Birth Mothers Attacked as Usual...or, Maybe I Need New Friends

I seem to be attracting fireballs lately--mainly because a) I'm writing about my daughter and telling people, so that brings up the whole idea that I found her, not the other way around; and b) I live in a world where adoptions are plentiful--everybody knows at least three people who have adopted and so far, so good. The kids are generally doing fine and so...the elephant in the room is the specter of the birth mother coming back.

That would be me.

So after just having had that horrible eruption with my close friend and neighbor, Yvonne, I got gob-smacked the other night by childless successful corporate attorney, also a friend. Call him Aston. He is godfather to one Chinese adoptee, who lives down the street from us, she's now fifteen; friend to another women who also has a Chinese girl, now fourteen; and one of his very best friends has a white son...from Gladney in Texas, one of the agencies that supports the National Council for Adoption.

Anyway, those are only the adoptions we know about that Aston is close to. God knows what started it, but he went on a long nasty harangue about how any birth mother coming back is always interfering, always upsetting this nice family, and after the parents have "invested" so much, both financially and emotionally, this WOMAN HAS NO RIGHT TO DO THAT!!!!

After I tried to make a case for the agony of not knowing, and gave him a brief history of sealed adoptions (Kansas and Alaska didn't count because they weren't big enough states) he came up with this question: What part of the pie chart of a birth mother who searches can be ascribed to self-interest? ....

Tell me, how do you answer that?

My husband Tony was there throughout and took Aston on as much as I did because that question left me speechless. The "discussion" might have taken place in a courtroom. Aston didn't know (why would he?) there was any research about birth mothers. Or the great mystery in the life of an adoptee. I did have him leave with both a copy of The Adoption Triangle and the Donaldson adoptee report. He's never had kids, when he and he wife wanted to adopt, his mother talked them out of it.

Damn, I can't even write about this without crying. All I know is that birth others are really seen as the pariahs by the elite class of adopters who have never been in the position of being poor, or feeling they had no options. Yvonne is one, Aston is another. Aston's wife, who did want to adopt quite badly, it came out, mostly said nothing but she at least got it that birth mothers would feel ...what is the word? Aston and I ended up using agony to refer to the pain birth mothers feel.

Here is what I emailed him the next day:

What I never got around to saying during your prosecutorial attack--the pie chart question seemed only designed to make birth mothers look bad and in doing so denigrate me--was that adoptees often want to be found because it indicates that their mothers do think about them, want to know them, want to know what happened, that the baby wasn't just dropped off and the woman/teenager went on with her life as if the child was a mere temporary inconvenience.

I'm just one person but I have had stacks of letters over the years thanking me for what I do from adopted people; what they want is for their mothers to find them. Adoption is painful, and keeping everything locked up--no matter who does the searching--does not make it less so. Only in the minds of people who have never walked the walk. Since you have such strong opinions that I'm in the wrong in such a major way, I hope you will take the time to read some of the material, including the birth mother survey that is at the site I sent yesterday. (you don't need to read it all, you can find the relevant sections from the TOC.

Unless you walked in my shoes, I don't think you can understand the depth of feeling that goes toward one's one flesh and blood. As someone one said, we can be casual about our own parents, but our kids always have us by the balls.

lorraine

In a message dated 09/07/08 10:10:49 Eastern Daylight Time, nccar@mindspring.com writes:

Lorraine,

I have given the following young lady your email and asked her to contact you, as her adoption was handled in New York. Please if you can pass her along to anyone who might be of assistance to her. She contacted me through the Care2 network.

Hello Ms. Roberta,

Thank you for responding to my inquiry. The main dilemma that I have been encountering is that I was born in Miami FL, but taken away from my mothers arms (when she moved up to NYC I might have been 1 yrs old) and put into foster care in Bronx, NY and that eventually led into an adoption by a family that was not well receiving of me as the adoptee. I somehow remembered from the time I was 4 1/2 yrs old that the foster care agency was located on 349 East 149th Street; Bronx, NY 10451 because of the building structure and the CitiBank logo on there; however, nobody knew the name of the agency that was once in the basement area of CitiBank back in 1984-1990's. I was told by CitiBank reps that that organization left during the 90's. This is the only detail I could recall of that has made me continue asking people if there's a way to get the agency's name during 1984. I even wrote Governor Pataki to please help me in this search and he replied with several agency's names in the Bronx and they claimed that I don't exist on their system.

I greatly appreciate your interest to assist me in any way, I hope to receive guidance if that's possible so that my life mystery can come to an end. Thank you so much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Christina

Do you think this woman would feel that her birth mother was causing an unnecessary conflict in her life if she were to call upon her daughter?

One more thing, that I did not bring up that night: Aston's father was the guardian ad litem for the Schmidt/DeBoer child, Baby Anna/Jessica. Who argued in the Michigan court that the baby's best interests were with staying with the DeBoers....Who in my mind were nothing but baby snatchers as the real mother asked for the child back within the time limit but fought her for two years in the courts. Incidentally, the DeBoers later divorced.

Oh yeah, where did all this take place? At my dinner table, just the cozy four of us. I'd love to hear from other birth mothers about the reactions they get when it becomes clear they were the ones who did the searching.
--lorraine

Virtual Twin Studies Show that Nature Wins Again

Adoption news is popping up everywhere...in the Home section of the New York Times on Thursday (9/4/08), in the TV reviews on Saturday (The Locator) (9/6/08).

In Studies of Virtual Twins, Nature Wins Again (By Sarah Kershaw) the headline reads. The story is about what happens to children who come into a family fewer than nine months apart, usually the result of a couple doing all they can on several levels (trying to get pregnant, having multiple feelers out for adoption) to acquire a child and voila! two babies arrive at the home less than nine months apart. So...how do these "virtual twins" fare?

Are they alike? After all, same environment, same parents, pretty much...same everything....Are they as alike as two regular twins would be?

Not by a long shot.

Nature's pull is stronger. One family quoted says the differences between their two daughters are striking, and that the girls became more different as they grew older and were less influenced by their parents. The researcher, Nancy L. Segal, who has been studying twins for seventeen years, has come to the conclusion that there is clear evidence that genetics play a greater role than environment in intelligence and a range of personality traits. Quelle surprise! The research is scheduled for publication in the fall in Personality and Individual Differences, a psychological journal.

There was so much about my daughter that I could recognize from myself, and her father. The way she walked; a similar style in dressing, a potty mouth, a deep sense of irony. She smoked and loving hanging out in a pub--sound Irish? Well, her father was. And he certainly loved doing those things. Some of these traits absolutely drove her adoptive parents mad and turned them away from her. There was so much about her they simply didn't get. We all wanted her to quit smoking, say, but her husband smoked, and hey! she met him in a bar. I might not have liked it, but I understood it.

Jane, one of the other bloggers here, told me once that her first daughter Megan was sitting there once with her sisters telling them how she wasn't like them in many ways, but she and one of the other daughters both had on Birkenstocks, which you have to agree are popular but still, a very specific taste, and they all wore no makeup, same kind of hair style, same posture.

Last night when I got around to watching the birthmother/daughter reunion on The Locator, wouldn't you know the two women both wear lots of eye makeup and were dabbing their eyes as they cried when they met. The Times reviewer made a sarcastic remark about them not forgetting they were on camera, but hey, anybody who wears that much mascara is aware that tears are not mascara's friend. Both women had on blue tops. When I met my daughter, we both had on pink sweaters. We both loved men's style clothing.

As for The Locator, we can criticize this kind of reunion, but it seems rather snobbish of us to do so. If the only way you can get someone to find your mother is to approach a guy you know does searches in a bookstore and start weeping when you want to talk to him, who are we to criticize? To find my daughter I would have done it on camera if necessary--hell, I would have done it at Grand Central Station with a thousand people watching under the camera lights, if those were the conditions. I didn't have to, but I'm not going to criticize anyone who does--or even the shows that exploit this heart-tugging material.

And the mother says all the right things, how she never stopped thinking about her daughter, how she had this hole in her life, etcetra. Yes, I cried by the time the reunion came. If the show furthers our agenda--to open records, to show that closed records are cruel and unusual punishment for being adopted--what's to complain about? I'm hoping the show airs again, so check WE and if anybody finds it, please post a comment telling us when.

We are only going to win the war against closed records when we reach the public--and because of deeply ingrained feelings that "forever families" should not be "interfered" with by natural mothers who search--we still have a long road to go.

see you around campus--lorraine

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/04/garden/04twins.html?scp=3&sq=%22Sarah%20Kershaw%22&st=cse


Incidentally, the story was written by the same person who wrote the story written about in an earlier post (Loss and Gain Collide in Adoptee's Search for His Birth Family) about the probably identical wins who had been separated, and the remaining son tracked down the adoptive family of his brother. Sarah Kershaw. She gets it! Anybody know her?

The Locator Starts Tonight!

Ah....The Locator, which we blogged about a few days past, begins tonight on WE. According to the review in the New York Times everything goes well, including the birth mother/adoptee reunion. Two half-hour segments are tonight, beginning at 9 p.m.; the first is a reunion of siblings; the second is a birth mother/adoptee reunion. Troy Dunn finds the birth mother even though an aunt, who arranged the adoption, wouldn't tell the girl searching anything. Boo on her!

And amazingly enough, Troy Dunn is indeed a Mormon (see Jane's previous post) who has written about child-rearing, his Mormon faith and his work....the review states that he's been so succesful finding people since 1990 that he is now able to take on free cases. That he is a Mormon who reunites mothers and children goes so against the tenants of the LDS--maybe we could get him to knock some heads at the National Council for Adoption, the enemy of open records and reunions.

Stay tuned. We're recording it tonight.

Review at
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/06/arts/television/06loca.html?ref=television

Adoption and the Mormon Church

My surrendered daughter Rebecca is a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints (LDS, Mormon). In spite of a childhood marred by not knowing her origins, she accepts without question the Church’s precepts that all unmarried mothers should surrender their children for adoption. This doctrine is founded not only on the Church’s concepts of morality but on its beliefs about family and immortality.

The Mormon Church advises couples who conceive a child out of wedlock:

“…The best option is for the mother and father of the child to marry and work toward establishing an eternal family relationship. If a successful marriage is unlikely, they should place the child for adoption, preferably through LDS Family Services. … Adoption is an unselfish, loving decision that blesses the birth parents, the child, and the adoptive family.” (Quotations are from the Church’s website, www.LDS.org.)

According to Mormon doctrine we are put on earth to work towards perfection. After our death and resurrection, we will stand “before the Lord to be judged according to our desires and actions. Each of us will accordingly receive an eternal dwelling place in a specific kingdom of glory.” The kingdoms of glory in descending order are the Celestial the Terrestrial, and the Telestial Kingdoms. Those who are unworthy will be called the sons of perdition and “will have to abide a kingdom which is not a kingdom of glory. After death we may be reunited with family members who are in the same kingdom.

The Church’s rules on family formation are set forth in its 1995 “Proclamation to the World.”

“…Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and … the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.

“…God has commanded that the sacred powers of procreation are to be employed only between man and woman, lawfully wedded as husband and wife.

“ Individuals who violate covenants of chastity … will one day stand accountable before God. … The disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.

By surrendering her child for adoption, a natural mother “ensures that the child will be sealed to a mother and father in the temple” and thus may have “an eternal family relationship” after death. Surrendering the child allows unmarried parents to atone for violating the covenant of chastity and “enhances the prospect for the blessing of the gospel in the lives of all concerned.” Finally, surrender protects society against disintegration and calamity.

If the threat of being excluded from a kingdom of glory is not enough, the Church adds the familiar arguments:

“Young women who choose adoption are more likely to complete high school and go on to higher education. They are more likely to be employed and less likely to live in poverty or receive public assistance. They are also less likely to repeat out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

Children who grow up without their fathers are three times more likely to have a child of out of wedlock, twice as likely to drop out of high school, and two to three times as likely to have emotional or behavioral problems, and they often become the poorest of the poor.”

Each ward (a church organizational unit of about 200 families) has a volunteer adoption counselor. The counselor contacts pregnant unmarried women, and if marriage is not possible or desired, refers them to LDS Family Services.

Each ward also holds periodic adoption promotion meetings during which the ward leader (bishop) reminds church members of the Church’s teachings on adoption. Adoptive parents provide favorable testimonials. The Church publishes articles it its monthly magazine Ensign urging pregnant single women to surrender their children.

Until recently, Mormon adoptions, like other adoptions, were closed. Now expectant mothers may select adoptive parents from profiles online and meet with them. The parties may agree to further contact.

The Mormon adoption mandate appears to be successful. Few Mormon women keep their babies. Those that do suffer condemnation from Church members. I have been told that while they can attend Church services, they are not permitted to participate in prayers nor sacred temple ceremonies.

This is the second of a series on the LDS Church and adoption-related issues.

Lorraine adding a note here:

The greatest most organized opposition to open records for adoptees comes from the National Council for Adoption. They send people to testify at hearings, they write letters, they have money to fight open records because they collect fees for adoptions...right?

And who make up a large--if not majority--of their agency members? The LDS adoption agencies. Given what Jane has reported (from their own website) NCFA will never support open records, and when any of you good soldiers in the fight against stupid sealed records come up against them...this kind of information should be made known to your legislators. NCFA must lose! NCFA not now, NCFA (Nik-Fa) never!

When a 'mistake' became a child

The Bristol Palin story has opened up the debate about abortion because of course...some are thinking, Bristol could have had an abortion. And then there's the language that calls the baby a "mistake," and how that impacts adopted people.

It's a tricky labyrinth because for those of us who gave up children, the pregnancy--there's no way around it--was a "mistake." The pregnancy was a "problem." It was a life--our lives--that were being turned upside down by an unplanned, and yes, unwanted pregnancy. Those of you who have read Birthmark know that I tried to have an abortion. At the time, I was 22, not married to the father (who was married to someone else), living on my own just out of college, without resources, and yes, my pregnancy, was a "problem." It was 1966 when it seemed unthinkable to raise--even admit I was pregnant--on my own.

But once you don't have the abortion, once you go go through the months of having your body and mind turn to a child, your child, everything changes. The "problem" became "him." (I thought I was having a boy up until the moment she was born.) And no matter what I felt before, my feelings turned to love and an aching desire to keep my baby, even though that seemed impossible at the time. So what was once a mistake becomes a child, your child, who you love more than you ever thought possible.

My husband, who was his mother's second child, was born at a time when the family was in financial difficulty, and he once heard that he wasn't particularly wanted...when his mother got pregnant. But that didn't alter one whit the love he felt from his mother; in fact, he turned out to be closer to her than his older brother.

So adoptees, though the word "mistake" is hard to hear, know that it doesn't refer to you as the baby or the person you became. My mistake turned into my daughter Jane and though she had a difficult life, I was always glad to be a part of it when she let me. --lorraine

And here's a comment from Linda:

I keep reminding myself that no one pointed a gun to my head, no one forced to to choose adoption (though therapy decades later told me "of course being a student at a Catholic women's college influenced my decision." My parents would have supported an abortion, in fact, my father sent me money for that purpose and I banked it. A single pregnant woman will believe anything, and I believed the sperm donor.

I know a couple of women who have expressed regret over their choosing abortion, but most, as Lorraine has often told me, can live with their choice without much remorse. I always said if I had to do it again I would still choose adoption, but my position changed post-reunion. I don't know what I'd choose (to raise my child or abort) but I'm 99 percent certain I wouldn't choose adoption.

I was 19 and believed the social worker and the whole "my child will have a better life with a loving couple" myth--marriage wasn't even on my radar. I wanted a brilliant career with a home on both coasts. Sarah Kershaw's article in today's (Thursday 9/4) NY Times more eloquently expresses my sentiments I posted yesterday in response to your blog:

Sociologists say that what drives the failure of teenage marriages — and some also say the postwar young marriage boom may have contributed to the divorce explosion of the 1970s — is the complex condition of being an unformed adult.

“They may not know quite what they want in a lifetime partner,” Dr. Popenoe said. “They still often have years of education to complete, as well as getting settled in the work world, and those two things may change their outlook on life considerably.”

And from Jane:

Giving up a baby is totally different from an abortion or a miscarriage. It causes extreme depression and obsessive thinking, not just an occasional sigh. I thought reunion would resolve some of these feelings -- it has helped but there is still pain.

I cringe every time I see bumper stickers that say "adoption, not abortion."

Lorraine again: Yes, it is sad when people who want to have children can't have them, but that doesn't entitle them to somebody else's baby.

http://www.amazon.com/Birthmark-Lorraine-Dusky/

Bristol Palin will be more than a firstmother.

Sarah Palin. Bristol. Five months pregnant. It might be a personal tragedy in their family, but given the background, maybe not. It's not clear that Bristol is giving up college for baby and marriage to the hockey hunk Levi. She is following in her mother's footsteps, who was pregnant when she got married. In terms of marriage, that has worked out.

Linda, one of the other bloggers on Firstmother Forum, has been upset about this and the girl's life going forward, but perhaps I'm more jaded. I just see the pregnancy as the typical response to having abstinence-only sex education classes, which is what Ms. Palin advocates. And I would assume, she would work to further abstinence-only sex education should she end up as vice president. Here's a snippet of a column I wrote for a local newspaper a year ago:

Everyone can agree that abstinence will prevent pregnancies as well as sexually transmitted diseases. Abstinence-only programs have been promoted by every GOP Congress and president since Ronald Reagan, who instituted them in 1981. In 1996, a GOP Congress mandated that $50 million each year go to abstinence-only programs, with another $37.5 million coming from the states in matching grants.[Obviously they had no trouble getting this money in Alaska.] Since then the government has spent $1.5 billion on such abstinence-only sex education, despite plenty of evidence that they are simply bogus.

They don't work in the long run--heck, they don't even work in the short run. The studies are numerous, but a favorite of mine is one done jointly by Columbia and Yale universities. It found that while "virginity pledges" seem to encourages teenagers to delay sex the effect was short lived. Eighty-eight percent--call it an overwhelming majority--of those who signed such a pledge ended up having sex not only before they married, but--equally fascinating, before the study ended. Hmm...sounds like most of the virgins stuck to the pledge when it was convenient, but not once they found someone to love.

Two other bits of data from that study stand out: Those taking the pledge had the same rate of sexually transmitted disease as those who did not. (Zero gain.) And they were less likely to use a contraceptive when they put their booties under someone else's bed. (Negative loss.)

And if those same teenagers are having unprotected sex, they are more likely to have unintended pregnancies. [I'm going to assume Bristol's pregnancy is unintended.] Which brings us back to that nagging abortion rate that's been stuck in neutral under Bush's watch, this is, not going down as it had under Clinton. In short, abstinence-only programs lead to more unintended pregnancies. According to the Guttmacher Institute, half of the 6.4 million pregnancies in the U.S. each year are unintended. Half of them are carried to term.

In April of 2007, the Department of Health and Human Services quietly released a long-awaited, Congressionally mandated evaluation of Title V-abstinence-only programs. The conclusion: "Youth in the program group were no more likely than the control-group youth to have abstained from sex, and among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age."

The good news was the the Democrats finally pulled the plug on such an inane and failed program. They planned to let a $50 million grant expire in June, 2000. Conservatives were outraged.

Along with their outrage, I would assume conservatives had more unplanned pregnancies in their teen population. I am a old-timer who went to Catholic schools and had sex at the time when guys who said that they didn't like using condoms got away with it. (Yes, my daughter's father did say that.) Today, more teens are having sex than they were in my day, but in a sane world they are given the education, and easy access to contraception, they need to have sex that is not only safe, but does not lead to an unplanned conception.

No matter how we feel about this family personally and politically, no matter how we feel about abortion, what I applaud and feel good about is that this child will not be given up for adoption. That would be the real tragedy. And we might not hear, as both the Bush presidents have been want to spout--"adoption not abortion."

Bristol's road will not be an easy one, but she will have her baby. And keep it.

--lorraine

PS: For those of you who listened to my lament about Yvonne, we spoke. She denies, denies that she could have ever called women who give up babies "reproductive agents." I believe she believes that she did not say that. She sat quietly and listened while I tried to educate her and open her mind somewhat. I may have succeeded. Or maybe not.

Yvonne is not/never was against adoptees searching, and thank god, her hairdresser (who eventually married the father) has had a successful reunion with the daughter the couple lost to adoption. Among the many things I said was that sometimes the adopted person is not able to do the search because the original birth certificate has been altered, or for other reasons. She was aware that in France the OBCs were never sealed. Can we be friends again? I hope so, in time. Right now I'm still internally reeling from her outburst.

The Locator...is looking for you.

This just in from Women's Entertainment (WE), home of Bridezilla, Platinum Weddings, Extreme Plastic Surgery:

The Locator

Are you looking for someone important who you just can't find? Birth parent? Sibling? Lost Love?

Over the last two decades, The Locator, Troy Dunn, has found over 20,000 "unfind-able" men, women and children - be it an adoptee seeking their biological parents, someone looking for a lost sibling, or anyone with a heartfelt need to reunite for a personal and compelling reason.

Troy is currently looking for individuals who have a desire to be reunited to be featured in his new WE tv series, "The Locator". If you want to say: "I love you", "I'm sorry", or "Thank You" to someone you can't find, Troy might be able to help you do it.

Apply now on our website: TroyTheLocator.com

Well, it could be like Extreme Home Makeover,ABC's Sunday night hit. I wonder if the Locator would do it for first mothers/fathers? The show is advertising for people, as the copy above indicates from their website. I assume you have to be willing to knock on the door-- unannounced--of your birth parents and take what comes. While anything that gets across the innate unfairness of closed records (to both adopted people and birth parents) gets a star in my book--even that tacky short-lived but highly controversial "Who's My Daddy?"--this ought to also rate high in the ick factor of personal invasion.

We'll see, it would seem that the person found would also have to agree to his/her fifteen minutes of fame to be seen on camera. How do you folks feel about this? Anybody want to apply? Know someone who might? You never know...I believe the show is scheduled to start this fall. My husband said that he saw a promo for it that shows The Locator knocking on the door of a first/birth mother.

--lorraine

Then She Found Me: The Movie

Then She Found Me, a comedy based on Elinor Lipman’s very funny book about a birthmother who finds her adult daughter, will be released on DVD September 2. When I reunited with my daughter I read everything I could find about birthmother/adoptee reunions, but I shied away from this novel for several years because I was in the camp that thought search and reunion should be the adoptee’s choice/right. I laughed and cried my way through the book when I finally read it. Lipman captured the reunion dynamic perfectly, and some of the dialog was eerily familiar; my daughter and I said some of the same things to each other.

About two years ago I learned Helen Hunt would direct and star in the movie I couldn’t wait to see it. Bette Midler was cast as Bernice, perfect as the in-your-face talk show host birthmother from, well, if not hell, certainly not heaven.

I finally saw the movie when it was released in May and I was terribly disappointed. (Spoiler alert: I discuss the movie and reveal the ending.) It was a small film, full of clichés. The book was all about the mother/daughter roller coaster relationship, which sadly took a back seat in the film. Hunt plays April, a teacher who is an insult to teachers everywhere--very drab and dreary. Hunt altered the book by throwing in a “gotta have a baby NOW” plot. Lorraine disagreed with me here; she “[liked] the emphasis on I WANT MY OWN BABY. I would have made her say: I want to see someone who looks like me....” While coping with baby fever, she's also dealing with her terminally ill (adoptive) mother. There's an unrealistic scene (at least to me, you're dying, this is what's foremost on your mind?) where April's mother is lying in her hospital bed with enough strength left to insist that there's no difference between a biological and adopted child, a mother loves them both the same (uh-huh). And she even tells her distraught daughter to adopt! April subsequently becomes pregnant by her husband who has walked out on her, and loses the baby in the first trimester

Bette/Bernice has kept tabs on her daughter’s life the way most birthmothers do--guesswork, a few crumbs here and there. She tells her daughter her father was Steve McQueen (altered from JFK in the book); the “sperm donor” was a neighborhood mensch, less than stellar, so Bette embellishes. She tells Hunt she was with her three days in the hospital, and then had to let her go, but April/Hunt later learns that wasn’t the case and she’s stunned by the revelation—her birthmother lied to her! And then the movie goes steadily downhill. The two argue. “You gave me away!” screams April. (Ouch!) Bernice is forced to admit she wanted to have a life rather than have her father ignore her, ignore her child. Lorraine shared this with me after she saw the film: “...It was painful for [me] to make Bette/Bernice say that, I gave you up because I wanted a life--Christ she was 15 and alone...and got no help from anyone, and so that seemed unusually cruel, but how they feel, I suppose. The adoptive saints were there.”

Bernice starts parking in front of her daughter’s house; the birthmother as stalker. April’s brother, their mother’s biological son, suggests that Bernice buy something extravagant for April to make up for all of “this.” That something extravagant is in vitro fertilization treatment. (The most extravagant gift I gave my daughter was a Tiffany bracelet.)

Cut to a few years later. We’re at Helen/April’s beau’s house (Colin Firth, who can do no wrong in my book). Helen asks his kids, “Where’s your father?” They point around the corner of the house. Helen goes to him; he’s gazing at something off camera. He leaves the frame, then Helen’s sitting alone, looking stoned. She’s looking at a little girl…her little girl, three, perhaps four. When the child turns around, I groaned out loud. April adopted a Chinese girl. Lorraine astutely noted, “It had to end with an adoption.... how tidy. How nice to make everybody feel ... good about adoption”

I walked out of the theater angry that I plunked down $10.25 for dreck.
I guess I was so annoyed because the movie was released shortly after Juno, and we all know what a great job that movie did for promoting adoption. Hollywood overall has done a terrible job of portraying out of wedlock pregnancies and single motherhood in film (Losing Isaiah, Knocked Up, and the dreadful Baby Mama come to mind). Yet the Hollywood/celebrity community doesn’t blink when unmarried actresses have children (biological or adopted) without marriage or even a father for their child (Angelina Jolie, Mary Louise Parker, Diane Keaton, an adoptive mother who was originally cast in the role of Bernice, Sheryl Crow, Calista Flockhart, Meg Ryan…feel free to add to the list).

Last Saturday night I was watching the 11 o’clock news and saw a commercial for a late night movie, The Last Trimester. Thankfully this made-for-TV movie barely saw the light of day, based on this anonymous synopsis from the IMDB web site: A young married couple, Eric and Tracy Smythe, are thrilled when they adopt a baby, only to have it taken away from them when the mother turns out to be married. At a complete loss, and in debt from in vitro, they are desperate to complete their family. When Eric comes home with what seems to be the perfect solution, a young woman who is pregnant and does not want the baby, their dream of family seems to be coming true...but the dream is about to become a nightmare.

So, birthmothers are as evil and deranged as Alex Forrest (the classic role played by Glenn Close) in Fatal Attraction?

This post has me thinking about birthmother/adoptee relationships in movies; surprisingly, there are a few, some of them quite good. I’ll post my favorites here in a day or two. Meanwhile, if you’ve read or watched Then She Found Me, did you feel as Lorraine and I did? Or did you take away something else?

Here are some reviews for the movie from critics who aren't birthmothers:

http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/04/25/movies/25foun.html

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/then_she_found_me/

Reproductive Agent, continued...

To add to the story--In writing about Yvonne to my blogging pal Linda, I believe I hit upon what bothered Yvonne about me searching so much: her own feelings of abandonment.

Her famous French mother was basically a high falutin' courtesan, and after she divorced Yvonne's father, had numerous affairs and a couple more marriages to wealthy European playboys, and left the raising of the children to their father. So Yvonne was raised in boarding schools with her sisters, both in France, until the divorce and the war, and then in this country. She says she hardly knew her mother when she went to live with her outside of Paris when she was seventeen. Her older sister did not see her mother for nearly two decades....

I've been attacked before by people who really hate that I am a mother who searched, that I am not against first mothers searching, that adoptees have the right to search, but unquestionably, the ones who are the most angry/upset are those who were abandoned by their own mothers. And that's what I think has happened here.

This is the letter I sent to Yvonne yesterday:

I am still quite distraught about what happened Sunday, but the white flowers seemed to say that you feel that we are only having a "disagreement" that could be easily patched up. It left the ball in my court to call you and say, Oh gee, let's forget it, let's be friends. I didn't accept the flowers because they would have only been a reminder that to you, I am, at the most basic level, a "reproductive agent." Without any rights except to mourn the loss of my child all my life. Instead of flowers, I would have welcomed a phone call to talk. I still would.

I don't know if the wine loosened your tongue, but if it did, it certainly only brought out how you really feel about women like me. I can not be separated from other women like me, anymore than you, in your mind, can not be separated from the French who did not stand up stronger against the Germans. That is a subject I have certainly not broached with you--for what purpose?--and I recall your angry reaction when Cocteau was criticized for collaborating with the Nazis. YOU WEREN'T THERE AND YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO SAY ANYTHING was your hot and instantaneously emotional reaction when the comment was made at our dinner table. Yet you can tell me--no, insist with anger and certainty --how I, and the other women like me, had no basic human need/instinct/right to ever find out what happened to the children we gave up for adoption. Yet you have not lain in my bed. You have no idea with the experience is like. Yet you make ironclad judgments about it as if you had lived through it yourself.

Would it surprise you to know that in 1980, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, after holding numerous hearings around the country (for which I testified) issued a Model Adoption Act that included these words:

"There can be no legally protected interest in keeping one's identity secrete from one's biological offspring; parents and children are considered co-owners of this information regarding the event of birth.... " The Act would have given both adoptees and birth parents the access to the information. It also included this phrase: "modern attitudes and realities of adoption no longer support the cloak of secrecy upon which sealed records laws were based." But adoptive parents, and the financial backing of the Mormon church (for their own reasons of "family" in the afterlife) have fought this tooth and nail. Most other countries today do not seal birth records of adoptees. Adoptions from places like Siberia and Kazakhstan are suspect because there are several known cases of stolen babies, forged relinquishment papers, and the like.

People like Brooks Hansen go overseas, it appears, to get babies so they can have babies without an identity other than the one they give them. Most adoptions in this country today are some form of "open adoption," in which the parties know each other. These natural mothers--i.e. reproductive agents--apparently have a much less difficult time in their lives reconciling with the fact that their children are adopted. Let me ask this--and I don't know the answer--how old was Brooks and his wife when they decided to have children? In their most fecund reproductive years? Their twenties? Later? Much later? It is always sad when someone who wants to have children can not, but that does not entitle them ipso facto to someone else's child.

Your vituperative attack on me--and referring to us as "reproductive agents" is an attack on me-- went to the very core of who I am and what I have been about for most of my adult life. I have, over the years, received hundreds of letters from grateful adoptees, and other natural mothers, aka "reproductive agents", for the work I have devoted a large part of my life to. The letters are full of tears and thank yous. And of course there are always a few from adoptive parents who want to kill me. I have tried not to talk about this to you--though it is basic to who I am--because I know how you feel, and that nothing I ever said would open a crack in your feelings that I am wrong, and should shut up and sit down. Your mind was made up.

But know this: All adoptions do not work out well, no matter that the few that you know of have. Kids get returned; one parents dies, or they divorce and the new partner often doesn't want the kid and he's shuttled off to boarding schools and summer camps with little affection the week they are home in between; adoptees end up back in the care of the state; the statistics that I can show you prove that more adoptees end up in therapy, special schools, on drugs, both prescribed and illicit, have other children out of wedlock, are prone to pathological lying, etc. than the general population. Some adoptees can not search for any number of reasons--they may not have a birth certificate with the right date on it, or even the place--and only the natural mother can reconnect, because only she has access to the accurate facts of that birth.

Adoption is way more complicated than your experience has shown it to be. This is not just from my own experience, or from a few friends; I have a small library of books/academic papers/reports about this. I have testified in Albany to a joint Senate-Assembly committee, in Washington to a Senate committee, and in court for adoptees who want their records, been on television more than a dozen times talking about adoption reform. This is the subject of my life.

What I feel from you is a basic rejection/repugnance of all women who have surrendered children ("reproductive agent" says that), or at least all women who want to do more than say a million rosaries for those children. And that has to include me. So where does that leave us? I don' t know, but if you like, I would welcome you to come over and talk. If you want to do that, please give me a call so we can set up a time. I have been so very upset by this break. I hope we can repair this, but you have to understand that I can not erase from memory the words I heard you say with such vehemence. I am writing all this because I feel I could never get it all out if we talk. And I feel I not only owe you an insight into my feelings, but also would like you to know what the extensive literature on adoption says.

This break has hurt me deeply because I have been so very fond of you. I have often thought of you as the sister I never had. Our closeness has only made this worse. It is as if my sister told me I was worthless, and that how I have lived my life was a mistake.

lorraine

I'll let you readers know what comes of this. She does not read her email everyday. I know some of you may not understand, but I do hope there is a way we can come to some sort of understanding and have a relationship. None of us are perfect, all of us have glitches, and there is much about her that I like. Coming to the realization about her mother was liberating, and made me think more predisposed to excuse her. Though I don't know if my analysis will have any bearing on the outcome.
lorraine

Reproductive Agents!!! Not Mothers. Of any sort.

Hi folks, just when you think there is nothing new under the sun...there is! I have--maybe had is the operative word here-- a good friend named Yvonne. She is 77, comes from an aristocratic French/American family, educated both here and there, and there have been times when she called me her "youngest sister" and I called her "the sister I never had." She is a neighbor who lives three doors down from us. We do all kinds of favors for each other.

But there was always one huge gulf between us: adoption. Yvonne never met an adoption that wasn't happy. Though she knew my granddaughter--who even stayed in her house with my nieces (when ours was overwhelmed with relatives) she always needed to make clear to me that she always sided with the adoptive parents and that...she was not in favor of reunions, searching, every adoptee she knew fit in just perfect with her adoptive family, you name it. I always managed to change the subject ASAP, and I knew she was a woman of adamant opinions that offered little room for negotiation.

When Juno came out, I gave her Birthmark to read, thinking that she might at least see my point of view. She did, for about fifteen minutes, apparently. She does know one adoptee who searched, found and became good friends with her mother. According to Yvonne, that is all right. That is the only thing that is all right. But birth mothers' searching: Non, nyet, no, nien!

Sunday, I stopped by her house for a late afternoon visit. On her coffee table is a new book from the point of view of the adoptive father, The Brotherhood of Joseph (the original Biblical adopter), by Brooks Hansen, the son of her old boarding school chum and who lives, as fate would have it, only a few blocks away from us both. You get the picture. Aristocratic also--Brooks? He couldn't have kids with wife (don't know the ages at which they got around to thinking about that) so they adopted a child from Siberia, and a second from Kazakhstan. Which Mirah Riben devotes a small section to in The Stork Market.

Here is a snippet of the description on amazon:

Brooks Hansen vividly captures the emotional turmoil he and his wife, Elizabeth, endured as they tried to concieve, (sic) the years their lives were put on hold, and the excruciating sense of loss. He writes too of the couple’s journey through the bewildering world of adoption—a path to parenthood fraught with financial, legal, and emotional risks of its own.

I first heard of the first adoption at dinner one night at Yvonne's house and when she was getting dessert from the kitchen, and the adoptive grandfather said his son and wife were adopting from Russia so they wouldn't have to deal with "that birthmother business"--he had no idea he was speaking to one--I thought, what the hell, I'm going to burst his smug bubble, and told him...I'm a birthmother, my daughter has lived with us for summers, worked downtown at the ice cream place one summer, her parents have been great, etc.

Well, frankly that's just what we want to avoid, he said just as Yvonne returned with an apple tart and we changed the subject.

Anyway, maybe Yvonne is in her cups a bit last Sunday--she has poured herself a second tumbler of red wine with ice--but this time she will not quit. Showed me Brooks's book on her coffee table, that maybe it's something I ought to check into later when I have the time (she knows I am writing a memoir about my daughter Jane), and somehow and before I know it, she is yelling at me that ... women like me are wrong, we have no understanding of what it really means to be a mother, we are not mothers...the only feelings that count are those of the adoptive parents, WE HAVE NO RIGHT TO INTERFERE, because...we are nothing more than "reproductive agents." We can only give up our children for whatever reasons and pray for them. That is it. Searching? On our own? NEVER.

I argued for a few more moments but tears just started spurting out of me and I said, I can't talk to you about this. As I ran out for the door, she was grabbing my arm, saying, but I love you, dear, let's have dinner this week.

I was sorry that her opinions were so cemented in hardness. I was sad this friendship had come to this. But there is a point at which we can not be doormats to outmoded opinions.

to be continued....

An Inconvenient Appendage

During our ten years of reunion, my surrendered daughter Megan and I have had many good moments but we have also had sharp disagreements, primarily over the nature of adoption. I believe--and the more I delve into adoption--the more firmly I believe that natural families are cast. The bond between family members can be stretched but never severed. No matter how much we dislike--even detest--our relatives, there is always a connection, those eerie similarities of expression and thought which pop out like moles in a game machine. We have an obligation to protect family members; ultimately, when all else fails, it is our blood which sustains us.

To Megan, a proper family is a husband, wife, and children. Her views come from – or at least are reinforced -- by her strong Mormon beliefs. If the natural family does not fit this “Ozzie and Harriet”/“Leave It to Beaver”/“I Remember Mama” mold, a new family must be created through adoption. This is the pattern God established for families.

Children adopted by Mormon parents are sealed for eternity to their adoptive parents through a temple ceremony. The LDS church discourages adoptees from searching for their natural families. Church Handbook of Instructions, 2006.)  Despite this teaching and her adoptive parents disapproval, Megan searched for me for over ten years.

The Church encourages its members to prepare a family history – in the case of adoption – it is the adopted family’s history although, according to Megan, they may also research their birth family if moved to do so. Genealogy is rooted in the Church’s requirement that its members baptize their deceased forebears in order to pave their way to a higher place after death. Genealogy has nothing to do with learning one's genetic heritage.

I am an inconvenient appendage -- a line on a genealogy chart that does not connote lineage.

Megan tells me that her adoption was part of God's plan for her although (thank goodness) she doesn’t go as far as Rosie O’Donnell to assert that God put her in the wrong woman’s tummy.

Although our quarrels over adoption have resulted in periods of silence, we have had a continuing line of communication through her four children. Early in our reunion, I asked Megan if I could send the children presents for their birthdays and Christmas to which she agreed. Over the years, I selected small items, often books or videos which I or the three daughters I raised had enjoyed as children. Occasionally I sent more expensive  items-–a scooter, a camera-–the price of which might exceed her family’s budget. When the older children reached 13, I sent checks on their birthdays, $5 for every year of age. I always signed the cards which accompanied the gifts "Jane," never "Grandma" not wishing to usurp Megan's adoptive mother's role. Megan participated in the giving, advising me on what her children would like or telling me their sizes when clothing seemed in order. Megan often sent emails thanking me. On rare occasions the children sent thank you notes.

This week Megan sent me the following email.

“Hi Jane,
Hope your summer's been fine. Aaron's birthday is coming up in a few weeks, and I would like to ask you not to send anything for it. We've always really enjoyed your thoughtful presents, and really appreciated them, but at times I've felt a bit uncomfortable about them. I wasn't really sure how to deal with it, but I've decided just to take the direct approach and ask you to stop.

I'm sorry. I don't mean to offend you. Thanks.

Megan”

Aaron, Megan’s youngest child is almost ten and I have been sending him gifts since he was born.

I replay conversations and actions over the past several months but can only guess at what precipitated Megan’s email.

I debate what action to take. Ignore her, end our relationship, or ask her what’s behind her decision. If I received a similar letter from one of my raised daughters, I would call her immediately. We are family.

It’s different with Megan. In the eyes of the LDS Church and the law we’re not family. Although painful, perhaps it’s best if I let it go. If she wants to extinguish this cord between us, so be it. We will still be connected: She was cast from my body.

What will her children think if I don’t send them presents? I was planning to send Aaron, who loves history, Charles Dickens’ “A Child’s History of England.” He won’t miss it but he may miss knowing that I thought about him. And even if the children are not sentimental about gifts, a teenager can always use cash. Will Megan tell them it was she who stopped the presents?

And So It Goes...Wedding Woes

I’ve been trying to turn off all things adoption, but it’s impossible. I’ve noticed that I can go for weeks without thinking about my estranged daughter, and then, wham! She’s living in my head rent-free and I can’t evict her.

My husband and I attended a family event over the weekend. We rarely see his family so naturally everyone was catching up on events. An in-law I’m close to asked if I had heard from my daughter and I replied no, but did I tell her I now have two “imaginary” grandchildren? I hadn’t. And this woman said what she says every time, “That’s not right. She came to you.”

It’s not right, but that’s how it is, as readers of this blog know all too well. The last time I saw or heard from my daughter was her wedding day, Memorial Day weekend three years ago. I didn’t want to go, but my inner circle of advisors said I must. The wedding was in North Carolina (her mother and I are in NJ). I met my daughter’s mother for the first time the evening before the wedding (we had been in reunion for over five years); it was a very awkward, very public introduction. My daughter made sure I kept my distance; I had less than fifteen minutes face time with her, as I expected. I wasn’t invited to the rehearsal dinner, she wouldn’t allow me to do a reading during the ceremony. I wasn’t included in any of the professional photographer’s family photos. I was just another guest. My husband, my sister, niece and I were seated at a table of the groom’s mother’s friends; I was on the other side of the room away from my daughter’s relatives, of which there were very few.

From what my sister has told me, my daughter was outraged that I stole her thunder on the most important day of her life. My status as the fairytale birthmother was the focus of the day, not the bride. My sister tried to tell her niece that I was on my best behavior, people came to us, I didn’t flit about the room bragging if I wasn’t for me, there’d be no wedding, as she insisted I did. People—her uncle, elderly second cousins--came to me; they shook my hand warmly and told me how glad they were that I was there.

I took away two things from that long afternoon and evening. The first was a brief but surreal conversation I had with an adoptive mother, a dear friend of my daughter’s mother, and the following encounter. My niece and I were in the ladies’ room and an attractive young woman turned to me and said, “I just wanted to tell you how great it is that you’re here. I’m an adoptee, and my mother wants nothing to do with me.” Of course, my heart sank. I knew, I KNEW, that I was just hours away from being cut out of my daughter’s life, and yet I had on my shiny happy birthmother face. I told this woman what we all know too well—reality is messy, reunions are complicated. I told her to give her mother time, try to be patient…the same things people have told me. She also mentioned her husband was also an adoptee but after seeing what she went through, had no desire to search for his birthmother. I told her that was fine, that was his right.

Later in the evening I found myself on the terrace with this young woman and her husband. He immediately started to tell me all the reasons he didn’t need to search for his first mother, and I listened and assured him his feelings were valid and allowed. As his speech wound down, I noticed he was in tears. I wonder if he’s changed his mind about searching.

When I arrived safely home two days later, I turned to my husband and said I felt as though I deserved an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy for my performance, and he agreed.

And so it goes.

Kinning. To which family?

Ahh, no guys, "kinning," according to the big Scandinavian academic who came up with the word, means the process by which an adopted person becomes part of the adoptive family....

It has nothing to do with the original, first, birth family. Quite the opposite. In fact, if you had been listening to the folks talking at the Second International Conference on Adoption and Culture at the University of Pittsburgh last fall (2007) you correctly would assume that the adopted person became so totally integrated into the new family that the old family...shucks, hardly matters at all. The adoptee point of view--about how maybe adoption is not that great--was relegated to the creative sessions...since we did not have academic papers to present.

By the time I heard the "kinning" paper presented, I knew what was coming.

Of course, I remember the time that my daughter Jane told me how she knew she was home: when my husband told her that her footfall on the stairway was just like mine. Heavy. She told me not long ago that she had been criticized for years...Jane, can't you just walk quieter?

Well, um, no she couldn't. It was an inherited thing.

There may have been more mothers at the Pitt conference, but Carol Schaefer, Mary Anne Cohen and Shelia Ganz and I were the only ones that I'm aware of who attended. Although Carol and I read at the opening session, which was good, Shelia and Mary Anne read at the late night and very poorly attended session for poetry and other original contributions. It was an academic conference, and our contributions were...not in the mainstream of what this conference was about. I was so glad to have the company of other birth mothers (along with Marley, my favorite bastardette), especially at the conference dinner.

However, I did have some nice interactions with several adoptees who seemed glad to have us there. Mostly, it felt like a conference of adoptive-mother academics who were hell-bent to "prove" that the original culture did not matter. But Marianne Novy, the adoptee academic at Pitt who was the main organizer, did invite Emily Prager to speak. And Emily raises hackles in some adoption families (and among those I know) because she did immerse her Chinese child as much as possible in the Chinese culture when they were living in the states, and then moved to Shanghai, where she and Lulu live now. Emily's book, WuHu Diary, is an interesting read. It's about taking her daughter back to China when she was five to see if they could track down her birth mother, or at least more information. They could not.

As a side note, Emily spent a part of her own youth in China with her father, who was a military attache there. And he is a close friend of mine, so I've known Emily since long before she adopted. Lulu, he says, the little girl in question (Emily kept the Chinese name she had been given) intends to come back to the states when she is older. She is just going into high school in Shanghai this fall. As for Lulu, it is almost certain that she will never be able to connect to her first family. She was left on a bridge near a police station, with a note from her birth mother, as I recall from the book.

But if I mention Emily...to another friend who also has a Chinese daughter...she sees red and does not contain her disdain. Which is what happened when I simply said I was going to be away the weekend of the conference, and that Emily was speaking.

This is not to say that these parents aren't good parents, they are; or that the girls who were adopted here are certainly better off than if they were languishing in a Chinese orphanage; or that adoptees do not form strong lifelong bonds with their new families, the only ones they grow up knowing.

But how one views or reacts to the nuances of "adoption and culture" is skewed by one's frame of reference. Absolument.

A Happy Reunion Story in the News

Mondays always bring a lot of adoption/conception related news from the weekend because there is always a lot of adoption news these days. The brightest story is that of Reese Hoffa, the world champion shot putter who didn't medal in Beijing at the Olympics on Friday, but whose story wins a medal from me.

Given up for adoption when he was four (and he and an older brother played with fire and burned their house down), he was adopted at five, but unfortunately separated from his brother, also placed for adoption. When Reese was 23, and at college, he decided to look for his other mother, and found her quickly on through an adoption website (which one, we don't know) that his mother had posted on two weeks earlier. His mother, on video, says of their separation, "It's always there, you never go on and be happy." Yep, that's exactly what she says. She also is able to tell Reese that he wasn't given up because his playing with fire wasn't the reason he was placed for adoption.

His adoptive mother turns out to be a peach, and though she admits she was somewhat apprehensive, and jealous, she wanted him to "have the answers he wanted." The reunion was seven years ago; his first mother had already found his older brother. Both mothers come off well in this story, and one is left with the impression that this reunion, seven years ago, has a happy ending.

Check out the story at:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/26182939#26182939

Reunions are so fraught! Birth mothers who long for reunion want to pop those kids right back into our families, but the adoptees are thinking: not so fast--I've got this whole other family that I'm a part of now. This was certainly true with my daughter--Lordy, a couple of months after we got together, I did what a lot of clueless mothers do: have a "reunion" gathering of sorts where relatives came by the house. Of course, they were curious. I'm sure she felt like an elephant in the circus.

Fortunately the day was saved by my husband--not her father--who a lot of these relatives had never met either, as we had gotten married earlier that year in New York, and all this was happening back in Michigan, where I'm from. So most of the relatives hadn't met Tony either. He kept Jane company on the couch, and made her feel safe and less of an exhibit.

Would I do the same thing again today? Nope. I'd let her be introduced to people bit by bit. It would have been enough to meet me, and my immediate family that time.

When I read the last section of Birthmark (a letter to my daughter whom I have not yet found) at the Pitt conference last fall, about my family all waiting and praying for her, the room was very quiet. I thought, wow, I hit a nerve.

I'll say, as the room was probably three-quarters filled with adoptive mothers for whom the idea of another family "waiting" for "their" child was anathema. I remember watching one large woman...later I would listen to her describe the practice she called "kinning," by which an adoptee becomes kin to the adoptive family.

One adoptive mother did speak to me after I read. She said, you know, we feel that the child was "meant" for us...that probably...I don't remember how she finished the sentence because we both knew what she meant. Like, yeah, it's hard for us to be behind the idea that we had a child that was "meant" for another family. It makes us seem as if we are breeders, like livestock.

--lorraine

One last note today. If you live in New York, take two minutes and make a call to Sheldon Silver's office in Albany and ask that he bring the Adoptee Rights Bill to the floor for a vote. Say you are calling in support of Bill A2277. It's very simple. You'll be asked for your address, but you don't need to explain why you are calling. The number is 518-455-3791, courtesy of Joyce Bahr of Unsealed Initiative of the New York Statewide Adoption Reform.

http://www.unsealedinitiative.org/

How are they gonna know in Albany that adopted people want/need/deserve their original birth certificates, with no restrictions, unless we let them know?

Both Parties Reach for Center on Abortion Debate

I'm sure you've been following this issue throughout the primary season and beyond. I've said many times that in an ideal world, any woman with a desire to bear and raise a child who has the financial and emotional means to do so should be able to do so as Mother Nature intended. In the 21st century, unplanned/unwanted pregnancies should be as extinct as the dodo bird, making the issue of abotion moot.

But we don't live in an ideal world; sometimes abortion may be the best alternative for a woman facing a crisis pregnancy. And yet in the first decade of the 21st century, when single celebrity moms have made out of wedlock births fashionable, we're at risk of losing that choice. I'm particularly confused about this paragraph from the following AP article I found on Yahoo this morning:

Democrats, meanwhile, had it both ways in revising their party platform ahead of this month's nominating convention in Denver. Platform-writers said the party "unequivocally" supports legalized abortion, a stronger phrase than the 2004 platform contained. But they also bolstered the section on reducing the need for abortions. The version awaiting approval in Denver says the party "strongly supports access to comprehensive affordable family planning services and age-appropriate sex education." It says the party "strongly supports a woman's decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre- and postnatal health care, parenting skills, income support and caring adoption programs."

I'm in 95% agreement with this statement, but will someone please define "caring adoption programs"? Have any of us had the good fortune to experience a caring adoption program?! We've said throughout the ages that if men were the ones bearing children, the rules would be different. Would they ever.
--Linda

Whew Linda...Lorraine here...you got that right when you point out the careful phrasing "caring adoption program." Caring for whom? Let's see, I assume they want to imply for the birth mother, but gee..exactly what are they talking about? An open adoption that has no teeth of law behind it to force the openness?

When I relinquished I argued at length with my social worker once I found out the insane policy, ie, the real mother will now drop dead and never return...of course, open adoptions changed all that (up to a point, as we unhappily all know), but at the time, my "caring" adoption counselor told me that if I insisted that I someday be able to meet my daughter, or find out what happened, she could not help me...so she passed me the Kleenex and that was that.

Abortion itself is such a tricky issue for adoptees, because ... many of them are aware that they were almost or might have been aborted. My daughter was pro-choice but this was not an issue we discussed at great length. And of course having read Birthmark she was well aware that she might have been aborted. I'd love to hear how adoptees who read this post feel about abortion. It always has to be a "what if" issue...right?

--lorraine

Reaching Those Women in the Closet

I wish I had the magic words that could unlock the hearts and minds of those women who reject the idea of their child coming back!

Though my pregnancy was certainly unplanned, and I admit that I tried to have an abortion in 1966, everything changed for me when my daughter was born. Everything. Giving her up was the worst/hardest thing I have ever done in my life, and I will spend the rest of my life accepting that. So I can't figure these women out.

Several years ago I read about a type of personality in the New York Times that is able to put aside, or internalize, bad things that happened to them--the total opposite of "let it all hang out," and there was some thought that this might be psychologically healthy--perhaps even healthier--than keeping the hurt alive. Well, all that is fine, but when you have a child, no matter what, you end up with a certain amount of responsibility to that child. Even if you are unable to have a relationship--because of the constant pain that resurfaces--you owe that individual at least as much information as you can give, and one face to face meeting at the very least.

The best understanding I can have of these women is that the birth and relinquishment was so painful that they can not deal with having it resurface, as it all does during a reunion. Oh, it does. During that time of initial reunion it feels as if the scabs are all ripped off the grief and you're back to where you were when it happened--but at least with the knowledge that you are able to know your child. Which is the relief. I used to look forward to my daughter's visits (which might be the entire summer) but she had a myriad of psychological problems, many relating to her epilepsy, that drew me and the rest of my immediate family into her vortex. Consequently, when she left there was always tremendous relief, and guilt over feeling the relief. I've hated to admit this, but it's true.

Yet despite any difficulties...

The need for the vast majority of adoptees and their first mothers to reunite was considered by the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) nearly three decades ago. After holding numerous hearings on the issue around the country, the agency included these words in a proposed Model Adoption Act in 1980:

“There can be no legally protected interest in keeping one’s identity secret from one’s biological offspring; parents and child are considered co-owners of the information regarding the event of birth….The birth parents’ interest in reputation is not alone deserving of constitutional protection.”

While some provisions of the act were promulgated, the recently formed National Council for Adoption (and, FYI, for closed adoptions) led the fight to keep this out the bill. According to E. Wayne Carp in Family Matters, HEW received more than 3,000 comments from the public, 82 percent of which opposed the model act entirely. Ninety percent of the adoptive parents who responded objected to the open-records provision. I'm going to project that if the bill came up today, adoptive parents would not mount this kind of opposition, because a Cornell University survey of more than a thousand adoptive parents found that the majority of them (80 percent) supported reunion. Or at least, giving their children the tools to effect it--that is, the information of their birth.

When the bill passed, the open records provision was rewritten "to protect the privacy of the birth parents."

Every woman who surrenders a child deserves our understanding, but...how do we reach those who reject a reunion? Maybe just by getting more of good reunion stories out there. The biggest hurdle for many is likely to be that they never told their new families, and how are they going to spill the beans? The husband/family is certainly going to feel as if they were lied to for all these years. Just as adoptees who were not told and find out when they are older feel betrayed. Lied to.

And on the other side, there are adoptees who reunite and then walk away, leaving the mother bereft and feeling worse than before the reunion.

Adoption is always painful. We are always making the best of a sad situation.

In Adoptee's Search, Loss and Grief Collide

Double Header Day:

Folks, I've twice lost everything I have written and so I'm a little nuts...so as lightening strikes overhead I'm going to try one more time because it's important to get our voices heard when adoption reunion stories make news. Today's New York Times (8/11/08) has a story about an adoptee, Mark Cellura, who searched and found that his twin, seemingly an identical sibling, had died in 1987. Reporter Sarah Kershaw does a good job of highlighting the necessity of this man's search, and the long slog it is taking to change laws to give adoptees their birth rights. For us, the only really sorry note in the story is that Mark's mother has not responded to a letter from his intrepid searcher, Pam Slayton. (However, there is one adoptee mentioned in the story who has happily reunited, so all first mothers don't look like--jerks.

I know adopted people are afraid of rejection, but is it really any easier if it's done through a third party? Adopted people should make contact themselves, have the courage to make a phone call. Just by the mere fact of birth, they are entitled by the laws of nature one meeting, one day of answers, all truths revealed, nothing held back. This is the story of their lives. I know some of these women still say no, but I'll go out on a limb here and predict that the total reunion-rejection rate is probably lower than when the contact is made through a third person, via letter. The only exception I can feel good about is when a confidential searcher, as in some states, is also a birth mother, and is able to allay the fears of women deep in the closet.

See "In Adoptee's Search, Loss and Grief Collide" at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/11/nyregion/11twins.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin

So, let's use today's Times story to storm our version of the Bastille: Write to the Times (Letters@nytimes.com) and email a copy of the letter to your legislators, all of them: Your state senator and assemblyman, as well as your congressman and senator in Washington. Unless you let them know what you want, they're not going to know. Urge them to get behind a clean bill--one that gives adoptees the rights that should be theirs as a matter of course. Read about the good New York bill at: http://www.unsealedinitiative.org/

You don't have to be brilliant, you just have to voice your opinion. The more letters the Times gets, the more ink we will get in the paper. You do have to remember to include your name, address, and phone number. Be brief, but be quick. Allow yourself to get angry! Me, I'm angry at all those women in the closet. I'd like to pull them out by the short hairs and give them 40 whacks. But how do we reach them? Aye, that is the question. How do we reach them, how do we change their minds and open their hearts? Through my high school grapevine, I know of one woman from Sacred Heart High School in Dearborn, Michigan who apparently is not curious, and never looked back. How do I reach her?

Dunno.

But remember, Well-behaved women seldom make history.

Baby Farming Hits a Bump in the Road

A messy story from India, where the baby-farm industry flourishes. In brief:

Japanese parents buy an ovum and rent the womb of a poor woman, but alas, the couple divorces before the birth. The natural mother, who provided egg and incubation for money, does not want the burden of raising the child, which is understandable, as we assume that she only took on this life-changing job because she is poor. Baby incubation is not a job middle-class or upper class women take on. Now the Japanese father is willing to take the child, but the Indian law says that only couples can adopt the baby...not a single parent, and there is some problem with the baby leaving India. So while this is sorted out, the baby languishes in a Jaipur hospital.
(read full story at: http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080060225
(Once I figure out how to do a link, I will!)

While this sounds shocking, something similar happened here in the USA a few years back and the whole sorry story was in O magazine. In that case, the surrogate mother--whose eggs were fertilized with man's sperm--had twins and again, due to divorce, neither parent who ordered up the babies wanted them. When they were born, the divorced couple simply turned their back on the surrogate mother. Wouldn't pick up the kids, answer her phone calls, and had temporarily disppeared since they had moved. The surrogate mother, ahem, the real mother, was raising the twins while this was being sorted out. (I tried to find this story on the O website to no avail, it ran about five years ago. If anyone can find it, please do.)

What to do? We humans are so cavalier about baby-farming--it's all about "I want" and "I can pay" that we do not consider the eventual outcome and impact on the children being created. Their needs are seen as secondary, not that important. Love will solve everything, right? Wrong.

Who out there doesn't know, or know of, some woman who has had a baby with an anonymous sperm donor? When one showed up at the AAC conference in Atlanta a few years ago, with the cute baby following her around--she should have been shunned rather than been on the program, where she was largely unchallenged as she told her story.

If we cared enough about the future needs of these children, there would be no anonymous sperm donating--anywhere; if we cared enough, surrogate mothers could not be paid for their eggs, or their wombs available for filthy lucre; if we cared enough, frozen embryos would not be passed around like so many jelly beans; if we cared enough, poor nations would not be exporting babies as a commodity contributing to their GNP; if we cared enough, there would never be another closed adoption anywhere, and open-adoption contracts would have the force of law behind them; if we cared enough, all adopted people, and sperm-donor babies, would be able to access their birth records--with all names--tomorrow.

But we do not care enough. Because the tools to manipulate life are there, a generation of baby boomers and X-geners use them casually, indifferently, without any real thought to the eventual lives they are manipulating. Historically, humans have always foisted atrocities upon each other, but this is the first time it is being done in the name of "love."

As for the baby above, we can only hope that the real father gets to take his baby home to Japan.

Lorraine

Watch Your Tongue. Sometimes.

It's hard not to think about language when writing about adoption from our vantage point --because it feels as if we are assaulted constantly by admonitions to watch our tongue, in an effort to not offend someone, aka adoptive parents. I have a friend, an adoptive mother, who is offended when I refer to my daughter's adoptive parents as my daughter's adoptive parents. (Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, as long as the person gets the drift.) She has, on two occasions, corrected me, and on a third, my husband, because obviously, she finds it offensive to use the word "adoptive" before "parents" when referring to adoptive parents. I've said nothing, but internally seethe.

I don't refer to her child as her adopted child, or make the distinction (except with those in this inner circle of hell we inhabit) when I talk about her. But that's what is so infernally frustrating about life at our end: we are continually asked to be deferential, when as far as I can tell, adoptive parents feel no such compunction.

Shortly after my daughter committed suicide, my husband Tony was at a Christmas party (which I did not attend) and a close friend, who had known my daughter for over twenty years, was asking Tony about Jane, and me...and simply referred to "Lorraine's daughter." An adoptive mother whom I don't know well was in that circle of three, and the second time Genie referred to my "daughter" the adoptive mother corrected Genie and said, "birth daughter."

My husband was irritated, but of course, said nothing. Impolite to point out? Right. But I do feel like asking her one day, how her adopted daughter is.... Why do I think she won't be happy? Guess we won't be good friends any time soon.

While that was irritating, sometimes spontaneous language that isn't "correct" feels just right. At one point during my daughter's wake a woman approached me and asked: Are you Jane's biological mother? She said it without hostility or emphasis, and I answered in kind: Yes. She was with a small group of people who turned out to be Jane's friends from Toastmaster's, and they seemed all delighted to meet me. They woman told me that Jane had talked about me often, in obviously a good way, to judge from their enthusiasm at talking to me.

In that moment, being Jane's "biological" mother was just fine--in fact, it was better than having this woman know the proper language. On that occasion, I preferred "biological" to "birth." When you deconstruct the word, "birth" gives off the vibe of being there only for the birth; biological says it all, clinical and machinistic though it can sound in a different situation. It's all in the context.

I try not to be overly sensitive, but sometimes you just can't help feeling that people on the other side of the adoption equation need to get a grip on reality, and be more sensitive our our feelings. How hard would it have been for the two adoptive mothers quoted above to simply hold their tongues? They can refer for me as "birth" mother or !@#!!* mother not in my presence, but when my husband or I are there, please refrain from feeling you have to put me in my place. I--or my husband--are really not going to forget that--Oh yeah, that's the daughter I gave up for adoption.

But what all this fuss over language does is acknowledge the enormity of the bond between mother/parent and child. If that biological/genetic/blood bond meant nothing, there wouldn't be this tug-of-war over language. I'm willing to be sensitive to adoptive families' feelings, and certainly those of adopted people, and consciously try not to offend them, but it would be nice if the favor were returned once in a while.

Lorraine

On Bulletin Board and Refrigerator Mantras

Lorraine’s old bumper sticker, “Adopted People Are Not Allowed Ancestry Because It Might Upset Somebody, "sounds a lot like the “daily affirmation” affixed to my desk. I read it in a novel, Sister Mine by Tawni O’Dell, in May 2007. The novel itself wasn’t memorable, but it stuck in my mind for this line, which I have handwritten on a 3” x 3” yellow Post-It Note: “The only way to be absolutely sure an adoption is safe is to make sure the biological mother is dead.” Since I’m at the computer every day, I read it several times a day. And it certainly seems to hold true, doesn’t it? To us, it seems absurd, the stuff of fiction, yet there’s Tom Junot (previous blog entry), writing about us crazy natural mothers who dare to want to have relationships with our adult children!

I’m sitting here shaking my head, thinking about how far we’ve come from the dark ages of the closed adoption system, yet there’s so much more work that needs to be done. How can we assure adoptive parents that we’re not going to show up after twenty or thirty years and usurp the adoptive parents’ roles? And why do we have to do the reassuring in the first place?! We’re just relieved and thankful to know our kids were loved and well cared for. Yes, the tears for lost years and what might have been eventually follow, but there’s no way around it, it comes with the territory, we need to grieve. And our children need to be allowed to grieve too. I’ve said this to Lorraine countless times: in an ideal world, women who wanted to bear children and who have the financial and emotional means to do to so would; and unplanned/unwanted pregnancies would be eradicated like polio. But we don’t live in an ideal world.

I have a magnet on my refrigerator that says “Donate Life.” I’ve seen the same magnet/sticker on a locker in the doctors’ lounge on Grey’s Anatomy. It was a gift when I signed an organ donor card a couple of years ago, but now it’s a daily reminder of how I and my fellow birthmother sisterhood gave the ultimate gift—the gift of life! And this—the stigma that still follows us in the 21st century, the unjustifiable fear and loathing from adoptive parents, the children who won’t forgive us for giving them away—is our thanks. Do you know—or perhaps you are—a birthmother who was welcomed with open arms by her child’s adoptive family, one where the adoptive mother isn’t scared to death of you, isn’t intimidated by you because her child resembles you and not her? If so, please tell me what it’s like. Dear reader, I’m not angry, I’m just very, very frustrated. I was the found party in my reunion dynamic, I didn’t seek; it took me about 18 months to recover from losing my daughter a second time. There are two boys--a 2-1/2 year old and a ten month old, who don’t know they have a Grandida and haven’t received the gifts she sent because their mother doesn’t acknowledge the women’s existence. I have no explanation other than this one offered by my sister, who my daughter will contact when she needs information, “She already has a mother. She doesn’t need another.” This just wasn’t what a signed up for. Or was it?

The Things That Take You Back

Ah well, sometimes you come face to face with the devil. As I did last night at a party on Shelter Island. I heard someone introduce someone as "Tom Junod" and immediately the wretched thing he "allegedly" did a number of years ago to the late Carole Anderson came roaring in. Carole, as some of you remember, was a leader in our adoption reform and a vice president of Concerned United Birthparents (CUB). While Junod was considering adopting, he wrote a piece for Esquire or GQ about all of us crazy natural mothers who go looking for our children, and egads, sometimes finding them and reuniting, having a relationship!

Carole told me she spent quite a bit of time with him, tried to make him aware and sensitive...as long as he agreed not to include in his story her personal saga--that although she had reunited with her son, he had not yet told his adoptive parents. He was an adult at the time, married with kids. Yet he couldn't bring himself to tell his adoptive parents.

When I hear about the "kinning" (a word I heard a the Pitt Conference last fall, there was much talk about how the adopted person becomes one with the new family, never mind the old) that goes on between people who adopt and their children, I can not help but think about the lack of honesty regarding the adoption process that still goes on between many an adoptee and many an adopter, even in our supposedly enlightened era when...it is not supposed to be that way.

On my bulletin board in front of my I have an old bumper sticker that says: Adopted People Are Not Allowed Ancestry Because It Might Upset Somebody. Now I suspect that initially the sentiment was to counteract the idea of the firstmoms in the closet, but it can also be read the other way, now can't it? Adoptees are not allowed to speak of that relationship...that will hurt the adopters' feelings.

I digress. When Tom Junod's story came out--I've been trying to find it on the web without success, help anybody?--it put Carole in a precarious position with her son as well as made birthmothers who simply don't walk away look like loons. Though she was devastated, Carole, a lawyer who worked in Des Moines, considered legal action but ultimately decided against it. I remember a long, long conversation we had about the story. To add insult to injury, the piece was one of the finalists (all of which get a certain amount of publicity, I know because I was a finalist once) for one of the big prizes in magazine journalism, the National Magazine Award. There's a big lunch at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the winners are listed in the New York Times, the editor and the writer go home that day very happy with the bragging rights that come with winning. Before the winners were announced, I wrote an outraged letter to the head of the organization, ccd. the editor in chief of Esquire (who is still there, incidentally) but to no avail. I received no response. At least I let a few people know that he had gone back on his word. As least Mr. Junod did not win that year. Shortly afterward I heard that he and his wife adopted. Hmm, I wonder how open their adoption is?

So...last night on a crowded deck, ice cubes clinking against the plastic tumblers, I hear his name, and BAM! I'm right there, looking to see who he is, and he's chatting it up with other journalists/producers I know. At some point in the evening, we caught each other's eyes they way eyes do, but that was it. Fortunately, the party was big enough that I did not have to meet him. I think I might have at least said: I was a friend of Carole Anderson, and see his reaction.

I am not railing here against journalism or journalists because I've been a newspaper reporter or a journalist, and an editor, most of my life. It's just that when you promise someone you will not include certain information, that's it. If you are an honorable person, you do not go back on your word--no matter how much pressure the editor gives you, or how much better you think the story will be if you do.

Lord, the simplest things take you back. I think that the mothers who really put the children out of their minds, who really do find a way to exit the stage, are better off than we are, but then--they must be the cruel ones, who do not meet their children when the children come calling.

Greetings and Welcome

I first contacted Lorraine back in 1979 or 1980, after reading her My Turn column in Newsweek. I had relinquished my daughter to adoption in 1976, and Birthmark was a lifesaver. Wow! Someone else just like me! I sent her a letter care of Newsweek, and it miraculously made its way to her. I still have her response, a form letter with a handwritten note (in fountain pen!) at the bottom. The form letter ended with “Whenever I get depressed, I remind myself of a quote of Lincoln’s I read some time ago: Let us have faith that right makes right,” which was followed by “Linda—Don’t be so negative about the possibility that someday you might meet your child—your daughter is too young for you to start looking…I wrote it [Birthmark] to let people know how we feel and to let us all know we are not alone…”

Two decades later, I reconnected with Lorraine after my reunion with my daughter started to head south for the second or third time. I asked her how I could see the glass as have full rather than half empty, and she responded “Well, you don’t.” Since that initial cry for help, Lorraine and I have supported one another through our relationships with our daughters and beyond, and have vented against the adoption industry—from modern day maternity homes to crawling into a cave for most of November (National Adoption Month) to the monumental, frustrating task of granting adoptees to right to their original birth certificates. Regardless of the 10,001 reasons we chose adoption, our journeys led us to the same place—we’re childless mothers.

Since we reconnected four or five years ago, Lorraine and I exchange e-mails almost daily. Happily, it’s not all adoption, all the time, just when it’s in our face, such as when a celebrity somehow sails through the bureaucracy and has a camera crew covering their third world adoption (we’re keeping a tally), or how we can’t seem to sit down and watch a TV show—from Grey’s Anatomy to CSI—without having a [usually deranged or drug addiced, rarely a broken hearted all-American girl-next-door] birthmother storyline, or when a movie like Juno is a blow for pro-choice and reproductive rights.

When we’re not raging against the system, we watch and recommend movies, TV shows, discuss the NY Times and weekly magazine articles. I turned her on to Amy Winehouse (regardless of her personal problems, she rocks). And we both love to cook (but I hate to clean up) and are really, really good at it; we share and compare recipes all the time.

No doubt you’re just like us. You rant and rave, cry on your child’s birthday or the anniversary of the day you signed the papers that said you’re no longer your child’s mother. And once in a great while, you may even manage to find a silver lining in this mess called adoption. Feel free to chime in, have your say. There’s strength in numbers as you know. Help right make right. And cross your fingers that some TV executive will be surfing the Internet and will have the brilliant idea to finally give Lorraine and me the TV show we were destined to host.