Who serves 'Adoptees' Best Interests'?

Lorraine 

You couldn't pick them out of a crowd, but adopted people are different. Two traits set them apart: a vague sense of disconnection of dislocation, and difficulty forming a strong sense of self. The lack of a specific heritage, which tells them how and where they fit into the cycle of life, is thought to be the root of the problem. To be missing a past might not seem like much, but that's because the rest of us have always known where we came from. "My Mom has really gotten interested in genealogy in the last few years," one 16-year-old wrote me, "and it's fine for her, but it doesn't do anything for me."

To the mother and child, adoption is always painful

Lorraine as a three or four year old

I met a woman on a trip last year and while we spent quite a bit of time together--with our husbands too--when she asked what I wrote, I just said "women's issues." We were on vacation, and I did not know enough about her to know whether her children were adopted, or even if she were. And I just didn't want to go there. Say you gave up a child for adoption, and the music stops. Say you write about "women's issues," and you are taken as a serious person. Instead of adoption, I talked about the books I've written about how women are often treated in the legal system, in contrast to men, and a study I did about women in the corporate world.

So much easier.

But we stayed in touch, via email--her name is the same as my daughter's--and a year later, I did tell her about my daughter, my memoir about giving her up, my work today. My faraway friend had searched me on the Internet but hadn't paid much

After the Mother and Daughter Reunion....

Jane and Lorraine, 1983

Other than the disappointment over her natural father's refusal to meet her, you may be assuming that everything was hunky-dory when my daughter Jane* visited--as she did for weeks and then whole summers--and that we continued to bond without issues, that I was generally on Cloud Nine, and that she went back to her adoptive family and home in Wisconsin like a shiny penny, self-esteem restored, LD (learning disabled) classes—what’s that?

Wrong.

How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives

Lorraine

There's plenty of information on the Internet about how the health--physical and mental--can effect the health of a fetus. For those nine months that the fetus is developing, it's aware of minute changes in its atmosphere, namely our bodies. I knew this, and I also am pretty sure that the birth control pills I took for months when I was already pregnant--having been given an pregnancy test that came back negative--were directly related to the seizures that my daughter had from the time she was five.

Birth Mother's Lament: A Message for My Daughter

Lorraine

Hello baby, I am writing this to you. It is strange and wonderful to think that you might be reading this. It is like putting a letter in a bottle and flinging it into the sea.

You will be thirteen. It seems like just yesterday you were struggling for your life in an incubator, and now you are almost grown up. Your body is changing, and your breasts may be starting. What are girls your age like? Long straight hair, blue jeans, peasant blouses and espadrilles. Giggles on the bus from school. The first telephone calls from boys. Girl friends who share all your secrets. Or maybe you're not like that at all. I wasn't. Not really.

Are you alive? Are you?