Two brothers, one adopted, find each other at the swimming pool

Isaac (Left) and Dakotah                 Courtesy of Dawn Nolting

Coming on the heels of the post the other day about two boys switched-at-birth is a real-life story of two brothers who were separated soon after the birth of one, and found each other because friends noticed the physical similarities between the two: same walk, same hands, same feet, same nose. One of the boys says, I've got a brother who was adopted by a woman named Dawn.

Other boy says: "That's my mom's name."

"Birth" grandmas are still grandmas

No matter what you call them, birth grandmas are still grandmas. My surrendered daughter Megan’s daughter Chelsea visited this past week. We took a quick trip to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon to see Hamlet, traveled to the Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport, got our hair cut and our nails done (mine in sparkling silver; Chelsea’s in turquoise blue). I took full advantage of the opportunity to indulge Chelsea and myself.

After all, that’s what grandmas are for – to spoil their grandchildren. Five years ago, when Chelsea and her sister Rachael visited, the airline agent joked as he issued their boarding passes, “Now that your grandma has spoiled you, she’s sending you home to your Mama.

When Should You Tell a Child He's Adopted?

Continued from earlier post in answer to questions posed by a prospective adoptive parent: 

"Also, in your opinion what IS the most loving, sensitive way to distinguish to a child their parentage?  It would be my desire to ensures/he knows that s/he is loved by both the mother who allowed him/her to be adopted and the woman who is raising him/her with love. Of course, as the child/ren's adoptive parent, I would want for him/her to call me mom (or some derivation) and still treasure the mother that allowed me to share the joy of motherhood."

My first thought was: When the child asks about where he came from.

We understand your fears, and being prepared ahead of time is best for everyone, especially the child. He should be your main concern, not how you feel about answering this question. Our advice is to answer the questions honestly as they come up. Some experts suggest that in order to allay other fears you not explain more than the child can understand--or asks. If the child only asks if she grew in your tummy, you can honestly answer, No, without adding more information. But if--and when, there will be a when--he asks the next obvious question, Did I come from your belly? answer it truthfully. It is important to get the child thinking about the process as he grows up, not to be confronted with news that will be emotionally devastating if he discovers it much later on.

Some therapists suggest not using the word "adopted" or "adoption" when the child is very young because he will not grasp what it means. Others feel that since the word will be a part of his life experience and vocabulary, you might as well not run from it but introduce it early. The child will come to understand in time. My own daughter said that when she was told she was "adopted" she understood it as, "she was a doctor," and did not understand why her parents said that, since she knew she was not a doctor. Other adoptees tell of the same confusion. In time, of course, my daughter did understand, but never expressed any dismay over accepting the meaning of the word that way.

Being adopted is the single most crucial fact of your child's existence, and he will have to grapple with this primal issue. Nothing you, as an adoptive parent, or even his first/birth mother, can ever say will erase that one basic reality, and no matter how the information is couched, the news will be life-changing. And the issue that he will understand immediately is that being adopted means that he was available to be adopted, that is, that someone gave him up for whatever reason. On some level, he will probably feel he was abandoned by his real mother, and that is how he thinks: his mother, the one who gave him life. That is the primal reality of his life. That he is adopted. That he is related to someone else.

Not telling early on is a sin of omission
Children can absorb bad news, such as death or divorce, but deception will color not only your relationship with the child, but possibly lead him to feel that such lying is the norm. Hayley, we understand you are not suggesting that in the least, but since we are writing here not only to you but the wider world, we need to talk about this, as so many adoptive parents still struggle with relating this information, as your question indicates.

Certainly, the child should be aware of his parentage by or at the age of reason. Delaying beyond that will increase the anxiety for everyone. And the adopted individual will feel cheated, as if you had been lying to him, because, in fact, you have. You have committed a sin of omission by concealing the truth of his origins. The longer you wait to tell a child he is adopted, the more likely he is to learn this hard fact of his reality from someone else--a neighborhood child, someone at school, a cousin, a grandmother making an off-hand comment.

You, as the adoptive parent, must also confront the reality that you are not the child's biological parent. As satisfying a relationship as you have with your child, it is different from the one the child would have with his natural family, different from the one you would have with a child you bore. You also need to be honest about the reason for the adoption: that you were unable to conceive, that an earlier child died, how you went about getting a child. Don't go and and on about this, and put more baggage on hm, simply state the facts honestly and briefly. He doesn't need to know details of how many tries at IVF there was, how many miscarriages. And no more stories of how you went up and down a row of cribs looking for the perfect baby, and there he was! The Chosen Baby is a myth, and your child will appreciate the truth as he grows older.

How one relays the information that a child is adopted is crucial, and just as important as when. If you are apprehensive and show your discomfort, this will immediately convey that adoption is not something that can be talked about easily in your house. If you act secretive and tense, so will he be secretive when he thinks about it. If you are open and accepting, he will feel he can talk to you about his feelings, and he will be more comfortable with his life situation, in his home. Do not interpret his lack of talking about adoption as meaning that it does not existentially alter his view of himself; it only means he is going underground with it.

Less is less
The more you know about the real mother, the better you and your child will be. Even today, in closed adoptions of recent vintage, I hear adoptive parents who say the less they knew (about the birth/first/natural mother) the better, because they did not want to imagine who that other mother was; and when asked, they would be able to honestly say, I don't know. But what a terrible loss that is for the individual. What a terrible thing you have done to him by denying him information about himself.

You also need to convey, in the strongest terms possible, that he was given up because his mother could not find a way to keep him--possibly because she was very young, her own parents could or would not help, because she was impossibly poor, and so, faced with impossible odds, she consented to his adoption, unquestionably with much sorrow and many tears. He should know that she loved him desperately, but could not keep him and so surrendered to forces greater than her ability to mother. She did not give him up because she "loved him so much."

The lie of: She loved you so much...
Yet that is what we hear from the writings of many adoptive parents, and the noxious language the adoption industry has popularized today: Your (poor, unfortunate, young, pick one) mother loved you so much she gave you up. In reality, this makes no sense and your child will recognize this immediately--he thinks, If she loved me so much, why didn't she keep me? She must not have loved me at all. Writing this today I am reminded of the television ads for a credit-card caveats that try to pull the wool over a child's eye by saying one thing but meaning another--you can "ride" the bicycle only in this impossibly small area, so small you can't ride; one child is offered a plastic pony, the other gets a real pony, etc.

If "love" were the reason that mothers gave up their babies, the most "loved" babies would all be available for adoption. A child is given up, or surrendered, because his real mother can find no way to keep the child at the point in time. A child is not given up because he was loved so much his mother decided that someone else could be the better parent. Unless there are extenuating circumstances, such as drugs or life in prison, every mother knows she is the best mother for her own child. She will instinctively better understand that little person at her breast, that angst-ridden adolescent, that troublesome teenager than any genetic stranger ever can or will.

After I found my daughter, and she was visiting in my home and we would shop or have makeup put on at a department store for fun, or put makeup on at home, she kept repeating how this never occurred with her adoptive mother, that she never learned how to put makeup on from her mother, that her mother did not enjoy shopping, that she missed doing this with her other mother. At first, I did not think much of it, and even found ways to excuse the woman she called Mom--she was busy with the boys, she was working--but I came to realize that my daughter Jane was expressing her own personal sorrow at not growing up with a style she longed for, a way of doing something--shopping and putting makeup on--that just felt right. This was way more than not fitting into the schedule of a too busy mother. No matter what, I would have found time with shop with my daughter the way I had shopped with my mother. I remember the time I gave my daughter a bottle of my Max Factor makeup that for some reason I was not going to use. I said, Do you want this? I'll try it, she said. And then, what she could not get over was that it was my makeup and it was the right color for her own skin tone. So much was contained in that simple fact. The right skin tone. My skin tone. And hers too.

Shopping. Makeup. Seemingly superficial, but the stuff of a life. Connective tissue. Like the way we both sang off key and climbed steps with the footfall of an elephant. As an adoptive parent, you may find certain similarities with your child, and some things undoubtedly gel because of nurture, but you will have to deal with the differences; and understand that your child will always note them, even if you do not.

Always opt for an open adoption
As for whether an open adoption is better than a closed adoption? There is no contest. No matter the truth of one's origins, it is always better to know than to live a life full of wonder. Open adoptions are better for the natural mother, and better for the child. We understand that some adoptive parents become frustrated when the natural mother does not maintain closer contact or visit more often; people are different, life is complicated and these things happen; but no matter what, for the individual who is adopted, dealing with reality is always better than shadow boxing with fantasy.--lorraine

The King of Pop Leaves a Legacy of Angst to his children

Michael Jackson Pals Around With His Kids

Michael Jackson and his three kids at Prince Michael II's (aka "Blanket") first birthday party. Seated left-to-right: Prince Michael Jackson II, Michael Jackson, Prince Michael Joseph Jackson I, and Paris Michael Katherine Jackson.(Zuma Press)

So...are the Michael Jackson's kids totally products of modern technology? Or do they have biological parents and a heritage they might know one day???

Maybe yes, maybe no. Say the celebrity writers here.

The purported mother of the first two children, Debbie Rowe, does not even seem to be in the mix as a candidate for custody, and she certainly has not stepped up to the plate demanding any kind of rights or contact with her "offspring." She reportedly has said (when she was pregnant with Prince, the oldest) that she was going to carry a child "for a friend," so my supposition is that she was merely the surrogate, and the ova was from another donor. (When she signed over all rights to the children, she reportedly got $8 million, plus a house, and $750,000 a year.) Whether the sperm is his or not is up for debate because the delicate facial features of the kids are not like Jackson's--that is the Jackson before he had several surgeries to change his facial structure with his slender upturned nose and cheekbones to die for. Another point: the two oldest children resemble one another, so maybe they do share some of the same "genetic material," that is their DNA. Perhaps they have the same biological mother. If their eggs were purchased, it is highly unlikely that the woman knows who they were for, as Jackson would have had good financial reason for not disclosing his identity to her.

The fact that Prince and Paris, the two oldest, look quite "white" is in fact, less of an issue since that skin tone is genetically possible (though not likely) with a white mother and because both of his parents are obviously mixed genetically. My guess: ova from elsewhere; Rowe the surrogate mother, sperm...unknown. There is some speculation that the genetic material came from Rowe's boss at the time, Jackson's dermatologist. But he does not have fine facial features, nor does Rowe. I would imagine that Jackson picked out the egg donor from a book of pictures, looking for the "white" features that he obviously craved and eventually, created for himself.

The third child, Prince Michael, aka Blanket, has more of Michal's features and is also darker than the other two, and apparently on his birth certificate there is no mother listed. Ova and womb, rented; sperm, possibly Jackson's.

One can debate endlessly where the genetic material (which is what sperm and ova are called by the legalese) came from, but what we are Birth Mother, First Mother Forum are concerned about is the mental and emotional void that this kind of engineering leads to. One can appreciate Jackson's dancing (innovative, mesmerizing, influential) and music (excellent) but we are appalled at his, or anyone, making children this way. Simply because he (and Sarah Jessica Parker) had enough money to do so is not reason enough.

If we have learned anything in all the years we have been involved in adoptee-rights work, it is that where one comes from--whose DNA one carries--is a crucial facet of one's emotional bearings, and the psychic confusion that results from not knowing this is the cause of endless ennui and angst. While these children are not adopted, are they going to feel, completely and wholly, that they are the King of Pop's children? Or will they have that niggling and persistent sense of lack of completion that adopted people speak of?

While there have been reams of literature written about the adopted person's quest to know his true parents, his genetic, biological parentage and heritage, as far back as 1972 the American Academy of Pediatrics had this to say:

"Determining identity is a difficult process for someone brought up by his natural parents; it is more complex for the individual whose ancestry is unknown to him....To state that a 'feeling of self' is paramount in the development of a strong and functioning individual is not an exaggeration. The driving need for identity and independence is not only indigenous to the individual but it is also a dominant force in entire national and ethnic groups. Minorities within national states express these needs; examples of this are painfully evident in our country and in other parts of the world....

What [the adopted person] is really seeking is to achieve a unity and persistence of personality in spite of the break in the continuity of his life. The struggle with this problem may reach its peak in adolescence and, in the extreme, result in running away in search of real parents."

As readers of FMF know, I found my daughter when she was fifteen and reunited with her, with her adoptive parents blessing, within the week. Was it the right thing for Jane? Yes, yes, and yes.

All through the years, my daughter Jane collected bits of data about who she was through how we were alike, and while I enjoyed coming upon these similarities, only occassionally would I become aware how important these pieces of connection were to her, even though they all seemed so small and unremarkable at the time. We sang off key, could not snap our fingers on our left hands, wore the same makeup shade (and like to wear makeup, which is why this meant something to her), had the same taste in what we wore, overcame our fears of public speaking. We frequently stood the same way, one foot crossed in front of the other, we both had a heavy step. We had the same kind and color of hair, the same eye color. And other "coincidences" kept adding up: we both had affairs (she married him, I did not) with men more than a decade older than we were; liked to garden, and collect stuff--a trait she did share with her adoptive mother.

If the makeup reference seems frivolous, note this: she once commented offhandedly that what she lost by being adopted was not learning how to apply makeup at her mother's side when she was a teenager; one of the fun things we did when the first time she came to New York was to have makeup applied by the masters at Saks in Manhattan. Yes it was a treat for both of us. I'm not saying she could not have done this with her other mother at a department store counter in Madison, Wisconsin; but the likelihood of this occurring with her other mother, who paid makeup and clothes little mind, was zero to none. We've written about what character traits are inherited before, what we can never write enough about is what the lack of them means to the person who is cut off from them.

I am sorry for Michael Jackson's children. All the riches and baby lions in the world can not make up for what they appear to be without: a known genetic connection to their heritage. We can only hope only the best for them.

Shared Similarities: Family traits not erased by relinquishment or adoption

Lorraine Dusky © 2009

What do amazing coincidences and similarities between birth/first mothers/fathers reunited with children who have been relinquished for adoption mean? They mean we are related. They are the normal similarities that are found between people who share the same DNA. Jane, the daughter I gave up for adoption and I found many similarities throughout the years we knew each other.

What absolutely blew me away were the sandals Jane arrived with that first summer she came to visit. I had the exact a pair of the exact same style and size. Now you might think that doesn’t mean much, but bear with me here. I have hard to fit feet—very narrow with a narrower heel. Though you can’t find this size anywhere anymore—at least where I buy shoes—my shoe size then was a Triple A width with a Five A heel. Really, really elegant, like a ballerina’s foot, I like to think. But all this elegance comes at a price.

It meant that my shoes--made with beautiful leather, impeccably detailed and sewn--never looked like my friend's shoes, which were much more common and could be bought at the local shoe store. This was indeed a trial by the time I was eleven. I wanted the shoes that all my friends had. When my friends were all wearing shoes that resembled white ballerina slippers, I was wearing...something else. A few years later, when everyone else was wearing shoes with "kitten heels," my heels were more stolid and thick, something then known as "Cuban" heels. Yuk, I thought. Another of life's torments just because, I would complain. Life isn't fair, why do I have these stupid feet?

Shoe buying has never been easy for me. But a few weeks before Jane came for her visit, I had found a pair of sandals that fit me fine. Woven leather flat sandals with the strap right across the ankle and a rubber sole. The heel was only a strap that could be adjusted, so I could adjust it to fit my narrow heel. The shoes were Italian made by a company named Famolare. How many pairs of that particular style were sold in the United States that year? I do not know. On the Famolare website today it says that their shoes are made in “very small quantity.”

Jane arrived with the exact same Famolares, size 38 in the European sizing the company used. I was amazed, to put it mildly, and remembered that when Florence Fisher first heard how her mother had painted her apartment--turquoise with lavender trim--she was struck because those were the same colors that she, Florence, had painted her living room.

Florence and her mother's favorite colors, the matching shoes Jane and I had were each one of those coincidences that are either meaningless or meaningful, depending on your point of view. Egads, isn’t this weird? I said to Jane, that you should have the exact same shoe as I have?

Hmmm, she said. She did not sound impressed. I found out later she was doing her teenage best to act un-impressed.

Despite her coolness, we kept discovering how we shared more than shoes. Like me, she had a 24-inch waistline (that was then) and fine oily mousy blonde/brown hair that is truly one of life’s little tragedies. Neither of us could carry a tune for more than two or three notes, or snap our fingers on our left hands. We often laced our language with irony, preferred tailored clothes, especially duds that resembled men’s suiting. In fact, we were extremely comfortable in each other's clothes. In photographs we are often shown standing the same way, one leg crossed at an angle just so in front of the other. She got her big head size from Brian, she had my hazel-green eyes, a combination jaw but not too far off mine, as far as I could tell, his nose (thank god), my eyebrows. If you saw us together, you would assume we were a set: mother and daughter.

One one day that summer, after she had walked up the stairs, my husband Tony remarked to her: “You come up the stairs just like Lorraine.”

"When I heard that, I knew I was home," Jane would tell me years later about Tony's offhand comment.

For what she had heard many times from her adoptive father was, "Jane, can’t you walk quieter?" as she went up or down the stairs at their split level house. Well, no, she really couldn’t without a great deal of effort. Her dad ought to hear my niece clomp up the stairs. We Duskys could be mistook for a herd of small elephants. What is an accepted family trait, not particularly elegant, at my house had been an annoyance to the family she was growing up in.

Family traits. We who have grown up among our own kind can not quite fathom what it’s like to be in a life where shared traits are few and far between. The more social scientists learn about various characteristics, the less they seem to be related to environmental factors.

What traits are hard-wired? They cluster into five basic factors in every culture that has been studied, from Britain to Korea, Ethiopia to Japan, China to the Czech Republic: Extraversion, the extent to which a person is outgoing, adventurous and sociable, or shy, silent, reclusive and cautious; neuroticism, the extent to which a person suffers from anxiety, guilt, worry and resentment; agreeableness, the extent to which a person is good-natured, cooperative and non-judgmental or irritable, suspicious and abrasive; conscientiousness, the extent to which a person is responsible, persevering, self-disciplined, or undependable and quick to give up; and openness to experience, the extent to which a person is curious, imaginative, questioning and creative, or conforming, unimaginative, predictable and uncomfortable with novelty.*

Although this says nothing about favorite colors or same shoes, this sounds like a lot to me. Sounds like a whole personality contained therein. The latest studies do not find a strong correlation between adopted children and those of their adoptive parents; in fact, writes social scientist Carol Tavris, “the correlation is weak to non-existent. This means that when children resemble their parents and grand parents temperamentally, it is because they share genes with these relatives, not experiences.”

Jane and I hadn’t been together, yet we were finding how much alike we were. For me, it was a constant source of amazement and pleasure. How much was evident apparently in my face. A couple of months after I’d met Jane, someone I didn’t know well asked a mutual friend if I’d had a face lift or “something done.” He said I looked “different, younger.” I was 38 at the time. The woman he asked was a birth mother. She knew what was up.

Life was grand, and my daughter was asleep in the room across the hall. Many many years later, Jane would point out to me the ways in which we were alike. Now she was delighted to find them; I had come to take them for granted, and I had not known she was keeping track.
_______________________
*Carol Tavris, “A new start in life,” Times Literary Supplement, April 18, 2008, p. 27. Tavris goes on to quote sociologist David Nettle who writes in Personality:“The area of environmental influences on personality is a morass of unsupported or poorly tested ideas.” If you grow up, as I did, surrounded by people with whom you share traits, they seem natural and you are more forgiving of those that others might find obnoxious. I think that a lot of the children who end up in some kind of therapy are there not simply because they are troubled in the sense that we think of, but because they are so different from their parents that their parents have difficulty dealing with their difference and idiosyncrasies.