The Year 2011 in Adoption: some good news, some setbacks

Jane and Lorraine, 1983

Some gains, some frustrations...that's the year in adoption news.

• Adoption was in the news this year starting in January with Oprah's revelation that she had a sister who had been adopted. This being about Oprah, her sister's lengthy search was documented everywhere, providing a spotlight on the fact that individuals who are adopted are still denied free access to their original birth records in the vast majority of states, though many have half-way measures in place.

• The best news of the year was the Rhode Island--the smallest state in the Union--passed a bill that will allow anyone 25 and over full access to their original birth records come July 2012.  The age of 25 was a compromise after Senate Majority Whip Maryellen Goodwin, a Democrat from Providence, wanted to raise the age to 30 so adoptees wouldn't ask for their birth certificates out of spite. Goodwin's sister has two adopted children. “I think 18 is too young,” said Goodwin. “It’s a tender age. I want them to be able to find their records in an appropriate and meaningful kind of way,

Utah's laws designed to thwart birth fathers

Lorraine

The Salt Lake Tribune is continuing their revealing series on how natural/ birth fathers are regularly screwed by the system in Utah. Today's installment by Brooke Adams tells the story of Jake Strickland and how he lost his son through outright violation of the law in Colorado, and despite that, the law in Utah to designed only to serve the adoptive process. The Tribune did not name the agency involved but thanks to one of our readers, First Mother Forum learned it was LDS  Family Services, the adoption arm of the Mormon Church.

Strickland's story involves a lying women--the mother of his son--who strung him along, letting him and his family believe that she was going to allow him to raise their son, or that they would do so together. In many respects, he did everything right: support her, pay for her medical bills, and continue to check up on her as the pregnancy progressed. A few days before they baby was born, the couple strolled through Temple Square in Salt Lake City.

Unwed Fathers Can't Win Against the Mormons in Utah

Lorraine

What is Utah doing in the United States? The Constitution protects us from  religious states, no? Not in Utah, apparently.

Its laws in one area seem to be outside those of human decency, and certainly unconstitutional. And it has to do with the Mormon Church, which really controls the electorate, which controls the legislature, the courts, the everything. This is Utah today. Separation of church and state is pro forma, but does not really exist. It is a state like no other where separation of church and state exists on paper only, because the Church of the Latter-Day Saints of Jesus Christ really runs just about everything, and should not be tax exempt.

In yet another case, a single father from another state (Florida) is fighting to gain custody of his nearly year-old daughter whose former girl friend left her newborn with strangers in that unholy state, reports the Salt Lake Tribune, in the first of a four-part series by Brooke Adams. Of course, in Utah, that was perfectly legal, even though the father of the child was doing everything possible to protect his paternal rights. In Utah, that matters not.

Does my (birth) mother think of me on Christmas?

My tabletop tree

Christmas, not April, is the cruelest time for many of us. All the gaiety, the awareness that families gather round together sharpen the reminder of who is missing: if you are a birth/first mother who has not been reunited, you are ever so aware of the presents you are not buying, the card not being sent, the phone call not made to the missing child. You wonder if he/she ever thinks of you at this time of the year. Question not. He is. My daughter said that she used to look at the moon on cold and clear winter nights, and think that somewhere I was under that same moon, wondering if I was thinking about her. I'll never know if our thoughts collided in space, but I like to think that they did.

Forty-five years later, I still regret giving up my daughter.

Jane

Forty-five years ago today, December 19, 1966, I signed the papers giving up my month old daughter Rebecca. It was dark that Monday afternoon when I left the social worker’s office, the lights of nearby businesses and the street lights obscured by the ubiquitous San Francisco mist. Although the streets were crowded with holiday shoppers, I felt an overwhelming sense of emptiness. I had nowhere to go and nothing to do. I knew, though, that my life would go on in some fashion. I wanted to know what that was, to leap forward in time, to the place where my life would resume and the pain would stop. I wanted to know how I would look back on this day.

Calling loved ones (and those you are not so sure of) for the holidays

From my alternate universe daughter

Christmas is right around the corner, and no one can ignore it. And for a lot of us--first/birth mothers and adoptees--it is a killer of a day. An adoptee wrote to me recently about her birth father--who wants a relationship NOW (many years after he was first contacted), and admittedly he's not the healthiest person around, or in the best situation. Last time she reached out a hand, he acted less than reasonable, and so now the adoptee is wary. Of making a phone call. What if he wants more than she is prepared to give? And anyway, it's confusing and she feels weird about him and where was he when she first got in touch and....

Reunion gives birth mothers a 'second chance'

Jane

Denise Roessle is euphoric when she learns that her son, whom she had lost to adoption twenty-six years earlier, has been matched to her through the International Soundex Reunion Registry. As the adult man replaces the fantasy child, though, anxiety replaces euphoria.

Denise was nineteen and living in Hawaii in 1969 when she became pregnant by a handsome Marine. After he reneged on his promise to marry her, her parents sent to a home in Los Angeles and arranged with a lawyer who specialized in placing children with Jewish families in New York to handle the adoption of Denise’s son. Erick Alan Janson became Joshua Goldberg, the son of Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn.

As a first mother it's better to speak up than suffer in silence

Jane and Lorraine. 1983

All right, I've been trying to avoid this all day...but what the hell? FMF is a personal letter in many respects to the world, and the friends and acquaintances I've made in the adoption community. Today is the fourth anniversary of my daughter's death and I have been trying to distract myself but it's not working too well.

What I do know is that she seemed determined to die by her own hand as she had tried to kill herself several times before, and that I could not have prevented her death. She was stopped before, years earlier in fact, but something that deep and resolved eventually wins out. Her life was troubled from the very beginning with adoption and epilepsy the double-whammy handed her. So I'm allowing myself to feel blue today--and I'm eating some dark chocolate too. Today, I feel bad. Tomorrow will be another day.

Over on Facebook a woman wrote that she is upset that her youngest brother is having his first child--out of wedlock--and no one in her family is upset. It is 19 years after she gave her son up. Now she is trying to be happy for her youngest brother, yet she finds

Playing Politics with the Morning After Pill

Lorraine

We try to stay away from politics here but yesterday brought news that infuriated me: An over-the-counter and safe method of birth control called Plan B--that is, The Morning After Pill--will continue to be denied to teenage girls under 17. Under 17 you need a prescription--that is, tell a doctor who may tell your mother, and anyway, by the time you get that script, it is likely to be too late for Plan B.

But you know what? A whole lot of teens have unprotected sex the first time because they are not planning on having sex. The Obama administration's head is in the sand on this issue, only slightly less buried than the previous Bush administration's, which allowed Plan B to be sold without a script only to those 18 and over. In 2009 after a federal court judge excoriated the FDA for placing politics and ideology ahead of public health, the Obama administration lowered the age to 17.

Breakfast on Pluto: A movie a birth mother can love

Lorraine

Breakfast on Pluto is a little known Irish movie by well regarded director Neil Jordan that is about the hero's search for his natural/birth mother in London. The "hero" is no ordinary fellow--he's a transgender "nancy boy" as gays are derisively called in England, and the story, in a series of connected vignettes set in the Seventies, is as at least as much about his troubles and travails as he flounders through life as it is about his search for his mother.

As soon as he is old enough, Patrick "Kitten" Braden (Cillian Murphy) leaves his unhappy foster home in Ireland and begins a series of picaresque misfortunes as he looks for love and place to call home with all the wrong people. All he knows is that his birth mother went to London after she deposited him at the door of the local priest, Father Bernard, played by Liam Neesom, and soon enough Kitten is going to "the city that never sleeps" to find her. All he has to go on is that she resembles Mitzi Gaynor.

Foster kids do best when placed with extended family

Jane

A couple who adopted nine boys through the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DFC) has been charged with sexually assaulting two of the boys, reports The Hartford Courant. George Harasz and Doug Wirth had been certified as foster parents, and a private adoption agency had recommended the adoptive placements to DCF. The two men also ran a puppy breeding business in the basement of their home and put the boys to work in it. In 2009, Harasz was cited for cruelty to animals when an animal control officer found 50 dogs in the basement. “Police said the room had inadequate ventilation and the smell of urine and feces was overwhelming.”*

Desperate moves of parents who lose custody

Lorraine

In early fall Nephra and Shanel Payne, parents who "kidnapped" their eight children from a foster care center in Forest Hills, New York, were all over the news. They and their kids--all safe, just after dinner in their car--were located a week later in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The couple was arrested and charged with eight counts each of kidnapping--one per child. The kidnapping charges were later dismissed after they agreed to plead guilty to second-degree custodial interference, a misdemeanor for which they were each sentenced to 90 days in jail and three years probation. They were released the day before Thanksgiving.

Stories about parents "kidnapping" their own children always catch my attention for I do not immediately assume that the state is automatically right in taking

Loretta Young's 'adopted' daughter wasn't adopted at all

Loretta Young and Judy Lewis

So imagine if you were "adopted" by your "birth" mother and raised as an "adopted child." Your mother later marries, and has two "of her own." You take her husband's name, but you are still the "adopted child" in the family. When you ask your mother "as adopted children do. They say, 'Where are my.... Who's my mother? Who's my father" And she would answer very easily by saying, 'I couldn't love you anymore than if you were my own child.' Which of course didn't answer the question, but it said, 'Don't ask the question.'" *

After you are all grown up, just as you are about to marry, you tell your fiance that you do not understand your confusing relationship with your mother [actress Loretta Young] and that you do not know who your real father is. "I can't marry you," the grown-up 'adopted child" says to her fiance. "I don't know anything about myself.

And he says: "It's common knowledge, Judy. Your father is Clark Gable."

Natural and Adoptive Families: Let's Gather Together

Jane

This holiday season families will gather together, give thanks for having each other, and wish each other well for the New Year.  Except many families separated by adoption.

As a culture, we’ve made great progress in traversing divisions of race, class, religion, and geography. Surely, we can cross the adoption boundary, knock down that artificial barrier created by a judge’s signature on a piece of paper, celebrated with a baptism or cemented in a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple.  Let’s bring our families together, natural and adopted, conceptually, if not physically.

Being grateful for what is, not always wishing for what isn't...

Lorraine and Tony celebrating their 25th anniversary

Chance favors the prepared mind said Pasteur and it seemed that way this morning as I read Tuesday's New York Times Science section and came across this headline: "A Serving of Gratitude May Save the Day." After the gloom of the last post when I was admittedly down in the dumps myself, this sounded promising:  A new study shows that cultivating a feeling of gratitude has been linked "to better health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, higher long-term satisfaction with life, and kinder behavior towards others, including romantic partners." The study also found that feeling grateful makes people less likey to turn aggressive when provoked.

Well, good god, let's do some of that!

Is the Adoptee/(birth) mother reunion ever (re)solved?

Evelyn Robinson

"When I talk to people about the loss of my son, they sometimes ask why I want to 'take up the past' and why didn't I let 'sleeping dogs lie.' When you give birth to a child, especially when that child still lives, that child does not exist in the past, but in the present. Once you have given birth, you are that child's mother and you will always be a mother, no matter what. Being a mother never ends; it is never in the past. There is no such thing as an ex-mother.

"Natural mothers have spent their lives apologizing. We apologized for getting pregnant, but we were not the only people having sexual relationships. We apologized for giving away our babies, but we were told by everyone that it was the right thing to do for our children. We apologized for missing our children, but it was a perfectly natural reaction for missing our children. Some mothers are still apologizing for wanting to find their lost children. It is time we stopped apologizing. It is right for us to search for our children, We are mothers, after all.

Thinking of Placing Your Baby for Adoption? Think very hard.

photo/ lamb white

Should you give your baby up for adoption? 

YOU WANT THE BEST FOR YOUR BABY AND YOU’VE HEARD THAT PLACING YOUR BABY FOR ADOPTION WITH AN OLDER, WEALTHIER COUPLE IS BEST.

The truth is according to child welfare experts that in most cases staying with you, his mother, is the best for your child.

Your body is preparing for your baby to come into the world and preparing you to care for him. Your breasts will produce antibodies to help your baby ward off disease, antibodies that he can only get from your milk. Once your baby is here, all your instincts will tell you to nurture him. In fact, your body at birth releases a hormone (oxytocin) to assure that you will bond with your baby, and be flooded with love for him.

Your baby knows your voice; your scents, your movements. When he is born, he wants to be with you.

Adoption Nation is No Country for Birth Mothers

Jane

Adam Pertman’s Adoption Nation: (second edition) is a grateful adoptive parent’s accolade to adoption disguised as a treatise. Pertman is the often quoted Executive Director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute,
but he doesn’t get it when it comes to birth mothers. As in the first edition, Pertman gives lip service to first/birth mothers’ pain but quickly diverts the readers’ attention to the stories of a handful of women who become “true believers in adoption” with “no regrets.” As a first mother reading this book, I could not forget that Pertman is an adoptive father of two.

Pertman minimizes the pressures and in some cases the outright corruption which cause mothers in the United States and abroad to lose their children. In his zest for all things adoption, he ignores the opinion of recognized child welfare experts--including that of his employer, the Donaldson Institute, that “”Every society, including our own, accepts that it is generally in the best interests of children to be raised by their biological parents unless they cannot or do not wish to.“*

Sandusky is not alone in abusing adopted children

Lorraine

"Adoption, that's an opportunity to enrich your own life and hopefully enrich the life of another. It's been a very positive experience for us. A kid is a kid. Sometimes it's easier to deal with kids who don't have your own genes."--Jerry Sandusky (NO RELATION!) in a 2001 story in the Philadelphia Daily News. The occasion was the publication of Sandusky's book, Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story, and sport columnist Stan Hochman was writing a "positive piece about a guy helping disadvantaged kids." The story continues:

"Jerry  and Dottie Sandusky adopted six kids of their own, [emphasis added] while helping thousands of others through The Second Mile, a charitable foundation he organized." As we know today, Sandusky is the Penn State assistant football coach accused of multiple counts of sexually abusing young boys over a 15 year period, and that university officials covered up the scandal for years.

A Letter to (Birth) Mothers Who Reject Reunion

Lorraine

My birth mother doesn't respond/ why does my birth mother reject contact/ birth mother rejects contact... must be among the saddest words on earth to type into Google. And then the person finds First Mother Forum and we are all about wanting a solid, good, reasonable relationship with the children we relinquished, and we are torn apart when they reject us. Or put us through what seem like unreasonable paces.

Carrie, an adoptee who found FMF the other day, wanted to know why some mothers reject contact from the children they gave up for adoption, as her mother did. Carrie's not the only one to face this, as we've heard this many times before. Every time my friend who is a confidential intermediary in a partially "open" state is in the middle of a search-and-reunion, she expresses fear that one side or the other will reject contact, and she cannot pass on the contact information. Carrie asked if I would write a letter to all those first/birth mothers who reject contact and reunion. It's a hard assignment because I'm not in their mind set, but here goes:

Adopted children killed by their parents as they "train" them

Lorraine

Spare the rod and spoil the child goes the old adage, but in today's post we change it to: Spare the rod and SAVE the child. 

The front page of The New York Times carries a story about a simple preacher from Tennessee, Michael Pearl, who with his wife, Debi, has sold more than 670,000 copies of his self-published book, To Train Up a Child. Train is another word for corporal punishment. Christian websites and magazines are all atwitter over To Train Up a Child. They love it, and so do, apparently, parents who home school their children.

Trouble is, some kids in families who have To Train Up a Child are dying because the use of the rod (and switch, and a quarter-inch plumbing line that can be rolled up and carried in one's pocket for immediate use). And you know what? The ones reported on the Times piece are all: Adopted. Many from Africa.

Joan Didion's Blue Nights is really an adoption memoir

Lorraine

Joan Didion's adoption of her daughter Quintana Roo has been on my radar ever since I realized she and her husband had adopted a daughter because their daughter was born within weeks of mine, and both girls were surrendered as infants. It wasn't until Quintana was ten or eleven that I paid more attention because one of my best friends in New York, who followed the lives of literati with interest, began insisting that this girl Quintana had to look a great deal as I must have as a child.

It was true. Except for the fact that I was a bean pole growing up, she did seem to me (and most assuredly to my friend) that she looked like I did as a kid. Photographs bore this out. Quintana was often mentioned in the magazine stories about her famous parents, including her age, and just as my daughter turned eleven, so had Quintana.

Should I tell my (adopted) child she's adopted?

Same-size Lorraine and real daughter Jane

You would think that the old and tired question of whether to tell your ''adopted" child she or he was adopted would have gone the way of Fifties Poodle skirts and Sixties love beads. But you would be wrong.

Over at Salon the guy who writes the advice column "Since You Asked" finds himself responding to an I-own-this-remarkable-kid-adoptive-mother who basically asks if her daughter ever need to be told the truth of her origins, and oh,. how she is wrestling with this question. (This issue of truth in identity must be in the air because yesterday's column idea--about daddies--seemed to come to me out of the blue.)

Are you friggen' kidding me? In this day and age?

Why not wait until some truth-telling cousin spills the beans? Or your best friend's daughter who is friends with your  daughter, and who has heard her adoption spoken of at home, blurts out the

Biological Fathers everywhere hiding in plain sight

Lorraine

Did anyone come around your house saying "trick or treat" and pretending to be a biological father in hiding last night?

Thought so.

I wish I didn't know that a few of my friends fathered children they do not acknowledge but it's true. I always find it disturbing when they reveal the truth to me because it's something I don't want to know. Call it TMI. There's the father whose child was adopted and when the birth mother called him asking for help in finding the son, he said no. He didn't go into the details, but I assume she was asking him for money to hire a searcher. This is a man who could have afford a thousand bucks easy. We've never talked about it again. He has a strong and 

Halloween ushers in National Adoption Awareness Month

Jane

November is National Adoption Month, ushered in prophetically by Halloween, a harbinger that adoption is not all treats. In fact, it can be downright demoniac. A reminder! Today, Halloween, is the last day you can vote for your favorite Demons in Adoption. There’s a stellar list of nominees; if you haven’t cast your ballot, do it now at Pound Puppy Legacy. (And see our previous post about our favorites to vote for--and scroll down and vote in all three categories.)

Back to National Adoption Month. NAM had its beginning in 1976 when Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis announced Adoption Week to promote awareness of the need for adoptive families for children in foster care.

Steve Jobs’ mother didn’t abandon him, nor did she 'make an adoption plan'

Jane

Steve Jobs “was born out of wedlock and abandoned” Steve Kroft stated on 60 Minutes. If Kroft had been schooled in the adoption industry's “Positive/Respectful Adoption Language," he might have phrased it differently, Jobs’ mother Joanne Schieble (later Simpson) “made an adoption plan.”

Simpson did not abandon her son (although according to Jobs’s  biographer, Walter Isaacson, Job felt abandoned). Nor is it likely that Simpson "made an adoption plan." Most likely, Simpson surrendered her son for adoption as single white mothers were expected to do in 1955. She cared about him enough that she insisted his adoptive parents agree to send him to college.

Job's adoption was a pivotal factor in his life

Lorraine

"If there was one trauma that persisted throughout much of his life, and which seems somehow connected to his extreme behavior, it was the effect of his adoption," according to the new biography of Steve Jobs, as reported in the Washington Post with Bloomberg Business this morning. Based on reading an advance copy of the new biography, the response was to a question asked by someone who knew Jobs: Why was he so mean?

Biographer Walter Isaacson was given complete control over the content of the book after Jobs asked him to be his biographer, and so it was not subject to Jobs's editing, and thus the answer above. From the Post:

At the age of 6 or 7, Jobs told the girl who lived across the street that he was adopted and she asked if that meant his “real parents didn’t want you.”

Steve Jobs Did Meet His Father--without knowing it

Steve Jobs’ biological father, Abdul Fattah Jandali, shown here with Joanne Carol Schieble, Jobs’ biological mother, (Photo courtesy Al Arabiya) See new details in the post today, Saturday, Oct. 22.

In the category of you couldn't make this stuff up--Steve Jobs did meet his father--and neither knew they they were father and son! This is a snippet of the new biography of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, today gleaned from the Huffington Post

Meeting His Biological Father

Jobs, who was adopted, was a customer at a Mediterranean restaurant north of San Jose without realizing that it was owned by his biological father -- from whom he was estranged.

Adoptive mothers bully birth mothers--what else is new?

Lorraine and Daughter Jane in matching shoes

Whenever I think that adoption and the animosity that some adoptive parents feel towards their children's natural birth biological parents has abated in the years since I first got involved in adoption reform, something happens to set me straight. In the minds of many adoptive parents, nothing has changed since the Seventies. We are two warring sides of the "adoption triangle" with the kid caught in the middle. 

The acrimonious push back--from a few adoptive mothers--that fellow blogger Jane's recent post on two mothers who have truly open adoptions* generated indicates the amount of jealousy and tension has not gone down--at least for the vocal crowd of Adopters Anonymous who decided to come to FIRST MOTHER FORUM and throw bricks at both adoptees and mothers who lost their children to adoption. 

Adoption is Not Gleeful; Fox's hit show tells it like it is

Jane

An adoptive mother who finds the adoption plot lines on Glee so offensive has started a petition asking for a Public Service Announcement that would offset the "harmful inaccuracies" the show perpetuates. Really, we wondered when we first heard if this--after all the inaccurate and nasty portrays of first/birth parents we've seen. What does this woman find so offensive on the Fox teen hit, FMF wondered.

It's about a birth mother who wants her child back. Quelle surprise! A cheerleader, Quinn (played by Diane Argon), is a birth mother who wants to get her child back from the adoptive mother; another character (born by surrogate) has had her real mother come back into her life. Well! How outrageous is that!?!

Is adoption ever funny to the adopted, to first mothers?

Lorraine

The inglorious New York Times Op-Ed Page today has a story about adoption! You might think that it might at at long last a piece about the continuing battle to open the vaults where the original birth certificates (OBC) of adoptees are still locked up in the vast majority of states--but NO! It's a spoof from someone named James Collins about how the writer is the biological father of Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and billionaire behind Facebook, and alas, how said father needs a heart-lung-liver transplant and asks if Mark wouldn't mind sending him a big check to help out.

The piece makes the nod to the adoptive father as the lifelong, long suffering caregiver who provided food and shelter, but points out that he is not the father " in the sense that you [Zuckerberg] are his authentic, natural child." Okay, I admit I smiled at that--at the language, at the choice of non-PC words.

How to make an Open Adoption work

Jane

Linda Schellentrager is a remarkable adoptive mother I met at the Coordinators2 Symposium in September in Richmond, Virginia. Remarkable because she accepts that she’s a second mother. A second mother not in the sense that she is subordinate--she has been the fulltime mother in every sense of the word--but that she is another mother, an additional mother to the one that her son was born to.

This was not the case in 1992 when Linda and her husband, Marty, adopted  a newborn boy they named Eric. While they met Eric’s first/birth parents, sixteen-year old Laura and eighteen-year old Justin, shortly before they took Eric home, they did not have an open-adoption agreement.

Steve Jobs, Mona Simpson, and Paternity: It's all in the family

How history repeats itself in families in so many ways. In the family of Steve Jobs, we know that he was adopted, and though he found his natural family, he also "abandoned" his own daughter, Lisa, who was the daughter of his on-again, off-again girlfriend, Chris-Ann Brennan, since high school.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs: Look like dad much?

Job's father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, did not marry his pregnant girlfriend in grad school, Joanne Schieble, because her father was opposed her marrying an Arab, and so Jobs ended up being given up for adoption. When Jobs was 23, his­­ on again/off again girlfriend Brennan gave birth to a daughter, Lisa in 1978. Jobs denied paternity for two years--while the mother and daughter were on welfare--even going so far as to swear in court documents that he could not be Lisa's father because he was "sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child." (He has three other children with his wife of twenty years.)

A Child of War Discovers 'Dad' Killed Her Parents

Lorraine

The difference between truth and reality in an adoptee's life comes crashing down on all adoptees who grow up not knowing the truth, but few with such harsh reality as that of Victoria Montenegro. She grew up as the daughter of the man who tortured and killed her parents. This happened during the civil strife in Argentina, it happened in the Seventies and early Eighties, when the military dictatorship ruled, the Catholic Church stood by and did nothing as babies were taken from the parents in clandestine detention centers and handed over to military or security officials, or even third parties. The new parents were supposed to hide the true identities of the babies. (Yesterday's New York Times* reported the story.)

Ms. Montenegro, now 35, grew up as the daughter of Col. Hernan Tetzlaff, first learned there might be a possibility that her father was involved in baby stealing

Like father, like son...John Jandali and Steve Jobs

Jandali and Jobs

Before his death earlier this week, Steve Jobs and his natural father never met, according to news reports. Abdulfattah "John" Jandali--Jobs's biological father--earlier expressed regret over having no relationship with his son and said that he hoped to meet him before he died, as Jane wrote about recently here.* But apparently his pride prevented him from picking up the phone and calling Jobs. 

Jobs's natural parents, Syrian-born student Jandali and graduate student Joanne Schieble, married ten months after Jobs was given up for adoption in 1955, and had a daughter, the author Mona Simpson.

Vote for your favorite Demon in Adoption!

Lorraine's Desk

It's that time of year again. Time to consider all the really bad agencies and people who promote adoption in way that we, Dear Reader, find despicable, immoral and unethical. It's time to vote for the annual Demons In Adoption Awards to raise a voice against adoption propaganda and the self congratulatory practices of the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute's annual Angels in Adoption Awards.

This is the brainchild of the Pound Pup Legacy blog, as its creators noticed that many of the recipients of the Angels in Adoption Awards have nothing to do

How the media encouarges separation of mother and child

The cover story of New York magazine last week was titled: "Is She Just too Old for This?" and showed a freakish and obviously photo-shopped picture of a very pregnant woman in her, hmmm...late sixties. The story eventually went on to say that old motherhood is great and as long as it's possible, go for it, if that is what you want. There are a lot of bothersome issues about having kids at an age that they will be taking care of senile parents while they are in college or right after, but that's not what caught my attention. Here's one issue that did:

"Among women over 40, birth rates have increased. Among women ages 45 to 49, they've risen 17 percent....Women over 45 who want to carry their own babies most often use donor eggs...."

Birth Mother to Adoptive Parents: You Make Me Uncomfortable

Jane

SEE LORRAINE'S AD AT END on Oct. 1

It’s not Politically Correct but I’m going to say it anyway: I’m uncomfortable when I’m around adoptive parents. I’ve experienced disconcerting feelings at every conference of the American Adoption Congress (AAC) I’ve attended, and those feelings of mistrust and caution were present last week when I attended a symposium sponsored by Coordinators2, Inc, a Richmond, Virginia adoption agency. The majority of attendees and presenters were adoptive parents and social workers; for the most part, they were warm and inviting.

When I learn that someone--an acquaintance, a neighbor, a co-worker--is an adoptive parent, feelings of distrust run through my body. I mentally  suppress a cringe when I hear “my child.” I change the subject.

If kids are 'better off,' does it matter whether they are adopted or abducted?

Jane

“But aren’t they better off”? That’s the question that’s always asked when people learn about the possibility that a child adopted illegally may be returned to his original family. The unstated hubris is that children are always better off with middle class American families than say, with a single Dad in Virginia, poor parents in rural China, or a couple in impoverished Guatemala.

A Guatemalan Court has ordered that seven year old Karen Abigail be returned to her parents, Loyda and Dayner Rodriguez. If her adoptive parents, Jennifer and Timothy Monahan of Liberty Missouri, fail to return Karen by September 29, the Court will fine them $3,000 Quetzales (about $389) and order Guatemalan authorities to work with US authorities and the International Police (INTERPOL) to find Karen and return her to her real parents.

Conversations with my daughter, Part 5

Jane and Lorraine in Sag Harbor, in the Nineties

What I've never talked about before here is that my found daughter Jane was sexually abused by her grandmother's live-in companion. This was not her adoptive grandfather, someone Jane remembered fondly, but the individual who lived with her grandmother at the time that I knew her. I never met the man, or her grandmother. At the time we taped these conversations (that have been posted sporadically in the past few weeks), her grandmother had died.  

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Ed. Her abuser. She says her parents put her in therapy right around the time the abuse started. “The reason I didn’t want to talk to Conni [the therapist] was because I didn’t feel I could tell

A first/birth mother remembers 'coming out' to her husband-to-be

Tony and Lorraine, at our 25th wedding anniversary party

Today is my 30th wedding anniversary, and I'm in the middle stage of a cold, so there won't be any celebrating today. That will have to wait until next week and then we'll go to the city, take in one of the major art museums, and have an extravagant lunch at some place we can't afford to have dinner. But what is on my mind today is how Tony understood everything right from the first moment he comprehended that I was telling him I'd given a child up for adoption.

It was rather quite easy to tell him because the information came in response to his question, What had my recent book been about?

Adoptive parents prefer head-in-sand to real questions and reality

Lorraine

"For Adoptive Parents, Questions without Answers" reads the headline on the front page of the NY Metropolitan section of the New York Times, and I thought--talk about irony there, unintended by the headline writer, to wit: Boy, you ought to try to be a first mother who gave up in a closed adoption or an adoptee yourself. Talk about "questions without answers," such as, How is my child today? Do his adoptive parents make him drink hot sauce when he is bad and give him a cold shower, like that adoptive mother in Alaska who can't bond with one of her Russian "sons?" Is she at boarding school because there has been a divorce? Because she acts out too much?

Or conversely, Who are my real parents, the ones I was born to?

Single fathers today stay to raise their children

Jobs's father, Abdulfattah Jandali

Single fathers are standing by their children, a dramatic turnaround from baby scoop era of the mid-twentieth century. Adoption was the name of the game in 1955 when Steve Jobs was born to a single white woman. Jobs’ biological father Abdulfattah John Jandali, 80, has made news for begging Jobs, who just announced his retirement from Apple, Inc, to get in touch with him before it is too late. Jobs is suffering from pancreatic cancer. Jandali says he is overcome with guilt for abandoning Jobs.

According to Jandali, when his girl friend, Joanne Simpson (nee Schieble) became pregnant, her father forbade him from marrying her. Without a marriage license, she had little choice but to leave her town,

Is the Adoptee/ (birth) Mother reunion ever (re)solved?

Evelyn Robinson

"When I talk to people about the loss of my son, they sometimes ask me why I wanted to 'rake up the past' and why didn't I 'let sleeping dogs lie.' When you give birth to a child, especially when that child still lives, that child does not exist in the past, but in the present. Once you  have given birth, you are that child's mother and you will always be a mother, no matter what. Being a mother never ends; it is never in the past. There is no such thing as an 'ex-mother.'

"Natural mothers have spent their lives apologizing. We apologized for getting pregnant, but we were not the only people having sexual relationships. We apologized for giving away our babies, but we were told by everyone that it was the right thing to do for our children. We apologized for missing our children, but it was a perfectly natural reaction to our loss. Some mothers are still apologizing for wanting to find their lost children. It is time we stopped apologizing. It is right for us to search for our children. We are mothers, after all.

Remembering those left in limbo by the events of 9/11

Before 9/11

Today is the tenth anniversary of the bombing of the World Trade Center and my thoughts invariably stray to the first parents who wondered if their children whom they would never know died in the World Trade Center, and to the adoptees who wondered if their birth parents whom they would never meet were in the buildings as they went down. 

I am one of the fortunate natural mothers who never had to wonder. On one of her trips east to visit me, my found daughter and I spent much of an afternoon at the World Trade Center. It was when the open-air floor was available to visitors, and since we both liked heights, we sat there on a park bench for about 45 minutes and chatted while we watched helicopters fly below us and around the buildings. In my mind's eye, I can see the two of us sitting there, happy just to be together.

My daughter was camping in Door County in Wisconsin ten years ago today, and as soon as she was able she found a pay phone and called me. Though I live a hundred miles away from Manhattan and the WTC, she wanted to be reassured that I was all right. I remember how deeply pleased I was to get that call. Though she had been adopted and I did not raise her, we both had the knowledge that the other was safe. Everyone deserves that kind of peace of mind.

Adoption with sealed records is wrong on so many levels, but to leave lives in emotional limbo for ever is enough reason to end it, and end it today.--lorraine

Adoptee (lawyer) argues for first (birth) mother's right to privacy

Lorraine

The amount of ignorance about adoptee rights can be downright staggering--even among adoptees themselves, but perhaps only among adoptees who have always had their birth certificates. At least it seemed that way to me this week.

I'm at a wake of a relative of my husband in New Jersey, and my husband's niece is also there. She is an attorney, and one of her friends who came is also an attorney has come by to pay his respects for her sake, and husband's niece knows that he is adopted and she thinks I ought to meet him. Though past experience has told me that is usually not a good idea because the most unlikely things can happen, she brings him over near the end of the evening and mentions that he's adopted and leaves. Okay, now what? But dumb me, I assumed that he had some knowledge of the NJ Adoptee Rights bill--he's an attorney and he's adopted, right?--and Gov. Christie's veto, and mention that.

He looks at me and I realize he doesn't have a clue what I am talking about.

Conversations with my daughter, Part 4

Jane and Lorraine, approximately 1990

 In 1986, my relinquished-and-reunited daughter Jane had a daughter and gave her up for adoption. The fact that she would end up, at twenty, another first/birth mother damned near killed me because I knew how emotionally I had been ripped apart when I surrendered her--and now she would have to go through the same grief of giving up a child. It also meant that my act of relinquishment had started a trail of adoption in my line, nearly the worst thing I could imagine--generations of women going through the hell of relinquishment. I was bereft. What would be worse? That my daughter was a serial killer.

Adoption is a good thing. Really?

Wack-A-Mole

We can't escape adoption. It's like the Wack-a-Mole game, rearing its head in conversations with new acquaintances, popping out in television and radio news reports, bubbling forth in magazines articles. (For those who haven't been to Chuck E. Cheese, Wack-a-Mole is an arcade game where the player hits pop-up moles with a mallet. As soon as the player hits one, another pops up.)  References to adoption, if not overtly positive, are almost always tacitly accepting of adoption as a good thing. Last week fellow blogger Lorraine listened to NPR for five minutes on the car radio and heard a report on how Hurricane Irene affected people's lives. What did she hear? A prospective adoptive father saying that he and his wife had been on the way to the Ukraine where they planned to pick up a baby for adoption--but their Aeroflot cancelled their flight!

Frank talk about adoption with my relinquished daughter, Part 3

I taped this conversation with Jane, my daughter whom I relinquished to be adopted, in the fall of 1998 or 1999. I will be eternally glad that I did. She knew I was doing this for a memoir I was writing. It was the longest sustained conversation we ever had about her life, epilepsy, and adoption.

Lorraine, Kim and Jane in 1994. I love this picture.

Frank talk about adoption with my relinquished daughter, Part 2

Continuing my conversation with Jane about adoption matters, in the fall of 1998 or 1999, at her adoptive parents' home, where she was living with her daughter at the time. How I wish I had taken more pictures--or could find the ones I must have taken that trip. But here is one of her and her husband, Bob, on their last visit to Long Island, in 2007. She would die a few weeks before Christmas that year.

Jane and her husband, Bob, in February, 2007 near Montauk on Long Island. It was a bitterly cold day.

Jane and I are serious most of the time on the tapes, but we found plenty to amuse us. We were ironic, reflective, bawdy. The conversation flows from the serious to the mundane: