Birthmother shame and postpartum depression are closely related, I believe. My essay, “My Face in the Darkness” explores the link. This essay will be included in a new anthology called Mothering Through the Darkness.
Birthmother shame
Somewhere in the timeframe of writing and submitting the essay, I came upon this survey. So I took the survey, realizing anew how completely abysmal my first experience of childbirth was. Mind you, my son was born in 1970, and there has been a fair amount of reform since then, but the survey questions did not evoke a single memory of support or compassion. Every interaction with the nurses and doctors in the hospital before, during, and after my son’s birth was tainted with shaming and judgement. I know that this story is not an unusual one among birthmothers
Women, girls, and shame
Women and girls are subjected to a lot of shaming in our society. Our bodies and our clothing choices are shamed, as are other aspects of our appearance. Everything we do is held up to scrutiny in a way that seems bound to our gender. As a mother of two daughters and grandmother to two granddaughters, I think about shame in the context of their lives. You can read more about shame HERE. Or watch THIS. I’m looking forward to reading the other essays in “Mothering Through the Darkness.” I wouldn’t be surprised if, in some way, shame figures into each and every story.
Though the poem, “Fable” by Louise Glück is not meant to be about adoption, it resonated with me nonetheless. But not in the way you might think-not pitting adoptive mother against birth mother. In the poem we read about the suffering of a daughter in a strained relationship with her sister. Loss and grief are deep and primal in this poem. Like the loss and grief in adoption.
A Fable
BY LOUISE GLÜCK Two women with the same claim came to the feet of the wise king. Two women, but only one baby. The king knew someone was lying. What he said was Let the child be cut in half; that way no one will go empty-handed. He drew his sword. Then, of the two women, one renounced her share: this was the sign, the lesson. Suppose you saw your mother torn between two daughters: what could you do to save her but be willing to destroy yourself—she would know who was the rightful child, the one who couldn’t bear to divide the mother.
I binge-watched the first season of Downton Abbey after coming down with a horrible flu. I’d heard about it ad nauseum, and finally succumbed while feeling a bit nauseated myself. The show hooked me, and I avidly watched the next couple of seasons until I grew weary of the problems of the English upper class. This year, well, here I am, grieving the loss of the man who loved me. Why not sit on the couch for an hour and escape? And then Lady Edith gets unexpectedly gets pregnant and gives birth to her secret child.
How Lady Edith and I are alike
Edith and me, we have things in common. Edith got pregnant after her first (so it seems) tryst with her boyfriend Michael. The same thing happened to me with my high school boyfriend. She had to keep her pregnancy secret and went away with her aunt as her confidant. (Somehow Granny finds out, but I missed that part.) In my case, only my parents and boyfriend knew, and I went away to live with a foster family in the Iowa countryside. My siblings were in the dark just like Edith’s.
Secrets and shame
Shame and ruination figured mightily in English society in 1924, just as it did in my small Catholic town in Iowa in1970. Edith manages to keep her secret, as did I, and returns home with her reputation in tact. Life goes on, right? Well, no. Sadness overtakes everything. My son was adopted by stranger in a closed records adoption. And though Edith can see her little girl occasionally since she’s been a adopted by a couple who work on Downton Abbey’s farm, she’s beset with grief. Giving one’s child away to someone else whether they are known or not, close or far, is impossible to bear.
An elaborate plan
Edith concocts an elaborate plan to be her daughter Marigold’s special guardian and bring her to the Abbey to be with the other grandchildren in the household. And then she runs away to London with her. At the 11th hour before I signed the papers relinquishing my son, I concocted my own plan to adopt my son.
I asked for a special meeting with my social worker. One evening after supper, with a thunderstorm brewing, he drove out to the farm where I was staying with a foster family. My boyfriend comes to the meeting too, and the three of us sit at the kitchen table while I tell them my latest plan. “I want to keep the baby with a foster family instead of doing a permanent adoption,” I say. “I’m staying with a foster family, and I get to go home in a week or so. The baby can do the same thing; it’ll just take longer. We’ll go to college at the end of August, just like we planned,” I say, looking at my boyfriend. “We’ll get engaged at Christmas and get married next summer.” I’m thinking we’ll be ready to be parents when we’re just a little older. “Then we’ll tell everyone that we can’t have our own kids,” I say, feeling my idea is pretty smart, “and we want to adopt.”
None of that worked out.
I hope Edith makes it work. That she keeps her little girl as her own.
And I’m not the only birthmother breathlessly praying for Edith and Marigold. There are probably thousands of us. Here’s one.
A Burger King baby update tells us that things are going well!
Of all the adoption stories out there on Facebook, this one has certainly captured my heart. I blogged about the baby a while ago, and here I am again with the update.
I like the candidness of the interview of the birthmother and the daughter, known as the Burger King baby, in the update. There’s so much redemption in the story. And I’m humbled.
I didn’t exactly have a solid plan when I was a pregnant 17-year-old. What I hoped was that I’d have the nerve to take a Greyhound bus to Chicago. I’d been there only once–on a school trip with my high school chorus where we sang in a church with other Catholic high school choirs. I told myself that when I got off the bus, I’d look for a church steeple and go there, hoping to find a convent. I’d ring the bell and ask the nuns to help me–to take me in and let me work for room and board. I would tell them I had amnesia, and that I didn’t know my name. You get the picture….how could this have possibly worked? The Burger King baby–or any number of other things could have happened to me. Desperate people do desperate things.
I’ve been working on the California Pregnancy Resources List at the behest of Claudia Corrigan D’Arcy who is a major force in the world of birthmothers. Click on that link and scroll down to her map. She’s got a nifty template where, with a bit of Googling, all of the resources can be plugged in for a particular state. But she needs our help.
Imagine you are pregnant. And you are desperate. You want to keep your baby and somehow be the best mother you can be. But you lack of money and/or support. And you don’t know where to start. Claudia is envisioning an online Crisis Center for Pregnancy Options that will lead to pages of resources other than to links that promote adoption.
For example, Claudia’s resources list for New York state is full of information. It looks like this.
This state-by-state resource list is super important. If you Google “pregnancy help,” you’ll see why. The results page has three top links. All are paid adoption ads. Let’s change that. Please check Claudia’s map and pick one of those white states that hasn’t been spoken for. If you’re a birthmother, you could perhaps choose the state where you relinquished your baby. You could help create a comprehensive list of resources for women and girls who need it. Just like you needed it. Only there was no list for you. So, let’s work together on creating this list!
Today is the last day of November. But it’s still National Adoption Month. I feel like pouring myself a glass of champagne and then maybe crying into the bubbles.
Originally created to call attention to plight of children in foster care, National Adoption Month is a particularly harrowing time for birthmothers. The media bombards us with accounts of adoption that don’t reflect the birthmother reality or perspective. National Adoption Month was never meant as a platform for touting infant adoption, or foreign adoption, or crowd funding for adoption. And I dare say that anyone involved in the foster care system is unlikely to be so delusional as to promote adoption as one big happiness fest. Yet, all of that has somehow elbowed its way onto the stage of National Adoption Month.
Adoption’s worst practices
And now it’s almost over. Of course as the media spotlight dims, all of adoption’s worst practices will carry on behind the curtain. But the fight against them must continue. Education is key. I’ve only recently found my voice as a birthmother, and in the coming year, I hope for the courage to speak out when the opportunity arises. I’m grateful to Carrie Goldman and her National Adoption Month series, 30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days. “Designed to give a voice to the many different perspectives of adoption, this series featured guest posts by people with widely varying experiences,” and there’s an awful lot of good reading to be found. I have an essay in the series. It can be found here.
Have you considered that this classic is a play about adoption?
A play about adoption
“The Importance of Being Earnest” is, at it’s heart, a play about identity. I saw a production of it Saturday that was a perfect confection. The play is a classic, written by Oscar Wilde, and first staged in London in 1895. Chockfull of wit and humor, it mocks social conventions. And, though the word adoption is never uttered, it’s also a play about adoption and coincidence.
The complicated plot
The plot is immensely complicated with one farcical turn after another. But suffice it to say that the play’s main character, Ernest (a.k.a. Jack Worthing,) lives a double life and invents a fictitious younger brother as an excuse to avoid certain social obligations. As the play opens, his best friend, Algernon, good-naturedly traps him in his lies. And so things begin to unravel most comically.
Ernest is known as Jack at his house in the country where he lives with his ward Cecily and her governess Miss Prism. Jack frequently excuses himself to travel to London, ostensibly to rescue the made-up brother he calls Ernest. Keep in mind that he himself is known as Ernest to those who keep company with him in the city. Because Cecily has a mad crush on the fictitious Ernest, she longs to meet him. Finally, she gets her wish when Algernon, in his plot to unravel Jack’s lies, shows up at the country house, impersonating Ernest. Unfortunately, Jack has ,moments before, in an effort to simplify his life, announced that Ernest has suddenly died.
The big plot twist
Meanwhile, Algernon and Cecily fall in love. Jack gets a visit from Gwendolyn, the London girl to whom he’s engaged, (remember she knows him as Ernest.) And in the ongoing investigation of Jack’s suitability as a husband, Gwendolyn’s mother, Lady Bracknell, (who is also Algernon’s aunt) prods Jack into revealing that he was a foundling. With his parents unknown to him, his standing in London society is jeopardized.
A few twists later we learn that it was the governess Miss Prism who accidentally left the infant Jack in a large handbag in a train station when she worked for Lady Bracknell’s sister. Are you ready for it? Yes indeed, the friends, Jack and Algernon, are really brothers. Jack investigates further to find out what his original name was before he was re-christened after being taken in by a benefactor. You guessed it….Ernest!
Real life adoption coincidences
Most adoption/reunion stories I’ve heard are full of co-incidences. They’re just not as funny. You need somebody like Oscar Wilde, I guess, to pull that off.
My search for my son yielded its own amazing coincidences. He was adopted in a closed adoption in a state that still has sealed records. Yet a coincidence led me to a person who helped me find him. After I learned my son’s name and whereabouts, I called directory assistance, (which was where he happened to work) to double-check the phone number I’d been given for him. He answered my 411 call.
Who’s in the audience?
I love “The Importance of Being Earnest.” And I’ve seen it at least a half-dozen different times over the last few decades. I love how the audience always gasps when Jack finds out who he really is. Every time, I think about all those strangers I’m sitting with in the dark as they realize they’re watching a play about adoption. How many of them are adopted? Do they have brothers or sisters they don’t know? How many would give anything to know the name they were given at birth? And how, in real life, that’s not funny at all.
A “pagan baby” adoption certificate, circa 1960s–a practice less repugnant than crowd funding for adoption.
Some examples
It’s National Adoption Month. And, of course, the topic of crowd funding for adoption has popped up here and there and everywhere.
“Pagan babies” in the 1960s
I went to Catholic grade school in the 60s. It was customary to forego one’s morning carton of milk, and instead give your pennies to the “pagan baby” fund. When we had raised enough money, the class could “adopt” a baby from Africa. These babies were not really removed from their families, but were baptized and given Christian names. We children voted on the names after Sister wrote the suggestions on the blackboard. After a show of hands, Sister would count up the hash marks next to each name.
As a result, some weeks later a certificate with the baby’s new name would arrive. We would display it in our classroom. I have no idea if the children were really called Christine Mary, or David John, or whatever Christian names we chose. I don’t know if the money was an honorarium for the missionary priest who performed the baptism. Or if the money was used to bestow gifts on the child’s family as an incentive for converting to Catholicism, or if it bought fancy white baptismal gowns, or what.
This practice seemed unbelievable when I recalled it as a grown-up former Catholic. It felt archaic and colonial, full of presumption and harm. Crowd funding for infant adoption makes the pagan baby racket feel like child’s play.
Funding for family preservation
How about some funding for family preservation? I recently learned about this organization. Their website is full of information that will blow your mind. Here’s a tiny taste. In the excerpt below, the word care means being removed from their families and placed in foster care.
“Compared to white children, based on child population estimates:
– American Indian children were 17.6 times more likely to experience care.
– Children identified as two or more races were 4.8 times more likely to experience care. (59.2 percent identified at least one race as African-American/Black and 56.0 percent identified at least one race as American Indian.)
– African-American children were over 3.1 times more likely to experience care.”
You might also want to read this. Tarikuwa Lemma is as eloquent as a poet about her own adoption.
Every adoption begins with loss.
Crowd-funding for adoption
And as if a National Adoption Month and a National Adoption Day are not enough, there’s now the 4 million bucks that a pastor recently crowd funded to establish International Adoption Day. Here’s a quote from the article in Forbes just in case you’re too busy eating your Happy Adoption Day cake to read the whole thing: “The main obstacle to adopting a newborn child is the cost.”
Checking out their website, I’m willing to concede that maybe these folks aren’t dealing exclusively in newborns from foreign countries… but the pastor did say newborn. Newborns, by the way, have never been the focus of National Adoption Month. According to the North American Council on Adoptable Children, there are currently over 100,000 children in foster care who cannot be reunited with their original families. National Adoption Month was created for them. This four million dollar funding effort is not connecting families with those kids. Adoption from foreign countries is a thicket of concerns, even when older children are being placed. The loss that initiates every adoption is compounded in international adoption.
Every adoption begins with loss
So while you’re toasting to your happy family,I’d like a pause–a deep breath, a nano second of silence in which the happy consider the gravity of loss in adoption. Every adoption begins with loss. That loss is like a stone dropped into a pond. It ripples out, and out, and out. Baby loses mother. Mother loses baby. Grandparents lose baby. Aunts. Uncles. Cousins. Sisters. Brothers. On and and on.
When is adoption truly necessary?
I want you to know that I believe some adoptions are good and necessary. BUT family preservation should be the number #1 goal. That said, I question the North American Council on Adopted Children’s statement above. Are there really 100,000 children who cannot be placed with family members? Rephrasing the quote from the pastor in the Forbes article, the main obstacle to family preservation is the cost. Crowd fund that.
Now party on. Festoon your house with balloons. I’m going to change my brightly colored clothes and find something black.
Lily Tomlin playing Edith Ann on Rowan and Martin’s “Laugh In.” If Edith Ann were and adoptee, she wouldn’t know her medical history.
Closed records hide medical history
Adult adoptees often don’t know their medical history. Treated as perpetual children, in most U.S. states they have no access to their medical histories. Why? Because their adoption records are sealed. Therefore, they don’t know who their biological parents are. Imagine going to the doctor and filling out that sheaf of forms by simply scrawling across the top “unknown.”
Adult adoptees need their medical history
A few months back the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement regarding adoption records. Therefore, the Academy is aware that adoptees don’t know their medical history. They say they want adoption records to be unsealed. Well, sort of. Their recommendation contains the caveat “unless specifically denied by the birthparents.” I’m a birthmother, not an adoptee, but I’m pretty sure many adoptees viewed this as only a partial victory.
Pointedly, it was the American Academy of Pediatrics that came forward to voice their support for open records. Not the American Medical Association. Doesn’t the silence of the A.M.A. perpetuate society’s view of adult adoptees as children? And as a person grows older, doesn’t medical history become even more important?
When I was searching for my son I contacted the agency in Iowa that had handled the adoption, and I petitioned the court. I asked both entities to forward vital medical history to my son, who was 20 years old. But I got nowhere. Absolutely nowhere.
