Tag Archives: birthmothers

The Handmaid’s Baby Scoop

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A scene from “The Handmaid’s Tale”

The Handmaid’s Tale and adoption

As is often the case, I’m a little late to the party. I just finished watching the last episode of the Hulu version of Margaret Atwood’s book, The Handmaid’s Tale. It pretty much killed me. Ever since I began watching I would frequently google, “Is Margaret Atwood a birthmother?” When that didn’t bring up much, I’d change tactics and google, “Is Margaret Atwood an adoptive mother?” With still no luck I tried, “Is Margaret Atwood adopted?”

Okay. I gave up. But somehow Margaret Atwood nailed what it was like to be a birthmother in the Baby Scoop Era. Secrecy reigned in the adoption industry then. Hell, secrecy still reigns in many ways. Anyway, Atwood’s fictional vision and the real life Baby Scoop are quite similar. Young fertile unmarried women were coerced into giving up their babies to those society deemed more worthy under the burgeoning theocracy known as the United States of America.

In the last episode of season 1 Jeannine is about to be stoned by her sister handmaids for the crime of endangering a child. She took her baby from its adoptive parents and nearly succeeding in hurling both herself and the baby off a bridge. In an act of civil disobedience not one of the handmaids will hurl the first stone. This communal act is what made me weep.

There was very little support for birthmothers in 1970 when I had my son. I labored and delivered alone. And after signing the papers, there was no mourning. The entire experience was a deep dark secret. End of story. For two decades, anyway. After watching that last episode, there’s now a scene In my head in an adoption agency with a contingent of birthmothers, and no one will pick up the pen.

And there’s this: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/watching/the-handmaids-tale-tv-finale-margaret-atwood.html?mcubz=1

Baby Scoop and other tragedies

Ms. Atwood pays homage to the women whose reproductive rights were abused under Nicolae Ceausescu and Hitler, and she mentions the 500 babies in Argentina who were disappeared, and the indigenous babies of both Australia and Canada, but there’s not a word about the women and babies from the Baby Scoop Era. According to the Adoption History Project from the University of Oregon, the Baby Scoop Era in the United States pertains to the period between 1945 and 1973. It is estimated that up to 4 million mothers in the United States had children placed for adoption during that time. Four million handmaids.

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The Handmaid’s Tale: Episode 2

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A scene from “The Handmaid’s Tale”

Dystopian future/dystopian past

Probably you’ve at least heard of it–“The Handmaid’s Tale.” It seems like everyone is talking about the Hulu series set in the dystopian future. Women with two good ovaries are fated to be surrogates for wives of societal stature who are infertile. For birthmothers this is where the dystopian future meets the dystopia past. Birthmothers have already lived in this world during the Baby Scoop Era and handed over our children to those that society deemed worthy.

I felt this when I read the book in 1989 (while nursing my youngest child,) but watching it come alive on the screen brought a bitterness that I have not tasted for some time.

In the story it’s customary for all the handmaids in the neighborhood to attend a birth. While the adoptive mother in waiting lies on a white sheet in a stylish living room, moaning though fake labor pains with the other wives coaching her, upstairs the real labor progresses with the handmaid who is lucky enough to have conceived a child in this toxic future world. When the birth is imminent, the handmaid leaves the luxurious marriage  bed  for a birthing chair, the privileged wife sitting behind her as if she too is pushing through the labor pains. When the baby is out, it’s the wife who situates herself in bed and receives the baby. The handmaid, (birthmother) is just a few feet away, empty-handed and anguished, longing to hold her child. A sister handmaid gently guides guides the birthmother’s face away from the baby and its new mother. Then the entire room of handmaids converge on her, hovering over her, murmuring their comfort. It’s a wrenching scene, but for those of us who were handmaids of the 60s and 70s, we had no compatriots.

Reality was worse

At the moment of my son’s birth, the intern in the delivery room joyfully asked me if this was my first child. Before I had a chance to utter a syllable, the doctor in charge guffawed. “She’s an unwed mother,” he said. My son was wrapped is a blanket and whisked away.

I suspect most of us gave birth that way. No family present. The baby’s father not allowed anywhere near. No murmured comforts anywhere.

An Essay About Reunion

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My essay about reunion has been published in “The Beacon,” the newsletter of the American Adoption Congress. Reunion, as we know, is a really big deal. Probably everyone involved in adopted has some fear about it. And of course after you reunite with your son or daughter, you might also meet their adoptive parents. The meetings and introductions might go on and on. Aunts, uncles, grandparents siblings. It’s a tsunami of emotion. I was super nervous about all of it.  The title of the essay is “How the World Didn’t End and Nobody Died.” Here’s the link.

The target audience for the AAC is mostly adoptees, I think. And some birthparents too.

But I  wrote this essay about reunion with adoptive parents in mind. I would especially like adoptive parents to know that reunion can go well. And that their pre-conceived notions of what birthmothers are like might not be true. So if you know some adoptive parents, maybe pass it on.

Thank you.

I’m grateful to The Beacon for the publication.

Relinquished Baby Found Safe

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photo by author

Many years ago I relinquished my baby for adoption. This news story  brought my choices (or lack of them) to mind.

A secret pregnancy in a Catholic town

It was 1970. I’d recently graduated from  a Catholic high school in my home town–a town so Catholic there was no public high school or public grade school there. Underneath my cap and gown was a well kept secret. So well kept that no one knew that I was pregnant until later that summer–six weeks before the baby was born. I confided in my mother. We told my father and my boyfriend (the father of the baby) and not another soul.

I was fairly certain than I was damned. Yet when it came time to sign the adoption papers, I specified that I wanted my son to be adopted by a Catholic family.

A year or so afterwards I viewed my wishes for a Catholic boyhood for my son as evidence of a sort of Stockholm syndrome. I was a captive of Catholicism, hobbled by the constrained morality of my town and my church. So hobbled that I could not endure the shame and scandal of raising my son myself. Yet I handed him over to be indoctrinated  with the same narrow-mindedness.

While it’s true that my son was adopted into a good and loving home, religion is no guarantee of that. And while there’s a bit more leeway in the Catholic Church these days, it seems that there won’t be enough for the mother of the child in the article linked to above. If she is identified, she will be  lucky not to be charged with a crime. A church is not considered a safe place to leave an infant, according to the Minnesota Safe Haven Law. And thus, the woman has committed a crime.

What do we wish (pray) for?

Certainly I have the same wish that most readers of the story will have. I wish for the baby to be loved, to be safe, to be given the opportunities in life that everyone deserves. But I also think of the woman who felt so trapped by her circumstances, that she (or someone she had implored to help her) had to climb the Cathedral steps that winter night with the almost insurmountable task of leaving that baby behind. Picture that.

I also wish that the priest had spoken up for the mother. That he’d  beseeched those hearing of the story to put themselves in the mother’s shoes. That he’d discussed how the Church has failed women and children like these over the decades. And how about pointing out that the Church has wrongly encouraged the throwing of stones at women in circumstances like hers. I wish he’d put out a plea for the mother to contact him. And when she did, he’d offered her support to help her raise her son.

National Adoption Month 2016

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I have an essay here.  While there’s only one National Adoption Month each year, the topic never goes away and I always have something more to say.  As a birthmother (and a grandmother,) I often feel that respectability and understanding are beyond my reach. People have strong opinions about adoption, strong impressions of what/who they think a birthmother is. Birthmothers and adoptive parents take sides and stand sharply opposed to one another much like we do in the arena of national politics. It’s hard to hold hands and sing kumbaya. Villains are real. Bad things happen. People do things for personal gain without considering the bigger picture. But every story is more complicated than we usually imagine. I respect Carrie Goldman’s efforts to share many points of view during National Adoption Month 2016 in her series 30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days on the ChicagoNow website.

Chicago reflected

The Adoption Museum Project

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This photo of me was taken by my son’s birthfather a few months after our son was born.

In my morning scroll though Facebook, I stumbled across a post that had to do with The Adoption Museum.  The what? I said. The what? The Adoption Museum Project?! The initial exhibit back in May of 2013 had to do with birthmothers (yes, there was an ensuing controversy about the term) and I had no idea that the project existed or that the event occurred. I missed it.

In 2013 I was still adjusting to my first year as a caregiver. In May I was obsessing over my mother’s CPAP machine.  All of that. My life as a caregiver, living with my mother, weekends with the man who loved me visiting us, doing what I could to support my younger daughter as she worked on her master’s degree. All of that seems so long ago as if the four of us here together in this house was a dream.

I suppose there are plenty of days that the memory of giving birth to my son and then giving him up resides in the background too. But some days the experience lives inside me close to the surface–not just his birth and the subsequent relinquishment or even the two decades of secrecy or the visceral memory of shame and grief. It’s that girl–the girl I was then. I was a different person then. The other big events–the deaths, divorces, estrangements– happened to the person I now know to be me. But that girl. That girl in the photo above. A visit from her is like time travel and space travel rolled into one. She’s an alien. And she is me.

Anyway, there are still ways to get involved and a newsletter you can subscribe to. They are open to feedback.

So I’m just shouting it out. And thinking about what feedback I’d like to provide–where to begin, actually. I am nothing but feedback when it comes to adoption.

Simone Biles’s Birthmother

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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.

Breaking the Silence

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Breaking the silence in adoption can be distressing.
Silence,by Odillon Redon

Breaking the silence in adoption scares us. We don’t dare.

This story highlights the secrecy in adoption. And a secret weighs heavy on the heart. A secret can be found out if you’re not careful, so you mind your tongue. Look over your shoulder, scan the room for a face with a knowing look. All the while, your heart begs you to lift its burden by breaking the silence into a million pieces.

Not long ago I was having lunch with new friends when someone asked the ages of my children. The answer to this question always elicits raised eyebrows or a comment. “I had my son when I was a teenager,” I said. “He was given up for adoption, but I reconnected with him.” I always keep the answer short, but people want to know more. When I say that I searched for my son and found him, people think that I’m Nancy Drew, or that I’m super courageous, or a ballsy political activist. My answer is just, I had to.

And sometimes we feel we have to tell our stories. Here’s the link to Caitriona Palmer’s book.

What to Say to a Birthmother

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Birthmothers, the mothers in the shadows

Do you know a birthmother?

There are millions of us birthmothers. For every adoptee, there is one of us. We’re your sisters, your friends, your aunts, your cousins, your teammates, your co-workers, your wives and girlfriends, that person next to you on the plane who’s flying home to see her mom and tells you everything after her 4th rum and coke.

Do you know what to say on Mother’s Day?

Each of our stories is unique, and they’re all the same. What you say to the particular birthmother(s) that you know probably depends on the story. Think about what you know. Step into her shoes. Is she still keeping her secret from others with you being one of the few in her confidence? Is she happily reunited with her son or daughter? Has her child refused to meet her? Is she searching? Does she have other children? Maybe you invite her over for coffee or take her out for a drink. Maybe you tell her you feel enriched by knowing her story, or you give her a card or a take time for a conversation. Maybe you ask her what she thinks of Birthmother’s Day, which is today, by the way, in case you didn’t know.

I don’t exactly hate the idea of Birthmother’s Day, myself. But I don’t really love it either. The phrase Happy Birthmother’s Day pretty much gets stuck in my throat. I’d rather cough up a carving knife than say that, but the idea of commemoration is a good one. We’re here. So, I’m thinking of us and all of our stories.

“Birth Mother” is on audible.com

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BirthMother
“Birth Mother” by Denise Emanuel Clemen

My memoir, “Birth Mother,” published last summer by Shebooks is now available on audible.com. I’ve listened to the sample, and while it’s kind of strange for me to hear another voice reading my words, I like the reader’s voice a lot. She sounds, well….kinda like me.

There are other fabulous books by women from Shebooks on Audible too. Check them out.