[Birth Mother] First Mother Forum

Mother's Day for Birth Mothers Is Hard

2025-05-10T16:39:00.002-04:00

The headline says it all, doesn't it?

We remember the child we lost to adoption.

We remember the heartache of the day the child was born.

We remember the last time we saw our child.

Or maybe we did not see the child at all. That was my choice, at least not some hospital nurse or social worker and I made the choice because I was having such a hard time dealing with the reality I would be facing. She would be gone. I know many others have made other choices, and cuddled their babies tight, but I was such an emotional mess--I was hysterical right after she was born, and gone--that I knew seeing her would only make relinquishing her all the more traumatic. And I did not feel I had a choice.

So here I am today, more than a half century later, thinking how will I get through Mother's Day tomorrow? Many of you know, from my book and other writings, that I found my daughter, we had a tumultuous relationship for a quarter of a century plus, and she died by suicide. I have two granddaughters, one my own daughter gave up for adoption; and one she kept.

The kept one is in my life as much as any granddaughter would be, and I am eternally glad for that. I was back in Detroit, where I am from, a few weeks ago, and saw her three times over four days. She's an art teacher, and doing well, and I am proud of her.

The other granddaughter I found through a private searcher, and while we spent some days together, we have not been in touch for years. Fate sometimes makes its plans without consulting you. But it's partly my choice too, for I did not want to have the roller coaster relationship I had with my daughter all over again, and I could see that ahead. Since she did not have a reunion with her mother, I knew I would bear of brunt of any adoption-related feelings and issues...all over again.

And some of you know that I lost my understanding husband of 43 years last fall. That has been hard too as I face challenges as a widow. I have a house to sell, possessions to dispossess, a big move to make in the future. Which brings us to Mother's Day, tomorrow!

I have always urged here before for natural/birth/first mothers like us to make other plans and I admit I don't have any firm plans yet. Most of my friends are coupled, and have children. But I am not going to spend the day moping because...that just leads to a pity party and more moping. I won't go to lunch in a restaurant because too many tables will be filled with children honoring their own mothers.

I might go to a movie that will not make me cry. I might go for a walk on the beach, which is nearby. I might go shopping and try not to buy something I do not need. I might go to an art museum nearby. Or I might just end up working on a project that I promised my husband I would take on before he died--rewriting a draft of a book he left behind. Work is always absorbing.

Oh! I could also get to the gardening store and choose the plants for my deck garden and that usually takes a couple of days before I'm done. After yesterday's rain the day here on Long Island is gorgeous. I am going to add up the good things in my life: I was able to turn my life's biggest sorrow--losing my daughter to adoption--into a passion and cause, that is, working to change society's perception of adoption and in the process, help to unseal adoptee's original birth certificates.

Sealed birth certificates and closed adoption is a blight on the land and has caused untold misery for so many. So the fact that I have been granted a voice to work for change is a plus in my life. I am thrilled that my last memoir, which I initially self-published, was picked up by Marylee MacDonald of Grand Canyon Press and together we came out with a better, fuller edition of Hole In My Heart covering so many issues. It just became available as an audio book, and I'm doubly thrilled about that.

So while I can't be a cheerful Pollyanna today--thoughts of my lost daughter and my life will drift in and out today and tomorrow, I am sure--but I'm going to do my best to make lemonade out of the lemons in my life's basket.

And I hope you all will too.--lorraine

FMF gets an offer to apply for an adoption grant

2024-06-03T22:30:00.001-04:00

Dusky

Though we are rarely posting--the action has shifted to social media--where immediate responses can be made--I'm here because of a particularly poignant comment came in and the blog has been "updated" to the point where I haven't figured out how to comment myself as the blog owner.

However, in checking the email, this came in and...it while it appears that the impulse is good, it is another striking example of how Adoption is seen as such a Good Thing that loan companies are using a thousand dollar grant (a drop in the bucket if you are adopting) as a good-will measure to advertise their brand.

Reminds me of a jewelry ad (was it Kaye Jewelers?) who had an offensive ad about handing over a baby a few years ago--sending the message that all adoption is good because let's look at the happy adoptive couple getting the baby! From the Adoption Stork! Without an authentic birth certificate! Get the natural mother off the set! We got her to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and gave her no choice to change any provisions! Etc. Despite all the voices and writings from both adoptees and natural mothers in the last decade, obviously there is more work to be done. Having been at this since the mid-Seventies--I know, before a lot of you were born--the media has often disregarded what we say and stifled publicity at times because of its bent to Adoption as a Good Thing.

And Justice Samuel Alito, the Christian Right, conservatives in general, and liberals too have csucked up that thought like mother's milk. Yet we shoulder on.

I took out the responding email but the link below will get there. If you are responding to them, please leave your missive here as a comment. I do urge you to respond. As for the comment that brought me her, I will get to it in a day or two.--lorraine

Hello,

I hope this email finds you well.

My name is Emily, and I am reaching out on behalf of Associates Home Loan. Associates Home Loan has started a brand new adoption grant, and we wanted to get the word out to those who are needing financial assistance in the adoption process. We have spent the past few years focused on scholarships for college students, but the adoption process is near and dear to our hearts. We wanted to explore how our grant could be a source of support to supplement the cost of giving a child a loving, permanent family.

This is a $1,000 adoption grant. The family or individual wanting to adopt applies through a form field on our website and uploads their Homestudy.
We will select a recipient twice a year. The next two deadlines are December 30th, 2020 and June 15th, 2021.
The selected individual/family to receive the grant will be contacted and will have two weeks to confirm their adoption agency and adoption process status.
A check will be mailed directly to the recipient’s agency to be used towards adoption expenses. Money is only payable in USD to a US adoption agency.
We accept applications from anyone adopting, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, religion, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, or disability.

RIP: The fire behind adoption reform, Florence Fisher

2023-10-05T22:19:00.015-04:00

Lorraine

Florence Fisher, the spark plug who ignited the adoption-reform movement in 1971, died peacefully on Sunday, October 1. She was 95, and in failing health for several months.

While she has long been retired from active work in adoption, she founded the largest adoptee-rights organization, Adoptee Rights Liberty Movement, better known as ALMA, which at its heyday in the Eighties had 50 chapters in cities large and small across America and about 50,000 members. At the time, it was the largest national reunion registry, numbering about 340,000 searching adult adoptees, natural/first/birth mothers and fathers, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents and others hoping to find family members. It operated out of walk-up couple of rooms in a midtown Manhattan office building, staffed largely by volunteers and Florence, who welcomed all who climbed those stairs.

I was one of them.

By the time I met Florence, she was well on her way. In March of 1971, she placed a small want ad in The New York Times: " Adult who was adopted as a child desires contact with other adoptees to exchange views on adoptive situation and for mutual assistance in search for natural parents."

Florence Fisher and her natural father

Initially the ad was refused, she told me, because, as the ad taker stated, "We can't control the outcome of what happens as a result of an ad like this." Florence said that was on a Friday. In a followup call from someone else in the ad department on Saturday, she played dumb about the ad having a explosive effect. It was scheduled to run on Sunday.

She waited for Sunday, had trouble sleeping the night before, she told me years ago when I interviewed her for the purpose of writing about her today. The ad appeared as she wrote it. I did not see it.

A deluge of mail from all over the country followed, including some hate mail from adoptive parents. As someone who gave up a child for adoption in 1966, I was deep in the closet of secrecy. I knew nothing of this going on, all the while wondering: Will I ever meet my daughter? Will she hate me? Does she ever think about me? Do adopted people want to meet their natural parents? Will my daughter want to meet me?

But I knew none of this until a year later when I read a piece by Enid Nemy in The New York Times headlined, "Adopted Children Who Wonder, 'What Was Mother Like?'" (July 25, 1972) As I read about Florence, and the desire of some adoptees to know their natural parents, I felt as if I had been thrown a lifeline: I wasn't crazy, my desire to know my daughter was valid, and most exciting--at least some adopted people wanted to know their natural parents! (The words birth mother and birth parents were not yet in use. We were "natural parents.") At the time, my hasty marriage after I relinquished my daughter was breaking up. Alone in my Manhattan apartment that morning, I felt an eerie calm: There was hope that I would know my daughter one day.

When something is in the air, it pops up everywhere. That very July, my own piece about giving up a daughter was on the news stands in a new magazine called New Woman under the absurd headline: "Things Your Husband/Lover Never Told You about Sex." Like, you could get pregnant when not married? Since I had asked that the piece be anonymous, the byline read, "Phyllis Bernard," a name made up by an editor. It was my story in brief; I didn't imagine then that I would ever write a memoir. But the story was coming out of me.

By the end of the day the Times piece appeared, I had typed a proposal off to my editor at Cosmopolitan magazine, the late Mallen de Santis. I did not reveal my connection; I was just on top of what's new! I ended up with an assignment to write a as-told-to-story about an adopted woman who searched and found.

Now where would I find such a woman? Why I would call Florence Fisher and meet her myself! Surely she would know the right woman to interview. So on a blistering hot day--it was late September by then--I showed up at Florence's turquoise apartment in upper Manhattan and tremulously began interviewing her. She made me iced tea. We sat side-by-side on her couch. I was fighting back tears when I could no longer keep inside what was bursting to come out: I told her I had given up a child for adoption six years earlier.

I thought so, she said, patting my knee, I could tell that you were not simply here as a writer. I finally let my tears emerge.

That afternoon of several hours of talking began our deep and lasting friendship. I started going to ALMA meetings where I could connect with other women like myself and adoptees who looked upon us with wonderment: Could my own mother be like them? Because searching was so daring, Florence would not let mothers with children under 18, nor adopted people underage, into the search sessions that followed the public part of the meeting. I really don't remember much about the meetings except that it was a place where it was safe to be who we were: women deeply traumatized by the loss of our children. The adopted people there made us feel comfortable too, hoping, I imagine, that their own mothers felt as we did. We were renegades and we knew there were millions of others like us, both mothers and adoptees.

To the outside world, I was deep in the closet as someone who relinquished a child. To admit my awful sin to the world was unthinkable! My soon-to-be ex-husband knew, but not my own family--certainly not his family!--and none of my friends, save two. One of them was a new friend who revealed that she too was a natural mother the afternoon I told her.

At the time, both Florence and I understood that all publicity was good because a new flood of letters and calls would ensue as word spread. More people would join her growing registry; more matches would be made; we would have a stronger case to make to legislators. The Cosmo piece did just that, appearing in the June, 1974 issue with this line on the cover: "I Found My Mother." Editor-in-chief Helen Gurley Brown understood the power of this story. I found my mother. Not birth mother. Mother. It was a victory for us all. By then, Florence's memoir, The Search for Anna Fisher (1973) had come out and she had appeared on numerous talk shows. Talk of a movie came and went. We heard of movie stars who didn't want the part; we never heard why. We assumed it was because the character was shaking up the status quo, was attacking adoption as America knew it.

In 1975, Florence asked if I would appear as a witness for an adoptee searching for her records; I did and realized that the case could be covered by the press. The attorney, Gertrude Mainzer, said that I could be anonymous, but it was time to be public. Whatever good I could do would be halfway unless I used my name. Florence agreed: Lorraine Dusky was a real person; an anonymous mother was...maybe a fake. We sat side by side until we were called to the stand. I got through the cross examination that ended when I resolutely stated: "You don't have someone in your body for nine months and forget." Within weeks of the trial, I went home to Michigan, told my mother, told my brothers, and announced I was going to write about the issue and use my name. My father was deceased by then, but I would have told him the same. My family never questioned my decision and gave me their full support. And so I went forward, coming out publicly as a woman who relinquished a child in an op-ed piece called "Yearning" in The New York Times. The following year I wrote a long a long essay on my experience for Town & Country magazine, which landed me on the Today show, interviewed by Jane Pauley. Later that year I published a piece that appeared in surprising location, Parent's magazine, with an even more surprising headline: "The Adopted Child Has a Right to Know EVERYTHING" (Oct. 1975), written just like that.

When Florence took ALMA non-profit, I was part of the inner circle and one of the original board members. We met at Betty Jean Lifton's apartment in Manhattan's west side. B.J.-- adoptee, author and therapist--remained the cool intellectual, with credentials of her own and through her well-known husband and author, Robert Jay Lifton, but Florence was always the engine behind the movement. Short in stature, long on passion, she was quick to laugh and just as quick to push back against critics. She began appearing more in the media, taking on adoption attorneys, adoptive parents, a man named Bill Pierce who was the founder of the National Coalition for Adoption (NCFA) and the enemy of unsealing birth records until he died.

By 1976, we had gained enough ground that the New York legislature took up a bill to unseal the records of adoptees. Florence, B. J. and I testified in Albany before a joint Senate/Assembly hearing. My picture was on the front page of the Albany Knickerbocker News, as that is where I fled and worked as a reporter after I gave up my baby in Rochester, New York. Instead of reporting the news, now I was the News. It felt somewhat disconcerting, but so be it. A higher calling was at work to combat any regrets I might have had about going public as one of "those women."

The bill died because Florence would not accept that the bill would only apply to adoptions going forward 18 years from the date it was enacted. Everybody born and adopted before 1976 (or before 1936 when New York sealed its records) would still have their records sealed. I kept writing, essays that were rejected by numerous publications, essays that would later become part of my first memoir.

Florence wasted no time. Working with a sympathetic New York University Law School professor, Cyril Means, Florence filed a class-action suit in federal court (ALMA Society v. Mellon, 1979). We lost. We lost on appeal. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, so the lower court ruling stood. My first memoir, Birthmark, came out that same year in the fall. It was the first memoir by a established publisher from the point-of-view of a mother who had relinquished a child. Now I was on a number of talk shows coast to coast, and in numerous newspaper stories, but sealed records remained the norm. Was it disheartening? Yes. But we knew we had the winds of justice behind our backs. And every time one of us was in the media, more people came out of the proverbial woodwork and the movement gained momentum.

But others were at work too. Lee Campbell had come out of the cloak of anonymity--she previously had appeared on talk shows with a veil covering her face--and had founded Concerned United Birthparents, better known to us as CUB. What was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), with Lee on the advisory committee, came up with a bill in 1980 that would unseal all records everywhere. Now Florence and I were invited to appear before a joint Senate-House subcommittee, and together we trooped up to DC, sharing a hotel room, again sitting side-by-side until called to address the committee. NCFA brought forth its own anti-witnesses and sponsored a letter-writing drive against the bill that elicited thousands of negative letters from adoptive parents. The senator heading the sub-committee was adoptive father, John Tower, known all over DC as a drunk and a womanizer. But he held the power, and that terrific bill also went nowhere.

Florence persevered. In time, states began unsealing their records. But New York held firm. I wrote about other things, wrote other books, always fitting in here and there pieces about adoption reform, and published my second memoir, Hole In My Heart in 2015, with a new (and better, if I say so myself) edition earlier this year. Florence gave me a cover blurb, as she had for Birthmark. There were long gaps in our conversations, but once in a while one or the other would call and we would chat for at least an hour. In 1994 the records were still sealed in New York, and she spoke about realizing that if she had gone along with the 1976 reform bill, adoptees born that year and after would have been able to get their birth records. It wasn't that either of us were sorry she hadn't made a different decision, it was simply a reckoning of what might have been.

At some point, well after computers became the new thing, Florence stepped away from ALMA. She knew it was time for a new guard. But sometimes she would tell me about some case that she had gotten involved in, even though she had vowed to stay out of adoption work. She never used a computer or email. The telephone was her medium, and she could talk for hours.

When Florence's beloved husband, Stanley Eigenfeld, died in 2013, she was inconsolable, and inconsolable she remained for the next decade. She said that when the money at ALMA ran out, Stanley paid the bills, sometimes covering the rent on the Manhattan office. Phone calls to her since his death always ended up with her talking about wanting to join Stanley in the next life, with her in tears. I listened. It was pointless to try to bolster her spirits. She only needed to talk. I can't think of a single subject I couldn't talk to her about--in my personal or professional life. We talked the day in 2019 when the New York legislature voted to unseal the original birth records of adoptees, and in doing so, became the 13th state to do so. What a long fight it had been, we agreed. In the last months she sometimes hallucinated, but I did have the opportunity one night when she was clear to tell her how much her work meant to so many. I knew it was near the end, and I wept.

As the years went on, ALMA was not the powerhouse organization it had been when she was at the helm. States had their own organizations, and one after another began unsealing the records. Today we stand at 14--perhaps soon to be 15--where adoptees can request their original birth records without restrictions. Nineteen states have halfway laws, where the law has loosened up some but still have restrictions. While others, such as Jean Paton had been quietly working in the background, Florence Fisher brought the movement into the light and created a force that cannot be stopped. Someday every state will have open records for adoptees, and Florence deserves a lion's share of the credit. She changed the law and in doing so, she changed lives, mine included.

Florence Fisher was a big soul, an old soul, an empathetic soul. I remember her telling me that ALMA in Spanish means "soul," and that was the reason she crafted that name. Tonight I mourn her presence, but know that she did so much for so many, and am at peace knowing that the work she started cannot be stopped. --lorraine dusky

PS: I'll be talking about Florence this evening (10/6) at the NAAP Happy Hour. Sign up here: https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10228215511791020&set=a.1437851744327

______________________

It's late tonight. Later I will post some of the links to other blog posts about her, and some of the above stories. Unfortunately, I have no photo of us together.

A small snapshot of adoption awareness creeping into the news

2023-08-15T15:39:00.010-04:00

Jane

Two obituaries in the August 6 Oregonian caught my eye. The first of a woman, Kathleen, born in 1933. She majored in Home Economics at Oregon State College; in 1954 her studies culminated in a ”Home Ec Practice Home,” a six week live-in course where each week a student was assigned as cook, housekeeper, or baby-tender of an actual toddler…” Kathleen became an adoption social worker.

Adoption agencies placed babies entrusted to them for adoption in these college “practice homes” both to give students baby-tending experience, part of the essential education of young women along with baking and sewing, and to evaluate the babies to see if they were suitable for adoption. I wrote about practice babies on FMF in 2011.

The second obituary was of a man, Robert, born in 1953, 20 years later. He and his wife “raised an amazing daughter, Hannah…. Bob also had the opportunity to share a relationship with his biological son, Steve … and his granddaughter, Kennedy.” It’s likely that the son was placed for adoption as an infant and, thanks to the search movement and the opening of records was able to unite with his father.

Similarly, Lorraine was acknowledged as her daughter Jane's birth mother in her 2007 obituary in the Wisconsin newspaper that carried it. Her adoptive family or husband in Wisconsin had passed it along to the funeral home as well as the newspaper. Thus Jane's obit carried the full truth of her life, rather than pretending that her life began with adoption. One can hope that the practice becomes more common as time passes and people acknowledge that adoptees have a life--and a family history--before adoption. Life begins at birth, not adoption.

With the first obit, we have an example of how a woman with little to no experience about the impact of adoption on both the adoptee and the natural mother would affect their lives became an adoption social worker. Later, we have a recognition of the man being a birth father of a child who was relinquished for adoption, and even earlier, of a birth mother being acknowledged in her daughter's death notice.

A snapshot, seemingly minor, of how society has changed for the better. -- jane

A late PS from lorraine, who happened upon her wedding announcement to Anthony S. Brandt in the New York Times on September 21, 1981...and realized that it put her connection to adoption fair and square:

The bride, a freelance writer and a former senior editor of Town & Country magazine, will retain her name. She was graduated from Wayne State University. Her books include ''Birthmark,'' published by M. Evans, a personal story of having a daughter and giving her up for adoption. She has been active in the movement to open the sealed birth records for adult adoptees.

I am obsessed with the trial of E.J. Carroll against Donald Trump

2023-05-08T22:05:00.010-04:00

Lorraine

I am obsessed with the trial of E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump for defamation. She is me and I am her. I remember the era of the Seventies through the Nineties in which we newly liberated women flirted and tried to carry on like men sexually--throw off the shackles of the past. People openly flirted at the office, sexually laced jokes in nearly every setting were the usual, and we didn't let anything bother us. We were cool, smart, sophisticated.

But we knew enough not to go to the police when we were raped. Because we heard the cops wouldn't take us seriously, we thought...well, maybe we shouldn't have worn "hot pants" to work, maybe we did flirt a little too much...maybe--well, the cops wouldn't believe us anyway. And who wanted to be picked over by not only the police, but the D.As who wouldn't bring a case to trial, and god knows, if they did, we knew the opposition lawyers would pick up apart.

So we carried on, as if...nothing had happened. We were women, we were strong.

That's the cool that E. J. emanates, and honestly I love that she's now tough enough to go to court and lay all this embarrassing stuff out there for the world to pick over. Her trial reminds me of the women I know who were found themselves in situations where they were raped because...to have not been there, at that time, with them alone...would have appeared racist. For myself, someone I had dated a couple of times--and told I didn't want to see anymore over the phone--ended up pounding on my apartment door after midnight, yelling: I know you're in there!! until I let him in. Then he wouldn't leave and I submitted to him. I even hate to admit this today. Why didn't I call the police instead of letting him in to stop the noise? Why didn't I keep him talking for another hour? Because in that moment I was afraid of him. I told myself for years it wasn't assault, but E. Jean's retelling of encounter encounter with the disgusting Donald Trump reminds me how I felt after my own very different encounter in that time: violated.

There's something else going on too that relates to giving up a child. So much blame and shame accrued to us as we came out of the experience. When E. Jean said on the stand people see you after as damaged goods, that is how I felt after that night, and most especially after I relinquished my daughter. Damaged Goods. I was damaged when I met my first husband, and I raced into that marriage to cover up the shame, to make myself feel better about myself, to gain some semblance of self-respect. I am all right today, I have carried on but I will take the guilt and sorrow and low self-esteem with me to the grave.--lorraine

Why Some First/Birth Mothers Reject Reunion, Part 2

2023-04-04T14:11:00.007-04:00

The work of my life

Why do some mothers reject reunion? Because they have closed up that hole in their heart. It's still there, underneath the scab, but they are afraid to let anyone rip it off. Besides they haven't told...the people in their lives today. There's more to say than I did in a previous post and so I am continuing the except from the new edition of Hole In My Heart, Love and Loss in the Fault Lines of Adoption, which to the end of the day is on sale for $2.99 in ebook. Now about those mothers:

...These women may have told their partners. Or not. They may have told any other children they had. Or not. They may not have had other children. They may have told their best friends. Or not. Cousins and more distant family members may know of the birth and adoption. Or not. Having found no succor from their mortified families throughout the pregnancy, birth, and relinquishment, they never talk to them of it. Neighbors and work friends probably do not know.

In short, dealing with reunion feels like fresh punishment for an old sin, one they thought they had atoned for. Instead of looking forward to meeting their now-grown child, they fear exposure. The overwhelming release of repressed grief on first contact—an email, a letter, or a phone call—unleashes a renewed sense of loss, guilt, shame, anger, and grief, now intensified by the loss having been shrouded in secrecy for countless years.

And now, come out of the closet and tell everybody in the family? Have her or him visit and figure out how to introduce her or him to people you run into together? Tell your best friend, when for decades you kept this from her? Tell the children you’ve kept this from their entire lives? Everybody will look at you differently.

You have been pretending to be someone you are not. You have been hiding this basic, essential truth about yourself for years! How can anyone trust you again? These women are everywhere. They don’t admit this on Facebook— or they avoid Facebook because they might be found—they don’t volunteer for TV shows, and they don’t end up in surveys and research.

Lorraine

Improbably, one of these women was a neighbor and friend of mine for years. She didn’t approve of my work to unseal birth records and talked about it so much with her grown children that one of them suspected she had a secret child herself. Yet somehow we maintained a connection. On her deathbed, she admitted that her “oldest” child was not her firstborn. It was not hard for me or the family to figure out where and when she might have given birth—or even who the father most likely was. It had been simply too hard to come clean to her family until she lay dying, a time when they were not likely to quiz or criticize her.

As noted earlier, couples who married after relinquishing a child appear less likely to welcome contact. Though I could find no data confirming this, other than anecdotal, this is commonly accepted among searchers and confidential intermediaries. Some individuals may decide not to seek a continuing relationship—it could be the parent, it could be the child. When there are vastly different lifestyles, or strongly held but conflicting religious or political beliefs, or addiction and criminal behavior, one or the other party might find reunion too daunting. Too much time has passed, and it may be impossible to build an enduring connection, no matter how much one side longs for the severed relationship to be stitched back together.

Often, adoptees initiate searches when they are about to be a parent. They may only want a medical history, not a relationship. Yet for an adoptee, reunion provides a second opportunity to claim something no one else on earth can provide: a mother’s unquestioning acceptance and love. They don’t speak of it in those terms because this yearning is difficult to acknowledge or articulate, yet the adoptees’ posts on Facebook attest to the pain associated with rejection. They are excruciating to read. Time and more reunion stories in the media—as in-the-closet mothers read about how others handle reunion—may lessen the number of these rejections as they embolden women to open their hearts and welcome their children.

If any natural mother afraid to reunite wants to leave a comment here, they will not be crucified. We will carefully moderate comments. We want to help you deal with this issue, not make it worse. I understand why this is so hard. --lorraine

______________________

And don't forget, the sale of Hole in My Heart ends at midnight.

Link between Adoption and Suicide is Real

2023-03-28T13:55:00.008-04:00

Daughter Jane and Lorraine

It was a bracing morning being brought back to reality about how the world see the woman who gave up a child for adoption. Not nicely is the short answer.

A ten-minute morning interview for drive-to-work radio show in the New York/New Jersey area led to be being mentally whacked for having a relationship with a married man, which I did, and his having an Irish Catholic background was another reason to pile on the criticism. She gave the listeners advice--don't have an affair with a married man, look where that led for this stupid person I'm interviewing.

We did cover that I found her, that her adoptive parents had already tried to find me, that her epilepsy was almost certainly caused by the birth-control pills I took when I was pregnant but did not know...and then she asked how my relationship with my daughter was today.

I had to say that she died. Since the next question was going to be about that--I told the truth. She died by suicide. Mincing words is not my style. I was able to say some more but since people listening today might come to the blog to read about suicide, I'm excerpting a small section of Hole In My Heart below:

While there are no good statistics on adoptees who actually commit suicide, research on adopted populations shows that a disproportionate number are likely to. No matter how you slice the numbers, adoption increases the probability of suicide, no matter how many adoptees never have a thought of it, no matter how many adoptees are successful, smart, and may one day end up on the Supreme Court. It is unlikely there will ever be good statistics on how many adoptees commit suicide because “adopted” is not noted on death certificates.

What we do know is that more adoptees than non-adoptees think about suicide quite often. Google “suicide and adoption” and what pops up is an entry from the medical journal Pediatrics, “Adoption as a Risk Factor for Attempted Suicide during Adolescence.” That study unequivocally states, “Attempted suicide is more common among adolescents who live with adoptive parents than among adolescents who live with biological parents.” The connection between adoption and suicide persisted even after the researchers adjusted for depression, aggression, and impulsive behavior. Not surprisingly, “family connectedness,” whether among the adopted or non-adopted, did decrease the likelihood of suicide attempts.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota reported that adopted teens were almost four times more likely to attempt suicide than those who lived with their natural parents, even after adjustment for factors associated with suicidal behavior, such as psychiatric disorder symptoms, personality traits, family environment, and academic disengagement. Girls were more likely than boys to attempt suicide. About 75 percent of the adopted teens in the study (more than 1,200, all living in Minnesota) were adopted before the age of two and were foreign born—mostly from South Korea.

This deep dive into suicide and adoption followed a study by the lead researcher and others who concluded that being adopted approximately doubled the odds of having a disruptive behavior disorder and having contact with a mental health professional. Interestingly, international adoptees were less likely to exhibit behavior disorders.

B. J. Lifton wrote that at a seminar for adoptive parents when she brought up the fact that the percentage of adoptee suicide was statistically high, a prominent psychiatrist asked if that nasty bit could be deleted from the tape, which was to be later sold as a record of the talk. Lifton agreed but later wrote she was sorry she had. --from Hole In My Heart.

Why Mothers Reject Reunion

2023-02-20T14:45:00.001-05:00

Lorraine

Besides the debatable differences on the grief scale for those involved in open or closed adoptions, there is a second issue: What happens later. And that requires looking at the impact of shame, humiliation, grief, and gossip—and the subsequent secrecy—that surrounded the mothers who relinquished their children decades ago. For months, the pregnant women, some of them high school teenagers, hid their growing bellies from the outside world. They were forced to drop out of school and go into seclusion, possibly with faraway relatives or in a maternity home—some even committed to psychiatric institutions—all to shelter their families from the ignominy of the unwed and unwanted pregnancy. Every day was a reminder of how disgraceful it was to get pregnant outside marriage. Knowing that they were going to relinquish their babies to adoption, birth itself was sad, harrowing in the present and haunting in the future.

A great many of these teenagers received little or no emotional support from their families, and instead endured their scorn before and after the birth. For these teens and women, it was a hellish time. Then these young mothers, still aching for their babies with the “love hormone” oxytocin running rampant in their bodies, were told to “forget” the whole experience! Social workers said it. So did priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, and doctors. Some women were told their babies died, while others were told they were supposed to think of their child as dead. The mantra women in closed adoptions heard was forget, forget, forget. They were supposed to move on with their lives and not grieve openly, the way one is allowed to grieve in any other catastrophic loss. Some dropped out of high school. Those in college often switched schools, having to integrate themselves into a world of coeds whose greatest problem was getting into the sorority of their choice. Like many others, I quit my job and moved to another town.

I was fortunate in that my social worker did not tell me I would forget. She said I would never forget, but that in time, my awareness of loss would be easier to bear. There would be scar tissue, but the wound would heal somewhat. And in truth, it did. It took a long time, but life—and acceptance of my life—did get better.

Perhaps writing has been a way of expiating my own sorrow and guilt, but since writing about my life is as natural as riding a bicycle, I don’t experience it that way. I do know those honest words from my social worker and adoption confidante, as I sat weeping in her office, have always been a lodestar on my life’s journey. She understood as well as anyone who has not gone through this herself.

But others had the primacy of secrecy drilled into them too deep to dig themselves out. Many were left an absolute emotional mess, without a shoulder to cry on, and once they managed to squelch their pain and sorrow and get their lives back together, they had constructed a suit of emotional armor that left them unwilling ever to go there again. Opening themselves up once more to the pounding grief, embarrassment, and disgrace of that time in their lives became unthinkable. And so, they reject reunion. Even when their grown sons and daughters return, however discreetly, asking for information and hoping for connection.--Excerpt from Hole In My Heart: Love and Loss in the Fault Lines of Adoption

Barbara Walters was no fan of adoption refom

2023-01-02T16:55:00.015-05:00

Lorraine

While the media is rightfully pouring ink and airtime out over the death of trailblazer Barbara Walters at 93, I'm reading about her and looking for somewhat different references than the general public: her relationship to adoption. Walters adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, in 1968, two years after I gave up my daughter for adoption.

By 1976 Walters was hosting a show that would be the prequel to The View. Called Not for Women Only, she presided over a panel of experts, with knowledgeable audience members sitting at round tables close to the front to be easily be interviewed. One day the topic was the adoption-reform movement, specifically adoptees searching for their natural mothers. Florence Fisher, the adoptee sparkplug who had ignited this tinder keg like no one before her, and I were present as those "knowledgeable" people on the subject. I'd already gone public as a woman who had relinquished a child by then, and had appeared on the Today show and in the Op-ed pages of the New York Times. Knowing the blowback I had received by coming out as one of "those women," I was expecting hostility. I have no clue who the supposed experts on the panel were--certainly there was no one espousing our point of view, most likely it was adoption lawyers and agency owners and social workers--and eventually Florence and I and a few others were able to speak.

I do not remember specifically what I said, but it must have been along with lines of never forgetting my daughter and always hoping to meet her one day. I don't know if I added "but I don't want to take her from her other parents, I just want to know her," because back then I was saying that all the time, hoping to allay the deep-rooted fears of adoptive parents everywhere. After all, to them I represented the bogeyman of their adoption: the natural mother who didn't die, didn't go away, didn't shut up. The other mother who had given birth to their child. She was alive! And kicking!

All I do recall from that encounter with Walters is knowing that she resented me and Florence. There were other adoptees there too--and maybe even another natural mother, but I don't remember who they were. (If anyone does, please leave a comment.) There was smoldering resentment--and fear--in Walters' attitude that day.

After that I noticed that whenever Walters did talk about adoption, she conveyed an attitude of wariness about unsealing birth records for adoptees. In the early nineties, when the Baby Jessica (DeBoer/Schmidt) case became media fodder as the natural parents tried to reclaim their daughter, Walters did a special on the case, leaving no doubt where her sympathies lie. For those who don't remember, Robbie and Jan DeBoer fought the natural mother (and later father) for years in the media and in court, while the courts diddled. It is worth nothing that the natural mother, Cara Clausen, asked for her daughter back three weeks after she relinquished her; as the legal fight ground on, the court let the girl stay with the Deboers, and thus the DeBoers were able to create a cause celebre with the media almost universally siding with them, adoptive parents. In fact, I seem to have been the only journalist writing the other side of the story.

But back to Walters. At some point she did do a story about her daughter--who had some troubled years as a hellion--and it showed her reuniting with the natural birth mother. What struck me was how alike they looked and dressed: hippie all the way, with a big skirt and dangling earrings, so unlike the tailored outfits Walters always wore. I haven't found any follow up stories about their relationship, but I haven't looked long and hard today.

In doing some digging today, I found this about the Walters' adoption: "I had had three miscarriages and my husband and I decided that we would adopt a child,” she said during a 2014 interview. “We had dinner one night with a couple we rarely saw and the woman said that she had a little girl who was blonde and blue-eyed, and they wanted to adopt a boy … who was going to be tall. They didn’t want the girl. So, we said, ‘We’ll take the girl!’” (It appears that they did get that baby, and that it was through a private, not agency, adoption.)

If one needed proof she was afraid of the natural mother, Walters didn't take time off when she adopted, because, as she admitted in 2002 to NBC, "I really didn’t want the biological mother to know that Jackie had been adopted by us, [so I] just kept right on working.”

There are lengthy obits of Walters, and the ones I read or watched on television, make scant reference to her daughter. The New York Times merely said: "She and her second husband, the theatrical producer raised a daughter, Jacqueline, during her time at Today." The next paragraph only notes that Walters is "survived by her daughter, Jacqueline Danforth." No mention is made of adoption. Which is often par for the course about adoption in the media. I did see a morning show once where Walters' and her daughter had some sort of rapprochement, after a lengthy break. Or maybe her daughter just sent her a congratulatory note about something, but in any event, it was a happy moment for Walters.

When there was a big scandal in the New York State Legislature a few years ago with a leader in the Senate named Dean Skelos, about arranging for a no-show job for his son with a firm that had business with the state, nowhere was it mentioned that the son was adopted, even though it was well known among insiders in Albany--and we in adoption reform. I emailed the reporter doing the story--for certainly, in this case, the son's adoption was part of the story. I got an email back from someone else at the Times telling me I had to be wrong. I wrote back suggesting the Times reporter or someone (like a fact-checker?) check with Skelos himself; whoever I was emailing demurred. End of story.

Not quite. When the Skelos defense team presented their case...the son's being adopted was part of his defense! Go figure. (FYI, The court threw that out.) The Times used to have a whole bureau of three guys--always guys when I was there--in Albany during the legislative session, but apparently now they have only people who are far from knowledgeable. Or maybe any mention of adoption in personal stories is generally verboten.

All of this comes to mind when I read about Walters, one story leading to another. Barbara Walters deserves every accolade for the doors she pushed open for women in the media. If there were few women covering hard news, as I did, on newspapers upstate in the Sixties, there were even fewer taken seriously on television. And Walters led the way then for those who would follow and was a mentor to many.

But she also was a force in slowing the unsealing of birth records for adoptees, and that brings to mind the wisdom of Thomas Kuhn, the American philosopher who concluded decades ago that a scientific paradigm topples only when the last of its powerful adherents dies. The same is true with sociological paradigms such as adoption, universally a sacred cow in the media, always to be admired, never discouraged or attacked.

Yet we have come a long way in the movement to unseal adoption records and in doing so change some people's perceptions. Walters was not a leader in the forces that still keep so many records unjustly sealed from their rightful owners, but she was a "powerful adherent" of that philosophy nonetheless, and her passing signifies the continual march to the end of its sway. To quote Martin Luther King: The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. --lorraine

______________________

Sources:

May the Richest Parents Win--The DeBoer Case

Barbara Walters, Others Tell Personal Adoption Stories

Who Is Barbara Walters’ Daughter Jacqueline Guber? 5 Things to Know About the Late Broadcaster’s Only Child

Why I Won't Miss Barbara Walters

Law & Order: SVU tackles adoption story line with honesty

2022-12-10T11:19:00.011-05:00

Lorraine

Law & Order: SVU this week dealt with Oliva Benson's adopted son's (Noah) finding a half brother nearby. Noah, 12, brimming with excitement, wants to meet him ASAP. Soon enough, Oliva and Noah drive from Manhattan to a nearby suburb to meet the boy and his adopted family, who are picture-perfect wonderful in their comfortable suburban home, decorated to the hilt for Christmas.

Big brother and Noah go off to play a video game, and when they appear for dinner, Noah asks to spend the night; Oliva stays for dinner and apple pie, but checks into the nearby motel, where the 2nd story line--about a creepy hidden camera in her room--proceeds.

What a pleasure to watch an adoption story line so realistically portrayed! Oliva lets her son guide the experience, but with some reluctance and pain as she sees his enthusiasm for a blood relative. As some point, he refers to his "real family," and you do see a tinge of ouch! from Oliva--but the son isn't looking--and she quickly agrees to what he wants.

As a teaching model for adoptive parents, the show did a fantastic job! Blood calls! DNA kicks up some primordial response as old as time: This is who I am connected to. This is where I started out. This is what might have been. One may not want to go back to that family for any number of reasons, but knowing who is there and where they are touches us in the most basic of places in the human heart. Watch an episode of Henry Louis Gates's "Finding Your Roots" on PBS (my husband is addicted to it) and you see the deep emotions and grown men--and women--brought to tears as they learn of the trials and tribulations of their biological lineage--without adoption involved. It's quite breath-taking.

Of course, people being people, adoptive parents are going to have fear (will he/she still love me?) when faced with the child's reunion with like DNA, and the story line will be a great teaching moment for adoptive parents. Since the boys have different mothers, and the father is deceased, the whole business of how to react to a biological birth mother or father is avoided. But still, a great treatment of the adoption story for modern times.

Mariska Hargitay, who plays Oliva, or "Liv," is a biological and adoptive mother in real life. I was neutral about that--trying not to be prejudiced against all Hollywood people who adopt--and then I read an article about how she willingly gave back an infant after the natural mother decided two days later she wanted the child back. Hargitay, in fact, had helped deliver the baby. Had done the kind of thing that I am against, for it makes it harder for the natural/birth mother to change her mind--she doesn't want to disappoint the adoptive mother and father by changing her mind and keeping her baby. Yet after that, Hargitay quickly acquiesced to the birth mother's desire to keep her child.

Here is what Hargitay said about returning the child to his natural mother:

“It was nothing short of devastating,” Hargitay explains. “But … it was probably the greatest, happiest ending. I mean, it was so painful for us, but it was deeply joyful and deeply right for her.”*

So. I am deeply sympathetic to Hargitay. If I ever met her, I'd probably bring that up and say, thank you, and tell her how aware I am of the opposite end to those stories.

The characterization of the natural mothers of both boys do not fare so well in the story line. Though neither is in the show physically, we know that both were drug-addicted young women, and the father a thorough scumbag druggie. Noah's back story includes a prostitute mother killed in a car crash; we know more about the new brother's natural mother other than "drug-addicted." Since this is sometimes true, no sense in quibbling about that. In the past, the show portrayed other natural mothers in a more positive light.

I'm guessing that the adoption story will continue to pop up occasionally. Law & Order: SVU (for Special Victims Unit) is the longest-running live-action series in the history of television. I've been a fan for years; the adoption story line has been part of the show since Oliva adopted Noah as a baby without a home. The adoptive family of Noah's half-brother have no other children, and they have made it clear they want Noah to spend more time with their son, his biological half-brother. At the end of the show, they give a gift to Noah so the two boys can play the same video game together, even when physically apart, and give Oliva a beautifully wrapped gift. To be opened later.

And I am sure, story line to be continued later.--lorraine

_________________________________

PS: The photo is a sneak peek at my author photo for the new edition of Hole in My Heart, coming in March from Grand Canyon Press. I'm quite excited about it! It's longer and more complete with additional narrative and a bibliography and index. Available for Kindle pre-order today! It will be available in hardcover and paperback when released as well. To peek at the new cover, or preorder, click on link below.

Hole in My Heart

YOU MGHT ALSO ENJOY

The adoption trigger: To hang on or let go?

Birth mother grief is acknowledged at last--Amy Coney Barrett may have done us a favor by acting as if it doesn't exist

2021-12-19T16:26:00.001-05:00

Jane and Lorraine, 1982

At last the unending grief of giving up a child to adoption is being recognized by others outside our closed circle! Today's New York Times has a piece vy Meg Bernhard about a social scientist and writer named Pauline Boss. She has been studying and writing about unresolved grief and I'm reading the piece and WHAM, I come upon these words:

"It [unresolved grief] can take many forms, often quotidian: an alcoholic parent, who when inebriated, becomes a different person; a divorced partner, which whom our relationship is ruptured but not erased; a loved one with whom you've lost contact through immigration; or a children you've given up for adoption."

At last.

Later in the piece, Boss brings our issue up again in when she says that ambiguous loss is not a theory for everything, and that how people describe their loss is a key indicator whether it is ambiguous: "'Am I married or not since my husband has been missing for decades?' 'How to I answer how many children do I have when I gave up up for adoption.?'"

Oh, we all know that question. We mothers have heard it so many times, and each time it's a stark reminder of our unclear status as women, as mothers.

I've never seen us grouped with others in such a simple, natural way, and I am thrilled. When I tried to explain our unending loss to an editor once, she didn't believe me. The only research she would fully accept was from England where a small group of birth mothers were studied before and after they were found, and how many of them sought help for depression after relinquishing their children--when they had not before.* The woman acted as if I were revealing some amazing secret. In the end, the piece was not published--even though I was told it would be. Obviously some editor higher up quashed it.

So to see this today--along with a treasure trove of letters from other birth mothers from my era, adoptees, children of mothers who relinquished on the New York Times editorial page--is quietly thrilling, even if it all stirs up my own grief, somewhat more resolved with my daughter's death. I could write "passing," which a lot of people prefer today, but I prefer the harsh reality of the word death. I have come to terms with her death, even her suicide, and I will carry guilt forever that she was adopted. That her unhappy life lead to two other lives that are still playing out the initial adoption in various ways that started with me.

Our lives as women who relinquished our children are suffused with this ambiguous grief that we normally can't acknowledge in public. Do I tell a stranger or a new acquaintance who asks about children the whole story? Do I say, I had one daughter and she died? Do I say that I had one daughter and gave her up for adoption and then I found her, and then she died? How do I answer the question, Did you have any children?

Right now my grief doesn't feel very ambiguous. I have always known that losing a child to death had its blessed finality, that one could grieve publicly, get understanding and sympathy from friends and relatives, but that was not extended to us. We had to deal silently with what felt like a living death. I remember seeing "Rabbit Hole"--a film about the impact of a son's death on a young couple--with a friend, and being critical of it. The film showed how the world was able to see their grief, and allow them to be sad; but we mothers of loss were supposed to shut up and move along. I was angry because our sorrow isn't acknowledged in any similar way. My friend didn't understand why I didn't empathize with the characters or the movie more. I couldn't explain.

Maybe now that is changing. Maybe the reality of losing abortion as a right will give our unending, ambiguous grief some light.

As for Amy Coney Barrett's asinine suggestion that adoption is the answer to being denied an abortion, it is thrilling to see the blowback from so many and in so many places. Lots of words have been written since she asked why "safe-haven boxes" weren't the answer since they removed the "burdens of parenting" from women. A few days later, an anti-abortion columnist in the New York Times (Russ Douthat) did the same thing, mentioning the desire for a career as the first reason a woman who avoid the burdens of parenting, and that can all be taken care of with adoption. Fie on them both! --lorraine

___________________________

* John Triseliotis, Julia Feast and Fiona Kylie, The Adoption Triangle Revisited: A Study of adoption, search and reunion experiences, British Association for Adoption & Fostering, London: 2005.

Should I tell my sister the son she placed for adoption long ago is looking for her?

2021-10-31T20:06:00.018-04:00

Lorraine Dusky

I sometimes open the New York Times Magazine and turn to The Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, to see if he's got another column about adoption, which seems to be his topic du jour on a pretty regular basis. While he proudly announces his highborn and mixed-race background, he has come down in the past for natural/birth mother privacy with the thud of insufferable and clueless righteousness.

Today it was Bingo! again for the headline reads: "The Son My Sister Placed for Adoption Wants to Find Her." What Should I Do?

Well, of course, I answer, Call your sister immediately and tell her! Give her the man's name and encourage her to reach out. Certainly anybody not adopted can understand the primal need to seek out one's own heritage, and help your sister, if she is hesitant, to put herself in her son's shoes.

I recently was involved somewhat in a similar case. A close friend (whose mother appears to have given up a child herself in France, which she kept secret from everyone until her deathbed,

but that's another story I'll get to) called to say that one of his nieces was contacted by someone in France who was some sort of relative, and did my friend have any knowledge whom the woman might be connected to? My friend almost immediately knew who the woman was--the daughter that a cousin of his gave up for adoption. In France. When she was fourteen. What should he do, he mused that Sunday evening when he called me rather excited.

Call your cousin, I immediately said. My friend knew all about my work and writings in adoption, having read hole in my heart when it came out. Although it's weird, his mother, the birth mother denier, and I lived a few doors apart for years, and she and I had become quite good friends. But over my work in adoption, my bald insistence that adoptees have a right to know, she and I sharply disagreed, and had verbal battles in letters to each other (hand delivered by intermediaries) over this issue. She was so upset by what I represented, and yes, she did know my daughter Jane briefly, that her son, the man who called me, mused that his mother might have given up a child herself. What else could explain her visceral reaction to mother and child reunions like mine? He even thought he knew who the father was likely to be. She died a few days after telling her known eldest son: You are not my first. And for now, this is where that story ends.

Anyway, my friend did call his cousin, in Europe, as soon as daylight caught up with her in Europe, and she reacted just as every adoptee who is searching wants: She was thrilled. Her son that she raised already knew about this sibling. Within a day or two, she was on the phone with her daughter. A few months later they all met--my friend, his cousin, and the newly found daughter. I was privy to my friend's emotional reaction to the whole drama unfolding, and then got pictures of how much the two women looked alike. Did I mention that the adoptee is a successful artist, and her maternal grandmother was also? That of late she painted pictures with a space theme, and that her half sibling in the US works for one of the space-flight endeavors? The father was a friend of her older brother's at prep school, and had no knowledge of the child at all. Last I heard, he was not denying, but requesting a DNA match.

All this came to mind reading the column in the Times today, because, as I said, Kwame Anthony Appiah previously has solidly come down on the side of privacy for the "birth mother." (That is the phrase he uses, so bear with me.)

Surprise! Not this time. He doesn't come out with a full-throated argument for the right of people to know their heritage, but this time he does make that argument: He notes, "Some people think that knowing your biological ancestry is a basic right, and that the agency and the adoptive parents should not have promised your sister confidentiality." Maybe he's been reading Mirah Riben, Claudia Corrigan D'Arcy, and Jane and me at First Mother Forum! But promised your sister is language straight out of the rule book of those against openness, since promise indicates natural mothers were seeking lifelong anonymity when we had no effing choice; it was a condition of adoption law in all states but two by 1998--Kansas and Alaska.

Appiah points to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child that states "as far as possible, the right to know...his or her parents." (Notice the lack of a modifier there, folks.) He quotes another philosopher (his own field at New York University), J. David Velleman, as arguing that "it's wrong to prevent people from knowing their ancestry, because for most people such knowledge plays an important role in the development of personal identity." Apppiah goes on to say that an open or semi-open adoption is better than a closed one; that the man seeking his mother "may have lost something of value in not knowing who his birth mother was;" and that there are medical considerations.

To further hedge his evolving mindset, Appiah points out that the man seeking his mother is a fully formed individual (a father himself, we learn) and that you can "develop a proper identity perfectly well" while being oblivious to your ancestry. Again, I refer you to Appiah's own Wikipedia page to see how rich that comment is. He has always been well aware of his highborn and highly educated, biracial parentage, has benefitted from it mentally, emotionally and financially, and that certainly was critical to his becoming the highly placed (Cambridge, Princeton, etc.) academic superstar he is today.

He goes on to tell the writer that she should tell her sister what's going on, tell the man whatever his sister is willing to share, and whether or not she is willing to communicate with him directly. And he adds that nothing prevents her from telling her niece, a grown woman now--the natural mother's daughter who may or may not know of this half sibling--but if she goes against her sister's wishes, she will be throwing a small bomb into the family. Small it may not be, but that's beside the point. He also notes that since the sister is on Facebook (or Meta, as per a recent announcement), he may figure out who his natural mother is without the woman's help.

All in all, The Ethicist in the Times has come a long way since his first column on adoption. And that is to be commended. Feeling good about him and this tonight. We are making progress, great strides to openness in the last decade, and let's rejoice wherever we find it.

And over in the Modern Love column today, there's a story about donor siblings reconnecting. More about that later, tomorrow if I have the time. Let me just say I was reading the column today to my husband (who is in rehab following a hip replacement), and I couldn't finish it without tears, even though when I first read it this morning I got through it without an outbreak of lachrymose fluids.--lorraine

-----------------------------------------------

For another take on adoption by a erstwhile Ethics columnist, see: Bloodlines in Esquire. Or read it at the link below. The writer, Anthony Brandt, is my husband.

Blood Relatives: Why They Matter

You might also be interested in previous posts about Appiah:

What if I Don’t Want to See the Child I Gave Up for Adoption?

'Give up' or 'surrender' or 'relinquish'? 'Forced' or' stolen'? The impact of culture on adoption language

Film: The Other Son poses questions of identity

'Give up' or 'surrender' or 'relinquish'? 'Forced' or' stolen'? The impact of culture on adoption language

2021-09-29T11:20:00.117-04:00

A preview of the new cover of
hole in my heart. Coming soon.

How we think about life and its exigencies, its ups and downs, cultural shifts and societal norms, the everyday incidents and the big moments that change the course of our lives are framed by the language we use. My daughter was born "out of wedlock," a phrase that most understand, but rarely use; yet it was commonly heard when my daughter was born--if people talked even talked about this. (Of course they did, but all very hush-hush.)

I've never shied away from saying: I gave her up. When an acquaintance--an adoptive mother--criticized me a decade ago for using that phrase, I was quietly astonished. Quietly because I didn't want to raise a fuss--but since we had been friends, and she knew all about my story, I was surprised that even she had been influenced by the adoption industry, an industry that prefers the antiseptic sounding, "make an adoption plan." I feel now, as I did then, that I gave up: gave up on finding a different path, gave up on believing my daughter's father would leave his wife and family for us and our new family; gave up on being able to write and support myself, and a baby. I gave up, and in the process, I gave up my daughter. Society made me feel I couldn't/shouldn't keep my daughter, but at the same time, my parents did not "force" me to give her up. They did not even know about her. My social worker did not push or coerce me to leave my baby with her agency; in fact, I think she would have been relieved had the father, with whom she had some contact, changed his mind and said, Bring her home, we'll figure this out.

I effing made no more of a "plan" over the months I was pregnant than a woman who's fallen overboard swimming toward a life preserver. The times, they were so different then. I felt societal pressure bearing down on me--a single woman who was impregnated by a married man, such a hussy was I!--to the degree I saw no way out other than surrender my daughter to adoption. That would give her a better chance on life, right? I couldn't see then that adoption would mean different, not better. Yet with the wind behind me pushing adoption, I went forward. I know many adoptees today look askance at that language, for it absolves me of the act of surrendering my daughter somewhat. It says: Society made me do it.

I get that. It's the reason that when we talk to our reunited children we at some point need to simply say: I'm sorry. Without excuses. Just I'm sorry you were adopted. I'm sorry I didn't raise you. I'm sorry. And the sooner the better, by the way.

Fellow blogger Jane points out that in legal lingo, mothers "surrender" to an adoption agency; in private adoptions--those arranged by an attorney--the child goes straight to the adopters and the word "relinquish" is used.

But all this led me to wonder how readers today--from anyone in the triad--prefer to use language. For instance, a great many teens and women were promised openness in their adoption--that they would be given photographs, have regularly scheduled visits, sustain an amicable relationship with the oh-so-nice people who wanted to adopt your baby. Yet frequently none of that happens. Or the very minimal letter-of-the-law compliance. A photograph of the back of the baby's head. Excuses are made to cancel visits. Or, a complete denial of all the promises made, promises that may not have been written down in a contract, but made at the hospital bedside.* Shouldn't that be called fraud? In that case, is the baby stolen?

How do you feel and what language do you use? Do your feel scammed? Do you feel that your baby was stolen by trickery and obfuscation? Were you coerced by your parents, the father of the child, or anyone? Did you feel the agency and your social worker or adoption broker was at times both sympathetic and predatory during the adoption process? Did you give up, surrender, relinquish? Were you forced/coerced? Was your baby taken under false pretenses? Stolen? Do you feel lied to? What do the natural mothers reading here prefer to be called? I started out with natural mother and I still prefer that. When somebody insists that the phrase birth be inserted every time I refer to my daughter, I'd like to smack that person--there's only been one--right back with, "How's your adopted daughter?" Of course, I haven't done that.

Yet.

The phrase birth mother, or even worse, birthmother, further cementing the term birth before mother, has been contentious for more than a decade, but is still in wide use. This blog's url is firstmotherforum.com, but I had to add "birth mother" to the title page to get more people to find the blog when they were searching for the topics we cover.

I'd love to hear from adoptees about this too--what words do they use in their own minds? In conversation? What words do they wish natural mothers used in reunion? What words do adoptees use? With their mother? With friends and adopted relatives? I imagine most of them grew up hearing only birth mother if they heard anything at all about her, and that's partly why reforming what we mothers are called is so resistant to change.

However, this morning I learned that Children's Minister of Ireland, Roderic O’Gorman, has said the term “birth mother” is “reductive and hurtful,” adding that an alternative term should be used--first mother or natural mother. This is in regard to long-awaited legislation will enshrine into law a right for adopted people to access their birth certificates, and birth and early life information.

Well, how about that? Progress is slow, but it moves relentlessly forward.--lorraine

__________________________________

*An Un-Open Adoption: Adoptive Parents Lie and Break a Mother's Heart

Are Open Adoptions a Boon for Birth Mothers or a Scam?

'Preferred' adoption language is bunk

Who gains when first mothers fight over "correct" language?

Birth mother, first mother, biological mother, or relinquisher? Framing the language when we talk about adoption

Mother denied visitation with son conceived with her egg

2021-06-10T17:16:00.006-04:00

Jane

An Oregon woman who let her former boyfriend, wealthy Portland developer Jordan Schnitzer, use her eggs to create a son lost visiting rights to that son--now five--this week. Cory Sause, 38, had been able to visit her son since 2017 after a protracted court battle.

In a 2-1 decision, the Oregon Court of Appeals reversed the lower court making Schnitzer, 70, the sole legal parent of the boy, Samuel. The majority opinion stated that Sause had not demonstrated a full commitment to parenting as required by Oregon's assisted-reproduction law to have parenting rights.

Sause plans to appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court which hears only a small fraction of the cases brought to it. If the Supreme Court refuses to hear the case, Sause will be barred from contact with Samuel until, as an adult, he is willing to see her. If the Supreme Court takes up the case, it may be another several years before a final decision is reached.

Schnitzer has two adult daughters from a former marriage but he wanted a son. At the time she donated her eggs to be implanted into a surrogate--bringing another woman into the mix--Sause understood she would have visiting right to the boy. Schnitzer denied this, and prevented her from seeing Samuel until she won that right in 2017 when Samuel was two.

Cory Sause with Samuel

What the two justices who decided against Sause--Roger DeHoog and Josephine Mooney--ignored in their opinions is that Samuel is a human being, with feelings and needs, not a piece of property. They criticized the lower court judge for deciding that Sause is the boy's legal mother "based largely on Sause's genetic connection." Judge Jacqueline Kamins dissented, finding that Sause met the requirements to be a legal parent to Sam.

Samuel will not be able to grasp that he can no longer see Mommy--as he calls Sause--because she didn't quite do the right thing as the right time. When Samuel learns that his mother fought to stay in his life--but his father prevented her from doing so--what will he think of his father? The boy might well become a legal orphan before he reaches his teen years. Who will care for him then? Schnitzer has said that his two daughters--now in their 20's--would care for him as well as a younger brother, also born to a surrogate with eggs from a different donor. They might, of course, but raising children is a huge responsibility for young women with their own goals. The boys could end up being shuttled from boarding school to summer camp and back again.

This decision was critical not only to Schnitzer, but to the Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Industry. Robin Pope, a Portland fertility and adoption attorney (her tagline "Forming Families through Adoption" has been changed to "Family Formation Lawyer") wrote a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Schnitzer on behalf of the Academy of Adoption and Assisted Reproduction Attorneys, formerly the American Academy of Adoption Attorneys. The organization repurposed itself as the supply of adoptable infants decreased and ART took off. AAAA needed a win to assure people considering spending thousands of dollars on legal services that contracts with egg donors are inviolable, and that the purchaser of the eggs would be the sole parent of the resulting off-spring. An egg donor was just bit of genetic material, so insignificant that even using the word "mother" in reference to her as in "not a mother" was incorrect.

Jordan Schnitzer

After I posted my disagreement with the decision on a discussion site, Pope assured me in an email that the assisted reproduction industry is not making the same mistake that the adoption industry made in the era of closed adoptions. "Most of my clients end up knowing their donors. They do it because they believe it's best for their child. There's much more openness in ART law than in adoption, even today."

That may be but, at least in adoption, the child already exists and may need a family. Some adoptive parents are motivated by altruism. The adoption industry is regulated--at least in theory--to meet the needs of children. The producer of the genetic material is recognized as a sentient human being, although dismissively referred to as a "birth mother."

In donor contracts, children are created to meet the needs of the adults who pay big bucks for them. They are merely matter in a test tube, commodities to be bartered and sold, held to agreements over which they had no say that can cut a biological parent out of their lives. In ART the producer of genetic material is an egg donor, nothing else. Unlike adoptees who in many cases can learn the identities of their first parents through their original birth certificates, persons born from ART have no path to learn the source of their genetic material if the donor is anonymous.

The irony in ART cases cannot be overlooked. On the one hand, the law treats genetics as inconsequential--relationships, not genetic material, matter. On the other hand, men like Schnitzer resort to ART because they are convinced that having a child with their genes is essential.

Even assuming that, as the ART industry claims, It's relationships, not genetics that count--Sause had a relationship with Samuel. It's now fractured because two judges put a hyper-technical interpretation of a law above the needs of a five-year-old boy.

Although now legally the sole parent, Schnitzer cannot wipe Sause out of Samuel's life. She is there every time Samuel looks in the mirror.--jane

_______________________

Judge: Egg donor Cory Sause is boy's mother and will get parenting rights.

Well-known developed Jordan Schnitzer wins fight to remain a single dad, keep genetic mom from seeing genetic son.

Surviving Mother's Day as a Mother of Loss

2021-05-05T13:33:00.006-04:00

Lorraine

Here it comes again, Mother's Day, impossible to delete from the calendar or totally ignore due to the incessant ads that pop up everywhere, from the internet to the newspaper to gifts on the morning shows that are "Perfect for Mom."

I got my hair cut today and as I was waiting to pay my bill, I heard the receptionist say to the woman ahead of me--Happy Mother's Day. The woman responded, I never had children. Neither, it turned out, did the receptionist. When she said this to the woman, I could see they shared a moment of understanding.

When I approached the receptionist, I quietly told her Mother's Day is a painful reminder not only for women who never had children--and wanted to--but also for those whose child had died, or were like me, a woman whose only child had been relinquished and adopted. In years past I might have ignored her well-meant gesture, but I'd known her for a while and felt comfortable speaking up. Besides, she had several more days to remind other mothers of loss that this godawful holiday was upon us.

There's no way around how much a trigger Mother's Day is for mothers of relinquishment, whether you call us biological mothers, birth mothers, first mothers or natural (same as biological) mothers. I've been through the gamut of emotions myself, beginning when I did not know where my daughter was (a nightmare), and my own mother did not even know my daughter existed (no one to share the blues), to those years after reunion when I tried to ignore the hoopla the week preceding the big day, always hoping she would remember me in some small way. But alas, she often did not. (A good day to dig in the garden.)

The card Jane sent one year.

While I was feeling sorry for myself, I always imagined a big celebration going on with her adoptive mother--card, flowers, lunch in a restaurant, the whole works. I never knew if the day went off as I imagined because I never asked. I tried to remind myself that the day was a made-up holiday, designed to help Hallmark and florists and restaurants, but that never erased the painful emotions flooding in. Everyone else was celebrating Mother's Day--I was too as long as my own mother was alive. After I left Michigan, I sent flowers, I called, I remembered. My next door neighbor is getting on a plane Saturday with her 12-year-old son to visit her mother in Florida.

Mother's Day for women who have had other children is different than it is for me, one of the approximately one third who never had another child after relinquishing a child. The others will be honored by the children they were able to keep

Lorraine, her granddaughter, and Jane in 1993.

. Many of them will not even know about their missing sibling, but the mother will. She's almost certainly going to be remined of her missing child at some point, wondering who she/he is and if that child ever thinks of her. So no matter the celebration by the kept children, Mother's Day will be one of bittersweet emotions.

SPEAKING UP TRUTHFULLY
As for me, I just suck it up and wait for the damn day to be over. It's only one day, I remind myself. After my reunion with my daughter, when she was married, she did a whole lot better remembering--especially after I told her that her ignoring me on the day--was hurtful. Once I got a handmade card that said: To my Other Mother. Inside it says: "I couldn't find a

card that defined our relationship, but then all truly matters is that I let you know, I Love You. Happy Mothers day LORRAINE, love Jane."

Now my daughter is gone--she died more than a decade ago--as well as my mother, and I realize the day is mine to deal with as I choose. I could mope all day. Or not. It is a given that throughout the day I will let thoughts of my mother, and my daughter, flit by with sweet sadness. My mother died two decades ago. We fought when I was growing up, but she was the rock I leaned on when I went to college against some odds, and later, when I went public about being a woman who relinquished a child and argued for unsealing birth certificates, she encouraged me. "Everyone must want to know where they came from," she said. Despite what others thought in the senior-apartment complex in our home town, she held her head up. I admired her courage for surely there was gossip.

My mother, Victoria Wrozek Dusky
in her twenties

I had a daughter, gave her up, found her, had a 26-year relationship, and then lost her again. As a friend of mine said, We've all got something. He'd been caring for his wife with advanced Alzheimer's for several years at home, and that is not a simple thing. Because of his devoted care, she lived more than a decade with Alzheimer's.

We've all got something. But I will admit that since my daughter's passing, the way I handle the day is different from when she was alive and I did not know where she was, or how she was. Dealing with her death was a matter of mourning, of accepting and accommodating grief, but also knowing that she was at last at peace. The grief wasn't trapped in some damn limbo of closed adoption that leaves you wondering if your child is dead or alive, and you are supposed to just stuff it down, pretend that you are not dying inside. That kind of grief is insanely consuming, and never changes. You can stomp it down--otherwise you will go crazy--but it's still there like a sore that will not heal to the scar phase. When she died, I could grieve publicly, I did not have to pretend that I was "okay" within days or weeks of her dying.

DON'T JUST STAND THERE AND WEEP...

While I can't put myself into the head of an adopted person, I imagine that if you are longing to know your original mother, or have a relationship with her, you also endure Mother's Day rather than celebrate. For both mothers and adoptees, the day is bound to be fraught. One can be honor one's adoptive mother, but how can you not be reminded of that other mother? Does she ever think of you? Is she thinking of you on this day? Without answers, the questions remain, and a truly quiet heart is impossible.

So for those mothers without children who will be a part of your life on Sunday, and children whose original mothers fill their thoughts, make a plan: Call a friend or someone else who might otherwise be alone. In the era of Covid, doing the ordinary things such as going to a museum, taking in a movie (a comedy!), or even having lunch with a friend is complicated and maybe not possible. If the weather permits, and you're a gardener, dig in. Others might do yoga, go for a longer run or bike ride than usual, or even--clean out your closets. Throw out 31 things, I heard someone say that the other day. Why 31? I don't know, but it sounds like a reasonable goal. The mental rewards of throwing out stuff is not to be denigrated; it leaves room for the new. Cleaning closets is highly underrated.

And remember, come Monday it will not be Mother's Day for another blessed 364 days!--lorraine

PS: I began writing an addendum about the noxious "Birth Mother's Day," the Saturday before Mother's Day, but I became annoyed about such a ridiculous day, designed to normalize giving up a child, that I quit. Supposedly it was started by a first mother herself. But when I Googled "Birth Mother's Day," it led to gifts for the occasion and adoption-agency sites. If we want to acknowledge our grief on this day, let us do it on our own, not through the conduit of our loss!

PPS: The expanded and revised second edition of hole in my heart is taking a much longer time than I anticipated, but I'm nearing the end. I hope I can have it out in a month--in time for my own birthday!

If you don't care about your origins, why are you searching First Mother sites?

2021-04-29T16:04:00.003-04:00

Jane

I am the daughter of a mother who was an adoptee" wrote Annie on an old FMF post. "My mother adored her parents and God help you if you'd identify them as her "adoptive parents."

Several years ago my mother sent her DNA to Ancestry.com to decipher her ethnicity and to learn medical concerns--if someone reached out to her. She had a lovely email exchange with her birth mother and genetic brother, which she shared with me, and able to answer both questions, but ultimately said she had no desire to meet them, as they were strangers to her.

Since then, her birth mother has reached out to her several times to meet, and my mom finally said her life was really complete and that she didn't really feel emotionally attached. I winced a bit, but she was being honest and I couldn't fault her for that.

As for me, I have even less interest in meeting my genetic grandmother or uncle. It's no different from offering me to meet my great-great-great-great grandmother from the 1800's. I couldn't be bothered.

Maybe it's a millennial thing but most people my age have grown in a world where the link of genetics is scientifically interesting, but emotionally empty. I have several adopted friends who just don't care. And my boyfriend was born from sperm donation. He has a dad he loves and the only time the subject came up was to ask me if I was a sperm donor baby (to ensure he wasn't dating a genetic half sister - HA!).--Annie

There's a lot of bravado in the old refrain--just wanted some ethnic and medical information from the biological family. Don't want to meet. Your statement about your mother not wanting to hear anyone refer to her parents as "adoptive parents" is telling. She's obviously grown up with a sense that acknowledging the truth of her origins--other than when she wants information--reveals a deep sense of loyalty and sole ownership that was instilled by those parents, and that any deviation from that is disloyal to them. A meeting would be the final betrayal and acknowledgment of her relationship to another mother, another family.

However, that is your mother's choice.

Yet millions of millions of Americans do care care about their roots. We find it interesting that you are surrounded by people who you claim are not interested in their roots. They spend millions on genetic search companies, biological family Search sites, and watch Henry Louis Gates' popular weekly program on PBS, "Finding my Roots." Mandy Patinkin broke out in tears last week on the show after learning about ancestors he had no idea even existed. Others have a similar reaction. When asked how he felt about learning his familial ancestry, Patinkin said it made him feel "warm." Today genealogy is one of the most popular pastimes in America, the place where most people come from somewhere else.

Truth be known, Annie, you do care or you would not have been searching first mother blogs. And your boyfriend may come to care when he sees a man with the same color eyes, the same gait, the same smile and begins to wonder. Volumes are written by adoptees who admit to professing their lack of caring -- until one day they do care.

As far as your mother not feeling the "need to meet" and not feeling "emotionally attached," those connective feelings often come after a reunion, when the adoptee and the first mother find out how much they have in common, how they share traits and personality tics. Your mother may not have the need to meet her mother, but her first mother obviously does have that need. Why not extend some kindness to her? The facts of your mother's adoption may be quite different from what your mother imagines, and she would have questions answered. We've found that adoptees who are instilled with guilt feelings about natural curiosity have had adoptive parents who are unable to accept their child's origins. This appears to have happened to your mother.

Your mother would not have to continue a relationship, but it would be an act of kindness if she were to meet her at least once. Facebook is rife with comments from adoptees who are sore at heart because their biological mothers will not meet them, and wherever and whenever we can, we urge them to do so.

I was contacted years ago by a cousin's daughter when her mother died. I had met this daughter only once, and her mother, only a few times. I happened to be coming to the area where the daughter lived so we arranged a visit. It was most enjoyable and we've kept in touch.

If nothing else, your mother could view meeting her first mother as a social obligation. We've all had these. We visit shut-ins, we have lunch with a lonely co-worker, we attend funerals of relatives of friends. It's something we do as decent human beings.

Annie, I encourage you to re-think your position. It sounds so walled off and contained. People who aren't interested in their roots as young people often think differently about them later, and wish they knew more. We know adoptees who have written pieces about why they don't want to search for their original mothers change their minds years later, and dive deep into searching. Or welcome the chance to meet their biological families when contacted by them. You yourself might find that meeting your biological grandmother will open up a world, and feelings, that you won't regret knowing.

Lastly, your world is peppered with people who are missing connections to their natural families--your mother, several friends, your boyfriend--so much so, in fact, that we wondered if you exaggerated the number of people you know who do not want to search. It's also weird that you wouldn't care to meet some ancestor if offered the chance. I've got an ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War and I'd love to talk to him. More evidence continues to emerge that all kinds of personality traits are inherited. They may be enhanced or squelched by upbringing, but they remain, ready to be passed on to the next generation. If you have no interest in your own roots, why were you searching for websites and blogs about adoption and birth mothers?--jane

For more on this issue:

Allison Quets: Birth-Mother? Surrogate Mother? No Mother?

Film: The Other Son poses questions of identity

2021-04-02T11:32:00.000-04:00

Lorraine

Switched at birth is a fantasy that may young children imagine growing up but when it does happen--as in a 2012 case in Russia--the two families and the children have a tanged weave to unfold.

In The Other Son, a 2012 French film, the intensely human tangle is additionally knotted by who and where the two households are: one is in Israel, the other the West Bank. That's a huge wall to overcome. At once, The Other Son plays on two levels. One is the great divide between the two groups involved, as they are basically at war with one another. The other is the personal drama of finding out that the child a mother gave birth to, a child who you believed carried your blood, a child who is genetically yours, is another couple's son. You can see how this has special relevance for not only mothers like us, but also individuals raised in another family, another religion. Is identity determined by your genetic fingerprint of your biological inheritance, or by the environmental influence of where you grew up?

The switch of the two sons, just about to turn eighteen, is discovered when one of them is about to join an elite corps of the Israeli army. A routine blood test reveals Joseph cannot possibly be the son of his parents. The only answer: switched at birth, which a routine investigation soon reveals. Brought up quite privileged, Joseph is the dreamy, musically inclined son of a doctor and an army officer. He hopes to become a singer-songwriter. The couples' biological son has been raised by Arabs living in the West Bank.

Yassin, the Jewish son raised as a Palestinian, the other son, has just graduated from college in France where he is planning to return for medical school, the Israeli family learns. And his real mother is a doctor. France is a bond between the families, because the French doctor was born in France, as were her husband's parents. French is the language they speak fluently at home. The film is in French, Hebrew, English and Arabic, with subtitles as needed.

Many scenes will touch our hearts, beginning with the one when the two couples meet at the hospital and learn the awful truth. The grace and sad acceptance with which the mothers handle the situation feels very true as they share photographs of the other son, looking for resemblances. Time will show how they long to know and cherish their original son while still very much remaining the loving mother of the son each has raised. The fathers are a different story: they are concerned about their blood being raised by the "other side," and at least one of the fathers needs reassuring that the son is really his.

Eventually, after a strained first meeting of the two families at dinner, the two boys on their own find their way to visit their biological families at home. Yes, my heart leapt when the mothers first touch the sons they carried and gave birth to. And the moment when Joseph discovers that his Arab father is musical too. And when a photograph reveals that one son looks remarkably like someone else in the family. To the director's (Lorraine Levy) credit, she found actors who actually resemble one another, not the frequent mismatch we often find in movies.

WHO IS 'MY' SON?
While the emotions are big, the film is restrained, and the most difficult moments are sensitively underplayed with skillful acting by everyone. Particularly poignant is the moment is when Yassin returns home from Paris, before he knows the truth. His father, a mechanic, is working underneath an old red Mustang. He rolls out on his pallet, briefly greets him but does not rise, and says he will finish working on the car and see him at home. The camera follows him back under the car. This is not his son. Yet this is his son. The son he has loved and raised.

One of the ironies of the film is how easily Yassin, the true Jew raised Palestinian, with his new identity papers, is now able to cross the check points and come into Israel, and that allows the two sons to become, if not friends, friendly acquaintances.

My mother, my daughter, my granddaughter and me

For mothers like ourselves--many who have searched for or longed for the "return" of our children--the film delves into all the psychological implications we can imagine: the difficulty of telling the sons the truth of their origins; their shocked reactions; the mothers' emotions as they hope for some sort of relationship with the son who is theirs, but also not theirs; the reaction of the Palestinian older brother who now feels that his brother, whom he loved, is one of the hated enemy.

While some may see The Other Son as a film about the exigencies of the endless Arab-Israeli conflict, and the stark differences between the lives of a middle-class family in the West Bank and one in Israel, it is much more about the emotional interactions of all the characters, and the implications for their lives. All are genuinely nice folks caught it a emotionally difficult situation.

MY DAUGHTER, MY SELF
Some of the critics have caviled that the similarities between the sons and their biological families are too convenient, not real. But we here at FMF know of these amazing synchronicities, some that have occurred in real life that would be considered too contrived to be used as fictional devices. My daughter and I could not snap our fingers on our right hands; she arrived her at 16 with the exact same sandal as I had, all the more amazing because they were made by an Italian company named Famolare with a modest output; her walk was a close version of mine, as was her heavy step; her strong suit was writing and English; she wrote poetry, as I had when I was young; she liked the easy camaraderie of pubs, as her Irish newspaper columnist father had. In photographs taken roughly at the same age, she resembles my mother so much they could be taken for each other, if not for the different hair styles. In short, in so many ways she was like me and my family, and like her natural father, Patrick, that it was as if I had raised her. Put that in a movie and the critics will rip you to shreds. We did not, however, have the great divide of a difference of political and religious opinion to conquer. Both of us were raised Catholic.

I loved this film. I am encouraging people not of our kind--the sisterhood of first mothers, and adoptees--to see this compelling snapshot of identity crisis. It is a insightful human drama that never sinks to bathos, while uncovering emotional truths that hide behind a question as simple as Who Am I? Films like this can only help to begin to open the door to the self-evident need of everyone to know the truth about themselves. Would the boys have been better off never knowing the truth? Then they would never have found someone who looked like them, who had their same talents and traits, or known the quiet joy that brings. They would have eventually wondered why am I so different from everyone else in the family? How come I don't resemble anyone? I often hear that Late Discovery Adoptees have these questions, and have them answered only when they learn the truth of their origins.

The film ends without any real resolution as to what will be in the future for these young men and their parents--both sets of parents, both lives--but it is a hopeful future. Personally, I could not have stood it any other way. My own daughter and I had many ups and downs in our relationship, but we always came back to one another. Near the end of her life, she said to me on the phone, that while she loved her other family, "I see it now, you and Tony are my real family." That might not be everyone's ending, but that's how it was for us.--lorraine
__________________________
See also:
Explaining Adoption Reform Issues to the Hip, Educated Masses
Generations After Me Are A Part of Me
Blood Relatives: Why They Matter

3 comments :

PaulaNovember 27, 2012 at 10:01 AM
Your account of The Other Son and it is driving me nuts--it hits home so hard. As you know, the third part of my recent novel,The Rescuer's Path, recounts the reunion between the Jewish Malca and the young woman Julie, yielded to adoption at birth while Malca grieved her Arab-American lover's death.
And I have been very emotionally torn during the recent weeks of Israeli-Palestinian war, so that this film comes at a particularly poignant time. I plan to see it.
Whether I'll tell my son of it depends. His adopters were, like me and his first father, of mixed heritage--one Jewish, one Central European--and so Jewishness is less important to him. And sometimes--as we here understand--he shies from being reminded of being adopted, of exactly what our relation, first mother and son, "really" means.
Paula
ReplyDelete
AnonymousNovember 27, 2012 at 6:22 PM
Robin said...

There is a story on MSN.com of two boys who were friends and didn't know they were actually brothers.

'So happy I had a brother': Boys meet as friends, discover they are siblings"
November 27, 2012 5:45 PM

ReplyDelete
AnonymousNovember 27, 2012 at 9:44 PM
I think this is the story Robin means
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2239483/Its-like-separated-The-boys-met-friends-discovered-brothers.html
ReplyDelete

'Adoptees' Best Interests' ignored by agency

2021-02-21T13:04:00.000-05:00

I recently published a photo of this story on Facebook, and many stated they could not read it. It dates from Feb. 6, 1982. I found my daughter in November, 1981, and we had reunited with her parents' blessing at the Madison, Wisconsin airport within days, and I spent the weekend at their home. Here is the column as it appeared in the New York Times op-ed page the following February.

Lorraine and Jane the weekend
we met in Wisconsin, 1981.

You couldn't pick them out of a crowd, but adopted people are different. Two traits set them apart: a vague sense of disconnection or dislocation, and difficulty forming a strong sense of self. The lack of a specific heritage, which tells them how and where they fit into the cycle of life, is thought to be the root of the problem. To be missing a past might not sound like much, but that's because the rest of us have always known where we came from. ''My Mom has really gotten interested in genealogy in the last few years,'' one 16-year-old adoptee wrote me, ''and it's fine for her, but it doesn't do anything for me.''

Adoptees also lack family medical records at a time when doctors place increasing emphasis on them. At least, I told myself, that was something I could give my daughter when I gave her up for adoption.

My social worker insisted that I fill out detailed medical histories on myself and her father, and I eagerly complied. Through the years, I volunteered to pass on additional information; responses to my letters always indicated that the agency's social workers had no further contact with the family after the adoption was made final. The letters said her family was delighted with her at the time of the adoption. The tone of the letters was friendly, conciliatory; I accepted their content on faith.

When I first became aware that the birth control pills I took during my first trimester of pregnancy might have harmed my daughter, placing her in a category of children similar to those whose mothers took the drug DES during pregnancy, I wrote again. The American Cancer Society and experts at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center with whom I spoke agreed that she should be examined regularly for gynecological abnormalities. I begged the adoption agency to pass this information on to her parents.

I wrote three letters in as many months before I received a reply. After seven more months, the director wrote and said that my daughter's doctor reported that she did not have the symptoms that I was concerned about. I was assured that her medical needs were being met. Yet when her parents and I met for the first time not long ago, we wondered on what grounds the director had made that statement, since Jane - that's my daughter's name -had never had a gynecological examination. They also wondered why their doctor's letter to the agency - written when Jane had her first outbreak of epilepsy at age 5 - never was answered. They were asking for the information I was volunteering to give.

As for the medical histories I filled out, who knows? Jane's parents were not given a shred of medical information; the only thing they knew was my nationality. Nor was the adoptive mother, who has Irish ancestors, told that Jane's real father also had Irish ancestors. I t may not seem like much to know that you are part Irish, but it is at least a tangible piece of information for a teenager grappling with questions of identity.

They did receive a letter about the birth control pills, but it was worded so casually that it was treated with no seriousness. Perhaps the director of the agency assumed that I was lying when I reported what the doctors had told me. We know that the letter from Jane's doctor was received because that's how the agency traced her family to its current address, a feat that took from August 1978 to March 1979. Is it possible that the agency's filing system is so disorganized? Hardly. It is likely that the social workers were following the letter of New York State law, which says that the original mother and adoptee should not have access to each other's name except for ''good cause.'' Although with medication my daughter has not had a seizure for the past two years, for many years they were frequent and furious. What are the criteria for ''good cause''? Whose needs are being served?

Jane's adoptive mother thinks she knows. ''The agencies forget who the primary client is - the adopted person. We pay the bills and so they do what they assume we want, even at the expense of the child.'' Her adoptive father regrets that he was not more aggressive in seeking information, had not written more letters. Our daughter said nothing, and I couldn't think of anything to add.

This case could be dismissed if it were rare, but it happens time and time again, judging by the stories we hear after reunions occur outside agency channels. Medical records are valuable data for anyone. For adoptees, they have become a rallying point because no one denies their importance. But they are only a piece of the whole.

It is in the nature of man to find people one is connected to by birth. The Italians have a saying: blood seeks blood. At last, my search is over. The injustice of sealed records can do no further damage to me or my daughter. But there are the others. They number in the millions. --Lorraine Dusky, author of Birthmark, is active in the adoptees' rights movement.

Of course, since then, I have written hole in my heart, a memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption--second edition coming soon. Now on the last lap. Or penultimate lap.

American Baby: A Riveting indictment of closed adoption in the Baby Scoop Era--Mothers manipulated, infants 'tested,' agencies lie

2021-02-04T09:55:00.017-05:00

Lorraine

Women who relinquished children for adoption in the Baby Scoop era that began after World War II through more modern times don't often talk about the experience except to each other because it roils up the bad feelings that lurk within. It's hard for us to talk about the personal horror we lived through, and if we do tell those outside of our sisters, we wonder if they really believe us, and if they do, it's likely...that they think we had a particularly bad experience and it couldn't have been like that for everyone...right?

I wrote a thousand-word piece about why adoption was not the answer to abortion for a prestigious liberal magazine. It was accepted. It was handed off to an editor. She peppered me with questions about how birth mothers really fared in the long run, from whence my data came, could it really be true? Hadn't open adoption changed the landscape and wouldn't that make it all right? Or at least a lot better?

She turned the rewrite, now longer, over to a college-age (I assumed) male researcher (he left in September) who had never heard such things

about adoption! This just couldn't be true! was the attitude I felt from him when we spoke. I got a piece back that was rewritten in sections, a piece that I would not put my name to, and spent hours either rewriting, adding research studies, on the phone with the editor, who actually--believe it or not--wanted to get this piece published.

But any research that came from Concerned United Birthparents, she said, would be biased because groups like that would of course attract people unhappy with the system in the first place! So I couldn't use that. Ditto for studies provided by the Donaldson Institute. I pointed out that studies coming from, say, the NAACP, would certainly show that there was bias against black people, and that did not mean the data did not stand up, but that fell on deaf ears. I then turned to John Triseliotis's long-term study, published in England as The Adoption Triangle Revisited, A study of adoption, search, and reunion experiences. That would be research not collected by people who might have a built-in bias. That research was acceptable.

The editor asked me for quotes from other women like myself who had endured closed adoption in the infamous Baby Scoop Era, women who agreed to be named or at least, to let the fact checker speak to them. Fantastic, I thought, that strengthens the point! I found them quickly via Facebook, all except one agreed to use their real names. The quotes were great. I scanned the relevant pages from the Triseliotis book, and faxed them to the editor, to be poured over by her and the scrupulous fact-checker.

The editor kept asking questions; I found more data to answer her queries. Her points were always good ones, and I kept thinking: this piece is going to be bullet proof! This went on over a year, since the piece was not officially scheduled, the editor would drop it when more pressing pieces filled up her inbox, and then come back to it. I never doubted that she wanted to get it published. I wasn't sure what payment would be, since I didn't have a contract, but I kept at it because in a prestigious publication like this one, the piece would get attention and make a difference. From a thousand words, it had grown to 3,800 as we went back and forth seven times, for that is how many versions of the piece I have downloaded on my computer.

Finally, the piece was to be published, on line, that coming Friday. I was elated. I felt it would make a difference to the argument of why adoption is not the answer to abortion.

It never happened. And the editor never emailed and told me why. Perhaps the next person up the edit ladder--and my editor is pretty high up herself--at the publication read the piece and had a conniption. Maybe he is an adoptive father; maybe it was an adoptive mother who objected; maybe he is a birth father--someone had to father all those babies. Maybe he has friends who have adopted children and everything is honky-dory. All I know is that the piece was killed, and I was never told why, nor offered an explanation, let alone what's known in the business as a "kill fee," usually a pittance, but at least something that acknowledges your time and work.

You're getting this whole long story of a dreadful publishing experience of trying to tell the truth about what it is like to be a woman who relinquishes a child, a first/ birth/mother/biological/natural mother during the Baby Scoop Era by someone who lived it herself. We are believed only by our friends and partners and sometimes, family. The rest of the world pays little attention. They finally did in Australia, where in 2013 the prime minister, Julia Gillard, made a full-throated apology to the women "who were betrayed by a system that gave you no choice and subjected you to manipulation, mistreatment and malpractice."

Gabrielle Glaser

All this is why Gabrielle Glaser's new book on the "shadow history of adoption," American Baby, is such an important addition to the literature of closed adoption. Using a dreadful story of a relinquishment as the plot line throughout the book, Glaser's detailed, methodical attack on closed adoption, the societal mores of the era, "maternity homes," cruel testing of infants--call it torture--before they were adopted, and the Louise Wise Services adoption agency in New York City in particular, spares no one. With measured but deadly precision she unveils the truth, the awful, horrible reality of giving up a child, and demonstrates page after page why closed adoption is social engineering at its absolute worst.

The story she tells of Margaret Erle is one that never should have happened: Margaret did everything humanly possible for a teenage girl to keep her baby against the objections of both sets of grandparents. Underage at the time of the birth in 1961, she and her boyfriend, George Katz, married secretly as soon as they could, all in hopes of getting their son back. Margaret and George were lied to, manipulated, and Margaret was finally threatened with being sent to "juvenile detention," a real threat in the early Sixties when the birth takes place, before she signs the termination papers. Gabrielle tells not only their story, and the story of the adopted son, David Rosenberg, but uses it as a backdrop to write the history of how cultural norms unleashed a system that preyed on young women and their children, both offered up on the sacrificial altar of adoption.

One hopes that this cold and devastating assault on closed adoption will not only pave the way to more openness in all adoption, but also be a beacon for the remaining 40 states that still do not allow adopted people the free and full right to their original birth certificates. I personally go further than that, for it is my sincerest hope that both adoptees and birth parents someday gain access to not only birth certificates, but also all court and agency or attorney papers that dealt with the adoption. Just as medical records are the property of the individual, so should the adoption papers belong to us.

Gabrielle interviewed both Jane and myself for the book, and you will find us quoted there. She tells our story, as well as that of the adopted, with empathy and understanding. Like Rickie Solinger's book, Wake Up Little Susie, Gabrielle Glaser's book, American Baby: A mother, A Child, and the Shadow History of Adoption, is not only a singular addition to the literature of adoption, but will be quoted and referenced far into the future.--lorraine

PS: Link to order from the sidebar.

New Year's Day: That time of year when we long to connect

2021-01-01T20:48:00.003-05:00

Lorraine

It's New Year's Day and I am reading a terrific new book about horrific adoption practices called American Baby, subtitled the "Shadow History of Adoption," but as I read about how records came to be sealed, how babies were treated as goods to be sold/given to wealthy families, my mind keeps turning to the sadness that is dripping across my Facebook feed. Adoptees and birth mothers write about the despair of not connecting, decades after birth and separation. It's that time of the year when our social impulse urges us to connect.

Mothers are distraught because their children, now grown and found, do not want to stay in touch after a brief reunion, or a non-reunion following connection via Facebook, email or telephone. Adult children are diffident about reunion, while mothers are breast-beating in sorrow, hoping, waiting for more. Adoptees are crushed that their found biological families--mothers especially--do not embrace them because of politics, strangeness, or just...because they can. My Facebook feed, which has eliminated nearly everything but adoption-related posts, is difficult to read now. I see less often the posts of friends from outside of adoption, even family members are less likely to come up.

And while now and then a "good" reunion story comes through, the bulk of them are overbearingly sad. I try to write a few words of comfort, but I remember the days when my daughter did not speak to me, and how much it hurt. I remember my granddaughter once telling me that my daughter once said, "We are not going to see Lorraine" anymore now. That's when a letter to my granddaughter was returned with a bright red "Refused" written on it. My daughter's husband at the time was a postman. But that separation too came to an end.

The beach near my home

In time, Jane would call and begin the conversation with "How are you?" as if we had spoken only days earlier. I learned not to question her about the absence, the messages not returned. What was the point? Did I ever get used to her comings and goings? Yes, somewhat. Eventually, I grew a protective shield. I cared less because how many times--after decades--was she going to stomp on my heart? Then things would be going great and I'd let down my guard and I'd do or say something that upset her, or her adoptive mother would say or do something that hurt Jane, and Jane's way of dealing with that was to shut me out. Again.

Adoption hurts. Beginning there and moving forward with the knowledge that nothing will ever be as if the rift between mother and child did not happen may be the true beginning of healing for both sides. Honesty, without being cruel, can help. Adoptees can say, I just can't deal with this now, it's too much, give me some time. Knowing how much pain is involved for birth/first mothers who ache for reunion, I hope that that "time" does not extend into "forever." Mothers can admit the flow of painful emotions are overwhelming, but they should recognize that the child, if wanting reunion, needs them now as much as an infant does for sustenance. Now the need is for emotional sustenance. I cannot stress enough that the pain that rejecting mothers inflict by rejecting adoptees seeking reunion and recognition in the family is as great as an infant crying out for milk.

For some, this horrid year of Covid and death will not have ended with the tolling of the bells at last night's midnight. Some reunions will never go the way we wish them to, and we simply must make do. The people who want to be in our lives will be; you don't have to go chasing after them. In the end, we all must accept that our lives can not be detached from our past. We can overcome a great many setbacks and difficulties, but they are still with us. It is what we do with them that determines our future and our peace of heart.--lorraine

PS: Soon I'll write more about that book American Baby, A Mother, A Child and the Shadow History of Adoption by Gabrielle Glaser.

After The Wedding is a story about a mother and daughter reunion; Catch it On Demand

2020-10-04T21:41:00.002-04:00

Lorraine

Of all the gin joints in all the towns in the world...is a line from Casablanca of course, but the other night I had a similar experience watching a film from On Demand that I knew nothing about....

After scrolling through what seemed like hundreds of movies to find something that wasn't a horror, action, comic book-themed movie, I came upon a drama called, After the Wedding. Info said it was about memories stirred up by attending a wedding. Hell, I'm about memories, right? Weddings, right? It starred Julienne Moore and Michelle Williams, both actors I like. I hit Play.

Isabel, (Williams) works at an orphanage in India and is summed back to the US to secure a $2M donation for the orphanage. The rich lady (Moore as Theresa) considering the donation is insisting Isabel show up in person to make the pitch. Reluctantly, Isabel flies to New York City.

Once there, Isabel is ensconced in a luxe suite the size of a small house--in sharp contrast to her room at the orphanage--and after a quick lunch together, Theresa suggests she comes to her daughter's wedding the next day, where they will have a chance to get to know each other better. That seemed a bit flimsy--there isn't a lot of time for the mother of the bride at a wedding to "get to know" a new person, I thought, but you had to get Isabel to the wedding somehow. At the wedding at the very big house and grounds of Theresa and her artist husband, Oscar (Billy Crudup), it comes upon you rather quickly without words that Isabel knows Oscar --he's the key, right? Well, not only him but you the bride is the daughter Isabel and Oscar had when they were young and decided to give up for adoption.

Papers signed, Isabel splits for the Peace Corps; Oscar, an artist, hangs around New York City, and visits his daughter for most of the 30 days in which he had to revoke his permission for adoption. And in the end, does exactly that. (In New York now, you have 45 days to revoke and adoption.)

How did I chose this movie? Or all the movies in all the On Demand list...synchronicity. Or course, I'd find this movie.

Oscar met Theresa when the child was two, and by all accounts, Theresa has been not only a highly successful businesswoman, but also a good mother. Oscar and Theresa, incidentally, had twin boys several years later--after a lot of trouble, Theresa notes; they are now eight or so.

The rest of the story plays out quite well without maudlin or fake notes. The scenes between natural mother and daughter, and adoptive mother and daughter, are quietly written and acted and believable, even as the huge stirring up of emotions that this unleashes for most birth/first mothers is downplayed.

But everyone's different, right? Even women who sign termination papers for their children to be adopted. Having heard too many stories about birth mothers who do not want to reunite or even meet with their children who were adopted, I've long ago given up believing we are all the same. Though it pains me to write this, as I know who much this hurts the adoptee, how truly gut-wrenching this has to be, some mothers do refuse to meet their children who were adopted.

It's a somewhat soapy plot as I related the whole story to my husband the next morning, but stripped of its language, Pride and Prejudice can be seen as soapy too. After the Wedding has an ending that pleased me--unlike Juno, which made me angry--and though I am usually a big weeper, only when the credits were running, did I shed a few quick tears.

But finding a story about our issue, the issue that sits at the heart and center of most readers who find this blog, and see it portrayed well was refreshing and heart-warming. Isabel the birth mother is a good person; so is adoptive mother Theresa. And even though Oscar lied and told the daughter her mother had died, he's not bad either, just human, and reflects the stories that are often told adoptees. This movie has no demons.

After the Wedding is a small movie, came out in August, 2019 in a limited release, unlikely to ever win any awards, but for me, it was a satisfying, well-acted piece...about women like us. I'll take it.--lorraine

_____________________________

Other Films You Might Enjoy (or NOT)

Philomena: A forced adoption, a lifetime quest, a longing that never waned

The Movie: Mother and Child packs a wallop

Mother and Child is a film not be be missed, though critics overlooked

The Baby Sellers portrays the dark side of international adoption

The Other Son asks questions of identity

Review: Gus Van Sant's film about John Callahan doesn't shy away from adoption theme

'Our Little Sister' a tender study of family and kinship

Analysis: Three Identical Strangers separated at birth for a social experiment now in theaters!

Why Ellen Page and the movie Juno bugs me--even years later

Are all parents who adopt internationally saints? Tucker Carlson thinks Amy Coney Barrett is one.

2020-09-29T13:41:00.003-04:00

Lorraine

Last night I tuned into Tucker Carlson on Fox who was railing against people who are railing against Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett for suggesting that her adoption of two black children from Haiti is not at least open to circumspection. Carlson went on a lengthy discourse about how terrible it was to attack her, or basically anyone, who had adopted children from another country. Period. Of course they were children who had no parents and would have pretty much starved to death if not rescued by people in America was his message.

In the past we've posted here at First Mother Forum about the gross negligence and crass commerce that is involved in some adoptions from foreign countries. Parents take their children to orphanages during the harvest season, thinking they can go back and get them when it is over, only to find the children gone and adopted in a far away land. Parents are duped into thinking their children will get a good education in America, and come back to them prosperous, and take care of them. But of course they never come back. Or if they do, they are such changed people that even communication is impossible without an interpreter.

The baby flow out of Guatemala was finally staunched after the government there did their own investigation and discovered that fully half of the adoptions during a ten-year period were corrupted with kidnappings and murders, falsified birth certificates, and fake relinquishment documents. As soon as corrupt adoptions from one poor country are shut down, they pop up in another. Religious organizations are often involved, giving the business a healthy sheen of benevolence and good works.

Carlson of course mentioned none of this. His point was straight-forward: Amy Coney Barrett and her husband, as do all adoptive parents who adopt poor children from a foreign country, have near sainthood status. I don't know anything about the circumstances of the children the Barretts adopted. How carefully the backgrounds and extended family of the two children were checked. If adoption was truly the best option because, after all, it requires taking them from their native culture and dropping them into ours. All may check out for the Barretts and I am not passing judgment on their decision. Their faith appears to be a guiding force in their lives, and indeed they may have rescued children who needed rescuing.

Rather than the personal defense of Amy Barrett's decision to adopt twice--once shortly after she discovered she was pregnant--that was irritating, it was Carlson's enthusiastic support of all such adoptions, and the sanctified glow that it gives all adoptive parents. Surely some deserve it. There will always be babies that need homes and parents other than the ones they were born to. But Carlson's pro-foreign adoption rant reminded me once again that adoption is still seen by a large percentage of the population as an uncomplicated act of charity, without all the questions and difficulties that lie under the surface for so many of the adopted, and yes, in some cases, the bewildered parents who never intended their children to be adopted.

Numerous memoirs belie the falsehood of such unthinking support of such adoption. Recently I write an essay--actually two--for a new book by the Vance Twins, Janine and Janette, who have chronicled not only their own story about being adopted from Korea, but brought to light numerous heart-breaking tales from children adopted from many cultures. Tucker Carlson should take a look.--lorraine

On a personal note, I expect to have the second edition of hole in my heart finished soon. My husband had a knee replacement this summer, I'm involved in a local community project, and...I just let myself get distracted from finishing. But it's coming soon!

_______________

ALSO FROM FMF

Encouraging intercountry adoptions with hard cash

Guatemalan Army Stole Kids for Adoption

The Child Catchers exposes the stench of international adoption--and domestic adoption too

Adoptive Parents Decry UNICEF's Humanitarian Position about Adopting Overseas

Abuses in International Adoption: The Lie We Love

Senate bill encourages more international adoption

Adoptees making contact with natural/biological/birth family in the time of Covid-19

2020-07-17T17:37:00.000-04:00

Lorraine

Has the coronavirus pandemic changed your feelings about searching? In the midst of a life-and-death crisis, adoptees and the mothers and fathers who relinquished them certainly have thoughts about whether this is the time they should delay search or contact.

We've said it before, but we will say it again. There is no right time, nor wrong time to reach out, there is only time. When I read Joan Didion's Blue Nights, she wrote of how inopportune it was when her adopted daughter Quintana was contacted by her biological sister by mail that had to be signed for on a Saturday. I thought: What better time? It's not a work day; she's likely to be home; she's likely to have time and space to deal with the flood of emotions. Yet somehow, Didion found this unacceptable: ...[O]n a Saturday morning when she was alone in her apartment and vulnerable to whatever bad or good news (italics mine) arrived at her door, the perfect child received a Federal Express letter...."

As I write the world death toll from Covid-19 is approaching 600,000. One could say, if one were not adopted, or had not given up a child, that searching or, even better, making contact, is wrong during this time of worldwide crisis. But then that leaves one with the question: What if the person I am seeking dies?

A few weeks ago I had a lengthy phone conversation with an adoptee who

Jane and Lorraine, 1982

wanted to ask if he should seek out his siblings that were borne of his birth mother, a woman who meets him secretly, but does not tell her family of his existence. The shame and humiliation of announcing that he exists to her family--perhaps she has never even told her husband--was too much for her to bear. At one point, she forbade the adoptee to attend her funeral, so that even in her death she wishes to disavow him. The woman had married into a Jewish family, and likely that intensified the fear of disclosure. This occurs to me because I once briefly lived with someone Jewish whose family was having conniptions over our relationship because....I was not Jewish. In fact, his father came in from Pennsylvania, checked into the Waldorf-Astoria, and invited us to lunch there for the express purpose of telling us we had to break up. Although I was wearing a gold Star of David around my neck that his son gave me, in truth, there never even a slim possibility that I would convert; nor did I expect him to become a Catholic.

But understand, at that point, we spoke to each other as if we might stay together forever.

We didn't break up immediately, but within months it happened.

So I understand the weight of the Jewish pressure to keep the family customs and bond strong, and it's likely that the woman feels she's never been fully accepted anyway, and this revelation would be more strikes against her. Suzanne Bachner, in her outstanding and revealing one-woman monologue, The Good Adoptee, comes eventually to not being welcomed into her original paternal Jewish family. Her birth father is deceased, and Suzanne receives a goodbye and good luck letter from an uncle. It's utterly heartbreaking. And it feels so cruel.

But we are going up against an outdated system of closed adoption today--a misguided and failed social policy--and no matter what religion one is, there is no reason in god's green earth why the man I spoke to on the phone should be denied knowing his siblings if he chooses to. I told him that contacting them might not have the result he wanted; that it might turn his mother away from him even further, and that his siblings might reject him and be angry he upset their mother; but that he had a human need and right to reach out to his own kin. I suggested that if he were set on contact without her involvement, he give his mother fair warning, give her a set period of time to tell them (I proposed two weeks), and then go ahead and do what he wanted.

Just before we hung up, he added: "I was on a ventilator for 14 days."

If not now, when?

I write this hoping that birth mothers and fathers in the closet, or those with secret relationships with their children, find this and consider the cruelty they are unleashing into the world, and particularly upon their own child. To the adoptees, I remind them that it might not turn out the way they want it to, but everyone has a right to their own history, their own story, their own lineage. And I fervently wish that adoption were not so damned fraught.

One final note: Didion refers to Quintana several times throughout Blue Nights as the "perfect" child. It's an odd choice of adjective, for I've never heard a natural parent refer to their adult child, even if they win the Pulitzer Prize, become a doctor, lawyer or titan of industry or junk bonds, as "perfect." I think Quintana was not just perfect, but a "good" adoptee, in all that it means. Quintana died in 2001; she was 35 years old.--lorraine

To Amy Dickinson: First/birth mother's right to privacy is a myth

2020-03-06T11:52:00.001-05:00

Jane

Should a man who has just discovered he has a child--DNA testing at work--reveal to his son, who he and his family have warmly welcomed, the woman who he strongly believes is his mother? It's a question that is sure to come up more and more in the future as more people join the DNA data banks.

Washington Post columnist Amy Dickinson dealt with the question the other day, but gave the father advice that is just plain wrong as well as misinformed.

She suggested that instead of doing what the father feels is the right thing to do--otherwise he wouldn't have written to Dickinson in the first place--the son should petition a court for access to his birth records to learn his birth mother's name. Dickinson also wrote it as an argument for birth mother privacy: "People placing children for adoption also have the legal right to their own privacy. They have tackled a very painful dilemma, which is worlds away from yours." And, we might add, a birth mother's dilemma, and the long aftermath of that decision--as well as the experience of an adoptee--is world's away from Dickinson's experience. That is, of course, unless she herself is a birth mother.

Lorraine

Here's our response to Dickinson:

Dear Amy,

Your advice to a Dad who wanted to know if he should tell his newly discovered son about the woman he thought was his birth mother* is incorrect. You told the father to advise the son to petition a court for access to his adoption records. In 30 states, the son has a much quicker and cheaper way to learn his birth mother's identify. He can obtain a copy of his original birth certificate from his birth state's vital statistics office. The birth certificate will have his mother's name except in the unlikely case that she gave a false name. A few states also allow adoptees access to their court adoption file just for the asking; no order by a judge is necessary. States allowing access to birth certificates and court records can be found at First Mother Forum, which we write.

Enlightening essays from all
members of the adoption triad

You also state that people placing children for adoption have the legal right to privacy. This is not true any longer in every state. Twenty-one states at this writing allow adoptees access to their birth certificates--if their birth/first mothers do not object, or if the birth and adoption occurred within certain years. In reality, only a small percentage of those women exercise that provision and object to releasing an unredacted original birth certificate. Ten states give adoptees their original birth certificate without any restrictions. Courts have upheld laws allowing adoptees access to their original birth certificates in face of arguments that the sealed-records laws violate mothers' right to privacy, stating that not only does the Constitution does not guarantee any such right, but that the state has no interest in protecting such a "right."

Adoptees speak their
truth

Adoptees should not be bound by an agreement between a mother and the state, as implemented by adoption agencies, when those individuals at the center of the adoption had no voice in that agreement. Sealed-records laws, at their core, treat the individual as chattel without free agency over their own lives in the same legal framework as slavery. These state laws, dating from the 1930s on, are being overturned in state after state as we now see them as inherently unjust to the adopted person. A popular misconception is that laws sealing adoption records were enacted to protect mothers' privacy; in fact these laws were enacted to protect adoptive parents from intrusion by birth parents. Adoption agencies and religious organizations such as the Catholic Church have long misinterpreted these laws. It is time to set the record straight.

On a personal note we are both mothers who surrendered children to adoption under these laws. We have both been reunited with those children. And we both have been involved with support groups and adoption reform for decades. We cannot speak for all natural/birth mothers but we do speak for the many. The overwhelming majority welcome--deeply desire--contact by their lost child. But whether they do or not, the truth of one's origins must be an inviolable right to all individuals in a fair and just society.

Sincerely,
Lorraine Dusky and Jane Edwards

Dickinson added in her response that she knows in her own small circle several men who have been discovered by offspring. The world is changing. Secrecy in birth is becoming a thing of the past.
_______________________
SOURCE
*DNA proves he's a dad but where is the mom?

For More Information
Laws, Searching, Reunion

State Adoption Legislation

TO READ
The Adoption Reader: Birth Mothers, Adoptive Mothers, and Adopted Daughters Tell Their Stories

Tear-jerker for anyone touched by adoption

This is one of the few books written about adoption that has brought tears to my eyes with the emotional intensity shared by the writers in their stories from all perspectives of adoption. I would recommend this book to anyone touched by adoption, or who is considering entering into the world of adoption, whether through adoptive parenting, placement, counseling, or reunion.

Dusky here: Note: she only mentions adoptees interest through reunion. Adoptees will find excellent insights here in both birth and adoptive mothers. Full disclosure: I have the first essay in the book.

The Adoptee Survival Guide: Adoptees Share Their Wisdom and Tools

Honest & Heartfelt True Stories of Adoptees

Very insightful & touching stories, it helps to more fully understand the issues for adoptees. Each of the sections was very clearly written by each of those who contributed their truth. I deeply appreciated the honesty of the writers & their experiences. If you're an adoptee or know someone who is, this book can be a tremendous support in understanding what the experience is like for them.

First/birth mothers: Letting out the secret of the child no one knows about; telling the family about my first child, relinquished to adoption

2020-01-18T18:34:00.000-05:00

Jane and Lorraine, 1982

New York's Gov. Cuomo announced yesterday that more than 3,600 people applied for their original birth certificates within 48 hours of the new law that allowed adoptees to obtain a copy of their original or "pre-adoption" birth certificates. He noted the numbers of people indicated how "valuable" this "policy change" was.

Damn straight!

All this interest does mean that a great many mothers and fathers whose children were relinquished for adoption will be eventually contacted. Not every adoptee will search, but many will. Many mothers and some fathers who have been in denial about this possibility may be fearful of being contacted. Worried about "what the neighbors will think." Or, what our (kept) children think? Will I have to tell him/her who the father is? Or they may start remembering the awful time of pregnancy and relinquishment, the shame of the past, the fear of being "found out" that they were "knocked up." My god, even the language of previous times sounds judgmental, indicative of the shame of that era.

What it was like from
conception to reunion
to relationship

I can remember the cold-stone fear I had when I told my mother about my daughter six years after she was born, adopted, gone. It was 1972 or early 1973. I took my mother to lunch, we ordered drinks, we ordered food and before it came, I found the words that went something like this: Mom, remember that time when I said I had mono and was out of work for a while and you found out about it? Well, I had a daughter, Mom, and gave her up for adoption. And I'm writing about it because I want to find her one day, and I've already testified in court for an adopted person who wants to find out who her parents are....

Sometimes the right words are the direct ones. No twaddling about with language. Just start, and let the words come out. I'm pretty sure I said the whole shebang fast, without comma stops or ahems to get the words out without faltering. And then, there, the story was on the table before the food arrived.

Many of you won't be telling your parents, but your other children instead of all ages, or even perhaps your husband/partner. No matter how frightening it seems at the outset--and it is likely to--telling the truth about yourself will lift a huge burden of hidden emotions you have been sheltering alone. But once you release the secret you've been stuffing down your heart, you can share your feelings. You will be free to be your complete self. Over the years, there must have been times when something reminded you of her/him--a child in the street, a movie scene, a cousin's pregnancy, talk of adoption--when you had a pang of guilt and sorrow and couldn't share it with anyone. That can't be good for anyone's health. I'd love to see a study of the health of women who have, say, cancer, and if there is a relationship between keeping grief and a secret hidden and rate of disease. Research has shown for years that stress is directly related to disease.

Revolutionary and still
relevant today

But as you face telling your family, remember that times have changed! The era in which you relinquished--even if only two decades ago--is past. Think how quickly the public went from not talking about anyone being gay to where one's sexual preference in many places is no longer a whispered scandal, just a simple fact. When I relinquished in the Sixties, unmarried people of opposite sex couldn't live together--or "shack up," as it was called--without a marriage certificate. My mother would have turned purple at the very thought! Now it's common; so is having a child without marriage. So while you remember that era, remind yourself that was the past, that was when we were so different then.

Not only are the times different, you are a different person today. You are not the scared, lonely, screwed up, teenager, or yes, addicted person you may have been once. You are stronger, older, wiser, more able to see the world and consequences differently.

No one is going to stone you, put you in the penalty box, or send you to a nunnery. Yes, there will be some initial shock: How come you never told me? How did you do it without us knowing? Is that why you went to Spain and decided to stay for a year? (I actually knew someone whose sister went to Russia--and stayed and had a child there.)

Richard Hill's search and
reunion due to DNA

The hurdle now is less the act than admitting you kept it secret. But people are pretty self-absorbed, and once they get over the initial shock, they will go about their lives concerned, not with you, but themselves. There's more to say about this, and we'll revisit this again soon.

As for New York, 3,600 number refers only to those adoptees 18 and over who applied for their true/original/pre-adoption birth certificates and applied online at the state Department of Health, the venue for people born outside of New York City. People born in New York City apply at the New York City Department of Health. (Hot links to the sites) Direct descendants of adoptees who have passed may also apply, such as a child, grandchild, or great-grandchild. There are an estimated 600,000 adoptees in New York State, but this provision opens the records up to many more people, should they so choose.

To adoptees: This is your record, your right, your heritage. To birth parents: think of your baby, only now grown up. Had circumstances not intervened, he/she would have always known you. Be a part of undoing the ill effects of bad social engineering. Don't let the wake trailing behind you determine your future.--lorraine
__________________________
To read:

hole in ny heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption
"In this brilliantly crafted and compelling memoir, Dusky covers all perspectives: her own grief and pain as a first mother, her daughter's anger and longing, and the adoptive parents' fears...I was equally astounded by her ability to flawlessly weave in facts about adoption practices over the years, the impact of adoption on both adoptees and birth mothers, and the lack of progress to unseal records."
--Denise Roessle, author of Second-Chance Mother, Adoption Today Magazine

The Adoption Triangle
Randolph Severson November 12, 2019

A True Classic That Really Did Change the World

There are few books that qualify as Essentials for comprehending the protean nature of adoption experience — this one does and it very well may top the list. The co-authors Annette Baran and Reuben Pannor, who collaborated as well on another classic in the field, Lethal Secrets, here together with the psychiatrist Sorosky present adoption not as it is often represented in the media, as a picture perfect solution to a threefold problem — the problem of infertility or child loss, a crisis pregnancy, and a child in need of a home — but as a complex, at times conflicted and deeply troubling human experience, a conflict heightened by the secrecy that prevailed in adoption at the time of the writing of the book. The author’s revolutionary argument, ratified and reinforced here with research and stories, was simply that you cannot build families, much less enduring trust and love, on lies and secrecy, no matter how well-intentioned. The Adoption Triangle truly changed the field of adoption and uplifted countless hearts with the possibilities of finding their roots and knowing their stories. Written with concision, heart and fluency it is both irreplaceable and indispensable. A True Classic.

Finding Family: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA

JnoC

Page turner

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2013

At the age of 18, Richard Hill discovered he was an adoptee when his family doctor, assuming he must know the truth about his birth, asked him, "How do you feel about being adopted?" His subsequent search for the truth about his birth parents which is detailed in this book occupied him on and off for the next 40 years and contains more twists and turns, false dawns and red herrings than most detective novels. This is a compelling read which I would recommend to anyone, not just those interested in genealogy.