A Birthmother's Fears of Reunion

Unlike Lorraine and Linda, I am a birth mother who can fathom the idea of rejecting our children which I did--before Megan, the daughter I surrendered to adoption, and I connected in 1997. I became pregnant in February, 1966 when I was 23 and living in Fairbanks, Alaska. I had grown up in Chicago and had gone to Alaska in 1960 to attend college thanks to the generosity of my uncle, my deceased father’s older brother who lived there with his wife.

I went to San Francisco in September and Megan was born there in November. She was placed in a foster home and I struggled for a month about what to do. Giving my baby to strangers was wrong but when I tried to visual how to keep my baby, I stared into a blank wall. I finally signed the paper but I told myself our separation would be for only 18 years. I knew that records would be closed but I figured I would go to law school, learn how to beat the system, and find her when she turned 18. By making this promise, I was able to rationalize abandoning my newborn daughter.

While I was in the hospital after Megan was born, an attorney who had been referred by a doctor I had seen who handled private adoptions came to my bedside. The attorney placed babies with Mormon families and knew a Mormon family in Idaho that wanted a baby girl. Idaho and Mormons did not appeal to me and I sent the attorney away.

After I signed the surrender paper at the San Francisco County Social Services Department which served as the adoption agency, the social worker asked me about religious preference, telling me that, while they could not guarantee any religion, my preference would be respected. I had been raised in a liberal Protestant church but I was not religious. I preferred either a non religious family or a liberal Protestant one. However, if it was necessary to give my baby a good home, a Jewish or Catholic family was okay. Remembering the attorney and the Idaho Mormons, I added as an afterthought that that I did not want my daughter to go a family with a non-mainstream religion like Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Seventh Day Adventists. I thought it was unlikely this would happen – after all, I was in ultra-liberal San Francisco. I considered Mormons and the rest as kind of loony. I had known some Mormons in college and they didn’t even drink Coca-cola. One had tricked me into going to a service of the Latter Day Saints (LDS) church by telling me we were going to a meeting which would be beneficial to me. The social worker and I crafted a statement containing my preference for either no religion or a mainstream religion and specifically stating my objection to Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Seventh-Day Adventists. Over the years as I learned more about the LDS Church (its racism and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment), I thought “at least I didn’t let my baby be raised by Mormons.”

I graduated from law school four years later. When 1984 came around, I was living in Salem, Oregon; I had a good job as an administrator for the State of Oregon, was married, and had three more daughters. I decided to put off my search until Megan was 21 telling myself 18 was really too young. While my husband knew that I had placed a baby for adoption, we had not talked about it since the day before our wedding in 1968. My daughters knew nothing about this older sister. In fact the only people close to me besides my husband who knew anything were my now deceased uncle’s widow, a few friends, and of course Megan’s birth father, all of whom lived in Fairbanks, far enough away that I felt secure that my secret would not reach Oregon.

In March of 1987, I came home one evening and my husband told me that my aunt in Fairbanks had called telling him a young girl in Utah or at Brigham Young University, I forget which, was looking for me. My husband had written the girl’s name and phone number on a napkin. I barely looked at the napkin and I did not learn her name for more than ten years. I thought immediately that the caller might be, probably was, my daughter. I refer to her now as my daughter but until we united I always thought of my first born as “the baby.”

I was stunned, terrified. I had heard of adoptees searching but not this young; she was barely 20. I called my aunt reluctantly; I did not want to know anything about this girl in Utah. My aunt told me that she had refused to give the girl my name and phone number. “Did I do the right thing” she asked. “Yes.” I assured her. She said something to the effect that since you have the information, I don’t need to send this. Later I learned that Megan had sent my aunt a letter and I think that’s what my aunt was referring to. At the time, I would have agreed to anything. I wanted to get off the phone. My aunt is a good person but we were not close and I did not like her being involved in my personal life. I was also angry that she had passed along information to my husband instead of waiting until she could talk to me. Since the young woman who called lived in Utah, she was probably a Mormon. I rationalized that it could not be my daughter. It did not occur to me that the social worker might have gone against my wishes.

My husband and I were going out of town for a conference in a few days. I decided not to think about the call and the name on the napkin until we returned and I didn’t. When we came home, I could not find the napkin. My mother-in-law had come to stay with our daughters; she had thrown the napkin away while tidying up. I was relieved.

I feared meeting my birth daughter. She became a ghost, haunting me, ready to strike. For the next few weeks I jumped when the phone rang or someone came to the door. A few months later as I was doing “spring house cleaning,” going through drawers and closets, throwing out the worn, the useless, and the meaningless, I came upon a picture of me taken a few days before Megan was born and the identifying bracelet put on my wrist right after she was born. I had saved these objects for 20 years because it was all that I had of her. I cut them up and threw them away to keep the ghost from returning.

What was I afraid of? Unlike many birthmothers, I was never afraid that people would find out I had sex without being married. I never thought that was wrong. I was afraid of people learning that my life had been out of control, that I had failed myself and my family by getting pregnant, that I was not who I pretended to be: competent, professional, knowledgeable.

My mother died in July of 1988. Death brings to us a need to strengthen the bonds with remaining family members. I began to feel Megan’s absence acutely. My mother never knew about her and never would. I begin thinking about conducting a secret search. I did not think of calling my aunt to ask for the name of the young woman who had called a year and a half earlier. It doesn’t make sense but I had completely blocked out this phone call.

That winter, I came across Florence Fisher’s The Search for Anna Fisher on a table at the library. I snuck to the back of the stacks and read the book in one sitting. It included information about ALMA (Adoptees Liberation Movement Association) which Fisher had founded. I sent in the membership fee and reunion registry information with a note asking that any correspondence be in a plain envelope. Several weeks later I began receiving newsletters with words like adoption, reunion, search spread all over the front page in big letters. I cancelled my membership. Sometime later I received a call inviting me to an ALMA meeting in Salem. I hung up on the caller. I was upset that someone, perhaps someone I knew, a neighbor, a co-worker, a parent at my children’s school, knew my secret.

My aunt, the same aunt, called again. I remember it being in late 1990. She told me a woman was looking for me who said she knew me in college. She gave me the name but it meant nothing. I told her I did not know the woman and asked her not to give the woman my phone number. Again I was terrified. Later I learned that Megan had contacted my aunt in 1991 asking for my number which my aunt refused to give her. That may have been the call that I remember receiving in 1990.

As time went on, I thought more and more about searching. I registered with AOL’s search registry which resulted in a slew of emails from private investigators offering to search for a fee. I thought of writing to the adoption agency in San Francisco but I was afraid my daughters would see the envelope when the agency wrote back. I checked into renting a post office box so that I could keep my correspondence secret and learned that the post office would not rent boxes to people with street addresses.

I can’t explain my thinking because it doesn’t make any sense. On the one hand there was this ghost which if it appeared would change my life for the worse, damaging my relationship with my husband and children, adversely affecting my career, and diminishing my image in the community. I did not want to be seen as a woman who could not manage her life, who at 23 was less rational than a 16 year old in the back seat of a Ford tussling with the high school quarterback. In failing to respond to Megan’s overtures, I did not even consider that I was rejecting her; I deluded myself into thinking that I could excise a part of my life that never should have happened.

On the other hand there was this baby out there somewhere with whom I desperately wanted a relationship in order to restore a missing part of my life. I hid from the ghost and feebly pursued the baby. What I wanted – and needed – was the ability to control the timing and pace of a reunion.

On November 18, 1997, the day after Megan’s 31st birthday my aunt called for the third time and told me my daughter had called and had written again. This was the first time she referred to the caller as “your daughter.” My aunt indicated she was tired of dealing with this woman. I told her I would take care of it and asked her to forward Megan’s letter. Although in retrospect it would be easy to criticize my aunt for not passing along me Megan’s letters or pressing me to contact her. I believe that my aunt meant well. She was trying to protect me. I’m sure she assumed as many do today that I did not want contact. I also think that she had an irrational fear that the story of my pregnancy would be circulated again in Fairbanks which somehow might occur if she cooperated with my daughter. She and my uncle were prominent in Alaska and very concerned about scandal when I became pregnant. Alaska is a dull place for the most part, particularly in winter. The most interesting goings on tend to be the negative, who ran off with who’s husband, who crashed his car while driving drunk, and so on. My aunt was so fearful of possible scandal that she waited until she took a trip to Seattle a few days later to mail Megan’s letter. Apparently she feared someone at the Fairbanks post office would see the envelope and know what was in it.

I could focus on nothing while I waited for Megan’s letter. One minute I wanted to jump off a bridge. The next minute I was euphoric. I knew my life was about to change. While I had read an occasional newspaper article about reunions and The Search for Anna Fisher, I knew little about the search movement or why adoptees searched. I knew nothing about AAC, Origins, Bastard Nation, the local Oregon support group, the International Soundex Reunion Registry, the fight for open records, Lorraine’s memoir Birthmark, Betty Jean Lifton's writings, or any of the other “books." I knew of CUB (Concerned United Birthparents) only through adoptive mother Lucinda Franks’ biased and mean 1993 New Yorker article, “The War for Baby Clausen” about DeBoer case. With work and three daughters I did not have time for morning news shows or daytime talk shows. I barely knew who Phil Donahue was. I prepared to call Megan by watching Secrets and Lies, a 1996 British film about a mother/daughter reunion.

I called Megan on November 24, anticipating the conversation would last less than 15 minutes. It lasted two hours. It was an awkward conversation, however. Megan had a lot of information and misinformation from the adoption agency and I was on the defensive much of time. I learned she was indeed a Mormon to which I expressed my displeasure. I later learned that the social worker had simply written “no Jehovah Witness” on my file. So much for the carefully crafted statement.

Megan told me about her search. In the fall of 1986 when she was 19, she obtained her non-identifying information from the adoption agency. It was so specific that she was able to determine her father's name, where he lived, and my maiden name. She wrote her father. He wrote back (against the wishes of his wife) giving her some information about himself and the name of my aunt who he knew was aware of Megan’s birth. He asked her not to contact him again.

Megan did not tell my aunt who she was, only that she was a young woman in Utah. She believed that if she told my aunt who she was and my aunt told me, I would be less likely to call her. The opposite was true. If I had known who Megan was I would have been more likely to have called because I could not have pretended I did not know who called. Over the years Megan contacted my aunt several more times, keeping her informed of her address in case I should ask for it. My aunt soon realized, if she had not known at the beginning, who this woman was. Several times my aunt told her that I did not want anything to do with her. Learning from some of our readers who have not had contact with their first mothers, I can only imagine how much this must have hurt her.

In the fall of 1997, Megan was living near Chicago where her husband was going to graduate school. He brought home The Joy Luck Club and Tender Mercies as part of a class assignment. These movies about reunion with lost children brought her to tears. Encouraged by some church members, she considered searching again. Although the LDS church discourages searches, it has no formal position against it. Megan prayed to God for guidance. She signed on to alt.adoption, a former newsnet group, and met a birthmother online who encouraged her to search again and be more forceful in her telephone conversations. Megan wrote and called my aunt once more. She also called her father. He was now divorced and agreed to meet her at his home in California where he had moved from Fairbanks several years earlier.

Megan also knew nothing about the search movement. If she had obtained help from a search group, she probably would have been able to find me without going through my aunt. If Megan had contacted me herself I believe I would have responded positively.

I’ve met adoptees who think they can soften the blow on their birthmother by asking a relative (even her husband!) to be a “go between.” A big mistake, I tell them. “Reunion is between you and your mother. Don’t let anyone else, who, for all you know might be your mother’s enemy, get between you.” I suspect that the reason that some confidential intermediaries claim a low reunion rate (fifty percent some assert) is that mothers become angry that a stranger knows their secret. They react negatively and the CI uses that to confirm what the CI believes, that mothers don't want contact. The best practice is for states to give adopted persons their original birth certificates and leave the search to them. Unfortunately this is only possible in six states.

Next: Telling my family, coming out in a full-page newspaper ad for Ballot Measure 58.

Most Birth/First Mothers Want Contact but still the secrecy lingers on

How many mothers reject contact? It's a question that dogs us all involved in adoption reform, because when we lobby for open records for adopted people, we always hear ad nauseum about the first/birth mother in the closet who will drive her car in the river if she is "found out." And we know from our friends in the blogosphere, such as Triona and Ungrateful Little Bastard, that refusal for contact does happen!

It is hard for we first mothers to even imagine turning away--well, I was a searcher mother, so that was never an issue; Linda and Jane were sought by their daughters. So since none of us can even fathom the thought of rejecting our children, we wondered how many first mothers really want to stay in the closet. Who are these women? We were prodded in our quest, we admit, by a call from the Evan B. Donaldson Institute because they are updating their white paper For the Records: Restoring a Legal Right for Adult Adoptees.

A while back we heard from Jacy Boldebuck in Wisconsin where she does searches for the state for adoptees past eighteen, that she gets approximately a 50 percent refusal rate! Is there something in the water in Wisconsin that leads to these kinds of acts of random evil? Is there something they say to the mothers to prevent them from wanting contact? What is going on? From Indiana, I have a report of 70 percent acceptance rate; 30 percent refusal.

I found this hard to believe because it is so wholly off from everything else I have heard from sea to shining sea--as well as what kinds of statistics we can find. While these are anecdotal reports, here's what I've been hearing:

Confidential intermediary Linda Burns (read more at link) from Texas (pictured holding a sign on the right), said that she had done about a thousand searches and "finds" over the years, and in the end, she had no refusals to contact. A few reluctant at first, but in the end, no refusals in the end.

To find out more, I sent out a request on Adoption News Service to confidential intermediaries or anyone who does searches and asked about their refusal rate. The reaction was heart-warming:
from Searchquestamerica: a 92 percent acceptance.
Birth mother Marilyn Waugh in Kansas (where the records have never been sealed) says she does between 400-500 searches a year, and has done them for the past 18 years, and she finds about five women a year (approximately one percent) who do not want contact and refuse information.
Joe Collins, searcher extraordinaire based in New Jersey, says he has done about 2,500 searches and estimates the refusal rate at two percent.
And from Tina Peddie in California comes this response:

I have been an adoption search consultant, like I said, for over 25 yrs.... after being reunited with my son for 26 yrs .... and most of my people..my clients (who many I consider 'friends' as well.... ), ask me to make the initial phone call, esp the adoptees who are petrified to make that initial phone call to their birthmothers - even tho i talk with them at length and encourage them to make the call if they possibly CAN ...but most are too afraid to ... so I do it ... and I do believe that having an understanding, empathetic birthmother on the phone with them DOES HELP THEM, once they get thru the first few minutes ... even tho MOST are very happy to hear that their adult child is wanting contact.

My experience (even if I wasn't a b/mom) still seems to be that the majority DO WANT contact! There are those FEW that might be hesitant at first who it DOES seem to help to have me, another b/mom on the phone to talk with about it, that by the end of the call, are okay and relaxed about it, and perfectly okay to having contact ....

And, as I said, in 25 yrs, I have only had 2 or 3 who never would have contact with their child at ALL - and they all had one or two things in common: they were all ELDERLY (older than the average birthmom being found) ... and tended to be the very religious ones. But mainly ELDERLY, like now in their late 70s or 80s!

It's heartbreaking because I KNOW it doesn't have to be that way ... and the birthmothers do not have to carry around that fear, guilt and shame, that I know is what keeps them apart. They just cannot deal with it. And two of these adoptees are males in their 40s/50s, and they are sad about it, but not angry, hurt yes, and feel sad for their birthmother, that she has to hold this secret still. (But after her death, they both want to seek out their siblings by this mother, and I will help them. I feel they have that right.) And I know that that most likely those siblings will feel badly for their mother, that she had to carry this burden all alone, and that she couldn't share it with her husband or children all those years. Sad.

I know a C.I. who is a birthmother, who does a good job - but I don't know that all do. I don't think they put as much INTO CONTACT as we do - or if they have the same empathy, or keep them on the phone as I do ... just to keep them on the phone, talking, or 'listening' - if a birthmom starts off hesitating, I at least try to keep her on the phone by telling her about the adoptee as much as I can, just to keep her on the phone, and telling her what I know about the adoptee, making the adoptee 'real' to her... and it always turns things around. I just don't think C.I.'s go quite that far. That's prob. why they don't have the same, high 'success rate.'

Thanks for what you are doing!

Take care,

God bless!

Tina

What is so sorrowful are the adoptees who are rejected, when it appears that with the right kind of contact, the closeted birth mother would find the courage to come out into the light, fess up to her spouse, her family, her friends if she chooses to and give the adopted person the sense of completeness that he or she lacks.

CORRECTION: There is more than one woman in New Jersey upset over being contacted by her daughter conceived during a rape. Both have become poster women for birth mother anonymity from their children: Kathleen Hoy Foley, of Chatsworth, who is photographed here, and a woman from Atlantic City, both birthmother wretchedaires, are the two in question. The Atlantic City woman, whose name is not being published in the newspapers (but read comments below--apparently her name is Renee Blackwell) is suing the State of New Jersey's Department of Youth and Family Services for a million dollars for the pain and sorrow caused by being contacted by her daughter. Though she received a letter stating that her daughter was looking for her, she did not respond, and months later, the daughter showed up after allegedly receiving her name from the state. Hmm...just wondering: The daughter could have found the woman's identity through other means...there are successful searchers.

As adoptee-rights advocate Pam Hasegawa has noted in newspaper reports, the woman could have gotten a a restraining order; instead she is suing for a million bucks. My heart aches for her daughter. For both daughters. Children of rape are wholly innocent and not responsible for their parents' actions.

It takes all kinds. What I think about these woman is not suitable for a family newspaper. Er, blog.-lorraine

Adoption and Lying: Adopted Syndrome or not?

Over the weekend I met up with an old friend, a therapist who facilitates groups of parents of troubled children, and while some of them are divorced parents, she mentioned that a fair number of them are adoptive parents. Another friend of ours sent their teenage son for a year to a school for problem kids, and the son reported that many, if not most of the kids there were adopted, or children of divorce. I won't go into the children of divorce issue here, but the statistics of trouble are there, among the adopted:

"The number of Adoptees in the adolescent and young-adult clinics and residential treatment centers is strikingly high. Doctors from the Yale Psychiatric Institute and other hospitals that take very sick adolescents have told me they are discovering that from one-quarter to one-third of their patients are adopted. A great many of these young people are in serious trouble with the law and are drug addicted. The girls show an added history of nymphomania and out-of-wedlock pregnancy, almost as if they were acting out the role of the "whore" mother. In fact, both sexes are experimenting with a series of identities that seem to be related to their fantasies about the biological parents."--Betty Jean Lifton, Lost & Found.

The daughter I surrendered to adoption had a great many emotional problems, but because she also had epilepsy, it was impossible to ferret out what was caused by the social and psychological trauma of being subject to frequent seizures, and what was caused by being relinquished by her natural mother. Yet one aspect of her personality that made it difficult--for both sets of parents, adoptive and (one-half) genetic--to deal with my daughter was her proclivity to lie. Christ, it is even hard to write this because I wanted to type "not tell the truth" because that somehow seemed gentler than come right out and admit how often and how easily Jane made up stories that were not true.

Some adopted people reading this may find it troubling, and so I want to stress right here, that not all adopted people have such a loose relationship with the truth as my daughter Jane did. But her proclivity to make up stories--all right, to lie--is not singular among the adopted population. Yet this facet of her personality made it extremely difficult to have a relationship with her that was not somewhat always on edge, somewhat removed. Because behind most of what she said lay the question: What is the truth? And in the end, her recognition of this perhaps is what finally let to her suicide.

From Hole in My Heart, a memoir of grief, adoption, sorrow and suicide
by Lorraine Dusky
copyright 2009

....honesty was often in short supply when you spoke to Jane. She bent the truth so often when she was asked just about anything it was hard to know what she thought much of the time. When she needed a story to smooth the way, when she needed an easy excuse, out came the lie. If she were twenty minutes late, and a simple explanation, and a quick I’m sorry, I got involved in talking to X, might have led to a mild annoyance, she avoided that with an elaborate fabrication. About someone who stopped her in the street and needed her help doing something that took an hour, or the boss who asked her to stay over time and she couldn’t get to a phone, or the movie that started late because the sound system did not work, or the phone that was out of order, and on and on. Her excuses were sometimes plausible, more often unbelievable, but if you pointed this out to her, she simply denied it and stuck to her story while giving off a defiant attitude: Why don't you believe me?

Was I really going to call the movie theater and find out if the movie had started a half hour late? No. Or check up and see if someone’s phone was out of order and now amazingly working? No. Or track down the old woman who needed her help to cross the street, and then the woman fell, and it took a half hour to get the woman to where she was going? Of course not.

Some of her stories were indeed fantastic. There was the story about her friend in high school with spina bifida who, she said, was sleeping with her doctor. What! I said, how is this possible? How can it even happen? Where do they, umm, tryst?

He comes to her house to see her and he comes to her bedroom.

What? That’s impossible. Doctors don’t make house calls, and her parents would never go along with this. Jane, that just doesn’t make any sense.

It happens when they are not home, she countered with conviction. He stays for forty-five minutes or so. In her bedroom.

Honey, that can’t possibly be true. Doctors do not make house calls anymore. And—

He does so. Really. Why don't you believe me?

Where to begin? You know she must be lying, but after a while, after her ardent insistence, after you have said you don’t believe her but she still persists with this improbable romance, that her teenage friend is sleeping with her doctor, who makes house calls and visits her friend alone, in her bedroom, what really can you say?

You raise your eyebrows in disbelief, you shake your head, you shrug and look away. You drop the subject. But you know. That can not possibly be true. You wonder why she has made up such a ridiculous story.

After hearing numerous falsehoods and obfuscations—too many to recount, too many to remember—I told her the parable about the boy who cried wolf one too many times. We were in my office at home, I was at my desk, she in a leather-and- steel chair from the Sixties that spun around, so she could turn away from me, and spare herself some embarrassment. I told her that I loved her, but that her lying made it hard for people to believe her about anything.

Adoption-rights pioneer B.J. Lifton,[1] an author and therapist, emailed me this about the predilection of some adoptees to have a loose relationship with the truth:

“Since adoptees grow up with falsified birth certificates and secrecy about reality, in their minds there is no border between truth and lying. They have no true narrative, so they can make up anything they want. They are ‘free spirits, not entrapped by roots,’ as a birth cousin suggested to me.”

The subject of adoptee’s difficulty with truth-telling is a loaded one, related to what some call the Adopted Child Syndrome, a name coined by a Long Island, New York psychotherapist[2] who noticed that an unusual number of his clients were adopted. According to David Kirschner, the parents would bring them the children, describe the problem, and then on the way out, turn and say: “ ‘Oh, I don’t remember whether we mentioned it, but Mark is adopted.’ They would immediately add, ‘but that has nothing to do with the problem.’ ” Kirschner writes that when he examined the child, he discovered a rich fantasy life, revealing that indeed being adopted was the problem, or at least a part of it. “The fantasies, reflected in projective personality tests, were usually spun around two sets of parents, one being viewed as the good parents, the other the bad. There were also elaborate themes of loss, abandonment, and rejection; and the child’s behavior problems often included lying, as they felt they had been lied to; stealing, to compensate for the theft of their identity; and truancy or running away, a symbolic effort to find their biologic roots and an environment in which they felt they fit and belonged.” He emphasizes that while this is not true for all adopted people, it does affect a subgroup where the process of forging a clear and healthy sense of self, “an integrated identity that is consistent with reality” goes haywire.

After a while, I did not bother to dispute Jane’s claims about—well, almost about anything. Tony and I took everything she said with a grain of salt. Maybe it was true. Maybe not. Of course this characteristic built a wall around her, and it was one that neither I or her other parents were ever able to climb. Yes, the four of us shared our frustration about Jane’s lack of truth-telling, but nothing any of us said made the slightest difference. The behavior was as automatic as a facial tic.

Yet there were moments when I was sure all pretense was discarded, no fabrications constructed, and that is I what I remember about that pristine afternoon after our Loehmann’s excursion, the late lunch at Pizza Hut, just the two of us with our Pepsis and slices. There were no lies, no fantasy stories, no crazy tangents about anything. Just for that few hours, this mother and daughter. These moments would always be all to rare.

[1] B.J. Lifton is the author of three books about adoption: Twice Born: Memoirs of an Adopted Daughter; (McGraw Hill) 1975; Journey of the Adopted Self (Basic Books) 1994; Lost and Found: The Adoption Experience (Third ed. Univ. of Michigan Press) 2009.

[2] David Kirschner, Ph.D., Adoption: Uncharted Waters (Juneau Press, 2006), Baltimore. Kirschner’s practice led him to notice that many serial killers were adopted, and this controversial connection raises hackles, to say the least, among adoptees and adoptive parents. But Kirshner’s work is diligent and the statistics irrefutable; any list of serial killers includes a hugely disproportionate number of adoptees. He has testified in more than 20 homicide cases in which the accused was an adoptee. When I wrote about his work in an opinion piece in Newsday, I received a threatening and disturbing phone call laden with numerous cuss words around midnight from someone who did not leave his name. I looked behind my back for the next couple of days.

Rowe says she is adopted....What more can this tale reveal?

The story continues to get more bizarro: In an interview with a British paper it states that Debbie Rowe says she is the "adopted daughter of a millionaire couple from Malibu."

She continues to claim that she is the biological mother but Wendy Murphy, feminist lawyer and commentator, writes otherwise:

"Latest claims are that although Rowe gestated Prince and Paris, she used an egg and sperm donor. Rowe denies the claim and says they are HER biological children - but not Jackson’s. It’s an interesting legal dilemma in theory because neither Rowe nor Jackson formally "adopted" the kids, which is the typical way parenthood is established in situations where children are born at the request, but without the genetic material, of mom and dad. But it's a moot point because a court long ago declared Rowe and Jackson the legal parents of Prince and Paris.

The more curious issue is the way Rowe has described her children as a "gift" to Jackson. Most people who give “gifts” don’t demand millions of dollars as a quid pro quo. Oh, and then there’s that quirky problem in law that says you can’t sell your children.

In fact, it’s a felony.

Ironically, however, Rowe has priority seating in the current custody dispute because a few years ago, a judge refused to enforce Rowe's “kids for cash” deal, which means she automatically regained her parental rights – though she got to keep all the money."

sick sick sick

Why is FMF fascinated by this weird tale? Because it is what happens when money outweighs common sense, natural law, reproductive ethics. What of these children? Not only is Jackson's mother 79, she is apparently in failing health. The woman with whom the children have the longest relationship is Grace Rwaramba, who has literally raised the children for more than a decade. The kids have reportedly been asking for her and would probably choose Grace to be their guardian.

The only good that could possibly come out of this would be for tough legislation that would somehow put the brakes on making babies in petrie dishes and then going to Rent-A-Womb for gestation. --lorraine

The Continuing Saga of Debbie Rowe....

The Debbie Rowe/Michael Jackson story continues to change, hour to hour. Last night Rev. Al Sharpton was on the tube talking about how Rowe, the mother of his children, does not deserve to get them because Michael wanted his 79-year-old mother, or 63-year-old Diana Ross to be their guardian, and that Ms. Rowe really is hardly worth considering.

This morning one "legal expert" on one channel was saying that she has almost no chance of getting the two oldest children--her children--while on another the legal expert was announcing that under California law, she has a very good claim indeed. Jackson's spokesman said that the children did not even know she was their mother [so who did they think was?], and dismissed Rowe as if she were no more than the "reproductive agent" that we at Birth Mother, First Mother Forum have in fact been accused of being to the children we surrendered to adoption. How involved Rowe has been in their lives appears to be little, especially after the divorce six or eight years ago. (FMF blogger does not pretend to be a celebrity hound, so that the exact number of years since the divorce escapes us.)

And then this morning, Rowe's lawyer was saying that she had not yet decided whether or not she will sue for custody. We do not know what kind of mother Ms. Rowe has been, or if, as it has been suggested, she is making noise now to get a better stake of Jackson's assets. But what is making us crazy is that some of Jackson's supporters and others are beginning to slime her. Jackson's former and current PR spokesman dismisses her as if she were not related to the children. He did admit that Jackson restricted visitation to the degree that it "irked" her. One legal expert said that her getting the children were "certainly not in their best interests."

Wait a moment--did anybody notice that Jackson's sainted mother is 79? That Diana Ross may not want to be their guardian-mother? Again, we are not saying that Rowe is a saint, but we do know that a child's real mother (and now we do think that Ms. Rowe supplied more than the womb) has a connection to that child that no one else has. Whether she is the right person to raise them we are not going to say, but we take this moment to speak up for her. As a final note: the two children she is the mother of are 12 and 11, and will almost certainly be asked by the judge in the case whom they would prefer to live with. Their preference will not necessarily decide the case, but should have an impact. The third child, Prince Michael, known as Blanket, has a murkier future, to our mind, as no mother is listed anywhere. Ah, the glories of the new reproductive technologies: a child without a mother! And now, no father!

What comes to FMF's mind is a case that involved two children adopted from Russia by a very wealthy couple who lived in the fabled Hamptons in a multimillion dollar house. The adoptive mother had an affair with one of the contractors working one the house and the couple divorced; the father stayed involved, but the mother had day-to-day custody. The father was apparently killed by the contractor...(he is in jail for the murder), and about a year or two later, the mother died of breast cancer.

The children--twins as I recall, a boy and a girl--were left in the guardianship of their English nanny, whom, as the story went in Vanity Fair, did not treat them well. And what did she do when all was said and done? Send the kids--who were 12 or so by then--to separate boarding schools. This sordid story eventually became a Lifetime movie, but FMF has no idea what happened to the kids, who must be in their late teens by now. Very wealthy, but probably very screwed up.

Yet another happy adoption story. Soon, very soon, FMF will leave this story and return to normal. FMF seems to have a case of Jacksonitis, which is quite surprising as we were never huge fans....as we were the wrong age group to be his groupies.

Breaking News on the Jackson kids is not for First Mother Forum

Let me eat my words before anything else: Debbie Rowe, the purported mother of Michael Jackson's two oldest children was announcing that she was going to ask for custody of the two children she bore at the very time we were posting our last blog. She added that she did not think she would get custody of the third child, Prince Michael, or "Blanket," but would make the case that keeping the siblings together would be best for their mental health. So.......we were wrong.

And in a further reassessment of the situation: checking out her picture, she does have that cute upturned nose that the other children have. So.........we were likely to be found wrong.

What can I say? Mea culpa.

I understand Perez Hilton, who does this kind of up-to-the minute blogging, gets very little shuteye during the night. That is not how we first mothers are going to run this little blog that we do for fun? because we certainly are not doing it for profit....

Anyway, good night all. I think I will leave the Jackson journey to other blogs. The Fourth of July is upon us. I've sent my draft of Hole in My Heart to my agent (as of Sunday evening) and am waiting to here what she has to say. And I'm going to enjoy the Fourth with friends. --lorraine

PS: That's me and my granddaughter, who was ten or eleven at the time.

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

Michael Jackson Pals Around With His Kids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death of a Birth Father

Lorraine Dusky (c) copyright 2009

This isn't contiguous in the book, but this answers the question left by the following post: Did my daughter's birth father ever meet her?

January, 1991. A friend from Newsday phoned, and she was not her usual cheerful self. I’d known Judy since we worked together as reporters in Albany—it fact, she had been the friend I’d driven over to see in a daze the evening Brian called and informed me we were a no-go. Now here she was, two decades later telling me Brian had died, probably of a massive heart attack, that’s all she knew. He might have been dead for a day or two before he was found in his bed, she said, he hadn’t shown up for work and she wasn't sure how long it had been before the paper sent someone to check on him.

Oh. That means that he was dead for a couple of days before…. And now it’s too late for Jane.

Jane was back in Wisconsin then, living with her parents.. We were in touch, but not often. I felt no particular urgency about making the call—after all, Brian had been dead for a few days before anyone knew. Did it make any difference when she knew? She was not going to be going to the funeral, and I dreaded calling her with the grim news that she would never meet the father whose DNA she carried. I waited a whole day before I phoned.

Remember my friend, Judy? I began. The one who works at Newsday? She called a day ago to say that Brian died.

Silence.

Probably of a heart attack in his bed, I continued. He hadn’t shown up at work, and the paper sent someone over, eventually.

Then: Why did you wait, why didn’t you call me right away, she asked, accusingly.

You might wonder why the time lapse of a day before I called her mattered—it wasn’t as if I had been on the automatic call list when he died—and if Judy had not been an editor at Newsday, the news would not have gotten to me for quite a while. But from Jane’s perspective, she was, no matter how you slice it, family. And family gets called right away. Family gets the telegram with the news, family doesn’t hear about a death casually, a day late, doesn’t hear, Oh, by the way, did you hear your biological father died? What right had I not to call her the instant I heard? None at all. Why had I controlled access to information that was rightfully hers? Why had I treated her like a child?

I apologized profusely, but the deed was done. She didn’t cry on the phone, but she cried plenty after, she later told me. Now she would never meet the father she never knew, the guy with the large head like hers, someone who shared her love of pub life, the man who made her legitimately Irish, the man with whom she shared half her DNA. Now that opportunity was lost for all time.

He was sixty-two years old. Newsday ran a great photograph of him in a fedora with the obituary. He was still a good-looking guy with an engaging smile that reminded me of Jane.

Some years later when we talked about Brian dying, she said, “I spent two months in mourning, trying to figure out how I felt about him, trying to create some kind of picture of what he was like,” she said. “It kinda pissed me off that he never picked up the phone. He decided I would never know how I was like him. All I wanted was a stinking lunch.” She paused. “He was the loser,” she said, bravado morphing into bitterness.

She spoke of Gary [her adoptive father] being upset that Brian’s death bothered her so. But you can understand his hurt—What was this man to her, anyway? Gary had done all the fathering in her life. He was the one who had to live with Jane’s round-the-clock drama. There is only so much grand opera that the people around someone like Jane can handle before they become saturated. After a while, the tap of empathy runs dry.

Brian’s wife, Bonnie, called me a week later and in a gesture of largess, asked if I would like to go to his apartment and see if there was anything left I would like to take for Jane. She said in going over Brian’s papers, she came across my letter with Jane’s picture, the letter we had composed together, as well as a letter from Jane that I knew nothing about. Did they ever meet, she wanted to know.

No.

That was so like him, she said. He couldn’t handle anything emotional, he just walked away.

Right.

The following Sunday there we were—two unexceptional women having coffee at the Walt Whitman Mall on Long Island, two mothers of Brian’s children. When he was living with me and Kristen [his daughter with Bonnie] he fell asleep with a lit cigarette on the couch, she said. The whole couch burned, the fire department came, it was a disaster.

Oh, I say, thinking, he fell asleep with a lit cigarette because he passed out after one too many, didn’t he? I simply nodded. No need to point out what we were both thinking.

I could not live with him and my daughter, she went on, I didn’t want the whole house to go up in smoke with us in it. That’s why I insisted he move out.

Right. Who wouldn’t?

If he dried out for awhile, it didn’t last, and he went back to drinking.

Uh, huh. I nodded. It must have been one of these times when I called, and he said the timing was off, he could not deal with meeting Jane now.

Bonnie wasn’t bitter, she was just flatly stating the facts about someone we both had loved. And no longer did by the time he died.

What we did not say is that we knew how he needed that drink, depended on it at the end of the day. When you work on a newspaper you become one of a tight little club, membership dependent on being someone who enjoys chasing the truth—especially when it’s hard to get to—and the smack of adrenaline that comes with daily deadline and front-page bylines. When the paper has been put to bed, when the presses are at last running, you hang out together afterward at a nearby saloon, you let off steam, you tell war stories, that’s the way of the world, for your peers understand you like no one else can—not even spouses or lovers unless they too are in the same business. That was Brian through and through, the consummate newspaperman.

I followed her in my car over to his place, turning left, turning right, knowing exactly how weird this was. We ended up in a modest basement apartment in a neighborhood of modest middle-class homes in middle America. Bluish fluorescence from an overhead fixture supplemented the grim February light that managed to sneak in through the small windows, the kind common to ordinary basements everywhere. We kept our coats on. You could tell that without a steady stream of heat the place would be musty, the faded linoleum floor cold. A central room had a space off to the side for a single bed and a closet. The vest-pocket kitchen, if you could call it that, was a small unfinished space where you could make coffee and heat up a can of soup. A small bath with a shower led off the “kitchen.”

This was a not-quite-seedy bachelor’s pad suitable for a young man starting out or an old man winding down. Brian had been a man with a first-class gift for prose, with a good education well grounded in literature, the ability to easily and readily quote poetry, and the Irish gift of blarney. But he had also been someone who loved the bottle too much, and at his death he had been reduced to coming home every night to this cheerless space in somebody else’s house. The apartment was orderly, for Brian was ever the neat Virgo, and consequently there was a place for everything—his considerable wardrobe of blazers, sport coats and ties; a couple hundred LPs by all the jazz greats and then some; a good-sized pile of books that included, most surprisingly, Wild Spenders, a breezy novel that had the singular distinction of being written by a friend of mine, stuck there like a foreigner among his jazz biographies, art books, World War II histories and Hemingway/Faulkner/Steinbeck novels, the hip writers of his generation. I felt weird being there with his wife, yet I was also glad to have this shared moment to partake in some sort of remembrance with someone else who knew him, someone else who knew the best of him. I had loved this man so much once; he had promised that we would be together, and he had deserted me when I needed him. Yet that day it was impossible not to feel sad. If I shut my eyes, I can still picture him sitting there—as I did that day—a snifter with an amber inch of Hennessy VSOP in one hand, the light low, smoke curling from a lit cigarette. It’s two a.m. From an old phonograph record, Lester Young on tenor sax is playing between the mournful lyrics Billie Holiday is singing. Yes, now I can even hear the song: I’ll Never Be the Same.

So here’s his stuff, take what you want, Bonnie said matter-of-factly, jolting me back to the here and now. His brother John came to the funeral and took a few things, she went on, Kristen didn’t want anything, and the rest? I have to clear the place out and I’m giving all this stuff away, so anything that is here now you can have. Brian’s other children had not even come to the funeral, she added, now with a brittle edge in her voice she made no attempt to hide.

Where was he buried? I asked, for Jane would want to know.

The military cemetery at Calverton. One of the boys said that he was coming, but then he didn’t, probably talked out of it by Erin, his oldest daughter, I’m sure of it.

I nodded, recalling what Brian had told me, that Erin had only reluctantly visited him and his new family once, that she had taken on her mother’s anger at the divorce and made it her own personal stash. That I knew this I did not mention. So Erin’s resentment had stayed intact all those years, she never forgave her father for his failings, for her uncomplicated life being upended when she was not yet in her teens. Maybe some transgressions can not be forgiven. I know about those.

I picked out a simple wooden chess set, a few LPs of Billie Holiday and Count Basie, a Herbie Hancock album; some art books that Brian had signed his name in—Jane might like to have his signature—a small collection of well-used metal toy soldiers that must have been playthings from his childhood, two leather jackets, a couple of vests, and a gray felt fedora. I knew the hat was likely to fit Jane, or be close, there was that. I knew she might even wear the vests.

Bonnie talked about how Kristen was probably never going to be close to her sister, and since she, Bonnie, was not going to have more children, maybe Jane and Kristen could be friends one day. But Kristen’s only twelve, she doesn’t know about Brian’s other daughter yet, I’ll tell her when it feel right.

Sure. Great, I thought, Jane would like that. To know a sibling.

I put the stuff in my car, and then it was time to say goodbye. Bonnie and I stood outside, next to Brian’s red car—I don't recall the kind, some modest Chevy, I think—parked in the driveway. Erin was only interested in the car, Bonnie said, she wanted to know, Was it worth anything, when was I going to sell it? Bonnie raised her eyebrows, turned down the corners of her mouth disgustedly, it felt as if—if it weren’t so tacky—she might have spit on the ground in disdain. The car was worth a few grand at best. I stood as if planted, not quite sure how to say goodbye, not hurrying the moment. Do I lean over and kiss her, do we shake hands? I was flashing on the time I had been out jogging one afternoon the summer before and a red car just like this had turned onto the narrow street where I had been running. With cars parked on one side of Elizabeth Street, there’s only room for one-way traffic at that point. Somebody has to pull over their car so the other can go by. The sidewalk is uneven and cracked there, and so I was running on the street like I always did. There’s little traffic on Elizabeth, so it usually wasn't an issue, but no one behind me could pass until I got out of the way, and quite suddenly, I sensed a car inching up on me. I stopped and turned around and I swear to god, I saw Brian was at the wheel of this very same red car. I stood there perplexed, squinting to make sure it really was him, and was just about to walk up to the car, say, Hello Brian, don’t be embarrassed, do you want to talk? when the driver hastily backed up into Hampton Street, a busy state road, nobody with any sense does that. Then he was gone. Now, looking at this little red vehicle, car, I was sure it had been him that day. This also I did not mention.

“He did love you,” Bonnie said, apropos of nothing. My eyes teared up. Oh Lord, please don’t cry, Lorraine. Do not cry. This is a man who did not marry you when you needed him, this is a man who did not have the courage to meet his daughter, this is a man who let you down.

But I had loved him. I had. Completely and utterly and for a long long time, all through my first marriage and even after, even despite myself, despite all good sense and self-preservation. If we ever met for lunch, and we did, over the years, there was never a slow spot in the conversation, the attraction was immediate, I’d walk away dreamily thinking about star-crossed lovers for the sexual attraction had never died. Bonnie put her hand on my shoulder and we stared into each other’s eyes as tears congealed into a hard lump at the base of my throat. “He did,” she said again, now nodding slightly for emphasis. I let the silence speak.

I drove home to Tony without the radio on and was there before dark.

Jane’s legacy from her father—all she would ever know of him—fit in a single cardboard box that I got at the UPS store. It was a good size, to be sure, but it was one box. With a copy of his obituary, I sent the package off to her and insured it for a couple hundred dollars, as if money could have replaced what would have been lost.

That time she showed up in the town where I lived when she wasn’t going to call me? She was wearing one of Brian’s jackets, the gray suede one, and his fedora. I was wearing a man’s black felt Stetson that day, I remember thinking that anyone would have seen that we were mother and daughter. My mother, my daughter and I—we all wear hats well, I thought, but keep your mouth shut about that because that might piss Jane off. I had to watch my step for I was on probation once again. Why—who knows why? Because she wants to show me that she can walk away whenever she feels like it

When she took off the hat and put it down beside her, our eyes met the way eyes do. I did not pretend to understand how she felt.

Some years later, when she came back with her daughter Britt, who was not yet three, Jane asked to visit his grave. It was about an hour's drive away. We stopped for flowers, stopped to get the exact location in a field of identical and orderly military gravestones. Jane placed the flowers on his grave, Britt picked up a stone and placed it next to the flowers. "That's what he deserves," Jane said, her voice barely above a whisper. "A stone."

But still, his daughter had come to pay her respects.

A Birth Father Refuses to Meet His Daughter

While we are talking about men's reactions to learning about a first child who had been surrendered to adoption, here is a section of the memoir I'm writing that relates to my daughter, Jane, and her biological father, Brian. This section picks up after Birthmark has been published, and I have found Jane. The year is 1983; Jane was seventeen. Jane lived in Wisconsin; her adoptive mother was a nurse, her father an insurance adjuster. At the time of this part of the story, Brian was a reporter for Newsday on Long Island, where I live.

Copyright 2009 Lorraine Dusky

Chapter 11 No-Show Dad

If the point of Birthmark had been to shine a light on the truth of adoption and the injustice of sealed birth records, as well as to show that mothers did not forget, then further publicity of our “happy ending” was a good thing. With Jane’s and her parents’ agreement, I initiated reunion stories in the media when she came back to Sag Harbor the following summer for an extended stay—most of the summer! Imagine my elation! Imagine my joy! Evan, my husband's son, was also spending the summer between college semesters with us. In two years, I’d gone from a single woman singing the blues to a wife and mother, two times over.

Sure, it happens to a lot of women, but to me? Not something I would have allowed myself to imagine. How much the changes in my life affected me was evident apparently in the lines of my face. A couple of months after I’d been reunited with Jane, someone a friend of a friend asked her if I’d had a face lift or “something done.” He said I looked “different, younger.” I was forty at the time.

Jane and I did a TV show in Boston, interviews with the local weeklies, and Long Island’s daily, Newsday, where Brian worked, sent a columnist. Her story [1] filled nearly half a page, with a picture with the two of us sitting on our back porch with our arms wrapped around each other. Ann [Jane's adoptive mother] is quoted, noting that while Jane had been curious about her biological mother, friends were against our meeting. “You never know how strong the ties are.” she said. “But we did it for Jane’s sake…. Here was this glamorous girl from New York. ‘It had to be that, didn’t it’ I thought then. I wasn't thrilled about the whole thing. I really did feel threatened.” She added that her husband was more suspicious about what I wanted, “but it was easier for him because it was a mother who came into the picture….But no, it worked out nicely.”

The writer noted that Jane was only uncomfortable with one question: What is Lorraine to you? “It’s hard to describe to other people what she is to me,” Jane answered.

Oddly enough, the writer did not ask about her father, and we offered no information. Did she know who it was? Did she even knew him? The information mill among newspaper people operates pretty well, as you might imagine; but maybe she hadn’t heard any of the gossip from Rochester, because after all, I left there in a cloud seventeen years earlier. If Jane hoped a story in Brian’s own newspaper would melt his heart, she kept it to herself, and I did not mention it. I hoped he would call. Unless he was at that moment away in detox, he had to have seen the story.

However, her father was mentioned a few weeks later, in a New York Times story, [2] that noted that he lived on Long Island, but so far had refused to meet her. The story included another mother [Alison Ward and her daughter, Holly] who had reunited with her teenage daughter. The four of us are all smiles in the accompanying photograph. “Jane, who had planned to start searching for her natural mother when she turned eighteen, views the situation this way: ‘I just feel I have two women who really care about me,’” the story read. No sweat, she seemed to be saying.

Ann was quoted in the piece, remarking that she “always wondered if [our meeting] would interfere with my relationship with Jane, but finding Lorraine has freed Jane and given her much more self-confidence. And, if anything, Jane and I are as close, if not closer, than ever.”

A spokesman for the National Council for Adoption—the opposition—was also quoted in the story, stating that the search movement could be the source of a great “potential for human sorrow” on the part of the birth mothers. “These women may have had their child through rape or incest, and a meeting could be very harmful to them.”[3] He estimated that only one to two percent of adoptees and birth parents want to meet; Florence Fisher of ALMA disputed that, and put the figure at 80 percent. Elizabeth Cole from the Child Welfare League noted that records are open in Britain and Israel and that her colleagues there “had not found the practice to be harmful.” She predicted that adoptees will eventually get their original birth records in this country. That was in 1983.

The piece ended with a zinger: “In 1979 Julie Welsh, a 33-year-old medical secretary from Fair Lawn, N.J., traced the son she had given up for adoption 12 years earlier to a family who lived only 30 minutes away. One day she summoned the courage to knock on their door. She learned that the boy’s adoptive mother had died when he was 5 and the father had married a woman who did not like him, so he was sent to a private school in New Hampshire.

“‘If you want him back you can have him back,’ Mrs. Welsh was told. She did, so the following weekend she and her husband drove up to get the boy, Jeff, who had not been allowed to come home for holidays or vacations. The Welshes, who have two other children, have legally adopted Jeff, whose first words when his mother encountered him were: ‘I’m so glad you came and found me!’”

Brian had to have seen at least one of the pieces. But he did not call. Nor had he responded to the picture and note I’d written earlier, sent to him at the office. There was no reason in making another call, only to be turned down again, but Jane had other ideas. She would get him on the phone herself—he would not turn her down if she called, right? Probably right? I admired her moxie—she was only seventeen, and she’d been the adopted kid who had seizures and wore a hockey helmet to school for four years. But what if, even then, he said, No, I won’t meet you and hung up? Was she up to this outcome? How much more pain did she have to endure? But I did not interfere; this was her call. She’s a gutsy kid, I told myself—she’s my daughter, all right.

So, from the upstairs phone in the hallway—the same one where I’d taken her name down two years before—I dialed his direct number at Newsday and handed her the receiver. Please stay, she whispered as the phone rang, I might need you. Brian answered.

But she was also his daughter, she was also a teenager afraid of rejection, and now her courage failed her. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?” I could hear his voice faintly coming through the line but Jane could not make herself speak. Her eyes were shiny globes of infinite sorrow. Go ahead, say something, I urged with a nod of the head, Say something. Say Hello. Say anything.

She could not find her voice. Maybe I should have grabbed the phone out of his hands and yelled at him to be a man and just say hello to his daughter, but he’d been so clear—even irritated the last time I’d called—about not being ready, just “not now,” and maybe my intervention now might just make him angry, and that might be worse than this impasse. That might set back everything, if she were ever to meet him. Maybe.

Brian hung up after twenty seconds or so.

Jane looked me, sad and terrified and disappointed all at once, a look that broke my heart. She ran down the steps and out of the house. No, she did not want me to come. She did not want to talk about the aborted phone call, or him or anything when she got back, and what really, could there be to say? We never spoke of that phone call again.

Of course now I was really angry with Brian. This was someone who had spoken of “honor” and “character” when we had been together. He turned out to be a straw man. He didn’t even have the backbone to meet his daughter.

---

[1] Marilyn Goldstein, “ Forging A Family Bond After 17 Years, Long Island Diary, Newsday, July 21, 1983.

[2] Judy Klemesrud, “Mothers Find the Children They Gave Up,” New York Times, Aug. 29,1983.

[3] While that seems to be the great bugaboo about open records to uninformed people or those opposed to open records, there are no indications, no statistics from states with open records that these women object to meeting their children in any greater number than women who were not the victims of rape or incest. Of course last week, we had a story from New Jersey about a woman who was suing the state when she a child contacted her. For such women, I have little understanding, as the child is wholly innocent in such a circumstance.

Dear Abby Gets It! Firstmother Husbands cont'd

I foolishly asserted in the June 19 column, “Firstmother Husbands: How They Handle the News of an Earlier Child,” that “the outraged husband who rejects his wife when he finds out about her sin … is a myth.” In her June 21 column, Abigail Van Buren responded to a woman with an outraged husband. Here’s the letter and Abby’s response.

"DEAR ABBY: I became an unwed mother many years ago, when there was a stigma attached to having an illegitimate child. Unable to care for my son, I placed him for adoption. He has now found me.

I have a family, and my husband does not want me to tell our adult children or contact the young man and his family.

Do I go against the wishes of my husband, whom I love very much, or should I tell our children and perhaps risk my husband leaving me? — CONFLICTED IN NEW JERSEY

DEAR CONFLICTED: From the tone of your letter your husband is the dominant partner in your marriage. If that’s the case, and you really think he would leave you after all these years because you leveled with your children about the fact that they have a half-brother, then keep the secret.

However, if your relationship with your husband is anything approaching a partnership, then stand up for yourself and make it clear that you are the sum total of all your experiences — both the joyful and the painful — and you need to see your son, thank his family for the love and care they have given him, and let your adult children make up their own minds about whether they want to be contacted.

This is the 21st century, and we are far beyond the attitudes of the 1950s in which a human being who is born out of wedlock is a shameful secret forever to be buried. In addition, secrets have a way of always coming out eventually."

JANE: The letter is right on except for the “thank his family” part. I can’t agree that raising a child is so much of a burden that birthmothers should thank the adoptive parents.I’d also add the following paragraph:

Consider the situation from your son’s viewpoint. He found you because he needs to know his origins and connect with people who share his genes. You gave him up because you had no choice but now you do. Think how painful it will be to him if you refuse to contact him, in effect telling him once again that he cannot be a part of your life. Learn more about why adoptees search and encourage your husband to do so as well. A good place to start is Tim Green’s “A Man and His Mother: An Adopted Son’s Search.” You and your husband might also consider joining a support group for adoptees and birthparents. The American Adoption Congress has a list of resources on its website.

The Chosen Child: Adopted and Special

I stumbled across this reunion story yesterday when I Goggled “Birthmother.” The adoptee, Margaret Harless, is now 54, just two years older than I. She was born to a “poor, unmarried housemaid” on the Air Force base in Germany where her parents, an American soldier and his wife, received their “gift” in a face-to-face meeting arranged through the base chaplain, unusual (I think) for an adoption of that era; it also struck me that it was a harbinger of the international adoption trend.

This following passage jumped out at me: “Throughout her childhood, Harless said her parents balanced their honesty about her adoption with a love that treated her no differently than if she had been theirs by birth. "They always told me, 'You're very special because we picked you out. We didn't have to take you,' “Harless recalls with a laugh. ”I never felt like I was missing anything."

Special. Picked you out. We didn’t have to take you. “Picked out,” like choosing a cake from a bakery display case? Like shopping for a car, selecting the color and preferred options? I pictured the cartoons of my early childhood, prospective parents smiling through a nursery window full of pink and blue bassinettes with a stork standing by, the parents pointing to their selection, the stork wrapping up the bundle of joy and delivering it down a chimney. How would I feel if I heard that from my parents? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have taken it well at all. And I also thought of the ancient proverb, “Beggars should not be choosers.”

But I read on and this really hit home: “But Harless also wanted to know the person who, according to her parents, had given her up because she couldn't afford to keep her and wanted a better life for her daughter. She didn't pursue this desire during the life of her parents. Though they were outwardly supportive of any attempts to locate her birth mother, Harless said she believed different feelings lay beneath the surface. [Italics mine].

How sadly familiar that previous statement is to so many of us FMF readers; we know those mixed signals all too well, the perpetual elephant in the room of countless adoptee/adoptive parent relationships.

Thankfully, Harless eventually followed her instincts and registered with adoption.com and forgot about it, until she heard from an American woman living in Germany who makes a career of reuniting American adoptees with their Germany birth families (what a great job!). Some missed communication ensued, but eventually there’s the happy ending we all dream of, in thanks to Facebook, which just confirmed my theory from my Facebook Fallout blog of April 3.

Lorraine and I briefly discussed the notion of being “chosen.” She noted that adoptees—especially aware adoptees—aren’t fond of the term. My daughter used that phrase early in our reunion; one day at work a colleague overheard her conversation and he poked his head over the cubicle wall and asked, “Are you a chosen one too?” My daughter’s adoptive father told me the story of how they came to be her parents. They didn’t “choose” my daughter; she fell into their laps. The agency called them the day I signed the relinquishment papers and asked if they were prepared to take on a daughter. No bassinettes full of bundles of joy, no storks.

JANE: Presenting adoption as a "gift" from doesn't sit well with me [me either-Linda]. It’s really just another international adoption story. Couple from US adopt poor child so child can have a better life. In the post-war period many German children went home with American military families. They were open adoptions only in that they may have met and knew each others names but no communication.

Ironically, Germany did well in the post-war period so it is likely that these German mothers could have raised their children, like the Korean mothers who gave up children in the 1960s -1980s.

There is an organization of German born adoptees, Geborener Deutsche, which helps German adoptees search for their original families. Peter Dodds wrote a memoir of his experience of being adopted from Germany by an American military family, >Outer Search/Inner Journey He learned German and found his mother. He is opposed to international adoption.

The positive part of all search/reunion stories is that they help counter two myths--that adoptees are welded to their adoptive families as if born to them and that birthmothers don't want to meet their children. Of course, the downside is that reunions are still news--meaning that the public doesn't expect them to happen.

Adoptee followers of FMF, we'd like to hear from you; tell us how you feel about being called "special" and "chosen."