Above is a link to a news story that will break your heart. Or maybe just make you swear a blue streak. The judge’s refusal to unseal adoption records for mental health reasons is just plain cruel.
Thirty-some years ago I begged the agency that handled my son’s adoption to help me. Begged. And was I shown no mercy. I petitioned the court to no avail. No mercy there either. I had medical reasons for wanting to contact my 20-year-old son. Two of my doctors wrote letters on my behalf. I shared them with the agency and with the court. Nothing. The agency made excuses. The court claimed there was no record of the adoption.
That was then. And sadly, it’s also very now.
If you’re interested in a state-by state summary of the fight for unsealing adoption records go HERE.
Mother’s Day is a difficult day to be a birthmother. Here are 10 things to say to a birthmother on Mother’s Day.
The comfort of shared experience is a good gift for a birthmother on Mother’s Day—Available on Amazon .
1. I know you’re a mother, so I’m thinking of you.
2. Is there a way I can bring some comfort to you today?
3. Wanna talk about it?
4. Would you like to go for a walk, or out for some coffee, or maybe see a movie?
5 .Do you ever think of searching for your child? or How is your reunion going?
6. How do you think your life would be different if you’d kept your baby?
7. What would you do if your son/daughter contacted you?
8. What’s the hardest thing about Mother’s Day for you?
9. What do you think of Birth Mother’s Day? It seems kind of hard to celebrate, right? And do you even like the term birthmother? Do you prefer natural mother, bio mom, or what?
10. I really appreciate your friendship, and I want you to know I’m here for you.
Sunday is Mother’s Day. And there’s also the controversial Birthmother’s Day, “celebrated” the Saturday before Mother’s Day. This addition to the holiday calendar was initiated by a group of Birthmothers in 1990. Even though its heart is in the right place, it does not inspire balloons, flowers, cakes, or presents. If you know a woman who lost a child to adoption, reach out to her on Mother’s Day or the day before. Don’t let her spend the weekend unacknowledged.
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.
National Adoption Month began in 1976 in the state of Massachusetts as a way of bringing awareness to the plight of children in foster care. Designating a month to this consciousness-raising effort had its heart in the right place. Children need families.
This year’s theme
This year the focus is on sibling connections–which I hope means that siblings ought to remain together, rather than be separated by adoption. All of this is mostly good. Although, I’d prefer a campaign that got more to the heart of things. Something like “Adoption: Designed for Children Who Need Families.” Maybe even throw in a subtitle. Like, “Not designed for families who want children.”
N. A. M., a different perspective
National Adoption Month can be a festival of pain and frustration for people who’ve been separated from their loved ones through adoption. Adoption is often touted as a fairy tale. But what if the tale doesn’t end happily ever after?
Explore adoption
Adoption is more complex than you think. Explore it from all points of view. There’s always plenty to read about adoption. Type adoption into the search box on Facebook and see what turns up. Then try it on Google. Check out the links under the “take action” tab in this blog. Maybe check out my book. Keep your eyes and ears open, and ask yourself how often it’s really necessary to remove an infant from a mother simply because she is very young, economically disadvantaged, or lacks family support. Is that ever really necessary?
Ask if adoption is necessary
I don’t think it was necessary in my case. If my narrow minded hometown/Catholic Church/Catholic school environment would not have made the lives of everyone in my family miserable, I could have kept my son.
My sister was already married and living far from town out on a farm. What if I’d had a hideaway deep in a cornfield–a little cabin or house trailer? Every night I could have carried my baby down a stubbly path to her house. I might have had supper at the kitchen table with her and her husband and her two little kids. We might have sat together after the dishes were done, rocking our babies and feeding them their bedtime bottles. Then she’d carry her baby upstairs, and I’d carry mine back through the cornfield, fireflies lighting our way.
In our secret abode I would have loved my son, and he would have loved me. No one would learn my secret. Happy years would go on in this secret place, my clothes wearing thin while I witnessed my son learning to walk and talk. He would grown tall, and my braids would grow long, so long that they reached the ground.
That was the fairy tale I imagined as a 17-year-old. It’s not what really happened.
Adoptees are everywhere too! Adoption! It’s huge! Everyone drank the Kool-aid.
No matter where I go
This past month I’ve been to Albuquerque and to Santa Barbara for T’ai Chi Chih retreats, and I’ve done some traveling with friends in Hawaii. Whenever I meet new people and strike up a conversation, more often than not, I find out that the person I’m talking to is either an adoptee or a birthmother. Or someone very close to them is. Adoptees and birthmothers are everywhere.
the cover my memoir, published by SheBooks
On the plane to Albuquerque, it was obvious the guy next to me wanted to talk. Business cards were exchanged. He stared at my card (the front image is the cover of my book) and out spooled a stream of questions. It turned out that his best friend is an adoptee. This friend had recently seen a lot of ups and downs with reunion. On Maui, one of the people in our group was an adoptee. Also in Santa Barbara. Adoption is everywhere.
Myth busting
When people in a group setting are party to these encounters and hear that I surrendered a child for adoption, there’s a very common comment. “Oh, what a wonderful generous thing you did,” they say. A few years ago I would have mumbled some sort of sheepish reply and changed the subject. But these days I’m much more comfortable telling people that it wasn’t like that at all. “That’s not how adoption works,” I say. So I tell them that I didn’t give up my son to be kind or generous. I tell them I had to in order to survive. And I tell them what it was like living in a town of 3000 Catholics in 1970, and how my family would have been ruined. More often than not people seem to get it.
Drinking the Kool-aid
It’s not just birthmothers who drank the Kool-aid, brainwashed into believing we were doing what was best. The adoption industry has been really thorough at handing out samples of that beverage to everyone. It always feels good to tell the truth about it.
Every adoption begins with loss. This can turn into multi-generational loss. Without reunion, I would have lost my grandchildren.
Unknown grandchildren
I became a grandmother 13 years ago last week. But here’s the thing. It’s quite likely that I might never have known that I was a grandmother. All three of my grandchildren are my son’s kids, and I relinquished him in a closed adoption as a newborn. Without reunion, I would not know that any of my grandchildren exist. Adoption can result in a multi-generational loss.
Without reunion, this loss would have extended to everyone in my family.My daughters would not be aunts. My mother’s number of great grandchildren would be cut in half. Adoption is a very large stone dropped into the pond of life. The ripples of loss just keep expanding. And with each subsequent generation, the loss expands to include more and more family members. Here’s an essay from the Washington Post where a six-year-old explains it.
Reunion unites a family
Reunion always focuses on the reunion between the birthmother and adoptee. While it may be the central relationship, it’s not the only relationship. Think about your favorite aunt, the cousin who is so close they feel like a sibling, that uncle everyone says you resemble. Reunion unites a family. Not just two people.
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like, had I not met my son. I don’t like to think about it, really. There’s been so much joy in our get-togethers. Four generations of us. Partying, talking, laughing. How would we have survived without each other?
The death of Edward Hirsch’s son has inspired a book length elegy. The article, “Finding the Words,” in the August 4th issue of The New Yorker, begins:
In October, 1988, my friends Janet Landy and Edward Hirsch flew to New Orleans to adopt a boy who was six days old. He was collected from the hospital by their lawyer, who brought him to the house where they were staying. Waiting for her, they stood in the street in front of the house. For several days, they worried that the mother, overcome by love or by guilt might want the child back, but she didn’t.
Later in the piece we learn, “Hirsch had a cousin who was a lawyer in New Orleans, who put him in touch with the woman at his firm who sometimes handled adoptions. In August, 1988….the lawyer called and said that a young woman had approached a colleague.” This is all we are given regarding Gabriel’s birth and his birthmother. Perhaps this is fitting since the story is about Hirsch’s grief and the book-length elegy that grew out of his suffering over the death of his son. But from my perspective as a birthmother, even as I followed the trajectory of Gabriel’s life and of Hirsch’s profound sorrow over the loss of him, a piece of my heart lay lodged in that first paragraph with the woman who had given up her son.
An excerpt from the elegy
Hirsch describes a section of the elegy he wrote as being extremely important to him:
I did not know the work of mourning
Is like carrying a bag of cement
Up a mountain at night
The mountaintop is not in sight
Because there is no mountaintop
Poor Sisyphus grief
I did not know I would struggle
Through a ragged underbrush
without an upward path
And continues:
Look closely and you will see
Almost everyone carrying bags
Of cement on their shoulders
Hirsch’s recognition that never ending grief over the loss of a loved one as a common experience connects the reader with an abiding truth. But I couldn’t help but wonder if he ever thought of the woman who might still imagine her son walking the earth, whole and healthy. She (and the rest of Gabriel’s birth family) has suffered a loss more terrible than his relinquishment, only she doesn’t know it.
I do not mean to say that Hirsch’s grief is any less because his son was adopted. I don’t mean that at all. I just can’t help imagining a mother thinking daily of the boy she gave away. And how, now that he has rounded the corner of official adulthood, it might be a good time to search for him. Perhaps, even though she did not merit a mention in the New Yorker story, Hirsch does give her a nod somewhere in the elegy. I hope so. She has been carrying her bag of cement since Gabriel was six days old.
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 LetMe Go.
If you are a birthmother and have not read Meredith Hall’s memoir “Without a Map” I highly recommend it. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a book in the pit of my stomach the way I felt this one.
And if you’re not a birthmother, I recommend it too.
