After the birth mother/adoptee reunion: Dealing with rejection all over again

Jane and Lorraine in Sag Harbor, circa 1996

The reaction to the post about my daughter that have stayed with me were with ones from first mothers whose children, now found, are not speaking to them. I mentioned the lapses in my relationship with my  own daughter's at the end of the previous post, Remembering my daughter on her birthday.

I usually don't write about her not talking to me much now because it's obviously no longer an issue. She is gone. I don't cry anymore because she won't speak to me; I have cried plenty, but now she cannot speak to me, except in dreams.

The Daughter I Never Wanted and other lies about adoption in the media

How do we deal with our reunited children--if we don't like them? Or, how does the media deal with adoption?

The topic is the subject of Dear Prudence, advice columnist at Slate.com, this week (3/26/09). Headline: "My long-lost daughter is a terror, and I want nothing to do with her." Well, the letter doesn't exactly say that.

The writer seeking advice from the ill-advised Prudence says that she got pregnant at 17, her family was not supportive, she gave the child up, but "never forgot her." The writer adds that she reached out to her daughter through the lawyer who handled the adoption, met the daughter, who also had a child at some young age and was living at home with her adoptive parents and the child. After email and phone contact, they met--what a meeting: the birth mother, her mother, another daughter she had five years later...and the adoptee, her baby, and her adoptive mother. Talk about a recipe for disaster!

The birth mother frankly admits that she did not like her daughter: She wrote that her daughter was "rude and disrespectful to her mom, yells at her baby, dresses like a slob, and was a brat the whole weekend." Ya think the girl might have had some issues? She also criticizes her daughter for not being more grateful for the "great gift" she got her. It ends with this note: "She is in school to join my chosen profession, which I think she will suck at." Signed: --What Should I do About the Daughter I Never Wanted.

There are so many issues here one hardly knows where to begin. But before we get to the writer's disappointment with her daughter, let me deconstruct the way the issue is handled by Slate and Dear ImPrudence, who now is going to join my rapidly growing list of obnoxious people I feel cranky about. Really cranky. Though the birth/first/natural/biological/real mother says she "never forgot" the child she gave up for adoption, yet the letter's signature says...the daughter I never wanted...Give me a break, Slate and Ms. ImPrudent. That is the lovely idea of someone in the editing department, or maybe Prudence herself. Does anyone know if she is an adoptive mother? Might be. Because that's just the kind of idea--that the girl was never wanted--that many today want to believe because that makes it easy for adoptive parents to imply...Your mother never wanted you. Meaning: Be grateful you got me, you lucky bastard.

And as someone involved in the media myself, I know that many professional women waited way past their fecund years to have a child and then found a way to adopt. (Further proof is Sunday's (3/29/09) New York Times' Modern Love story, "My Clock Was Already Ticking. You know how that one ends. After an abortion at 34, the writer [creative person, natch] gets married a "couple of years later," and whadda ya know, she can't get pregnant [now she has to be 36,37, at least], even with expensive IVF treatments over a couple of years. So a birth mother provides a child--no two birth mothers provide two children. I am feeling cranky about this tonight.)

But I digress.

Back to Prudence. Dear ImPrudence, those of us who relinquished our children did not want to get pregnant when we could not keep the child--if that was anybody's goal she needs her head examined--but once we were carrying our babies, once we had them, we sure as hell bonded with them and let them go only under terrible duress and unending sorrow. To make up the "daughter I never wanted" line might be satisfying to adoptive parents, but there is nothing in that letter that would lead to that. Nada. Not liking a daughter in person is not the same as "never wanted.

Furthermore, the birth/biological/first mother/letter writer says she initiated the search! If she "never wanted her" it is not conceivable she that would have searched.

In Prudie's answer, she goes on to tell the writer that a) maybe the girl has issues, and b) notes that one of the issues might be that her biological mother kept a second child, also a daughter. Well, there she has a point, through the rest of the verbiage chides the writers for "disrupting" the girl's life. We also get the smack in the face that of course her "mother is the person who raised her." We know that, Dear Pru, it's been drummed into our heads since the beginning of time. We are just the DNA carriers. And gestational wombs. And then we are supposed to exit, Stage Left, never to return and certainly not for the curtain call.

As a last insult to us natural mothers, the link that shows up at the bottom of my screen says this: I loathe my daughter...Really, did the writer say that? This is yet another example of how the media looks upon us. We loathe our children; we "disrupt" their lives if we find them? Prudie the Ignorant shows not one whit of sympathy for birth mothers. But ain't that the way?

Well, there's more to this story. Fellow blogger Linda, as regular readers know, was found by her daughter, had a wonderful reunion and then the daughter cut her out of her life. But Linda did have some less than laudatory feelings about her daughter. Here's Linda after reading the Dear Prudence column:

I smiled as I read about how obnoxious the adoptee is. I can relate, a little. My daughter was 23 when she contacted me, and as I’ve said before, the honeymoon was short-lived…the daily phone call and the all-day-long e-mail blizzard ceased six weeks into our reunion, and I was…shocked? hurt? dumbfounded? confused? Yep.

People who’ve met my daughter have sympathetically said “It’s how she was raised” to excuse her behavior. She wasn’t bratty, but rather cool, aloof, she grew up in a privileged bubble, the polar opposite of me…if we were cast in Titanic, she would have been Kate Winslett in first class quarters and I would be Leo DeCaprio having a grand old time with the peasants in steerage. She was accustomed to getting her own way 99 percent of the time, and then she met me, who knew what she was thinking before she did, and that really freaked her out. No one was more shocked than I when, having had enough of her bad behavior (that snotty sense of entitlement that was just unacceptable to me), I told her “I love you but sometimes I don’t like you.”

Unlike this writer to Dear Prudence, my daughter was wanted, And yes, unfortunately, my daughter inherited many of my least favorite qualities. That doesn’t make me love her less.

I realize a lot of it, if not all of it, boils down to "you gave me away," even though she understands the circumstances and has told me many times she feels very fortunate to have the advantages she’s enjoyed. And it's not just the abandonment issues, it's so much more, as I've learned from the adoptees who I've met and learned from. I realize she'll be struggling with these issues for years to come, even though she swears (at least the last time we spoke, and apparently tells my sister regularly) that she's a shiny happy adoptee. I didn’t hide my feelings and heartache about relinquishment as well as I should have (too much information isn't necessarily a good thing)…but as I’ve also said, if anyone was prepared for reunion, it was me. It's virtually impossible for anyone to be prepared for the post-reunion Pandora’s box.

Oh, what a friggin’ mess this business of adoption is.

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PS: We'll find out if Madonna is going to take another child out of Malawi on Friday. I know she is going build a school or some such, but why can't she leave it at that? Every time a celebrity adopts, it sets the thought in motion once again: Gee, how great to adopt. I think I'll adopt. I'll get one of those cute starving kids from India. Nepal. Siberia. And so it goes. More kids are stolen to supply the bull market in babies. No recession here.

A Daughter's Guilt Comes to the Forefront

Continuing yesterday's post about my daughter's first visit to my home on Long Island:


Copyright (c) Lorraine Dusky 2009

That day I made the case for some leeway in this language business because I needed to introduce her as someone other than “my [amazingly young] friend Jane,” which begged the question, Is she your niece? I told her that sometimes I would introduce her as my daughter whom I had given up for adoption because she that’s who she was, right? She agreed. Or just say “my daughter,” so as not to get into a discussion neither of us welcomed at that moment.

But I had better watch it.

So throughout our entire relationship I was parsimonious in the use of the word “daughter” when she was around. She was free to say “mother” reference to me when the spirit moved her, and she knew that I purred with pleasure when she did. If she saw a man she didn’t know talking to me, she delighted in calling “Mother” from across a crowded room. She came up with her own name for me, Maraine (a combination of Ma and Raine from Lorraine), and the two of us used sometimes when no one was around. I typically signed cards and letters to her that way, only daring in the later years to write Mother. Words do matter. The parameters of our relationship were outlined in the language we used. She who had no control over the biggest event in her life could now control this one thing.

Those three packed days of sightseeing and bonding in Manhattan ultimately wracked her with guilt. On the last day, we spent hours at Macy’s shopping for her. Now I am a good shopper. I like to put outfits together, find the right shoes to go with the right top, the right belt to pull the outfit together. Jane enjoyed this as much as I did, looking over racks of blouses and vests and pants and skirts to find outfits that she could take back to Wisconsin and show off to her friends, clothes from Macy’s, the world’s biggest store!

When we met Tony for dinner at Benihana she was wearing one of her new outfits. Tony and I chose the Japanese steak house because we thought she’d get a kick out of the flashing knives as our own personal chef diced and sliced. We had second-row balcony seats for Evita after that.

Now seemingly out of nowhere, gloom settled in as she became silent and sullen. Tony, who can pour on the charm like heavy cream on plum pudding, did his best to amuse her, but Jane could not be moved. Brooding she was. Tony and I shrugged and continued on to the theater. Same thing. She didn’t seem to enjoy the play at all. She was silent on the long drive back to Sag Harbor.

Later, I heard from [her adoptive mother] Ann that when a road show company brought Evita to Madison, Jane told everyone that she had seen it, and on Broadway! She knew the story, the songs, it was great! Fantastic! Really? I said, surprised. Yeah, really.

And many years after that, Jane told me that everything had gone so well, during her visit, she was having such a good time, she felt so comfortable—and now it was being capped off with dinner and Broadway—that she suddenly felt incredibly disloyal to the family back in Wisconsin. She shouldn’t have so much fun with this new family unit, she shouldn’t feel so comfortable. She should feel like an outsider.

It’s utterly totally impossible to plumb the depths of what it feels like to be surrendered for adoption. It happens pre-verbally; it happens without the consent or, or cognitive knowledge of, the individual being given up. By the time the individual is aware of his life situation, being raised with genetic strangers and not one’s own, it is a fait accompli, its undoing impossible, no matter one’s preference. And to be available to be adopted, you first have to be given up.

Of course there are always reasons why adoption can be a better option than living with one’s mother. Drug and alcohol abuse, child abuse, abandonment—all are valid reasons why adoption for many is a life-saving solution. But in situations where that is not the case, it may be impossible for the individual who is given up to truly accept reality and understand a mother’s circumstances and reasons, and ergo, to be able to truly and completely forgive. We are human after all, with all the insecurities and failings homo sapiens is prey to. We are all, birth mother and surrendered child, only human.

And what of the adopted people who never search? Perhaps it’s the impulse that made me a journalist, but I can not comprehend living with such a mystery, such a basic hole in one’s self knowledge, and not doing everything in one’s power to solve the mystery, answer the questions. What we do know is that women search in much greater numbers than men; men often search at the behest of their wives when the time comes to have children; more men than women profess not to be bothered with curiosity about their roots; many who say they do not want to search do so later on, especially after their adoptive parents die, and that adoptees start and stop searches and start again and stop again and start again. Searching can be frightening, who knows what or who we were before we were adopted. --from the upcoming memoir, Hole in My Heart