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.  

       *               *                *

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:

The Persistence of Roots

The Persistence of Roots

Irene did no damage to our house but we were without power for three days, due to falling trees that pulled down power lines and hit transformers. The crew who worked on our street was from Georgia and they were great. For three days, I read on the back deck, gardened, swam in a friend's pool in the late