Confronting the shame upon admitting I gave up a child

Lorraine

What was it like coming out of the closet when it was very lonely out there? In the late 1970s, only a small handful of women, spoke openly about this "shameful" deed we had done in the national media. What was shameful was not sleeping with someone we loved, the shame was that we had given up our babies. 

Adoptees sometimes cannot understand why their mothers are so traumatized that they cannot deal with the reunion, or the reality of their child, now grown, now an adult. For many of us, that deep sense of shame and humiliation that we felt when we gave up our children now comes back in full force, and we ourselves do not understand why the reunion is so deeply disturbing. To try to explain what it was like in the Seventies to come out publicly, I am post an excerpt from the memoir, Hole in My Heart, that I am working on (and hope to be finished with very soon). The year is

Adoptive mothers bully birth mothers--what else is new?

Lorraine and Daughter Jane in matching shoes

Whenever I think that adoption and the animosity that some adoptive parents feel towards their children's natural birth biological parents has abated in the years since I first got involved in adoption reform, something happens to set me straight. In the minds of many adoptive parents, nothing has changed since the Seventies. We are two warring sides of the "adoption triangle" with the kid caught in the middle. 

The acrimonious push back--from a few adoptive mothers--that fellow blogger Jane's recent post on two mothers who have truly open adoptions* generated indicates the amount of jealousy and tension has not gone down--at least for the vocal crowd of Adopters Anonymous who decided to come to FIRST MOTHER FORUM and throw bricks at both adoptees and mothers who lost their children to adoption.