Author Archives: declemen

About declemen

Author, birthmother, advocate for adoption reform and other good things

The Noble Birthmother

Things people say

You did the noble thing. Or you did the right thing, or the best thing, or a generous thing or a good thing. These are the responses people often have after learning that someone is a birthmother. Of course, I’ve heard all of these comments at some time or another. People mean well. Afterall, people are shocked when they learn you placed a child for adoption. They say the first thing that pops into their heads.

And pretty much all of society supported that point of view in 1970. My adoption social worker told me adoption would be the best thing for the baby. The best thing for the baby.

I didn’t want to do it. At the 11th hour, I tried to back out. I wanted the baby to go to a foster family for a year. “Bonding. Blah, blah, blah,” social worker said. “Attachment, blah, blah, blah,” he went on. He was right in a way. Of course, bonding. Of course, attachment. But, if there hadn’t been a cloud of shame and secrecy enveloping everything, and I could have spent every weekend with my son, I think my plan could have worked.

What I said

The 767 I flew on today had around 300 passengers. I sat next to an adoptee. Two members of the triad. Total strangers. Sitting next to one another. Really? Of course I wanted to know what the likelihood of this was.

The adoptee was a charming 40-something on her way to visit her terminally ill 82-yr-old mother. Born to a 15-year-old, she was adopted by a woman who’d already had eleven kids.

So, I told her my story. “Well, you did the noble thing,” the woman said. “I would not have wanted to be raised by my 15-year-old birthmother.” While I might have smiled and nodded or even said thank you when someone said this to me years ago, that’s not what I did today.

“Well…I don’t buy that line of thinking anymore,” I said. “I think society needs to work harder at keeping mothers and babies together.” She was a little taken aback, and nervously fingered the psychology textbook she’d propped on her tray table. We talked a bit longer about separating mother and child and the hole that separation leaves in both lives. She’s working on her masters in clinical psychology. Maybe, just maybe ,what she knows about herself, what she knows about mothering her 4-year-old son, and what we talked about today will affect how she counsels someone in her future practice as a psychologist.

Adoption statistics:

Here’s what I found after a tiny bit of googling.

The Evan B. Donaldson study from 1997 claims that one in five Americans is or knows someone close to them who is a member of the triad.

“According to Dr. Ruth McRoy at the UT School of Social Work, there are approximately 5,000,000 US births each year. Of that, approximately 118,000 are adoptions (roughly 2.36% new adoptees each year). Anywhere in the US, a minimum of 2.3% of the population are women who are also birthmothers who have placed children for adoption. Then you also have 2.3% of the population who are birth fathers, and 4.7% of the population who are adoptive parents. Total that up and you have about 11% of the population who are triad members. That does not count aunts, uncles and grandparents to adoptive families and birth families.

Whenever you are in a room of strangers you can figure that one out every ten is a triad member.”
from www.reocities.com

“Just Kids” by Patti Smith

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A moving memoir

I’ve recently finished reading the memoir, “Just Kids” by Patti Smith. “Just Kids” is a relationship memoir recounting Smith’s more than two-decades-long love affair and friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. The book is a moving exploration of the interplay between artist and muse–roles that were filled both by Smith and Mapplethorpe alike as they found their way to their respective versions of art.

I’ve never been a huge devoteé of Smith. I knew who she was, liked her music well enough the times I crossed paths with it. I read the book because I’m addicted to memoir. And also because I saw Smith read and sing at a local bookstore when her book first came out. I figured a poet and a songwriter would be a vivid writer. And she is.

Smith is a birthmother

I was stunned to learn, just a few pages into the book, that Smith gave up a child when she was 19. Sent away to a foster family because of judgmental neighbors, she gave birth to her child as nurses ridiculed her for her immoral behavior. A bit later in the book Smith writes, “Though I never questioned my decision to give my child up for adoption, I learned that to give life and walk away was not so easy. I became for a time moody and despondent. I cried so much that Robert affectionately called me Soakie.”

That’s pretty much the last we hear of Smith’s experience as a birthmother. Granted, relinquishing a baby is not the story this book sets out to tell, but I’d say Patti Smith just might have another memoir to write. While I liked the book a lot, that lost baby was, for me, a profound song left unsung. And, for me, it made everything else in the book ring ever so slightly less true.

“Tangled”

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image from Paul O. Zelinksky’s Rapunzel

The Disney Movie

I couldn’t remember the name of the movie I wanted us to see. “Is it Untangled?” I asked. “Tangled,” my daughters, said. We all went. Daughters and I, the son and his wife and kids. Not really a fan of everything Disney, I wanted to go because the story it’s based on, “Rapunzel,” had been one of my favorites when I was a kid. And I figured the grandkids would dig it.

I remembered parts of the fairy-tale read by my mother at bedtime, the incantation echoing in the dark long after she’d kissed me good-night. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair that I may climb the golden stair. Back then it was the blond hair that filled my dreams. Princesses often had long blond hair. Something I would never have.

The Fairy Tale

The Grimm’s version of this tale, “Rapunzel,” is, of course, much darker than the movie, “Tangled”. Rapunzel is stolen from her parents and raised in a tower by a witch, unaware of her true identity. So right aware we’re in a story about adoption. And then before you know it, Rapunzel herself is, unwittingly, an unmarried pregnant teen. It goes from bad to worse. Rapunzel is cast out, left in the desert as punishment for her predicament. And as if giving birth to one baby alone and clueless isn’t punishment enough, Rapunzel has twins.

So Rapunzel, for me, is the story of an accidentally pregnant girl forced to give birth alone. Pretty familiar.

Real life

“What did you think of the movie?” my son asked when we were back in his kitchen getting ready for our own fairy-tale activity of building a gingerbread house. “To me, it was a movie about adoption,” I said.
“A lot of fairy tales are about that,” he said. He’s right.

The gingerbread house brought to mind “Hansel and Gretel.” In this tale, it’s the children you are cast out by their step-mother.

The real-life adoption story involving my son and me has pretty much untangled itself. It was dark (from my perspective) for a long time. Finding my son when, at first, it seemed impossible now feels like a fairy tale ending.

The life we live is as sweet as this.

Published in Ramshackle Review

My Choice

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*The Road Less Traveled*
collage by author

I made my choice.

I chose a road. But in my mind’s eye, I see the road not taken. Unlike in Frost’s poem it was not the road less traveled.

I’m not surprised anymore when someone surfaces from the murky waters of adoption. Ever since I came out of the closet as a birthmother almost twenty years ago there’s been a parade of conversations where it’s been revealed that someone I know has also given up a child for adoption–or is an adoptee. There’s sometimes a deep and instant connection when we share our stories. And sometimes pain. I’m at a loss when an adoptee tells me he/she has searched for a birthparent, and the parent has refused contact. Usually it’s the birthmother. It’s because of the shame, I want to tell the adoptee. And the fear of revisiting the grief.

Losing a child through adoption is a unique brand of grief. The death of a child, while the profoundest of tragedies, is beyond a mother’s volition. Giving up a child for adoption is a choice–albeit a “Sophie’s Choice” sort of choice. No doubt the death of a child continues to haunt and hurt, but unless the mother was directly responsible, the knowledge that the child is now beyond harm is perhaps some sort of balm.

I could have kept my son. That’s a truth. A truth without emollient. The rough fact that I would not have had my daughters if I had kept my son is a Judas kiss. My lips feel cold and sharp as razors when I think of it.

Adoption in Literature

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Rumpelstiltskin

I’ve been fascinated by adoption in literature ever since my mother read me Rumpelstiltskin. The miller’s daughter escaped relinquishing her son in the end. But the possibility of separating mother and child terrified me. It was a very close call for the miller’s daughter and her baby.

The Greeks and Shakespeare

I read Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. the summer between high school and college.The complete set of Greek tragedies was given to me by my foster mother–the woman the adoption agency placed me with. I was in a farmhouse, hidden away, deep in the Iowa countryside, awaiting the birth of the baby I would give away. All of Oedipus’s troubles began because he was taken from his mother, I thought. What will become of my boy? As a theatre student, I found more adoption stories in Shakespeare. Cymbeline. Pericles. A Winter’s Tale. And in the novels of Charles Dickens.

Great House

Currently, I’m reading Nicole Krauss’s novel, Great House. It’s a complex story with several threads. The character of Lotte is mysterious. We learn she has a tragic past. But her husband does not know how tragic, exactly.

She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them. But often I did–with time I learned where to look–and tried to fit them together. It pained me that she felt she couldn’t come to me with it, but I knew it would hurt her more to know that I’d uncovered what she hadn’t intended me to find. In some fundamental way I think she objected to being known.

Later in the book, Lotte develops dementia. She’s around 75 by then. One day she escapes from the nurse who’s tending her at home. Lotte goes into the courthouse, finds a magistrate, and says that she’d like to report a crime.

“What is the crime?” the magistrate asked.

“I gave up my child”, Lotte announced.

“Saying Goodbye” Published

Never Let Me Go

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The movie

On Saturday night I saw the movie, Never Let Me Go. Adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name, the film opens in an alternative version of the 1970s and then jumps ahead to the 1990s as the main characters grow into adulthood. The initial setting is an idyllic, but mysterious, boarding school in the English countryside. In this revised version of our recent past, medical science has made great advances. People now live to be well over one hundred.

During a shocking and moving scene, some of the children find out that they exist simply to be living donors of vital organs and other body parts. Consequently, they learn they will begin their mission when they are young adults, donating three times or more. If, that is, they survive the surgeries before they succumb to premature death. In other words, these children are clones, or “modeled” as the movie calls it. They have no parents and will never know life outside of the institution that houses them.

A birthmother’s perspective

My head exploded.

Children exploited for the purposes of adults who need something they don’t have, I thought. Children who don’t have a say in their own fate. Children wondering about the person they were “modeled on.” What does that sound like to you?

Later, in one particularly moving scene, the 20-something protagonist pages through a stack of magazines, looking for the woman who is her model. The protagonist has accompanied a friend on a mission into town to view a woman who might be her friend’s model. Don’t you know they don’t model us on people like that? the friend cries when she see’s the photo in the magazine. If we want to find the person we are modeled on, we have to look in the gutter. Winos, prostitutes, addicts–the dregs of society. Those are the people they use for models.

Holy moly.

An adoptee’s worst fears, I thought. A birthmother from the dregs of society.

The movie does not disclose what happens to the modelers. Whether they are destroyed in the cloning process or not. They are societies’ throwaways.

In the movie, there’s a serpentine cloning bureaucracy, threaded with myths and lies. No one can find the information they’re looking for. Because there is no viable information. In other words, searching leads nowhere.

Searching leads nowhere. Like adoption and closed records.

The movie was excellent and thought-provoking in many ways.

However, I brought my own experience to it and saw it from a point of view that the author and the filmmaker most likely did not intend. Whether or not you share the perspective of someone involved in adoption, I highly recommend Never Let Me Go.

Adoption in Minnesota

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Land of 10,000 Billboards

Adoption in Minnesota is being promoted mile after mile. These billboards are as plentiful as birch trees in Minnesota.

“Face it. I had Eyes, Ears, and even my Tongue 28 days from Conception.”
“God knew my soul before I was born.”
“Adoption can be a Life-Saver.”

The ads feature photographs of adorable babies and are impossible to miss even if you’re powering down the highway at 70 miles per hour. These billboards are the work of Prolife Across America, a Christian organization that makes the claim that it has been “saving babies for 20 years.”

I’m not going to say much about abortion here. Hilary Clinton is the politician that makes the most sense to me with her “safe, legal, and rare” philosophy. I’m a girl who got pregnant in 1969 while attending Catholic school in a town so Catholic that public school wasn’t even an option. Abortion could not be on my list of considerations.

2 million couples wait to adopt

It’s the mention of adoption on these pro-life billboards that I’m concerned with.
“2 Million Couples wait to adopt.”
“God made me! Mom and Dad Adopted me!”
“If you’re not ready to be a Daddy, let someone who is.”

I feel a little crazy at these slogans which promote adoption as the sole alternative to abortion. And I find it curious that mothers do not merit a mention equivalent to the “If you’re not ready to be a Daddy” campaign. In fact, there’s no mention of the mothers (not even in the archives of past campaigns) at all.

Shame the women

I think shame’s role in the pregnancy/abortion/adoption drama should have played out by now. But I don’t think it has. It seems to be that one way to shame the mothers/women is to pretend they don’t exist. They are not worthy of even a mention.

Or don’t shame the women

I’m not a pro-lifer, but if I were and my mission was saving babies and I believed that God had entrusted me with that work, my campaign would go like this:

“If you’re not ready to be a Mommy, let us help you get ready. Parenting classes and cash subsidies available!”

“Thinking of abortion or adoption? They both hurt. Let us help you keep your baby.”

“Prochoice means More Choices. Keep your baby. Daycare and parenting classes available.”

Of course I’d have another component to the ad campaign too:

“Sex. Everybody does it. Be safe. Be sane. Be satisfied.”

“Take control of your Birth Control.

Or how about this? “DEATH TO SHAME. It makes babies and then kills them.”

And of course I wonder about the financial relationships between the anti-abortion and adoption forces. If the prolifers and adoption agencies are in the conjugal bed, a plague of shame on both their houses.

Denise Emanuel Clemen

Author, Artist, Advocate for adoption reform