Birth Mother? First Mother? Both names are belittling

Lorraine

By Lorraine Dusky  (c) 2011

Shortly after my daughter, Jane—whom I had given up for adoption but had reunited with a quarter of a century earlier—died my husband and a friend of ours were talking about the circumstances of her death at a cocktail party I had chosen not to attend.

If you are an adoptive parent reading this blog, do I have your attention yet? I’ve used words that adoptive parents recoil from: gave up, daughter without modifiers,

Does My Natural Mother Ever Think of Me?

Lorraine

It's the little everyday things in life that remind you of being a natural/birth/first mother. It's noticing how I always look at kids when they are with people I assume are their parents, and make a split-second decision: related by genes, or not? It's being alert to every mention of a celebrity adoption: Denise Richards, Charlie Sheen's ex adopting a newborn when she already has two girls (ages six and seven) with Charlie Sheen, (really?

Navigating between Two Mothers: Biological and Adoptive, Part 2

Photo by Ken Robbins

The previous post begins a chapter about my daughter, whom I relinquished at birth in 1966, and her relationships with two mothers, me, her biological, birth, first original mother; and Ann, her adoptive mother; as well my relationship with the adoptive family, which always was a little dicey. To briefly recap: I found my daughter, and was reunited with her, when she was fifteen in 1981, when reunions were just beginning to make news, and open adoption was pretty much unheard of. My daughter's family were salt-of-the-earth types (her father was an insurance adjuster; her mother, a nurse) lived in the Midwest; both my husband and I are writers. All of us came from working/middle class backgrounds.

To continue from Hole in My Heart, an unfinished memoir:

Copyright, Lorraine Dusky 2009

Yet despite any doubts about me, Ann would refer to Jane as, “our daughter,” a pronoun which rang like a bell the first time she said it, and for which I have always been appreciative. Tales of other adoptive parents that I heard from other first mothers were not nearly as encouraging as the relationship I was forging with the Schmidts, and they were doing it at a time when reunions of this sort were indeed rare. Other first mothers were told to never contact the children in question; that the police would be called otherwise. Adoptees who had the audacity to search, or, what’s worse, find and meet, were cut out of wills, and told by their parents they were now dead to them, and that included the grandchildren. The common solution? The adopted person would keep any relationship with his first family secret from his adoptive family.

I hoped my daughter would feel the same indelible connection with me that I did with her. However, that did not mean I wanted her bonds with the Schmidts to loosen, for their enduring relationship would be proof that the adoption had gone well, and that would at least assuage my conscience. But navigating between the two mothers would always prove hazardous. As Jane would describe in an email one day many years later: “I feel like a magnet torn between two sides that are pulling at me. To move towards one, you have to pull away from the other.”

Yet Jane maintained she would not have had it otherwise: “You took such a great stress out of my life by finding me,” she said when we recorded the conversation. “I was very lucky to not have to be forced to search….It was a given as I was growing up that I would search. The attitude was, you get through high school first, and then we’ll deal with this. But you coming along made my life a lot less—so many questions I didn’t have to wonder about anymore. Especially when I went through depression—this wasn’t one of the issues.”

Over the years, Jane would sometimes point out that it would have been extremely difficult for me, as a single woman with an erratic income, to cope with raising her, especially because of her epilepsy. Hell, it would have been hard to raise her as a single parent back then, with or without the epilepsy. With Ann and Gary, in Madison, Wisconsin, in a stable family with good health insurance, Jane had the best medical care known at the time, and the control of epilepsy has not advanced all that much since then. I might have been a perfectly acceptable mother—I was a sought-after baby-sitter as a teenager—but I recognized all along how overwhelming raising her alone would have been. I never have thought I would have been a great mother—I always did want a career, I was ambitious, I was raised at a time and in a family where a career and motherhood were not compatible, when being a single mother with an out-of-wedlock baby was a disgrace, and my family had no cushion of money that might have eased the way. Jane understood all this, and when she said, I don't know how you would have done it, Lorraine, I did not argue.

My relationship with her father, Gary, was far less problematic than the one I had with Ann. He was far more accepting of me, and unquestionably smoothed my incursion into their lives. He would have preferred I was someone who went to Sunday mass, but he showed no overt disdain towards me, or us. But then, I was Jane’s mother—not her father—and that other man was nowhere in sight. Gary had no competitor. True, when Jane visited, Tony took on a role not unlike that of a step-parent, but he was not her father.

Tangible evidence of Jane’s difficult see-saw relationship with her two mothers is a picture snapped by Gary one sunny day many years after we all knew each other. We—Gary, Ann and I—imagined it might be a swell record of our rather remarkable relationship. Because despite my sense of being the moral underdog in the eyes of the Schmidts, all of us--Ann, Gary, and I--were managing to work through the uncharted waters of this adoption and reunion with a modicum of turmoil, and we all knew it. Jane is sitting between us. Ann and I are staring straight into the camera, both of us smiling the way you do in pictures, both of us looking comfortable in our roles. However, Jane is pensive, not a glimmer of a smile. She is looking away from the camera, looking as if she did not belong there, looking uncomfortable sitting between her two mothers.

Some might say that life would have been less complicated for Jane if I had not contacted her when she was a teenager, and people openly admit that they adopt from Siberia and China and India not only because it’s easier to get an infant there, but because the likelihood of a child’s original mother coming back is pretty much nil. No competition, no complications. But prima facie that ignores what the adopted individual might want—in fact, it gives the individual no choice. Adoption then becomes not an arrangement to fulfill the needs of a child who needs a home; it becomes a deal that satisfies the desires of someone who wants a child at any cost—and that child’s need to have and hold his connection to the tree of life be damned.

Jane would not be caught in that trap.

Allison Quets: Birth-Mother? Surrogate Mother? No Mother?

Allison Quets, the Florida woman who pleaded guilty in 2007 to kidnapping the infant twins that she bore and gave up for adoption, was back in court today (3/25/09) before the North Carolina Court of Appeals seeking to have visitation rights reinstated. Quets was artificially inseminated with others' embryos and sperm, but maintains she was ill after severe medical problems during the pregnancy and signed the adoption papers under duress. She has fought the adoption for three years.

To make this very clear, as she is being called the twins' "birth-mother" on Wikipedia and elsewhere, Ms. Quets became impregnated with donated embryos and sperm. (Yet another way to be a birth-mother. With a hyphen; as almost or merely a surrogate.) As far as I can make out from the complicated chain of events, Ms. Quets planned to keep the children when she was impregnated at 47, but severe health issues forced her to relinquish the girls.

When her twin girls were 17 months old, she took them to Ottawa, following a visitation. She was apprehended in Canada a week later, and the twins were returned to the adoptive parents, Kevin and Denise Needham, in Apex, North Carolina, and her visitation rights were terminated. A Wake Country District Court judge dismissed her claims, saying she could not seek visitation because her parental rights have been terminated. She was also ordered to pay the Needham's legal fees. A ruling from the the North Carolina Court of Appeals typically takes about three months.

Ms. Quets had been a systems engineer for Lockheed, and is now working at a computer consultant and lives in Orlando.

When I first heard about this story, I thought she was the girls' biological mother; instead she is a woman who tried to become pregnant at a very late age, and ran into severe health issues during pregnancy, which is extremely common with pregnancies after 40. She spent five months on a feeding tube during the pregnancy. She had seizures shortly after the birth, and then came post-partum depression, during which she signed the surrender papers. The adoptive parents were recommended through a former boyfriend of Ms. Quets. At this point, she seems only to want visitation, but I can understand the Needhams' reluctance, as that is when she took the children to Ottawa in hopes, perhaps, of disappearing with them.

I don't know what to think about this mess. I do think that women who want to have children ought to realize there is a cut-off date to their fecundity, and 47 is past that. If more women did not wait until such a late age to get pregnant, single or coupled, there would be fewer families racing around the world looking for children to adopt, fewer children stolen off the streets in India and Nepal and you-name-the-Third-World-country to be placed in adoption agencies (holding pens) where babies are literally sold to anyone who can pay. The whole system is wacky. Stinks to high heaven. International adoption is often no better than baby-brokering.

My sympathy for Ms. Quets is not bottomless. In this last discussion of who is a birth mother, we did not include women such as Allison Quets, but that is what she is being called in the media. What do you, dear and gentle readers (yes, be gentle in your commentary, please) think? Of her? Of the situation?

Birth Parents —an 'endearing' term for expectant parents?

Are a couple considering adoption for their unborn child in the same place as a couple who surrendered a child for adoption? Some Oregon attorneys think so.

An attorney posted a query on the Oregon Family Lawyers list about whether paying travel expenses to bring “birth parents” to Oregon whose child was due in August.

Being the somewhat obstreperous birth mother and attorney I am, I posted a response stating that a couple expecting a baby are not birth parents since the child has not been born, let alone surrendered. Calling them birth parents marginalizes and de-humanizes them. I noted that the term "birthparent" was coined by Lee Campbell, founder of Concerned United Birthparents in 1976.

This led to a flurry of responses. In general, attorneys saw adoption of the unborn child as a fait accompli once the expectant parents were in their office; there was no practical difference between expectant parents and parents who surrendered a child. Here are some samples of what they wrote:

“The term birthparent is commonly used for any biological parent considering or having placed their child for adoption. It is used both pre and post birth. And, at least when I and my clients' use it, it is one of the most endearing, loving terms out there. It does nothing to marginalize or de-humanize. In fact it does just the opposite; it makes that person's relationship to the child to be adopted very real.

I don't know specifically what Mr. Campbell, (he must be referring to Lee, assuming he is a male)or any other anti-adoption group, thinks of when they use the term but for us today it is a wonderful and honoring term.” (Incidentally, the writer is an adoptee as well as an attorney.)

And:

“The term "birthparent” identifies with a sense of feeling and humanity the place of the parents who give life to the child. If one wants to use a term that separates the expectant mother from the child, another term that is cold and without feeling is available. One can always call the life givers "biological parents.” (“Life giver? Biological parents?” They haven’t given life and aren’t parents, but no matter.)

And:

“It is unfortunate,… that in the decades of expanding civil rights, diversity, multi-acceptance and personal freedoms, we have concomitantly developed a narrow and faux sensitivity to the use of words, nominatives etc. which seems to elicit a censorship like obsession, exalting form over content and simply distracting from important productive outcomes by continually fussing about what "we call it". Unless something is simply inaccurate or boorish or indiscreet, let it be.” (Calling someone who has not given birth, a "birth parent," is not inaccurate?)

And:

“Sperm donor and expeller would seem more descriptive.” (No comment.)

Thankfully, a couple of writers were supportive:

“Thank you for adding that. Little things like that tend to drive me crazy.”

And:

“I, for one, appreciate Jane's sensitivity and sensibilities. While I don't always agree, I applaud her intelligence and voice. Thanks Jane. …

As readers of First Mother Forum know, we have discussed the issue of using "birth mother" to refer to women who have surrendered a child in an earlier post. See previous posts:Natural, Real, Biological, Birth...Mother;

Natural and Real Language;

and more just the other day in a postscript as to why we are changing the name above but not the url, which has well over a hundred posts since we started blogging last August. And they are found at firstmotherforum.com.

But "birth mother" or "birthmother" is what people Google, even though many of us are trying to replace it with "first mother.”

Lorraine doesn't mind being called a "biological mother" by people who are not in the loop, but does get her back up when it's very clear people are talking about her or her daughter, whom she knew for 27 years! Or insist on calling her daughter her "birth daughter." Linda finds when she writes "birth mother" comes naturally.

I don’t get excited over whatever term is used to describe me and I can accept “birth mother.” However, I very much oppose calling a pregnant woman a "birth mother." It reinforces the message -- important to adoption attorneys and the adoption industry -- that she is carrying the baby for someone else.

And so dear reader, let First Mother Forum know what you think about referring to expectant mothers to be as birth mothers--I’ll pass it on the Oregon adoption attorneys.--Jane

Gathering Memories with my "birth" daughter

copyright (c) Lorraine Dusky 2009

Two years later after my daughter, Jane and I were reunited:

We are Loehmann’s on Long Island, a store since shuttered, and she and I have just found a great black pin-striped suit, man-tailored jacket and skirt, and it fits her to perfection, and I’m staring at her in the mirror and she is smiling at herself, back at me. How to explain the joy that is quaking through me as I smile back at my baby, and that is what she is to me, only she is a teenager but that is okay because we are here in this moment, and we are mother and daughter, plain and simple, not "birth mother" and "birth daughter"—anyone could see that—shopping for clothes for her.

When she smiles, I do not see a girl with swollen gums—the unpleasant by-product of her epilepsy medication—I see her happiness, I see my daughter quite pleased with herself, and I see how this simple purchase will please us both. I slap down a credit card and $79.99 plus tax later, the prized suit is hers. It is just the kind of tailored jacket that suits her to a tee. Me too. If there had been another one in the same size I would have bought it for myself, for Jane and I are the same size—alternations needed only to lengthen the sleeves in both our jackets.

Besides arms longer than the norm, she has also inherited my predilection for man-tailored clothes intact, as if there had been not a single mutation of the style gene when it passed from me to her. So shopping for clothes, or anything, with Jane was always a special pleasure. You might dismiss shopping as a frivolous act of consumerism, but hey! It’s also the modern day equivalent of gathering, as in “hunting and gathering.” We were two gatherers fulfilling a role determined long ago in the millennia before homo sapiens wore hide skirts and hair shirts.

Shopping with Jane brought back such shared moments with my mother. Those shopping excursions did not seem like the stuff of memorable occasions at the time, because once you hit puberty you begin to think all the high points of your life are those spent apart from your parents, but later on, they glisten like little jewels in your memory box. I can summon up the coziness of my mother and I hurrying to finish the dishes after dinner before the sun went down on summer nights. Remember, my mother was a fulltime homemaker, and when we owned the motel, a fulltime cleaning woman who kept the five units spotless and washed and pressed the sheets too, so this hour after dinner was likely to be the only time she got out of the house during the day. Dishes draining on the counter, we’d head over to the nearby mall, specifically to a somewhat upmarket department store called Crowley’s. Mostly we weren’t there to buy anything, we were just browsing, killing an hour before closing. There’s where as a teenager with my own money to spend I learned the name Trifari meant good-quality costume jewelry; where an affable sales woman hooked me on Elizabeth Arden face powder; where I got my first black dress, and where my mother and I tried on hats.

Over the years, dozens and dozens of hats. This one looked good, this one was silly, this one was gorgeous but way too expensive, and this one was positively off the charts, who in their right mind would wear something as silly as that? We always ended up laughing, usually stifling our mirth so as not to raise the eyebrows of the sales ladies, but sometimes we laughed so hard we had tears in our eyes. Not that we didn’t buy one now and then. We did. Hats back then were not optional at Sunday Mass, and they had to change with the seasons. We always got new bonnets for Easter.

One evening my mother found a particularly fetching model and I could tell how much it suited her, how much she wanted it, but it seemed too pricey by our modest standards, $25 back in 1961. It was the summer between freshman and sophomore years of college, and I had been working as a waitress both lunch and dinner, socking away everything for tuition and books. Between shifts I studied for the two classes at the local community college I took in the mornings. To make the schedule work, my mother had washed and hung up to dry my nylon uniforms, supplying me with a fresh one every day. Let me buy the hat for you, I said, knowing that $25 would eat up the cost of a couple of text books. Really, she said, smiling, hoping I was serious. Her delighted surprise is one of those precious frozen-in-memory moments. The hat is a circle of feathers in a vivid Crayola ® color called Burnt Sienna. It has flashes of red and orange among the umber, and a jaunty tuft of feathers pointing skyward at the back. She left nothing monetarily valuable when she died nearly forty years later; the hat was in a box in the hall closet. I have it now.

So you can imagine the blissful buzz the time Jane and I ended up in an antique shop, and there on the second floor, among the old Victorian vanities and early plastic-and-paper “vanity dresser sets” of a comb, brush, mirror and hairpin box, we came upon a cache of chapeaus from the Thirties and later. On and off they went, the more outré the better, the more our merriment. It was a hot day in October, late afternoon sun peered through the windows in skinny stripes, dust motes floated in the light, we kept insisting the other try on the craziest ones.

Later that day, I tried to tell her about my mother and me and hats, but it was lost on her, and in truth, would have been if I’d raised her, just as my mother’s relationship with her mother seemed of little consequence to me when I was a teenager. All that Jane said about that half hour of hats was, You had a better time than I did, but something about the way she said it just broke my heart. The slight look of distance, a second’s hesitation before she spoke informed me that she was thinking: Well, you didn’t raise me, did you? How can you expect me to know what that was like? I hardly knew your mother.

Stuff like that came up now and again and despite the joy of the moment, I could quietly be reminded of what had been lost, what we could never get back; but that is what reunion is in the living of it. Pinpricks invade the moment, like thoughts that flit in and out when you are learning to meditate. But any prickly shards of remorse quickly become diffused with the content realization of what is. After all, you know in your bones, you did give her up, you tell yourself without realizing you are having this conversation with yourself, anything shared now is pure gold. Be grateful.

--from the upcoming memoir, A Hole in My Heart by Lorraine Dusky ______________________________

Jane will be here next week with a post on the use of the term, birth mother, before a child is born.

Review of Coraline and Perfection: Perfect Parents, Perfect Children

Last Sunday my husband and I saw Coraline, a 3-D film using stop action technology based on Neil Gamain’s book of the same name. It was a welcome break from finding and perusing the manuals needed to re-set the clocks on the micro-wave, the CD player, and loads of other gadgets.

Coraline is an 11 year old girl who moves with her loving but work stressed real parents to a new home, a large and mysterious mansion divided into three apartments. She discovers a birth canal-like passage which leads her to a fantastical world. There she finds loving, perfect other parents, appearing identical to her real parents except that they have buttons for eyes. After several visits to the other, button-eyed parents, they tell her she can stay if she agrees to have buttons sewn into her eyes. Horrified, she refuses. The other parents morph into witches and Coraline’s real parents become trapped in the button-eyed world. Coraline must rescue her real parents as well as three lost souls who had agreed to have buttons sewn into their eyes years before.

As a birth mother, my first reaction was that the story was meant to convey one of those trite pro-adoption messages. You know the kind; a seemingly wise character says to the confused adoptee “Your real parents are the parents who raised you. Don’t search for them that birthed you; you’ll just open a can of worms (or find a bunch of buttons.)

But I got to thinking. The characters identified as the “real” parents looked like Coraline and shared her interest in gardening. The button-eyed faux parents disguised themselves to look like the real parents but underneath they were evil witches. So maybe the message is that first parents are real parents and adoptive parents are false and untrustworthy.

Perhaps, of course, the story has nothing to do with adoption (the reviews I’ve read don’t mention adoption but then adoption themes are rarely seen by non-triad members unless adoption is spelled out in capital letters.) Coraline may be a modern version of The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland telling children that the magical land over the rainbow, down the rabbit hole, or at the end of a tunnel is scary and there’s no place like home.

I recommend Coraline. It has wonderful graphics and a thought-provoking story line regardless of how one’s thoughts progress.

While Coraline explores the search for perfect parents, Perfection, a play by Measure 58 mother Helen Hill, recounts the quest for perfect children. (Measure 58 was a 1998 ballot measure which gave Oregon-born adoptees the right to obtain their original birth certificates. Ms. Hill largely funded the process.)

Perfection was produced in Portland and ran for three weeks in February. It takes place in 1934 when states routinely sterilized those deemed to be genetically inferior. In the play, a doctor at a state institution prepares to sterilize a resident who recently gave birth to a child which was taken from her. The woman is poor and uneducated but not mentally disabled. The doctor convinces her to submit to an operation (he does not disclose the nature of the operation) by telling her the operation is necessary for her child to be returned.

Thus, the play blends themes of eugenics and adoption. Helen Hill has experienced both. She was adopted as an infant and her adoptive father was a Creek Indian who had been sterilized under a eugenics program. She used money she inherited from him to fund the Measure 58 campaign.

Much of the dialogue in Perfection is in the form of an argument between the doctor and his nurse about the righteousness of eugenics, some of it bordering on a polemic, a method which never works well. The play as a whole works, however, because it has sympathetic characters and good drama.

My first thought, though, was “you’re beating a dead horse.” After the disclosures of Nazi atrocities, eugenics was thoroughly discredited. Being against eugenics is like being against slavery. No one is for it today.

As I thought about it, however, I realized the belief that tinkering with nature can create better human beings is very much alive today. Adoption, after all, is a form of social eugenics. Pre-natal testing gives prospective parents the option of aborting embryos found to have genetic flaws.

The counterpart to preventing the birth of inferior people is the creation of superior ones, something the Nazis also pursued. Spend five minutes on Google looking at egg donor websites and you’ll see how important genetics is to the process. From a March 15, 2006 article in USA Today:

“Advertisements in campus newspapers and on websites plead daily. ‘Egg Donors Needed. $10,000,’ says one in The Daily Californian, the student newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley. The ad, from a San Diego broker called A Perfect Match, seeks women who are "attractive, under the age of 29" and have SAT scores above 1,300.”

Conceive Abilities, a fertility business with clinics in Chicago and Colorado tries to soften the reality that fees paid to donors relate to the quality of the donor:

“Our agency compensates egg donors anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 and can be dependent upon a number of considerations some of which include location, number of previous donations and ethnic diversity.

Then there is The Egg Donor Program which boasts:

“The Egg Donor Program is the premier egg donation agency in the United States for solving female infertility by IVF donor egg treatment. Our Los Angeles based egg donor clinic has the most beautiful and accomplished donors in the country. Our egg donor center is also known for its extensive database of Superdonors, which includes hundreds of women from many diverse ethnic backgrounds. For over 15 years we have specialized in matching couples with exquisite young women whose motivations are heartfelt.

If you are interested in becoming an egg donor and want to be listed with the country’s most prestigious agency, we will ensure that your journey is safe and gratifying and we will reward you for your gesture with commemorating gifts and the highest level of compensation. We will treat you like the angel you are.”

In the end, the message of both Coraline and Perfection seems to be: let’s accept what nature has given us.
__________________________
PS: Lorraine here. Serious consideration is being given to changing the name of this blog. Stay tuned. All the old posts will stay but the only consideration is the links we have from other bloggers.

My Daughter's First Visit: Barriers fell and our bond strengthened

Jane's post got me to thinking about my daughter's (also named Jane) first visit to my house on Long Island. She had just turned sixteen; it was April; we had met the previous fall at her home in Madison, Wisconsin, with her parent's blessing. Yes, I know, I had done the unthinkable by searching--and finding--a minor, but that is what I did. The year was 1982; the World Trade Center was an icon of New York City. My daughter Jane had never been to Manhattan, so I arranged to us to stay at a friend's apartment there while we took in the sights. Here's a snippet of what I wrote for my upcoming memoir:

(Please excuse the way this looks but I can not fix it without retyping the whole thing. Sorry.)

Copyright (c) Lorraine Dusky 2009

It’s funny what sticks in one’s mind about any event. Sometimes the smallest detail, like the glint of a diamond on somebody else’s hand, is what you recollect, not the size of the rock. And it’s often the gleam that turns out to be the essence of the thing. Like what I remember about the three days Jane and I spent in Manhattan that spring.

She had never been to New York City. We took in all the usual tourist highlights— we shopped in Chinatown for cheap gewgaws, visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, lunched at the historic Fraunces Tavern near Wall Street, cruised around Manhattan on the Circle Line, sat for a half hour on a bench outside at the top of the World Trade Center and watched the helicopters, rode the Staten Island ferry, even had one of the ladies at the cosmetic counters of Saks Fifth Avenue give us the full treatment. I mean, I crammed in everything I could in those three days.

All that was fine fun, of course, but what I remember best is what we shared at the Statue of Liberty. We took the first boat in the morning from Battery Park, and without speaking of it, made sure we were among the first people off. Then together we raced straight for the elevators, not quite running—because that seemed too crass—but almost. Another family made the first elevator with us. When it stopped, we trotted lickety-split out the door ahead of them, trying not to break into an out-and-out sprint. Without so much as sharing a look, we had, each of us, wanted for us to be the first up the steps of the statue. (We had already discovered that we both loved heights.) Once we reached the steps, we clambered up them quickly, wanting to speed ahead of the other family. Only after a couple of twists and turns did we slow down, look at each other, acknowledge our single-minded quest, and giggle like teenagers.

You might dismiss this as not so unusual, lots of people would do this, you can say, but we knew—wordlessly—why it was important to be first up the steps. Just because. Years later, if we ever spoke of that day, Jane would say, “Remember how we had to be first up the steps of the Statue of Liberty?” and smile. I’d nod and smile back. Our particular shared silliness. No one telling the other to “slow down,” or “Hold on, what’s the rush?” Being first up the steps that day was far more important than the view once we got to the crown. That was nice too, yes, but the best part was being first. Standing there just the two of us, looking down over Manhattan, the first of the day to get that view. She knew that too. She was my daughter. Those were magical times, there seemed to be no self-consciousness between us those days. Barriers fell and our bond strengthened.

Because I had written an Op-ed piece for The New York Times about finding my daughter and the sealed-records statute in New York state, the photographer Jill Krementz wrote and asked if we would be willing to be included in a book for children and teens to be called How It Feels to be Adopted. She’d photograph us and tell Jane’s story in her own voice. Jane immediately agreed to the project. She was going from simply being a kid in an L.D. class to someone special, someone with something to say that others people wanted to hear.

In her essay, Jane reveals that though her mother was pleased that I called, she was “especially nervous” once I was on track to visit because she was threatened. Jane says that most of her own friends were pitted against me, saying things like “I wouldn’t let her just walk into your life. You should tell her to buzz off.” The story is mostly a straight recollection of events after I phoned.

Of our days in Manhattan she says…“What I liked best was our just getting to know each other…. Now I understand the problems she had before I was born and why she put me up for adoption. Being adopted had always made me feel a little insecure, and even though I loved my parents, I still had a lot of unanswered questions and stranger fantasies. Actually, one of my fantasies turned out to be true. I’d always imagined my birthmother was a writer….”

Yes, she would go home to her other life in a few days, but we had these days. However she felt, to me we were mother and daughter then. It didn’t matter that she called me Lorraine. She mostly called me Lorraine—there were a few exceptions when she called me mother, but they would be later, and always rare. Mom was always the woman who raised her; Mom was back home in Wisconsin. But she also called herself my daughter, when it proved expedient. However I really didn’t have equal rights; if I called her “daughter,” she bristled.

We were in the little supermarket on Henry Street--now it's a fancy take-out emporium called Espresso--but then it was a small grocery story, Federico's Market, located practically across the street from the two-story colonial Tony and I were renting. I introduced her to the woman behind the counter--This is my daughter, I said simply, not explaining further, knowing that the woman already knew the whole story. Jane smiled and said hello, but told me once we were on the street that she did not like being introduced as "my daughter."

Then what should I call you?" I protested. She didn't have an answer. Neither of us came up with "birth daughter," for the term wasn't in vogue then, and besides, it implies that the daughter is a daughter only at the time of birth, as if the ties of blood and strings of DNA matter for naught and had been dissolved with the signing of a paper soon after birth. But here we were, sixteen years later. Jane would always be the daughter of two women: Ann, who raised her, and me, who had given her life.

Grieving for my daughter's adoptive mother

But if all unhappy families are the same, every adoption is quite different. Consider this one between first mother Alison Ward and her daughter's other mother, Sandra. Last week Alison, who now resides in Fort Myers, Florida, wrote to me after her daughter's adoptive mother died. Alison and I both searched for minor children (she ahead of me) in the early Eighties, when most of the adoption reform movement disapproved of that. Alison spent several years on the board of Concerned United Birthparents (CUB), was a co-founder of Origins in New Jersey, and was involved with the defense of Mary Beth Whitehead in the Baby M case (which resulted in a surrogacy ban in NJ). Alison and I, and our daughters, Holly and Jane, were featured in a New York Times story, "Mothers Find the Children They Gave Up," by Judy Klemesrud on August, 29, 1983. (Yes, we do go back.) We were also in the Jill Krementz book How It Feels To Be Adopted. Holly's adoptive family is also pictured there.

by Alison Ward

When we all searched so long ago to reunite with our children, I don't think we ever gave much thought back then to anything but the early years, the ones following the loss, and the present. We were so much younger than the adoptive parents. Now, all our children are grown, the ones we lost and any whom we raised. We are all grandmothers now, although sometimes are not recognized as "real" ones.

My daughter, Holly, had adoptive parents who raised her and loved her. They invited me for a weekend at their home several months after I made that first phone call to a 14-year-old. They asked me to stay with Holly when they went away to horse show when she was 15, which was when Jill Krementz came to tiny Dacula, Georgia to interview Holly, Sandra, and me. Sandra allowed the picture of the three of us to be in People magazine way back when, and we were later all on Oprah Winfrey's show in Baltimore (before Oprah went to Chicago) with the late Bill Pierce of the National Council for Adoption and a sworn opponent of openness in adoption. I doubt if Sandra and Holly's adoptive father, Allan, received much support from their friends when they allowed Holly to spend Christmas breaks and summer vacations with me when she was a teenager.

Certainly it was difficult for Sandra and Allen when Holly lived with me and my second child, Daniel, whom I had when I was 36 and was raising as a single mother in New Jersey. Holly was going to college in nearby, and things seemed to be going well when one day she simply walked out and left. She was 24 at the time; we had known each other for nearly a decade. Letters went unanswered and the years rolled by.

After Holly withdrew from our relationship, any letter or package I sent her went c/o Allan and Sandra. Although I never received any response from Holly, Sandra reassured me that she gave everything to Holly and I believed her.

I did not hear from Holly for 17 years. Four years ago when Holly was 41, she wrote me, told me about her life and her son, Matthew, enclosed a picture, and asked for medical information. I responded and sent a baby gift, but did not hear from her again for a couple of years. Then, in 2007, she mailed me a wonderful album full of photos of Matthew, in kind of time lapse photography fashion. It was then that I knew we would meet again. Matthew is Holly's only child. He was born when she was 36, the same age I was when I had Daniel.

Sandra and Allen knew that Holly met me again on Sanibel over a year ago. She knew I met Matthew, who was four at the time, and her husband, Phil. Last October, when Holly told me that Sandra's health was rapidly declining, I wrote Sandra a note to wish her well and to thank her for all she had done for Holly and for me. She wasn't a perfect mother and, God knows, I'm far from it.

I'm not exactly sure why I have been affected so much by Sandra's death, but we were connected for the last 42 years (even the first 14 when we didn't know each other). While Sandra's obituary won't mention me, she leaves me behind as well as her family. I know that, while she could never replace me, I can never replace her.

One Messy Minefield: A birth mother's relationship with her child's adoptive mother

(c) Lorraine Dusky, 2009

Our relationships with the adoptive parents, especially the mothers, is fraught right from the first moment of adoption. And if one's child has had a good relationship with her adoptive mother, we are the outsiders looking in on a close bond. How the adoptive mother reacts to us--whether they fear us, are resentful that the adoptee is curious, are angry that a search was completed, and so on--determines to a large degree what kind of relationship the adoptee will maintain with her first mother.

In my last post about my daughter Jane's pulling away from me for well over a year, and it had everything to do with Jane's other mother, to wit:

As I wrote the other day, even after I "apologized" without caveats, Jane kept her distance for several more months--maybe up to another year. And then one day she simply started calling me again and we went on as if a break had not occurred. She did not want to talk about what caused her behavior, and I did not press the issue, but eventually I did understand it.

When one of Jane's brothers (a biological son of her parents) died in a tragic skiing accident when he went off a cliff on a Double Diamond run. Jane called me, still crying, with the news almost as soon as she heard. The memorial service was to be out west, where her brother had lived at a ski resort. Jane and her parents, as well as another biological son, lived in Wisconsin. Initially the parents only wanted their other biological son to go to the memorial service, and offered him and him alone airplane fare. Jane's adopted brother lived near the ski resort and would be there. Jane was understandably very upset, and only after she made this clear to her parents did they invite Jane to come west with them.

At the memorial service, her mother uttered these fateful words about her dead son: He was my favorite.

Now that's tough to hear when you are a biological sibling, but if you are adopted, it brings home how immense the difference is between you and the blood siblings in the hearts and minds of your parents. While books and movies sometimes like to play up the good-for-nothing biological son in contrast to the upright and stalwart adopted son, or son-in-law, who is favored by the patriarch of the family, this is rarely the case in real life. At the service where the unspeakable was spoken, Jane's adopted brother apparently said something unprintable to their mother, and didn't talk to her for about a year. Jane's reaction was to retreat almost completely from me in an effort to prove that she was A Good Daughter, worthy of her adoptive mother's love. There is no way around this harsh reality: Being adopted into a family is not the same as being born into it. DNA counts.

One issue that certainly came into play with my relationship with Jane's adoptive mother is how long Jane and I had our own relationship. Though it had its off times--as well as on--her mother came to deeply resent my continuing presence in Jane's life, especially it seemed, after Jane had a "perfect" daughter who did not have the physical and emotional problems that encumbered Jane. If I had been tolerated before as Jane's other mother, now I was actively disliked. What right had I to be Gramma? Furthermore, she felt angry because the golden granddaughter began living with the adoptive grandparents when she was six as Jane was unable to provide a stable home for her. (Yes, my story is complicated.) So there were reasons for her resentment.

And along the way, Jane's mother instilled a sense of guilt into my granddaughter about our relationship, the same way adoptees have guilt over searching, reunion, a relationship with their first mothers. That seems to be dissipating, but not before it hurt me deeply. I had hoped my granddaughter would be spared that.

But not all adoptive families are the same. Tomorrow Firstmother Forum will have a post from Alison Ward, who, like me, searched for and found a daughter when they were minors. Alison reflects upon the death of her daughter's adoptive mother, with whom she had a different kind of relationship. --lorraine

Birth Parents Win One in Michigan

More positive news about children NOT being separated from their natural parents has been in the news. A Michigan couple, Christine Wolfe and Kenneth Barnett learned on Christmas Eve that the Court of Appeals sided with them after a five-year battle for their son.

A prospective adoptive couple, Phyllis and Phillip Unthank, of Dearborn (coincidentally, my home town) had custody of the boy from birth to 18 months--though the mother never relinquished him legally. As a divorcing mother, she did not think she could financially care for the new baby as well as a daughter the couple already had. Again the story--as these stories all are--is complicated: a couple divorcing, the husband/father questioning paternity, the paternity confirmed, the couple get back together, and the father asks for his son.

The Unthanks said, No thanks, and thus began the long court process.

The father filed for custody of the boy in both circuit and and probate courts and was denied. Now why is that, you ask. Clearly, he was the father and had never agreed to give up his son. Answer: He didn't have a lawyer. When the couple divorced, they were granted joint custody of their daughter.

And although Christine had given the Unthanks power of attorney for medical reasons for the boy, she never signed surrender papers. When the boy was 18 months old, Christine asked for him back and revoked the couple's power of attorney. The case dragged on because Wayne County does not have a family court to handle all the family's issues from divorce to custody, and so two different judges were involved in the early stages.

Now I know it is difficult for adoptive parents to have a child, believe that she or he will be a part of their family, and then lose that child, but what in their DNA makes them go against the ethical rightness of returning that child to her or his natural, biological, genetic parents? When Aston some months back asked me what part of my pie chart could be ascribed to selfishness when I was reunited with my daughter Jane, I was speechless. But what in adopters like the Unthanks can be ascribed to compassion for the natural parents? In their unremitting determination to have a child at all costs, they lose all moral authority and human dignity. They become craven child snatchers. And the courts have so often sided with them.

Guess who pops up in this story: Roberta Deboer, the she-devil of child snatching. "Once you have a baby that you care for day in and day out and you in every right believe that child is yours," she says in The Detroit News, sounding every so much like Sarah Palin with her fractured syntax. "Those parents became parents the moment they took that child in their arms." Sorry Roberta, that would made every nanny a parent with the right to hang unto the child...forever.

Time passed, the Barnetts had another child, and got a lawyer, and a good one: the same one who represented the Schmidts in the Schmidt/DeBoer case we've been discussing here of late: Marian Faupel. So far the couple has paid about $30,000 in legal fees. They are in debt for another $80,000. Their home in Dearborn Heights was foreclosed. "Most people would have lost their child -- that's the tactic," said mother Christine of the many motions and counter-motions brought by the Unthanks. "It's to force you to give up."

The Barnetts (who also have an older child, Samantha, now seven) were eventually granted visitation, and when that went well, the courts came up with a time-share plan: the boy, called Daune by the Unthanks, and Cody by the Barnetts, was to spend a half week with his natural parents, a half week with the Unthanks. Think of it, on Sunday, you're Cody, on Thursday, you're Duane. The story stays he was being schooled in different religions, but does not specify. I doubt it was between Presbyterian and Methodist. Is this sick or what? But all this child-sharing ended abruptly in February of 2008 when the Probate Judge June Blackwell-Hatcher granted the natural parents full custody. Hurrah! Now Cody could be Cody 24/7.

What did the Unthinks do? Ka-ching, Ka-Ching, they had the bucks to continue dragging it out in court, and that they did. Fortunately common sense and moral rectitude prevailed when the State Court of Appeals upheld the lower court's decision to give the Barnetts' fulltime custody on December 24. Talk about a Christmas present! Interestingly, the Court cited the Michigan Supreme Court's decision in the Schmidt/DeBoer case in their decision.

Whew!

The story in the Detroit News covers the ups and downs of the case and includes this particularly tasty tidbit I quote here: [Child] advocates laud the ruling, which underscores parents' constitutional rights to raise children regardless of their circumstances as long as they are fit. They say birth parents frequently give up or lose such battles because adoptive parents typically have more money to spend on qualified representation and extended court fights.

But adoptive parents and their supporters sympathize with the Unthanks, and say courts sometimes favor birth parents over the best interests of the child.

Courts sometimes favor birth parents over the best interests of the child?

Why do adoptive parents think that simply because they have more money they are always "in the best interests of the child?" We know that's how adoptive parents often feel--and act on that--but this attitude makes me nuts. Unless there are serious compelling reasons to remove a child from his parents, everyone is better off with their natural parents--people who look, think and act like them. Who can give them a kidney if necessary.

If we first mothers and fellow travelers keep winning these cases, maybe prospective adopters will stop fighting in court to get children that are not theirs when the natural parents are ready and willing--and want them back.

This case of course reminds us of the DeBoers, but more recently a Chinese couple had a protracted and expensive fight to get back their daughter, who had been born in the U.S., and return to China. That was the Anna Mae He case, which dragged on for five years, from 1999 to 2007 until the Tennessee Supreme Court decided for the Hes, the biological parents. One of the reasons the adopters used against the couple was that they were planning to take their daughter back to China.This was a particularly noxious case in Memphis, with all the prejudices of race and money on display. Learn about it here. --lorraine

Natural, Real, Biological, Birth...Mother

They call me "biological mother." I hate those words. They make me sound like a baby machine, a conduit, without emotions. They tell me to forget and to out and make a new life. I had a baby and I gave her away.

But I am a mother.

That's a quote from my memoir, Birthmark that was used on the cover, back in 1979 when birth mother was not in vogue yet. Yes, it caused quite a stir then.

Language frames how we think. How the world thinks, reacts, responds to a thing, a person. It's why women object to the use of "his" when we actually mean "his" and "hers." In writing on other subjects, I will often substitute "she" for "he" or avoid using a masculine or feminine pronoun at all if possible. But that language frames how we think about someone, or something, is a given. We know this; adoptive parents know this, and that's why everyone is so sensitive about the the words we use to describe ourselves and our relationships.

There are times now, however, I don't mind being referred to as "biological mother" because it gets to the heart of the matter: it conveys conception, gestation, labor, birth, DNA, blood, lifelong connection, inheritance of traits, the whole nine yards.

At my daughter's wake last year--come to think of it, that would be a year yesterday--a woman with a group of four or five other people approached me and quite enthusiastically said: "You're Jane's biological mother, right?" She was smiling broadly, for she must have known the answer.

Everyone waited.

Yes, I said, nodding. As nearly everybody in the room at the funeral parlor were friends and relatives of Jane's adoptive family, it was clear this group were friends of Jane's, and Jane's alone. It was also a relief to be sought out. Who are these people? I was thinking.

"She used to talk about you all the time," the woman said. "We're from Toastmaster's." Jane had been a member of the local club, amazingly overcoming her fear of giving a speech. The people in this little crowd waited for me to say something. "Jane was so proud of you," someone else said.

"That's so nice to hear," I responded. They then introduced themselves--the group included the mayor of the town, Reedsburg, Wisconsin--and we chatted for a moment longer. I realized right then and there that I preferred the term biological to birth in this instance because it felt as if the woman was not thinking the PC way, she was not schooled by adoptive parents on how to refer to me, and biological suited me just fine. It meant, that woman you knew, who won trophies for her humorous speeches--yeah, she was my daughter. She got that touch with language from me, the writer, not her other parents.

But it did not all go so pleasant. My sweet nephew who flew up from Tampa was standing next to a group of people and they were looking over the photographs that had been set up. On a small table were a few framed pictures--including a studio shot I had taken of my mother, Jane, Kim and me...four generations. My nephew, Donald, overheard someone derisively ask--"What's this?"

He volunteered the information: That is my grandmother, that one is my Aunt Lorraine, that is my cousin Jane, and that is Kim, her daughter." Information given. They glared at him, harrumphed and moved away.

So today, birth, biological, natural, real...it's all the same. We wish we could eradicate the modifiers, but for clarity we can't. Yet I am more than a little pissed off when people insist upon modifiers when they are not necessary, to wit:

My husband and a good friend, Genie, were talking about the aftermath of my daughter's funeral at a New Year's Day party last year. (I was not present, as I was still bawling my eyes out.) As I had known my daughter for 27 years, as she had lived in Sag Harbor off and on for some years, Genie knew her quite well. Another woman--adoptive mother, poetaster--was standing there, and she didn't say anything the first time Genie referred to my "daughter," but the second time she couldn't hold back and she corrected her: birth daughter.

Screw her. Why is it necessary for this adoptive parent to go out of her way and insert the PC language and in doing so, diminish me? Because she felt threatened. Because she's a small-hearted person. Because her poetry is second-rate.

I've always avoided this woman since, but now she goes out of her way to track me down at parties and be friendly. For what purpose, I'd like to know? I'd still like to smack her. Or maybe just ask: How is your adopted daughter these days? I see that she doesn't visit often....

I'm sure that Jane's other mother referred to me as Jane's "birth mother" when I wasn't around, just as I referred to her as Jane's "adoptive mother," but when talking about our daughter, that's how she referred to her: our daughter. And that's what she was. Our daughter.

Below is one of several lists of "preferred" language, obviously written by adopters. Yes, I am using that word here because the list doesn't include a shred of sensitivity to our feelings...the ever gracious "life-givers." I don't know what my favorite is, perhaps that "is adopted" should be replaced by "was adopted." Hmmm...so that means that being adopted is a one-time deal and then after the decree is final you are not an adopted person, you are born to--tell me, exactly whom? The stork?

Incidentally, we use birth mother here as two words. It at least leaves the word "mother" alone. I don't think adoptiveparents want to be one word. Notice that while we could be listed below as "parent....birth parent," yet "adoptive parents" are always supposed to be "parents." Not in my book, kiddo.

--lorraine

PS: I'll be back on Saturday with a new post about a different subject. The joys of Christmas as a mother, perhaps.

Natural and Real Language

Some years ago, I went to the LDS Church with my surrendered daughter, Rebecca. She introduced me as her “birth mother” to an elderly African-American woman sitting near us. The woman gave her a puzzled look and then said “Oh, you mean your real mother?

As we left the church, the woman signaled Megan to come over to her. After we got into the car, Rebecca told me the woman criticized her for using "birth mother," saying that it was disrespectful. Megan asked if the term offended me and I told her “no,” displaying what I felt was appropriate deference to her adoptive mother, her full-fledged mother.

Although “birth mother” was coined by a birth mother (Lee Campbell, founder of CUB), the adoption industry has seized upon it, using birth mother to refer not only to women who surrender a child but to pregnant women considering adoption and women whose child is in foster care. (Birth mother may not be with us much longer, however. “Life-giver” is coming into vogue as in industry-sponsored Life-Giver Celebrations honoring selfless women who keep adoption brokers in business.)

In arguing over whether a birth mother is the real mother (an argument nobody can win since there is no scientific test or accepted definition for real mother), those of us who support family preservation have missed the real issue: the need to frame language surrounding adoption in a way that causes people to agree with us. Positive framing is no mean task. Political think tanks spend millions on it: For an overview of the power of framing see the UC Berkeley article on George Lakoff, a professor of linguistics and cognitive science.

The adoption industry has seized the upper hand when it comes to language. The Adoption Information Institute (founded in 1996 as Celebrate Adoption), an adoption promo organization has created “A Journalist’s Guide to Adoption” listing what it considers negative and positive adoption terms.

Not surprising, topping the list of verboten words are “natural” and “real;” the Adoption Information Institute's approved alternative is birth mother. The Institute knows that the public identifies positively with things that are natural or real (natural foods, natural child birth, reality TV) and eschews things which are unnatural or artificial (genetically modified foods, synthetic materials, artificial lawns).

If we want to convince the public and decision-makers to support preserving and reuniting families, we need to use the words “natural” and “real.”

Keeping families together is natural. The woman who gives birth is the real mother. Losing a child to adoption causes real pain. Mothers produce milk because it is nature’s way of nurturing an infant. An adopted person has a natural need to know his roots; a natural mother has a real need to find her child.

The corollary is that we need to associate adoption with “unnatural” and” artificial.” Surrendering a child for adoption is unnatural. The adoption and reproductive industries construct families through artificial means.

The wise woman at Rebecca’s church knew I was the real mother -- the mother nature created --of the young woman sitting next to me who looked like me and spoke like me

Are Birth Mothers Motivated by Selfishness?

As National Adoption Month draws to a close today, I find myself irritated with myself that I let the thoughtless remarks about birth mothers who search from an acquaintance get to me as much as they did. He basically said that birth mothers searching and longing for a reunion was motivated by selfishness, and selfishness alone. Our deep-seated guilt and continuing sorrow over abandoning a child to genetic strangers? Oh, well. His attitude, I would guess, is formed by the many adoptive parents he knows as well as that lovely movie, Juno.

An email response to his wife alerted both of them that the heated discussion about adoption that we had in September got out of hand and hurt me deeply. He called on the cell the evening before Thanksgiving just as my husband and I sat down to dinner. He was apologizing, but I did not actually think he knew why he was doing so. I said, let's get together, we just sat down to eat...

The meeting never happened. He did have a busy Thanksgiving weekend at his house, but his house in less than a half-mile away, and he has no kids demanding time and attention. He may have thought I wanted to berate him and dissolve into tears, and while I told myself I expressively did not want to do that, He didn't know that and I was insisting we meet in person. Now I am sorry I set any kind of pre-condition. I assumed we were better friends than we were. My mistake. I just need to let him move out of my life. Or at least, move away from the place where he can upset me so much.

I've been attacked many times over the course of the last three decades when I published the first birth mother memoir, Birthmark. And I've always been able to brush aside the fusillade, even though my adrenaline is coursing through my veins. Talking about adoption for me is never merely an intellectual exercise; it's always intensely personal and strikes my core.

But Lordy, even writing about this incident again feels like too much messaging of my sore ego. Now he's probably on the way back to the city in this miserable rain; I just want to drop this whole thing and move somewhat away from him (not as easy as it sounds, given our multiple connections), but be able to sit next to him comfortably at a dinner party. But when he asked: What part of the pie chart of a birth mother who searches is 'selfish'?, I wish I had quickly responded: "What part of the pie chart of adoptive parents who are against a birth mother making a reconnection is 'selfish'? The woman gave the adoptee life, doesn't she have any rights? How did all the rights move over to the side of the adoptive parents? The condition of anonymity was not requested, it was imposed on birth mothers."

What this contretemps taught me is that here are a lot of people out there who really really think our curiosity about the children we lost to adoption--what we feel is so much more than that word conveys--is motivated only by base and selfish reasons. We've got some educating to do. In that respect, I ought to be grateful to this man. Now I know how he, and many, many others, feel. To them, open adoption is pretty much unthinkable.

Now the good news: In the Zanesville Times-Recorder, columnist Lori Law writes of adoptive parents who make the birth mother a part of their lives. And in the Fredericksberg Free Lance-Star there is the story of an adoptee who was happy to be found by her mother. So progress is being made.

Happy Adoption Month...Well, I don't know if I'd go that far.
--lorraine

this Birth Mother Is Uncomfortably Numb

Since I joined the virtual world nine years ago I’ve referred to some of the citizens as walking wounded, i.e., most people are in chat rooms, blogging, etc. because they’re striving, seeking, finding. Honestly, all is well in my world and I’m considered a happy, upbeat person, except when it comes to my life as a firstmother. Last week while I marked my daughter’s birthday I was thinking about this passage from The Giver, a futuristic young adult book by Lois Lawry that I read in the aftermath of 9/11:

Lily sighed. I hope to get assigned to be a Birthmother.”
“Lily!” Her mother spoke very sharply. “Don’t say that. There’s very little honor in that Assignment. The birthmothers never even get to see the new children.”

Very little honor indeed. And a simple phone call to my sister this morning was a grim reminder that in the world of adoption, we birthmothers are merely, to borrow a phrase from Lorraine’s July blog entry, “reproductive agents.”

I phoned my sister, Judasina (the name Lorraine and I call her, you’ll see why in a moment), to ask her if she wanted to join me for a Sunday drive to a craft show, and we caught up on the past week’s events. She knew from her daughter, my beloved niece, that I had sent myself a bouquet on my daughter’s birthday. She knows that’s always a difficult day for me and she leaves me alone until she’s given the all clear sign. I told her I had discovered my daughter’s address but that I wouldn’t use it because I didn’t want to upset or anger my daughter any more than I have, but that it was a comfort to me to have the information.

And then my sister confessed what I knew all along, she’s been in touch with my daughter over the past several months. This soap opera began over three years ago, up to and during my daughter’s wedding. My sister basically usurped my role…she met my daughter’s adoptive mother before I had the chance, despite knowing what a huge moment that was for me. She’s visited my daughter, who lives several states away, and bounced my grandson on her knee, yet I’ve never seen a photo of either of my grandsons, let alone told about their births (like everything else over the past three and one-half years, I discovered that information on the Internet) While my daughter has cut off all contact with me, she sends my sister photos of her two young boys (whom I jokingly refer to as my sister’s grandchildren), they e-mail occasionally, and apparently they tried to have a clandestine get together this past summer while my daughter had a month-long stay at the family home at the Jersey shore. My sister’s back stabbing and secrecy over the past several years has earned her the moniker Judasina. Suffice to say her ongoing relationship with my daughter (she’s not the firstmother so it’s OK to connect) has caused me a lot of heartache and long estrangements from my sister, and my sister ceased being my confidante long ago.

So, while I calmly let my sister share all the details of my daughter’s life, she saved the best for last: my daughter was recently diagnosed with cervical cancer. There’s absolutely no history of cancer on either side of her birthfamily, so I suspect it may be stress-induced. When I heard the words “cervical cancer,” all I said was, “that’s a shame,” as though my sister was talking about a work colleague, or an acquaintance.

I went to my craft show, did some errands, and by mid-afternoon I was just dumbfounded. If my daughter is so angry, so hurt, so overwhelmed that she can’t share serious health news with me, then I’m screwed. She really, really doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. I know and understand adoptees' struggle, but this—not being able to tell me she has a serious, life threatening illness, is just more than I can bear. One of the comments in my previous post told me to keep fighting, but I have no fight left in me.

I was going to send my grandson a first birthday gift this week, but decided against it. Jane commented in the previous post, perhaps we’re being spiteful. NO! This is self-preservation; I need to protect what’s left of my heart.

When my daughter’s first son was born, I--crazed, stalker birthmother than I am--phoned hospitals in my daughter’s city, and I found her on the second attempt. My sister, unable to keep the news to herself, told me she was having a Caesarian and the scheduled date. I just wanted to know that mother and child were well, and was it a boy or girl. Before I had a chance to react, the receptionist connected me to her room. My daughter answered the phone, and all I could say after not hearing her voice for nine months was..."Congratulations. And what did we have?”
It took her several moments to recognize my voice, and all she said was “Thanks for calling,” and hung up. I immediately sent an-email to Lorraine that I felt as though my heart was cryogenically frozen and it shattered into thousands of shards. Thankfully, I don’t feel anywhere near that at the moment, actually, I don’t feel much at all, and that hurts even more. I’m not angry, I’m not sad, I’m not wistful. I’m just numb.

I Did Not Want Anonymity

I've been thinking about all the pain and anguish that is evident from our own postings, and those that come through in the comments, and how this can be translated into something for the good of mankind....and the only way I can see out of revisiting the grief, like an old phonograph record stuck on a groove, is to work for change. Open the records. Get them out of those moldy, dusty basements and into the light. Free everyone from feeling they have to decide whether to search but let them have the idea that it's not a slap in their adoptive parents' sense of well being but normal and natural....so I say to all, adoptees and first parents, get involved in your state, and the state in which you were adopted or relinquished parental rights.

When we go to lobby, legislators will say that they haven't heard from enough people to warrant a change in the law. That they have to "protect birth mothers in the closet." Which makes me particularly crazy and mad. Unless you let them know how you feel, they are going to go on protecting you until the end of your days.

Change is not going to happen until we make our voices heard. Stop feeling sorry for yourself and write a letter. Call your legislator and make your voice heard. Do it. Do it now. Do it again tomorrow.

A few weeks ago, I called Sheldon Silver, the head of New York's Assembly, and let them know I was a birth mother in favor of the Adoptee Rights Bill, and would they please move it out of committee and pass it. ! Last weekend I got a letter from him saying that my "situation will be useful during future discussions on this matter." Damn straight.

I unearthed a piece I wrote for womensenews, in 2004, just before New Hampshire opened its records for adoptees, and it explains my "situation" as well as any. The piece is going to be reprinted in a book of some sort--womensenews didn't tell me the name of the book.

And a note to Mairaine:Thanks for correcting the source of the quote in the previous post. I fixed post.

To get more involved, check out these sites:

American Adoption Congress

Origins-USA.org

Concerned United Birthparents

and in New York:

Unsealed Initiative

For information on Illinois, click on 73Adoptee website on fav blog list at right.

Conflict Is Built into Adoption

"In all of us is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are, and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning, no matter what our attainments in life, there is a most disquieting loneliness."

This quote from Alex Haley is what inspired a 62-year-old adoptee in North Carolina, Raye Hedden, to search and find her natural/biological parents. Though reunion stories are rife today, this quote caught my eye because it sums up everything about the need to know. Contrast that with the comments from singer/actress Kristen Chenoweth, also adopted, and a memoir in progress, A Little Bit Wicked, about why she has not searched. In the interview Chenoweth says she gets sick of people pointing out that Brangelina have adopted children; that's she tired of the pressure to search and:

One thing it's [the book] not about is the search for her birth parents. "It's actually kind of the opposite, about what it's like not to do that, and what it's like not to have that family history, but to connect with the people who raised you," Chenoweth said.

"There's so much pressure," Chenoweth said. "Every time I meet somebody, and they say, 'You're adopted — have you found your birth parents yet?'

"If you met my parents, you'd know, (Chenoweth) is so their kid. I mean, we don't look alike. If I'm going to be honest, they're tall, brunette, they can't sing. They're engineers."

Asked about her brother, she said, "He should never, ever sing. Not ever."

When it was suggested that her family probably wonders sometimes where someone like her came from, she nodded. "I talk about that. I talk about like a little bit of depression that happened in my life and where that came from, and rosacea, and just things that people who aren't adopted know about."

Adoption-reform pioneer Florence Fisher, who remains a good friend, talks about "good adoptees," who tow the line, do everything possible to make their adoptive parents happy and...not do anything to offend them in any possible way. It sounds like they are afraid of losing their parents' love. Sounds like Chenoweth.

How sad. How pathetic. How unreal, but then, that is their reality.

In the years that I knew my daughter, Jane, before she committed suicide last December, I often would be so aware of her not being able to freely connect with me because of hurting her other mother. The first time Jane visited us, we spent the day shopping for clothes for school for her at Macy's (The world's biggest store! In New York City!), had dinner with my husband at Benihana, which we thought she would enjoy, and then went to see Evita on Broadway. She was fifteen.

She was non-nonplussed and didn't seem to like the show--even though we had first row balcony seats. Okay, I thought, maybe it's not her cup of tea.

But later, years later, she confessed that she only did that because she was having such a good time that day she felt disloyal to her other parents. One can truly understand the conflict, but it's sad. Sad that she could not be free to be loved and feel loved by both sets of parents. (My husband was not her father, but he took on the role of step-father rather easily, and that's how she saw him.)

And this again came into play when she stopped talking to me after her adoptive mother said at the funeral of her eldest biological son: "He was my favorite."

Jane barely spoke to me for a year. She needed to prove that she was worthy of her adoptive mother's love and the way to do that was to cut me out of her life. It was a hard time.

--hugs to every single adoptee out there reading. We first mothers are sometimes so screwed up ourselves that we can't connect with you...of course I'd like to give all those rejecting first mothers a smack on the head...but that's another post.

--lorraine

"Adoptions Made Easier" Does Not Get My Vote

Oh there they go again, the Republicans urging as ever, "adoption not abortion," which has been the slogan of the two Bushes in office, and now of course we have Sarah coming on strong...

This is from the Katie Couric interview that was broadcast on Tuesday.

Palin: I am pro-life. And I'm unapologetic in my position that I am pro-life. And I understand there are good people on both sides of the abortion debate. In fact, good people in my own family have differing views on abortion, and when it should be allowed. Do I respect people's opinions on this. Now, I would counsel to choose life. I would also like to see a culture of life in this country. But I would also like to take it one step further. Not just saying I am pro-life and I want fewer and fewer abortions in this country, but I want them, those women who find themselves in circumstances that are absolutely less than ideal, for them to be supported, and adoptions made easier.

My question is, Easier for whom? First Mother would like to keep politics per se out of firstmother forum, but when a candidate makes a inane, uninformed, asinine, hurtful, BS comment like that, there's nothing I can do but blast her and the party of grand old guys that she stands for.

No one is for abortion; neither should anyone tell another person what to do with her body.

So for Sarah Palin to blithely suggest that Hey, girls, we'll make adoption even easier for you than it is now! I just want to punch her in the gut.

Let's start with the fact that there are so few available infants for adoption that giving up a child is amazingly streamlined in this culture. It could be quicker, first mother supposes, if women signed the relinquishment papers before the baby was born! Or before they were completely out of anesthesia! Or within the hour after birth!

If someone wants to place a child, just look at the place mat at your favorite hamburger joint, you'll likely find an ad there for prospective adopters. Or like Juno, find someone in your local penny saver, or the classified ads in your hometown newspaper. Or type in the word "adoption" in your gmail, and whadda ya know? Three ads pop up--one for surrogacy, one for a list of agencies, a third for a lawyer in North Carolina. I clicked on one of the sites one day and found that it promised to make the surrender of your child "a beautiful adoption experience."

I'm not kidding. And I'm mad as hell at anyone who tells me that "adoption not abortion" is the answer.

I don't have a link to it, but I did hear Obama say once that he wanted to provide support for single mothers. I don't know if we can get him to take on the issue of open records for adoptees, but at least he's aware that if his father hadn't married his mother...his life might be a different story and he wouldn't have a clue what his roots were.