Tag Archives: adoptive parents

Simone Biles’s Birthmother

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cinderella_by_stargazer_gemini
Rendition of an ugly stepsister’s foot from the fairytale, Cinderella.

image from stargazer-gemini.deviantart.com

About Simone Biles’s birthmother

Here’s the link to a newspaper article about Simone Biles’s birthmother. I read it twice. And I also read another interview with her in the Huffington Post and in the New York Daily News–all based on an interview with her from TMZ. It’s worth a read. After you it, read the comments. If you can stand a foray into the meanness olympics.

So, here’s the deal. Shannon Biles says she’s glad she and her daughter are not estranged any longer, but their relationship is still fledgling.

And that she wished her dad hadn’t thrown her under the bus in a recent interview of his with the press. Also, she said she thought he was insensitive about the way he described her battle with addiction.

She admits that she took the loss of her children very badly. That she yelled at her father, and that she was hard-headed, and that she didn’t understand then why she couldn’t see her kids. But she says she understands it now. She admits that she wan’t able to care for them back then.

And she admits that she was an addict, and says that she’s been clean for nine years now.

She is raising her two youngest children herself. She has a job.

It seems pretty clear that Shannon Biles’ s children were in jeopardy. “In and out of foster care” is not a good thing. It worked out well, probably better than imagined. Simone’s grandfather and his wife legally adopted Simone and her sister and are now their mom and dad. Hooray for all that. Gold medals all around.

Stop the hate

While I understand the hunger of the media for a story and the  curiosity of Olympic viewers and the general public about all this, I don’t understand the hate directed at Shannon Biles in the comments sections.

Shannon Biles was an addict. She lost custody of four children. That’s a clusterfuck of hurt  for a lot of people, including innocent children. It’s personal disaster beyond measure. BUT this woman who lost her children and the respect of her father is now clean. She has turned her life around. In the olympics of her personal life, that’s pretty damn golden.

Birthmothers are human beings

Birthmothers/first mothers/bio mothers are human beings, deserving of compassion. We did what we did for a million reasons. Put on those shoes, haters. Try a little running and jumping in them, and when your feet are bloody, give thanks for your perfect life and your shiny veneer over your hate-filled soul. I have to try a little bit not to wish you ill, but I can do it. I wish you well. I wish for you understanding, and some personal peace, and an inclination for you to share that with the world instead of hate.

“Fable” –a poem by Louise Glück

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Judgemnt of Solomon by Raphael(1)
“The Judgement of Solomon” by Raphael

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.

The Death of Edward Hirsch’s Son

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photo by author

The adoption of a baby boy

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.

A Good Age to Be A Mother

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What’s a good age to be a mother? Probably not 16. Or 17. In 1970, the year I had my son, it was 21.

 

Pregnant at 16

“Grandma, did you want to give my daddy away when he was a little baby?” I’m sweeping the floor in preparation for my eight-year-old granddaughter’s birthday party when she asks her question. In a couple of hours the house will be overflowing with pizza and kids and presents, but right now, an emptiness seizes me in the pit of my stomach.
“No,” I say. “I didn’t. It was sad to give him up.”
“Why did you do it then?”
“It’s what girls had to do in those days if they had a baby too young.”
“How old were you?”
“I was sixteen when I got pregnant with him.”
“That’s so old. That’s a good age to be a mommy.” She’s sitting at the table with a glass of milk and a cracker, her eyes wide as she watches me. I must seem ancient to her.
“Not really, I say.” And then I explain about high school and college, and how a baby should probably have a grown-up mother.
“Bompa and Grammy said that the first time they saw Daddy they knew he was the baby for them!”
“I bet they did,” I said. “Your daddy was a really beautiful baby.”

Now a grandma

A couple hours later we’re all singing Happy Birthday together–Bompa, Grammy, and me–along with a the other guests. I’m wearing a black fringed shawl as a gypsy skirt, a scarf wrapped around my hair, borrowed bangles, and silver hoop earrings. It’s a costume birthday party. There are pirates, a witch, an old man, a couple of versions of bat girl, cat woman, and a knight.

I think of the first time I met my son’s adoptive parents twenty years earlier. I stood in my hotel room that evening changing into and out of every article of clothing I’d brought on the trip. A costume party might have assuaged some of that nervousness. I’d probably have chosen to be a saint or a nun. Maybe the first woman president or a high-powered executive to disguise the bewildered and shamed teen-age girl that  lived inside me in those days, not far at all from the surface.

After the cake has been devoured, the games played, the princess unwraps her presents. She sits on her chair next to her mom, dutifully reading her birthday cards, one minute in the reality of party thank yous, the next in whatever fantasyland her new toy conveys her to.

At the end of the evening my son’s adoptive father comes up to me to say good-bye. “I’ll bet you haven’t had a hug yet today,” he says.
“Not from a tall person,” I say. He laughs. My son’s mother and I hug, too.

In my perfect fantasy world, I would have kept my son. I would have decided that 17 was a good age to be a mother. But in the post-reunion reality that I live in, I can’t imagine things being any better.

Adoptive Parents, Read This

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You might be sitting at the top of the triangle

Dear Adoptive Parents,

When I think about how the past 18 years of reunion have gone with my son and the hows and whys of all of it, I can’t help but think about his parents (his adoptive parents.) Especially his mother. She had lost a child herself, and I think because of this experience, was able to understand what I had lost. In our correspondence through letters and in person, in all these years she has never once been negative toward me, any aspect of the reunion process, or post-reunion life. The last two years, we’ve been at the same Thanksgiving table.

If there are any adoptive parents who stumble onto this blog, I encourage you to imagine yourself sitting at the top of the triangle. Imagine your arms and hands stretching downward. See the strength in connecting all of us.