Category Archives: Adoption

The Loss Comes Back

2 Replies

Like evil butterflies

The loss comes back.

I got an email from my friend Elizabeth the other day. She’d found a blog from a woman whose brother was given up for adoption when he was a baby. This “birth sister’s” writing went right to my core and, before I knew it, the feeling came back.

It’s mostly centered in my gut, this feeling. And it radiates out from there. It’s like evil butterflies. Like life or death fear. And the death wouldn’t be painless or clean or peaceful.
 
 
I felt this way sitting on a picnic table in the park the day I met my very first birthmother (other than myself.) She told me she wanted to search for her lost daughter and asked me if I wanted t search for my son.
 

Like an earthquake

The butterflies radiate out from the center and the beating of their wings cause a quaking, and it takes energy to keep from full-out shaking.-I mean St. Vitus dance arms and legs akimbo, flailing. The effort it take to not let that happen makes feel like I could sleep for a week. That is,  if I could just relax and make the feeling go away. ButI know it won’t. Drinking is the thing that helps. The thing that tamps down the earthquake.
 
 
I felt like this every time I told my story  to friends and family. And then, even years later, when I started to write about it, the feeling was there. Not that long ago, I told someone it had been only recently that I could re-visit the experience of having given up my son without experiencing that shaking.
 
 
But then it came back. It can still come back.
 

Adoption Words

1 Reply

A word about words

Adoption words. Let’s have a word here about the adoption words so prevalent in any discussion of adoption.

Birthmother, an adoption word

I’ve been looking at other adoption/birthmother blogs and general adoption sites on the internet. What I’ve found is that there is no consensus among birthmothers about what we want to be called. Some of us think the word “birthmother” is derogatory and implies being used as a breeder. The word birthmother is sometimes a hyphenate, sometimes a compound word. I like the word birthmother in its run-on one word fashion. There’s something headlong about it that describes my personal experience.  Which was I can’t believe this is happening, but it is happening and there’s no way I can stop it.

Birthmother seems appropriate for other reasons, too. I gave birth to my son. I’m his mother. The mother who gave birth to him. Even if he has an adoptive mother. The other terms out there include bio-mother or biological mother, first mother, exiled mother. I desire no squabble with any woman who has had a child and relinquished it for adoption. Let her call herself by the name she prefers. And let us not divide ourselves from one another.

Relinquish, another adoption word

The word “relinquish” also interests me. It was the word used by my social worker in 1970 as I prepared to give up my son. It’s in common parlance today as well. I use it, but maybe I would like to break myself of the habit.
 
Relinquish according to Webster means to withdraw from, to retreat from, leave behind or give up–and here’s the part that pisses me off.  It “usually does not imply strong feeling but may suggest some regret, reluctance, or weakness.”  I wonder if adoption professionals got together and handpicked this word. I find it far more insulting than birthmother or any of its alternatives. I don’t, however, have a better word. Which is the problem about these adoption words. Looking for a better word when there might not be one. What if the focus had been looking for a better resolution to the mess we birthmothers found ourselves in. That solution should have been not considering it to be a mess at all. That solution should have been being able to keep our children if we wanted to. That however would have required a different world, not just a different word.

What I’m thankful for:

Leave a reply

What I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving includes this.

The sight of my youngest child giving the youngest grandchild a “plane ride” by lifting him into the air  on her feet while lying on the ground with her legs extended.

Of course, I’m thankful for a lot of other things too.

Like Concerned United Birthparents, which on a very serpentine trail led me to my son. Without having found him, I wouldn’t know that I have grandchildren.

The sound of the blender in the kitchen and my son asking me, “salt or no salt?”
 
 
The ring of my my cell phone with the song “Wooden Ships on the Water.” This means the tall-ship-sailor daughter is calling, even though she can’t join us in person.
 
 
So much happy noise that it’s hard to have a conversation.
 
 
I’m thankful, too, to be at my son’s house. The table here where all of us gather. Adoptive parents, birthmother, children, grandchildren, siblings.

Memoir Manuscript

3 Replies

This is how my memoir manuscript begins:
    I come from black dirt.
     I come from tee totaling Presbyterians, fallen Catholics, and a small town where nothing is taller than the church steeples.
     I come from the river and all the muck that lies at the bottom of it.I come from snow-white cranes on water and the hidden places in the woods that shelter a mushroom so delectable it melts your taste buds like a hot skillet melts butter.I come from red-winged blackbirds, and the shock of a flash of scarlet as they flutter up from a ditch beside the road.I come from fields and bare feet watching out for thistles and cow shit.I come from people who mind their own business and yours, from whispers, party lines and pointing fingers.
       I come from weather; hail of all sizes, lightning bolts big enough to rip the sky wide open, tornadoes that will turn your town into a pile of sticks, and summer heat that just might last forever.I come from the relief of a sigh made visible by the cold on a morning when a blizzard blots out the road and school is cancelled. I come from rain that entire counties pray for day and night.I come from corn, and more corn–fields you can hide in where the shiny leaves are sharp enough to slash your arms; corn on the cob on a butter-soaked paper plate at a barbecue; corn in the feed trough stuck to the shiny wet-black nose of a steer that’s next summer’s steak.
      I come from pitchers of peonies on old oak tables, and a girlhood of hats and gloves.I come from children should be seen and not heard, and don’t do as I do, do as I say.I come from mind your manners, and you know that girl was asking for it.I come from the deer at the side of the road that bolts when your headlights blind him, and the next thing you know his antlers are embedded in your grill, and the rosary hanging from your rearview mirror won’t stop swaying.
      I come from ice-slick bridges, backseats, and beer.I come from gravel roads, and highways coal-colored even under the full moon.I come from red barns and hay and sweat that equals money.I come from mom and pop businesses on a narrow-minded main street where you can see the church steps from the door of every tavern.I come from the specter of hell and the promise of eternal salvation.I come from litanies of saints and hog prices.
      I come from the place where a mistake can follow you as close as your shadow and be forever spoken of in the same breath as your name.

The Best Advice About Grief

Leave a reply

This is the best advice I’ve ever read about grief.

It comes from Anne Lamott’s book, Traveling Mercies:

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I’ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.
 
 
Like many birthmothers, I gave birth to my baby in secret. Secret losses can only be grieved privately, without support, and that’s more like denial than grieving. More like the desert than the necessary sea. 

 

 

Today is the best!

1 Reply

Today is the best day of the rest of your life!

A poster similar to this one here hung on the wall of my social worker’s office at the adoption agency.

Its message struck my 17-year-old self as profound.  I understood it to mean that I should live in the present, forget about the past and the baby I couldn’t keep. Go forward. Never look backwards. These ideas were routinely espoused by adoption professionals in the 1970s. Birthmothers were assured we’d forget the babies we gave away. That the other children we’d have later would fill the emptiness.

For me, it was the opposite that occurred. There were no best days. It was after the birth of my first daughter that I realized the fullness of  what I had done. What I had lost. What my son had lost. Those feelings consumed me. Every day I climbed out of a dark hole, only to fall back to the bottom again and again. When my third child was born, I knew I had to search for my son. To at least try to find him. To leave a message in a bottle, so to speak, in the hope that he would someday know that I had always loved him.

All these years later whenever I hear or see, “Today is the best day of the rest of your life,” it’s a shot to the heart.