would be in her file. So far, she had not come back. Or chosen to make contact. ---lorraine