Having a Baby Today; and a new book about identity when adopted

photo by Ken Robbins
We've skated in the past over this generation of young women choosing not to have children until OMG it's too late....well, today, two books reviewed in the New York Times Style section caught my eye: Rattled! a memoir by Christine Coppa is about a young woman who got pregnant at 26 and decided to have the baby, even though daddy split; the other, In Her Own Sweet Time: Unexpected Adventures in Finding, Love, Commitment and Motherhood by Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is the story of the author, now 39, who is considering insemination unless Mr. Right shows up on her beach blanket this summer. Don't know if she is considering insemination by someone who the child might someday be able to know. Here's the link to the Times. Perhaps we could send her a copy of Lethal Secrets: The Psychology of Donor Istemination, Problems and Solutions by Annette Baran and Reuben Pannor, long time adoption-reform advocates.

You probably won't have any trouble deciding which author we at Birth Mother, First Mother Forum would prefer to have over for tea or a rum and tonic.

And from New Jersey, Linda has alerted us to a new book by a fellow Jerseyan, Ann Bauer: The Sound of Hope about her quest to find her original parents and identity.

And while we are feeling frisky and cranky today: check out what just popped up after I hit the publish post, View Blog:
Shall we barf now or later?

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FirstMother Husbands: How they handle the news of an earlier child

Photo by Ken Robbins

How do the husbands of first/birth mothers handle the news of learning their lovers and wives have relinquished a child for adoption? What, if any role, do they play in whatever relationship occurs with the "lost" child of the birth mother they are married to? Should first mothers tell their husbands about the child? Here are the experiences of we three FirstMothers:

LINDA: I met my husband, Ken, when my daughter was 21 months old, and I told him about her very early in our relationship. He wasn't freaked out, it never bothered him, and he accepted my status fully, except when her birthday arrived every fall and everything stopped for my "national day of mourning." He always said it had nothing to do with him, so he'd just step aside and let me deal with it.

Ken answered the phone the day the adoption agency contacted me; he knew exactly what it was about, thanked God the phone call finally arrived, and was thrilled for me. He also admitted just last night that he was thankful that we would finally come together on something that separated us...he always felt like an outsider, excluded, whenever my sisters and I would talk about my daughter in hushed tones.

My daughter and I exchanged letters and photos immediately; when her letter arrived I asked Ken to open it, look at the photos, and tell me what he thought. "Oh, she's definitely your daughter," he reported. When he met her for the first time at her home in the South, about four months into our reunion, he confirmed she had my temperament, and loved her very much. He still does. Throughout our reunion ups and downs he would have preferred I hadn't been so hard-nosed, but he understood why I was--there was more to deal with than just my daughter; he never said anything because it wasn't his affair.

Ken told me he could see the troubled relationship coming. He described me as out of control, as though I was on speed, trying to cram 23 years into two; "everyone" but me knew it was overwhelming. He wanted to be the knight in shining armor, wished things were different, that things would turn around.

I asked him what was the best part of the five years my daughter was in our life and he replied having her in our home, having her here. She came to us, it meant a lot to him. The worst part is now, not having her in our life, but he knows it's something he can't control, and he won't voice an opinion. He knows he could call her today and they'd have a great conversation, but he won't because of how it would affect me. As we were discussing this last night he kept saying, "She is your daughter. I love her. It's the not knowing that tears you apart. When I met her I thought, how could you make me miss this for so many years?"

Ken and my daughter's parents are about the same age, i.e., a decade or so older than me. When I told him there are many husbands and significant others who aren't as open minded as he is when it comes to their wives' past, he just couldn't comprehend men rejecting their wives' children because another man is their father. Ken confessed, "If it ever bothered me, I got over it once I became a part of things, I embraced it, welcomed it. It was a joyous occasion. The black cloud left, and then the sun came out, and then the sun went away [the past four years without contact from my daughter]. But today, seeing the pictures [coincidentally, my daughter emailed us photos of my grandsons the same day I interviewed him for this article], I see a rainbow."

JANE: My husband, Jay, and I began dating when I was in my first year of law school, the year after Megan was born and surrendered. Jay went into the Army at the beginning of my second year. He had leave over Christmas and we went to Reno to visit his sister and her family. He asked me to marry him and we were married in Virginia City, Nevada on December 31, 1968. The evening before our wedding I told him about Megan. Other than a few people who knew me when I was pregnant I had not told and did not tell anyone else about her other than my obstetrician until our reunion in 1997. One reason --I have to admit--that I told Jay was that I read in Ann Landers (please don't laugh) women should always tell husbands about previous childbirths.

A week later he returned to his Army base in El Paso, Texas and I returned to law school in Eugene, Oregon. We did not talk about Megan for many years. He did try to bring her up several times but I did not want to talk about her to him or anybody else.

Several weeks after Megan contacted me in November, 1997, I told Jay we had connected and he was very pleased. He has been welcoming to her, her children, and her husband.

Although I've heard of women who were afraid to tell their husbands about their lost child, I have never met any birthmothers whose husband rejected them. Au contraire, every birthmother I've known who has married has had a supportive husband. Interestingly, about 20 percent of birthmothers marry the birthfather. I really think the outraged husband who rejects his wife when he finds out about her sin, a la Angel Claire of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Ubervilles, is a myth.

LORRAINE: I've been married twice (the first one within two years of relinquishing my daughter) and both husbands have been entirely supportive. I told Husband Number One when he asked me to marry him. No problem; we did not, however, share this with his parents. When I met Husband Number Two, Tony, it was a little more than a year after my memoir, Birthmark, was published and when he asked what my book was about...the truth was out. When he barely reacted, I was naturally surprised. Later I found out he (who had one daughter in college, a son in high school from his previous marriage) had only been meeting and dating women my age (35 and up) who were desperate to have a child and his first reaction was: Great, she's already had a child, she won't be having baby hunger, worrying about her biological clock, I wonder if she will go on a date with me.

Tony and I have been together since then--1981--and he had a lot to do with my decision to search for my daughter when she was fifteen. He saw no reason why it was sacrosanct that I wait until she was older. After I found her, she lived with us off and on for several months at a time beginning when she was in high school, he became a kind of step parent to her. Jane liked and respected him. Though I have not been active in the adoption reform movement for long periods of time, Tony has always been supportive whenever I have. He understands this is so much a part of me that to stop it would be like trying to turn me into someone else.

Our advice from FirstMotherForum (and reaffirming advice columnist advice): If you have not yet told your partner, and if you have a loving relationship, it is unlikely to be harmed by letting go of this secret. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will be to tell, because then it will seem as if you have been lying by omission, something Late Discovery Adoptees know about. And once the truth is out, your relationship is likely to strengthen because now you are sharing this very deep part of you. And there will not be any difficult moments with your partner and other children, should the phone ring one day and someone says: I was born in City X on such-and-such a date...."

Learning About One's Birth Family at the Kitchen Table

My husband's son and his family are visiting and last night as we sat around the dinner table, my husband, Tony, told stories of his mischievous youth to his grandson, who is ten-going-on-eleven.

There was the story about being found out playing with kids in houses under construction. His mother happened to drive by and catch him hanging from second-story rafters. She used a yard-stick on his behind afterward and grounded him for two weeks. (Corporal punishment! I can imagine that's how that would be interpreted--because, yes it technically is--by a social worker, but that sounds so much worse than the story in context.) Earlier in the day, the grandson mentioned to me and Tony that he was related to Franklin D. Roosevelt on his mother's side, a fact we had not known. Later in the evening, Tony and his son were reading side by side, and their common love of history and lifetime learning was evident, while grandson Dylan watched a science show on television.

I remember how pleased I was when my eleven-year-old granddaughter mentioned that she was determined to learn French when she could take a language--rather than Spanish. I don't think there was any way she knew then that I was a Francophile pretty much from the age of reason. She's seventeen now, and called the other day to say that next year she would go to France with her fourth year French class. And by now she does know, yes, I am a lifelong Francophile. Her prom pictures show her wearing long white gloves, just like the ones I wore to the prom, while the other girls in the picture have forgone the gloves. Yes! I said, she's my granddaughter all right! Jane has written before about hearing Megan, her daughter who was adopted, talk about how different she was from her sisters...while they all sat there in the Birkenstocks.

Though I never met her, I know that my father's mother was well educated in Poland, and came to this country at a young woman by herself--a rather daring feat. Here she was a bit of a rabble-rouser as she wrote letters to the newspaper in her small town in Pennsylvania (though I'm not sure which town the newspaper was in--Jenners, or Boswell, or an even larger town farther away) and for extra money (my grandparents were very poor, with six kids) made bathtub moonshine she sold for 50 cents a bottle. When she was caught, my grandfather took the rap and spent a night in jail. Cool grandma, I thought, but...handed down from a social worker that probably would have been translated into: Criminal activity--even imprisonment--in your family.

What does all this have to do with the resolution--A Right to Human Identity--that Jane wrote about in Wednesday's post, (6/16/09) and the author (Rev. Mark Diebel) of the resolution commented on? Just this: if we are not adopted, we learn a great deal about who we are from our ancestors and people who are genetically related to us in the daily course of our lives. Denying anyone the right to know whatever is possible to know about him or herself is so grievously wrong that the mind boggles at even trying to explain why. It simply is.

I'm bringing up Rev. Diebel's comments here because readers might otherwise miss them:

...the real point of the resolution is to assert that a person has a right to their history...in the case of birth it means knowing the identities of the parties involved. In the old times that meant parents. Today it means donors, surrogate mothers...commissiong parents...first mothers and fathers.

The means for passing on this information must be examined. I certainly hope that the resolution in the Episcopal Church can help put the discussion of this important subject in another forum.

The EP has no pull in the legislature. Statements like this serve to indicate how a group of people are coming to think. It has an indirect value (we hope!)--Mark Diebel

We need more adoptees making noise like this. We need more adoptees demanding their birth identities. We need change in our lifetimes. Act up and make it happen! --lorraine

A Right to Human Identity doesn't go far enough

The Albany diocese of the Episcopalian Church recently passed a resolution "A Right to Human Identity" urging the New York state legislature to enact a law enabling adoptees “to secure current information regarding their historical heritage, medical history, and genetic derivation without the necessity of court action.” Our friend and adoptee Episcopalian priest Mark Diebel of East Greenbush, New York wrote the resolution, and it will be taken up for consideration by the Church’s General Convention in July.

While we strongly support the right of adopted persons to have this information, we at FirstMother Forum have doubts about the mechanism for achieving this result. Information gathered years earlier and filtered through the eyes of a social worker often leads to misinformation.

Two years after I surrendered my daughter Megan for adoption in 1966, I married and my husband and I have raised three daughters. Over the years we have given them information about their heritage, medical history, and genetics through dinner conversations, get togethers with relatives, and the like. “Your great-grandfather came cross country on a train all by himself when he was five; my cousin played the piano; this used to belong to my mother; I remember when I was a little girl….”

That’s how Megan, my surrendered daughter, should have gotten her information, from me and her father. That’s why we at FirstMother Forum wholeheartedly support the right of adopted persons to obtain their original birth certificate which has the name of their biological mother, and often their father.

Megan, however, first learned about her historical heritage, medical history, and genetic derivation in 1986, not from family folklore or direct experience but through a redacted version of a report prepared by a social worker 20 years earlier based on a couple of relatively brief meetings. There were bound to be errors. Here’s an example:

The social worker asked me about my parents and siblings. I told her my younger brother had dropped out of high school, smoked pot, and protested the war in Vietnam. When Megan got the report from the agency 20 years later, she read that she had an uncle with metal health problems. We didn’t meet until 1997. So for 11 years she believed that there was mental illness in my family which might be hereditary. As for my brother, he is still a hippie today, but his is also an excellent father to four sons and runs his own business selling South American imports at Seattle’s Pike Street Market.

Besides being inaccurate, Megan obtained personal information about someone, my brother, who had nothing to do with her. My raised daughters were not entitled to this information about his youth, although if they had shown interest, I would have shared it with them in the context of the times, when many were smoking marijuana, dropping out of school and protesting the war.

Social worker notes may contain comments like "the mother very much wants to place her child” or “the mother does not want to parent her child.” We were much like the condemned man walking to the gallows. The time for tears, for protestations had passed. We signed our surrender papers as stoically as General Robert Lee signed the surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. We would not outwardly resist the inevitable even though our bodies were screaming “don’t do this.” The social worker wrote what she observed but what she observed was a façade. An adoptee reading these remarks years later might well believe that his mother had no feelings for him and decide not to search.

A couple of other comments about the inherent unreliability of case reports: Information about the adoptee’s birthfather likely comes from the birthmother and thus is further filtered. The picture of the mother in agency reports is fixed in time. The pregnant 17 year old, frozen with guilt, unable to express her feelings, is far different from the confident successful woman the adoptee is likely to meet years later.

The availability of material from the adoption agency file can derail legislation allowing adoptees to receive their original birth certificates. If adoptees want only historical, medical and genetic information, the adoption industry argues, the redacted file is sufficient and adoptees don't need to search for their birthparents. As birthmothers, we want adopted persons to search because we know there are thousands of women waiting hopefully for their calls.

On a positive note: The resolution adds a respected voice to those asserting the right of adoptees to have information about themselves and the injustice of denying it to them. Media coverage of the resolution at the General Convention in Anaheim will bring to the fore once again how millions of Americans are denied the fundamental right of knowing their identity. And just perhaps, the legislatures in New York, California, and the other 42 states which have refused to end this discrimination against adopted persons will finally get it.

Here is the resolution in its entirety:

A Right to Human Identity

RESOLVED, that the Diocese of Albany adopt the following statement: Personal history is a fundamental human right and knowledge of one's entire parentage should be assumed as part of a person's natural property. Be it further
RESOLVED that the Diocese of Albany adopt the following statement: That the NY State legislature be urged to establish procedures that would enable adoptees [upon reaching legal age] to secure current information regarding their historical heritage, medical history, and genetic derivation without the necessity of court action. Be it further
RESOLVED, that the Diocese of Albany propose the two above resolutions to the next General Convention (July 8-17, in Anaheim) with the second resolution written so as to cover all states.

More Madonna News; Child Trafficking in Asia

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Madonna's bid to adopt a girl from Malawi, Chifundo Mercy James, has been approved by the highest court in that country according to several news sources. The papers also say that while "her family" (ie, maternal relatives, her mother died in childbirth) is for the adoption, her father, who has never seen the girl, also according to these sources, is against it. From Mirah Riben's blog, Family Preservation Advocacy, we took this statement:

We are delighted to report that Malawi's Supreme Court has overturned an earlier ruling denying a petition by Madonna to adopt Chifundo "Mercy" James, and has granted a full adoption. According to the New York Times, Chief Justice Lovemore Munlo, in reviewing the lower court's ruling, said that the first decision was a narrow interpretation based on old laws and that "in this global village a man can have more than one place at which he resides." We agree. Moreover, in our increasingly inter-connected world, a child should not be viewed as the sole responsibility of his country of birth.

--from the press release of ACT for Adoption, a Rye, NY, based organization of adoption attorneys with a Harvard connection through the proponent of all-adoption-all-the-time Prof. Elizabeth Bartholet of Harvard.

Read Mirah's blog, Family Preservation Advocacy, for more on the skinny.

And while we are on the subject of international adoption, read about child trafficking in Asia from Australian radio where babies are brought in fishing boats, packed in styrofoam fish crates with air holes so they don't suffocate. This is from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

First world demand to adopt very young babies is driving a new twist in people smuggling, particularly in Asia.

One of Australia's senior law officers, John Pascoe, says more and more, smugglers are trading in pregnant women - the perfect incubators - for access to their newborns. Australia's Chief Federal Magistrate John Pascoe, Australia's Chief Federal Magistrate (analogous to our Attorney General) says that among the measures needed to fight the insidious trade should be a new system of children's rights. To illustrate the shift in focus for the smugglers, Mr. Pascoe describes a 2003 case that happened off Indonesia--where the babies were found in fish crates.

JOHN PASCOE: Sadly this is a crime which is very hidden, trafficking generally is very much a hidden crime, but there are increasing numbers of reports, there are fortunately an increasing number of arrests in this area, so we believe that it's increasing and that the numbers are probably in the thousands rather than in tens or hundreds.

Interviewer LINDA MOTTRAM: So why is this growing? Is it just because the trafficking progress is evolving? The traffickers are finding new and better ways, if you like, to move the people they want to move or are there other factors there?

JOHN PASCOE: We believe that trafficking is always motivated by economics, but also there is significant demand for children for adoption apart from anything else. I believe that most newly born children end up in some sort of illegal adoption process. There's huge demand from first world countries for very young children for adoption purposes.

LINDA MOTTRAM: Well, what can be done about this? There are international conventions on the rights and protection of children but clearly that's inadequate?

JOHN PASCOE: Yes, I think we need to encourage countries throughout the Asia Pacific region to become signatories to the various conventions that protect the rights of the child. and that is not universal across the region. And I am also putting forward that I think we need to move to a system that actually gives a child rights which crystallise the moment it is born and those rights should include a right to know its nationality, to know who its parents are and generally to be properly cared for.

And you know what? Every time a celebrity such a Madonna adopts, three little girls somewhere in the world decide they are going to do their bit for children...and adopt.

Though I thought the weekend would be adoption free, it was not. Someone I know was hosting a friend who adopted two children from Brazil, though from the story I heard, the adoptive mother found the siblings in separate orphanages or homes and reunited them when she adopted; a good thing, but was there no one in Brazil who could have done the same? And then I heard of someone I knew vaguely who had two children...and since the man telling us the story knew she was not able to have children (as he had once been her boyfriend), he asked the father who had had run into at his office...how this was possible? Surrogate mothers. I think it's more prevalent than we know. This is a story from the publishing world; Jane tells the same about the legal community, and Linda is always meeting adoptive parents by...accident?

Navigating between Two Mothers: Biological and Adoptive, Part 2

Photo by Ken Robbins

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

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

Copyright, Lorraine Dusky 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jane would not be caught in that trap.

Navigating between Two Mothers: Biological and Adoptive

copyright (c) Lorraine Dusky 2009

From Hole in My Heart, an as yet unfinished memoir, a chapter called Two Mothers:

(For those new to the blog, Jane is my daughter who I relinquished for adoption and reunited with when she was fifteen; Ann is her adoptive mother, Gary her adoptive father, Tony is my husband who is not Jane's biological father. The time frame is the early Eighties. Tony and I are living on the eastern end of Long Island, as we still do today. The Schmidts, Jane's adoptive parents, live in Madison, Wisconsin.)

Life seemed to be going on relatively smoothly two years after I found Jane. We’d had a few lengthy visits, and the initial intensity had worn off.

Some.

I was always thrilled when she was coming, emotionally fraught and fragile when she was here, and exhausted when she left. I tried to act as if I were absorbing everything, no sweat, but I guess I was not doing such a great job for Tony always noticed how internally fried I was, especially as she left. It was as if I were holding all the emotions inside and was only able to breathe once she got on the plane back to Wisconsin. Even if we did much the same things as I did when I visited my mother—lunches, shopping, movies—the emotional quotient was vastly different.

Be that as it may, Jane and I were settling into the relationship we would have over the next quarter of a century. We started out before email. We wrote infrequent letters, especially at the beginning. She was a teenager with severe epilepsy, and frankly, I did not know what to write about my life to her. Telling her what I was doing on a day to day basis seemed silly.

So I phoned now and then, but not too often, she was living with her parents, calling often would have been too intrusive. I kept it to holidays, and just now and then. It was awkward to call, and I never picked up the phone except on a holiday without second guessing myself. Should I? Is it okay to call today? How long has it been since I phoned? Don't get me wrong, everyone was always friendly, and if she were not home, she always called back within a day. Yet I felt like an intruder. Say I called when Jane and her mom were having an argument. “Jane, your birth mother is on the phone,” would not be a welcome interruption. In any case, all of us together—Jane, Ann and me—stumbled along without any major problems for several years.

Gary and Ann had come out to visit us without Jane for a few days, and that went smoothly—as smoothly as one could expect for two couples who did not have much more in common other than a daughter. It is unlikely we would have been more than nodding acquaintances had we had lived in the same town. We showed the Schmidts the beach and the lighthouse at Montauk—Jane and her mom both collected lighthouse memorabilia—and we cooked in, we ate out, we watched television, we talked about Jane. As I’ve said, they are salt-of-the-earth types, and they sincerely hoped that my becoming a part of Jane’s life would give her ego a much-needed boost. It was clear to everyone that her self-esteem hovered ten points below zero.

Perhaps for that reason, Ann, who is a private person, agreed to be a part of joint memoir that would include her side of the story. As Birthmark ends before I was reunited with Jane, I tentatively thought of calling the new book Happy Ending. But we always ran into some roadblock. Such as some new crisis from Jane, not a particularly “happy” one. Besides, I was of two minds about the project. A part of me wanted to finish the story; another part wanted to move on once whatever good might come out of the reunion in regards to adoption reform was over and done. I wanted to be more than the crazy lady who was always dragging around a soapbox with Adoption Reform written on it.

Yet while Ann was willing to let me be a part of Jane’s life, her defensive distrust of me could not quite be hidden behind surface friendliness. It wasn't just me, as Jane’s other mother, it was what I represented: a New York City career woman. And to top that, a writer—not something more understandable, more normal, more like her or Jane's father, an insurance adjuster. If only I’d been something else, I could feel her thinking, a teacher, a nurse, a dental assistant—even a dentist. Her attitude was not conveyed in words, at least not to me; it was a pursed lip here, a flinty look there. We were—arty East Coast types. Our politics might be the same, but we were likely to have a suspect moral code—and besides, Look what I had done. The unthinkable. Given away a child. Gotten pregnant outside of marriage in the first place.

They would call to make arrangements regarding Jane, and we might be entertaining friends with dinner, and the background merriment did not make a good impression. Though I tried—Don’t answer the phone now!—Tony simply could not be broken of the habit of answering the phone no matter when it rang. Obviously, we were party people one could barely trust, while they were good sober citizens who didn’t entertain debauching drunken friends in their home Saturday nights. Twice they had called when we had people over! All this was disdainfully reported to Jane, who reported it to us. We could never forget that she, Ann, held the morally superior position.

I anxiously wanted the Schmidts to approve of me and not see me as the enemy. But like Jane, I always felt as if I were walking on a fence and with any wrong step I would topple off. And of course, they had all the power. Not only were they her legal parents, they were Mom and Dad, and while Jane was a minor, their disapproval could cut off all contact with her. To counter Ann’s opprobrium, I emphasized my Midwestern working-class roots, dropping Michigan into the conversation whenever possible. I didn’t go as far as going to Sunday Mass with them when they visited, but I considered it. Tony, a lukewarm Methodist by birth, a Buddhist at heart, never would have gone. We stayed home when they went to church.

to be continued...

JUNO COMES TO REALITY TV: 16 AND PREGNANT PREMIERES ON MTV

Spotted in this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly:

Series Debut

16 and Pregnant

This reality series, which focuses on a different teen each week, features cute, Juno-esque graphics. But unlike that fluffy comedy, 16 spotlights the struggles girls face — and what they're forced to give up — when having a child. It's a must-watch for sexually active teens everywhere. B+ —Tim Stack

Wanting to know more, I found this on the MTV Website:

16 and Pregnant is an hour-long documentary series focusing on the controversial subject of teen pregnancy. Each episode follows a 5-7 month period in the life of a teenager as she navigates the bumpy terrain of adolescence, growing pains, rebellion, and coming of age; all while dealing with being pregnant.

Each story offers a unique look into the wide variety of challenges pregnant teens face: marriage, adoption, religion, gossip, finances, rumors among the community, graduating high school, getting (or losing) a job. Faced with incredibly adult decisions, these girls are forced to sacrifice their teenage years and their high school experiences. But there is an optimism among them; they have the dedication to make their lives work, and to do as they see fit to provide the best for their babies.

I’ve watched the trailer twice and it’s like watching a plane crash or train wreck--sensationalistic, edited for drama and ratings, not reality, and of course there's a camera in everyone's face so how much is reality versus acting? The cast members in the trailer have twangy accents and one guy (I’m guessing a grandfather-to-be) was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, baseball cap, and sported a very long mullet...in other words, perpetuating the stereotype of an unwed young mother as trash. And yes, adoption is mentioned.

I wonder if the series sought out pregnant teens in affluent zip codes; probably not, because those teens have the means and access to pregnancy alternatives; besides, I doubt they (or their parents) would subject themselves to such public scrutiny.

I’m as uneasy about this series as I was the ABC series "Who's Your Daddy?” where a young woman had to guess which man was her birthfather à la The Bachelor (there were even red roses, it was...just creepy and unseemly. Thank God just the one show was aired). My gut reaction upon hearing of the program was shame on MTV, and what were those young girls and their families thinking, or not thinking?

An old friend of mine, an adoptive mother who facilitated my adoption support group for a decade, posted this comment on her facebook page last Sunday:

"[She] has observed a pregnant young girl (high school student?) in church who asks for God's care for her baby and herself. Today I congratulated her and her mother for planning to keep the baby -- told her that was the best for all! Tears came into the mother's eyes -- so I hugged her twice!”

I responded with, “Yay!...Yay Yay! If I were with you right now I’d squeeze you so hard I’d probably break a rib.”

I know many will disagree that it’s best for a 16-year-old mother to be a mother herself, but as we’ve discussed often and strongly here at FMF, relinquishment and its consequences are even more difficult.

I'm sure the news media will have plenty to say about 16 and Pregnant tomorrow, when the show premieres. So should we.--Linda

Lorraine here, adding that I think the show might actually do some good and get kids to be more careful sexually, i.e, use birth control. New mom Bristol Palin is now an advocate for teenager not having kids--of course, her answer is abstinence alone, which is unrealistic. Adoption for some of teen moms is going to happen; I won't be offended or put off if relinquishing a child for adoption is presented on the MTV show as the terrible terrible gut-wrenching, life changing event that it is. Will I watch? Probably check in and see how it hits me. And I might as well add, I thought even the incredibly tacky tacky Who's Your Daddy raised awareness of the need to end ALL RECORDS-CLOSED adoptions. A Good Thing. My original piece seems not to be available for free from Newsday, where it was originally published, but here is a thoughtful look at the whole situation that includes some of what I wrote by an adoptee writing in the UK.

Wednesday evening update: Here's what the NY Times says about the program.

The Adoption Contract vis a vis Slavery, Continued

As the movement in America (both Canada and the US) is towards open records for adoptees, running a magazine story (see previous post) that is counter to that--while edgy and gives a great cover line (I Don't Want to Meet my Birth Mother!)--is also running a story that goes against the tide. The people I've encountered who are not interested in meeting their biological families are typically somewhat antagonistic towards adopted people having the right to their original birth certificates. They are not quite neutral; they seem to find the concept somewhat threatening.

Just as would running a story about the Phyllis Schlafly ladies, or the women in Boston who organized against women getting the vote (they did!) or...running an interview with a well-cared for house slave (quite possibly the offspring of the "Massa" of the house) who might voice an opinion against emancipation (and having to find housing and sustenance) would have been counterproductive to the opposite movement, the More editor's (Lesley Jane Seymour's) aggrandizing comment in a recent issue (June, 2009) about her choice to run a tough piece about why someone would not want to meet her first mother is counterproductive to adoption reform.

Sure, everyone has a right to an opinion, and so does an editor have a right to make the choice to run an story that goes against the tide. But then, so do I have the right to point out that one has to go back to slavery to find another contract between two parties that so controls the identity of a third party for that person's entire life, as per yesterday's post. Since I have been long aware that the slavery analogy seems overblown, and thus likely to weaken one's argument, that is how I make the case when writing to legislators, that is...that you have to go back to slavery to find a contract that has power over a third party who was never asked if said contract was in their best interests for their entire lifetime. If anyone has any examples of other contracts with the same kinds of binders over third parties, please let us know at First Mother Forum.

And no, adopters are not "slave owners," and as I made abundantly clear in yesterday's post, there are huge differences between the conditions of slavery and the conditions of being an adoptee. But closed-adoption contracts that have no opt-out clause for identity disclosure of the adopted individual upon reaching the age of reason have aspects of "owning" another person, no matter how you deconstruct it.

Yes, I do mean, the age of reason. Say, eight or twelve. I am talking about letting an individual choose the right to own the information of her or his birth, no restrictions, and as soon as they are old enough to ask for it. There exists no valid reason why that right ought to be limited or restricted until one is old enough to vote. Yet as we are all aware, under the current rules, that is, the current contract adoptive parents make with the state, adopted individuals do not have the legal right to make their own decisions about this most personal of matters. The state has taken this choice away from them.

Yes, the pressures of some adoptive families upon the adopted to be "loyal" to them will cloud feelings and decisions about whether to ask for that information. This would be especially true of younger individuals. But a different contract would at least offer a choice. And adoptive parents, knowing that such would be the case, would eventually come to see the curiosity about one's roots as a natural part of growing up. It would not, and should not, be seen as a sign of disloyalty to the adoptive family.

One time when my daughter spoke of having made her adoptive parents aware from a very young age that she wanted to search for me, she added that her adopted older brother's not wanting to know was a "gift" to her adoptive parents. Later he did want to know, but as far as I am aware, was unsuccessful in his search to learn his original identity. He is now in his late forties, still bound by a contract in which he had no say-so.

Of course in cases where there is no information available...there is no information available. And no contract, or emancipation, or Adoptees Bill of Rights, can fix that.
--lorraine

PS: Incidentally, to those who asked, More magazine's Lesley Jane Seymour, in the same editor's letter that began this discussion, revealed that she has three children; and her picture indicates she is of the age where her friends who would have gotten pregnant by mistake would most likely have had abortions. So the likelihood of her having birth mothers in her circle is small; adopted mothers, high. To judge by my own experience in the publishing world: VERY high.)

Why Is Adoption Like Slavery?

Lorraine

When adoption reformers such as myself make the connection between adoption and slavery, some people--adoptive parents in particular--get very upset. I can understand their objection. When I made the connection the other day in an earlier post, we received a couple of comments objecting.

After all, adoption is not slave labor, incarceration, and inhumane treatment, though such troubling adoption stories do bubble up now and then--as they do with biological children. But slavery involves the buying and selling of human beings against their will. Slavery treats the slaves as lesser human beings, not entitled to free will. Adoption is not like that, right?

Adoptive Parents: Not a Breed Apart?

Years ago, when I was a young attorney, a woman came to me seeking a divorce from her dull, school principal husband. She planned to leave her equally dull community and move to another city with her lover, an exciting but unemployed artist. She and her husband had three adopted children. I wanted to scream at her, "You promised their mothers that their children would be raised in a stable two-parent home and you're breaking that promise!"

When I surrendered my newborn daughter for adoption six years earlier, I believed that adoptive parents were a breed apart--dedicated, stable, educated, la crème de la crème. After all, adoptive parents spent many years and thousands of dollars to become parents; they were screened by social service agencies and courts. I thought it was ironic that the infertile made the best parents while those of us who could conceive were--at best--only marginally fit to raise our child.

I thought of this a few days ago when I read about James Gumm of Hillsboro, Oregon who shot and killed his two adopted children before killing himself. Newspaper reports did not disclose a motive. Of course, natural parents kill their kids as well. A week before Gumm shot his adopted children, Amanda Jo Stott-Smith threw her two children off a Portland bridge into the Willamette River, killing one of them.

The sad truth is that adoption is a lottery, a game of chance, as John Sayles depicts in Casa de los Babys. Adoptive parents may or may not be June and Ward Cleaver. Like other parents, they may or may not divorce, suffer from alcoholism, become unemployed, or commit murder.

The only guarantee about adoption is that the child will have a different life. If parents want to assure that their child is reared in a safe, loving, nurturing environment, they need to do it themselves.

Our Treacly Stories Do Not Interest More magazine...

Last night as I was going to bed I read in the Editor's Letter in More magazine, the magazine for women over 40, something that woke me up:

"My whole career has been built upon being a contrarian. When other magazine editors ran treacly stories about readers reuniting with their birth mothers, I found a reader who did not want to meet hers--and had her tell her story...."

So, that's what our stories are to Lesley Jane Seymour. Shall we all applaud her contrariness? Oh, her letter was headlined: GET OUT YOUR Handkerchiefs! It's hard not to be sensitive on this issue, but then I wondered: if she had been an editor during the first half of the 19th century, would she have run a story by a slave who was against being emancipated? No more free housing, food, et cetera.

Why not?

Email Ms. Seymour--who has probably never knew anyone who claimed to be a birth/first mother--at more@meredith.com. The magazine did not have a Letters to the Editor page in the June issue, probably a victim of falling ad pages.

Have a good day, you treacly sisters. --lorraine

PS: Wanna bet she loved Juno?

What Rights do First/Birth Mothers Have? Not many in the US

Allowing first/birth mothers access to the names of their children after being adopted is an issue that does not come up in the United States in the battle to give adoptees their original birth certificates. Given the way some legislators act about first mothers--that most of us are all still cowering in the closet and fear contact from our children--a lot of them would keel over if we started lobbying to be included in the legislation.

After all, what rights do we have? We are the poor women who had the babies we couldn't care for, and we ought to thank our lucky stars that someone else came along and took over.

Yet there is enlightenment across the border in Canada. In Ontario as of June 1, first mothers are able to get their children's new names--unless the individual has filed a disclosure veto, and vice versa. Yes, it's true! Here's how the official Canadian website outlines the law:

Adopted adults and birth parents also have the option to protect the privacy of their post-adoption birth information. Adopted adults and birth parents can:

• file a notice of contact preference to specify how they would like to be contacted
  
• file a no contact notice if they do not want to be contacted, but are willing to have their identifying information released
  
• file a disclosure veto if the adoption was finalized before September 1, 2008. This will prevent identifying post-adoption birth information from being released.

As of June 1, approximately 1,100 people--closely divided between adoptees and first parents--had asked that identifying information NOT be released to the other party, according to Canada's premier newspaper, the Globe and Mail. That's less than half a percent of the estimated 250,000 adoptions since 1921 the new law covers. Since this law was hotly contested in Ontario, one assumes that most people became aware of this provision through the many stories in the media. Another 1,400 filed affidavits indicating the identifying information can be released but they wish no contact, or how they might like to be contacted, such as by email. The "no-contact" preference includes a steep penalty if it is violated.

The Canadian law makes me want to stand up and cheer.

While any rights for first mothers are not even whispered as we work for adoptee access to their original identities, it was not always so in the U.S. of A. As one of the old war horses involved in adoption reform for a long time, I remember that back in 1980 when the then U.S. Health and Human Services Department proposed changes in the adoption law, giving first mothers the new names of their children upon reaching adulthood (can't remember if it was 18 or 21) was amazingly enough included. Before the proposed legislation was written, hearings were held all over the country. Florence Fisher, B.J. Lifton, and I were among the many many people who testified at Columbia University to testify for such openness in adoption. Lee Campbell, founder of Concerned United Birthparents, served on the advisory committee (and was the only first mother who was) which wrote the legislation. Here is the wording from that long-forgotten Model Adoption Act:

“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.”

We did have some support in Congress, but we also had a strong foe in the late Senator John Tower of Texas, adoptive father, known drunk and womanizer in DC, as well as the National Council of Adoption. To those who do not know, NCFA is a consortium of adoptive agencies (including Mormon [LDS] and Bethany Christian Services) who have been opposed to openness in adoption from their origin. In fact, NCFA is a direct outgrowth of the movement for open adoptions. The Gladney agency in Texas is a founding member.

Somewhere in my voluminous files I have the original 1980 bill, and when I can fish it out I will post the wording that speaks more directly to first mothers and their rights.

In the meantime, what do First Mother Forum readers think? Adopted people, first mothers, adoptive parents, let us know. --lorraine

Knife in My Heart: On Learning That My Daughter Is Giving Up a Daughter

As I heard that the blog today was a jumble of symbols--while I saw it read clean--I am trying again with the same post. To those of you who read it yesterday, please excuse the confusion...Mercury is still making retrograde mischief.

By Lorraine Dusky (c) 2009

It was Jane’s birthday, 1986. She would be twenty years old. I’d never not been in touch with her on April Fifth since we had been reunited, and despite our falling out, I could not ignore the day. Our day. That was inconceivable. For a first mother, the birthday of one’s relinquished child is reason for a day of quiet mourning, laden with grief that most likely will be internalized. Do we tell co-workers or college roommates why we are blue? A husband why we are snappish? Our other children why we need to be alone? Maybe not. You just go on, and if you are lucky, are able to get by with the knowledge that tomorrow will be another day, the sun will come up just as it did the day before, sunset will happen on schedule, the day will be behind you for another year.

I admit that some years before I found Jane, the day would pass without me consciously noting it, and then, the next day, or the day after that, I’d catch myself, remembering, Oh my god, it was her birthday, how did I forget? Of course I’d feel guilty. Not that I could have sent her flowers or anything. But still.

Because her birthday was so close to Easter and spring vacation from school, we had been able to celebrate together on the actual day, close enough. I’d make a cake, ice it with my mother’s recipe for no-fail butter cream frosting, buy her as many presents as we could afford.

This time—five years after our reunion when she was fifteen--there had been the great divide between us. Though her departure had been stony, I was not going to let her think that I had forgotten her. I phoned.

Her father answered. Jane, he said, Jane was not there, but Gary seemed to be stumbling over his words, not sure what to say even though I was not asking anything complicated. Just tell her I called to wish her a happy birthday, I said. I hope she’ll call me back.

She did, and with that call came the saddest news a first mother can ever hear: She had had a daughter three days earlier, a daughter she was not going to keep. The father—someone she’d met at Burger King, where she had been working again—was pretty much already out of her life. When I called, she had been at the hospital, feeding her baby—I named her Lisa, she said, Lisa Marie—which explained her father’s confusion over what to say. There were no tears from her, just a straight-forward explanation in a voice that was half dead.

There’s not a lot to say about how I felt. Knife in my heart spills out of my hands on the keyboard and I know it is a cliché of the first order, but knife in my heart kind of says it all. The years of sorrow, the buckets of tears, the bottomless guilt, the immense culpability for not having kept her, for not finding—for not making—a way, rained down on me.

Oh god Jane, No, no no, I am thinking. What have I unleashed in the world? A chain of adopted children? Jane and now Lisa and who knows after that? All the guilt that giving up a child infects in one’s life—all this would be hers too?

Knife in my heart.

Over the next few days the story spilled out. When she went back to Wisconsin, she went to work again at Burger King and again worked the last shift. Eventually she got to know someone, an African-American named Oscar who came in often. Oscar paid attention, he became her boyfriend, she got pregnant, they broke up.

Why didn’t you use birth control, I asked.

Because I was going to kill myself before I had the baby, she said.

There’s no possibility of keeping her? I asked.

Let’s not go there, she said.

Wisconsin has something called “open adoption” now Jane, you could be involved in the choosing of the people and even…know who they are, keep track of her, I said. You don't want to go through what I have, I was implying.

Silence.

His mother wants to take the baby to Michigan—someplace called Inkster, she said, ever heard of it?

Inkster! It’s the predominately African-American community right next door to west Dearborn, a few miles away from the motel my parents owned when I was in high school, where I grew up. How coincidental is that? And Great! I’m thinking, then Lisa wouldn’t have to be adopted, Wow, I might be able to visit when I was in Michigan, this is totally amazing! Sounds like a plan, Jane, what do you think?

No way. I’m not even considering it. I’m not going to give her my baby. Not if I can help it. I don’t like the sound of it.

But that might not be such a bad idea, I said…then…then you could someday know where she was, you wouldn’t have to go through what I have…then she would not have to be adopted, I did not say.

There was so much certainty in her voice, so much resignation, she was not asking for advice, not going to hear my words no matter how I pleaded my case. Please other family of Lisa, I was thinking, fight my daughter and keep this baby. Jane will soften in time, she just can’t handle this now, or is she too much her father, will she just walk away because emotionally she can not cope? Please don’t let her do what I did, the times are different now, it doesn’t have to be this way. Or is this some demented way of repeating history, of saying, Well, my mother did it to me, and it wasn't so bad, look I’m fine, and so my daughter will be too? Being adopted isn’t so bad.

More silence.

So do you want me to find out anything about open adoptions for you? I asked. In 1986 there where not yet common, but they were possible. All that it would require is for Jane to ask for one. Wisconsin was even in the forefront of open adoptions.

She would not even hear of it. Nothing I said about open adoptions, about letting the young man’s mother take the girl, reached her. All I could think was that she was determined to repeat history, to end up, as a Park Avenue psychiatrist once told a girl friend of mine he was dating when she got pregnant—You don’t want to end up like Lorraine, do you?

I was an senior editor at Town & Country when he said that, and if you did not know me, and you saw that I had on a good suit and a thrift-shop Gucci scarf, you would have imagined that I was some society girl working until, well, I didn’t any more, because who else would be an editor at Town & Country? Yet he could say: You don't want to end up like Lorraine. You only say that about someone who is pathetic. Someone with a drug habit. Someone in jail. Or someone who has given up a child. I was mortified when I’d heard what he said, but he got it right. You don't want to end up like Lorraine.

And now Jane was. Ending up like Lorraine.