What Happens When a Natural Mother Grows Old?

In earlier posts I've discussed how it felt to be young, scared, barely adult, and faced with an unexpected pregnancy and a boyfriend who had other plans for his life than me and a child.  I've also read posts by natural mothers who are either planning to relinquish their babies or already have.  These posts are uniformly sad, as one might expect.  There are few things sadder (that I can think of) than bearing a child and giving him to someone else to raise.  It breaks my heart to read about these mothers' grief, but that isn't what disturbs me most about these cries from the heart.  The really amazing thing is that these new mothers defend their actions as "in the best interest of the child" or a beautiful way to help a childless couple.  In other words, they declare that they are at peace with their decision and are moving on with their lives.

As with so many of life's conundrums, the question of adoption is vexed, more so now that adult adoptees are speaking out about their experiences with greater candor.  I get so tired of those who defend adoption because theirs was happy, who view outspoken adoptees as angry and bitter, or who argue that everyone has the right to be a parent even if that means taking another woman's child.  We need to listen to all adoptees' voices, rejoice with the contented ones and sympathize with the wounded.  Adoptees have been expected to remain unquestioning and grateful.  Now we are learning that everything we'd been told by the adoption industry was not, in fact, true.  Since a child has no say in what happens to him, he is subject to the decisions of others.  If those are good decisions, the child flourishes, but if they aren't, then we must see that child as a victim.  Our sympathies go out to victims, so it is easy for most people to at least listen to what adult adoptees are now saying in books, articles, and on the internet.  But there is a group that has been even more marginalized than adoptees: their mothers.  If adoptees were expected to be grateful, their mothers were expected to remain silent.  The mothers were not seen as victims but as perpetrators.  They broke the rules, so they had to pay by sacrificing their own happiness.  By having an untimely pregnancy, they demonstrated their lack of responsibility.  The way to atone for that lack was to admit they were unfit, by reason of youth, poverty, or lack of education and/or employment, and let "better" parents raise their children.

In the Baby Scoop Era (post WW II-1972) being an unwed mother was virtually out of the question, at least for white women.  African-American women have a different story to tell.  Renting an apartment, finding child care, even getting a job were all but impossible, to say nothing of the stigma.  A ruined reputation could make an unwed mother unmarriageable, a shame to her family.  A girl who became pregnant would be kicked out of school, her chances at anything like normal success abruptly cut off.  Those were the circumstances of a bygone era.  Times have changed, but girls and women are still making adoption plans for their babies with the encouragement of a vigorous adoption industry and an endless supply of would-be adoptive parents.  Why do some women still make a decision that is not in any way as imperative as the one made by mothers in the BSE?  I believe the explanation is two-fold.  One reason is that adoption agencies, lawyers, pro-life Christians, and social workers offer help and support to women in crisis, taking advantage of their vulnerability.  Slick brochures, showing glowing young couples who offer to love your child, testimonials from other "birth" mothers praising their lost babies' new families, and the message that relinquishing a child to adoption is beautiful, compassionate, responsible, even noble, comprise what I would call "soft propaganda."

A "crisis" pregnancy, like a death sentence, has a way of focusing the mind.  Awareness contracts to the here and now.  How will I care for a baby when I'm only 15?  Does this mean I'll have to give up that college scholarship?  I have no money, my boyfriend left town, and my parents won't speak to me.  I'm all alone and simply not ready for the responsibility of a baby.  What options do I have besides abortion or adoption?  I don't believe in abortion, so that means I must give up my child.  That way he can have a good life with parents who want him, and I can finish my education, stay in my parents' good graces, and with an open adoption I can even stay in contact with my child.  Surrender your baby for adoption, and all your problems are solved.  Sure, it will be hard, and you will suffer, but that will be temporary, and you'll get over it.  So some mothers, seeing the walls of social pressure and perhaps poverty closing in, make the decision that the "experts" assure them will bring the most happiness to the most people.  Your sacrifice will bring joy to others.  Isn't that better than being selfish and denying your child a better life than you can give him?  Than you can give him today.

What does a tiny baby need?  A safe place to sleep--a basket or a drawer will do as well as an expensive crib.  Food--you can supply that for free for at least six months.  Clothes--thrift stores and churches can supply what you need.  (In Finland every new mother is given a baby box at the hospital before she goes home.  The box is filled with everything a baby needs to get started in life--clothes, diapers, everything--and the box can be used as a crib.  Every mother gets this supply of essentials worth about $200.)  When you think about it, a baby doesn't really need all that much, though try telling that to a middle-class mom who thinks you're a failure if you don't own a jog-stroller.  What does a tiny baby need?  He needs his mommy, for whom there is no substitute.  We have turned adoption into a huge money-making scheme, babies into commodities, and their mothers into an impediment to fulfilling a demand.  Mothers, caught up in a crisis situation, and adoption agencies, concerned only with placing children, think only of the present and leave the future to take care of itself.  But there are those who have to live that future: mothers of lost children.  It is of them I wish to speak.

Actually, I can only speak for myself, but I don't think I exaggerate when I say I'm fairly typical.  I succumbed to the propaganda and thought only about the moment I was caught in.  I made an adoption plan for my baby, and I saw it through.  I didn't know at the time how badly my spirit had been broken or how I would never be the same person I had been before my pregnancy.  My parents didn't throw me out, but they made it clear that I could not come home with a baby.  They said so in so many words.  My mother was 40 when I was born, and at 62 she didn't want to take on a baby, something I, at age 69, can understand.  My parents were good people and loved me; they helped me by buying me a VW bug and finding me a place to live with a family that had two young children.  I never met the minister who put my father in touch with this couple, but the wife put me in touch with her doctor, who put me in touch with the headmaster of a small private school, who was apprised of my situation and, dear man, gave me a job teaching English.  So I did have help of a kind, at least until my son was born.  Here's what might have happened: I could have remained in the large basement bedroom with my son.  After a few weeks, I could have returned to the school; my day lasted from 8:00 until 1:00.  The stay-at-home mother in whose house I was living could have looked after my baby while I worked.  My social worker could have warned me about how difficult life without my child would be.  My parents could have accepted their grandson, and honestly, if given the choice between returning to my hometown or keeping my child, I would have chosen my child without question.  My mother was devastated, so I let my son go to lessen her anguish.  The man I'd met while I was pregnant, the man I later married and had three children with, could have stepped up and been a father to my baby, but he didn't.  In other words, I made the decision others wanted me to make.  No one ever asked me what I wanted.

Every time I see a single mother doing a bang-up job with her kid, I ache with longing.  Every time I hear a successful adult express gratitude to a single mom who raised him or her, I am reminded that I wasn't brave enough or strong enough to do what many other mothers have done.  When I walked away from the adoption agency that placed my son, leaving him behind for what I believed would be forever, I felt as if my insides had turned to stone.  I literally felt as if the blood had frozen in my veins, as if I no longer inhabited my own skin.  I became a walking, talking statue, emotionally disconnected from my past and my own sense of self and self-respect.  I was a failure in my own eyes, and in 47 years that has not changed, despite earning a PhD, teaching for 30 years, raising three wonderful children (one of whom is adopted), and finally achieving a happy marriage.  I didn't know that fateful day that it would take many decades for me to realize the enormity of what I had done.  I feel I must tell any mother who is considering placing her child for adoption that the way she feels today won't last.  The sense of doing the right thing will fade, and the grief will intensify.  Giving away a child is not something you can undo.  Your child will always wonder about you and why he wasn't kept.  Even if he has loving adoptive parents and a "good" life, he will always know he doesn't fit his adoptive family any more than a kitten adopted by a lactating dog fits into the canine world.  If you have other children, you will love them, but they will never replace the one you lost. 

I've heard younger "birth" mothers proclaim their satisfaction with their decisions to relinquish, and I've heard many, many mothers-of-loss express the incredible sorrow they still feel years and decades later.  Each of those mothers believed she was doing the right thing for her child too.  At the time.  I have never heard a mother who kept and raised her child say she wished she hadn't.  My own first son's father was the child of an unwed mother who raised him on her own, making his abandonment of me and our son even more inexplicable.  He adored his mother, and they were very close.  She struggled to raise him and provide a good education, and I would have saluted her if I'd ever had the opportunity to meet her. 

That brings me to the question of fathers.  We now have laws that compel fathers to support their children, whether married to the mother or not.  I made many bad decisions, two of which involve the fathers of my children.  When my first son's father told me he didn't want to get married, I let him off the hook.  He was English, and I was American, and once we parted the ocean between us proved to be infinite.  He should have helped me, and I should have demanded ongoing support.  My first husband and I divorced after 17 years.  At the time I was supporting the family (three children) with a graduate assistantship and some part-time jobs, while he drifted deeper into an alcoholic haze and joblessness.  By the time we separated, he was virtually penniless, and I signed away my rights to child support in exchange for the house we lived in.  He had nothing, so I didn't press the issue.  Within just a few years, however, he did have money, but it was too late.  In the moment, all I wanted was to be quits with him.  My children and I paid for that decision and are still paying. 

There are decisions you make when you're young that are so irrevocable I shudder to think about it.  Youth, in its optimism, often sees a sunny future, a second or even a third chance.  Americans are a people of the "do over."  But you can't regain what is truly lost, so I say to anyone considering adoption for their child, consider the future, which certainly won't be what you see today.  Have some thought for the woman you'll be when you're 50 or 60; have some thought for the child who will always miss you and wonder if you ever think of him.  This is not an argument I'm trying to win, and I'm not "bashing" adoption as some have claimed.  This is my experience, and I offer it as a warning.  There are more options than you may think and more sides to every story than you may realize.  At least stop to consider what I've said.

  

Is the Primal Wound Real?

Ever since I read Nancy Verrier's The Primal Wound, I've relied on it to make sense of what happened to my son and me when I relinquished him for adoption in 1968.  Reading the book for the first time was a revelation, and suddenly my feelings of over forty years made sense.  There are those who say the primal wound is a myth, that it's not scientific and can't be proved.  I don't know, but I suspect those who dismiss the primal wound are "birth" mothers and adoptees who are at least satisfied with their lives.  Some older "birth" mothers may have found peace and laid their grief to rest, while younger ones may feel justified, relieved, even proud. 

I've been reading literature all my life, and it's given me a lot more wisdom than even my long lifetime of experience could have provided.  It's given me a way of interpreting the world, other people, even myself.  I believe that each of us constructs a narrative of our own life.  As David Copperfield implies in the first sentence of Dickens' novel-- "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show"-- every person's life is a story with, if not a hero, a central protagonist--him/herself.  Literature follows Hamlet's precept to "hold up a mirror to nature."  You might ask if Hamlet is true.   Or the Iliad.  Or Oedipus Rex.  Did the events described in these great works actually happen?  Are they real?  They did not happen as depicted historically, but they are true nonetheless.  You don't bring a scientist in when you analyze a text, because some truths are not quantifiable or measurable.  When it comes to human experience, you need a heart as well as a mind to try to understand it.  If a work speaks to you, what it says is true.  If your experience evokes feelings in you, those feelings are real, whether anyone else responds the way you do or not.  There is Truth (measurable, quantifiable, replicable) and there is truth that is uniquely personal. 

The primal wound is my truth.  It explains my own experience and, I believe, that of my son.  Someone with a cold sneezes on you and on me, but only I become sick.  Should you then assume cold viruses aren't real?  There is no need to argue about this, as some have done.  If you relinquished a baby and feel no less intact than you did before, then either you have been unaffected by the primal wound or it has yet to open.  But if you lost your child to adoption and never recovered, then the primal would is as real as love or delight or sorrow or any of the myriad emotions no one would dare dispute.  Of course, the primal wound is real.  I have felt it and known it my entire adult life, and all I can ask is that others respect my own understanding of what happened to me. 

Perhaps it's akin to religion.  I'm not religious, so I suppose in some ways I'm like those who pooh-pooh the idea of the primal wound.  But I know people for whom religious belief is as real as the sunrise.  I respect that, and while I don't understand it, I would be ungracious to argue against it.  I'm not equating the physiological and psychological trauma of mother/baby separation with religious faith, but I suggest that they may be in some ways analogous.  The Bibe is constructed out of stories that many Christians take at face value.  My life is the story I tell myself, just as history is the story human beings tell about their culture and collective experience.  When we look for guides to living, we look to stories, not to the stars or the test tube.  Science tells us what is; stories tell us what it all means.  The primal wound is my story, and I'm sticking to it.

Beginning in the Middle

"I have been forced to sit in the audience of my son's life, watching a fictional story being played out in front of my eyes.  The reality being that strangers are living my life as my child's mother and grandmother."--Lily Arthur in Adoptionland: From Orphans to Activists

I've been reading a lot online in recent days about National Adoption Month and Orphan Sunday, and I am flooded with reactions and emotions, most of them none too pleasant.  November has been celebrated as National Adoption Month for about a decade and was initially begun as a way to find homes for the thousands of children languishing in foster care, a notoriously unsatisfactory place for a child to grow up.  It was about children and their needs, not advocacy for those wishing to adopt infants and toddlers, but that has changed.  These days "adoption" is all-inclusive and seldom makes a distinction among the various kinds of adoption.

November is also the month when we celebrate our veterans, acknowledge their sacrifice, and honor their service to our country.  We honor our soldiers, but we do not celebrate the wars they fought.  I see parallels between adoption and war.  Perhaps reflecting on a few similarities will help me understand both a bit better.

War is hell.  No one disputes this.  War always involves suffering, violence, chaos, and loss.  When evil becomes too overwhelming to be ignored, then responsible people step up to combat it, even though they know what it will cost.  In other words, sometimes war is
necessary.  The same can be said of adoption.

For some, adoption is hell as well, but it's a hell that is not acknowledged or fully understood.  Every adoption is grounded in tragedy.  There is no adoption without adoption loss.  A mother loses her child.  A father is dismissed as irrelevant.  A child loses his identity and his heritage.  The only winners are the adoptive parents and those children whose fates would have been dangerously compromised had they remained with their original parents.  But those children suffer too.  Whatever the circumstances of a child's adoption, there is pain preceding it, and the pain doesn't end the day the child goes to his new home.

I keep thinking that if I can find the right words to describe adoption loss, the trauma of separation experienced by both mother and baby, and the near-impossibility of ever being rid of the unique pain felt by adoptees and their mothers, I will be able to convert what is inchoate into something clear and manageable, but that's not happening.  Is it pessimistic to believe that life is one long string of hurts, strung along between good times but always present, the way scars are omnipresent?   You can slap makeup on a scar or hide it beneath a shirt, but without serious medical intervention you can't get rid of it, yet we live despite our scars, both emotional and physical.  I guess I think of life as "despite..." rather than "thanks to...." 

The initiative to "Flip the Script" that some adoptees are urging on Facebook has got me thinking more about adoption from the adoptee's point of view.  I've always tried to do this with my adopted son, though I now realize with how little success.  I no more understand what it's like to be adopted than I can imagine crouching behind a bomb-blasted wall.  In the presence of those who do  know those things, the rest of us should probably maintain a respectful silence, but a sense of shared humanity leads me to try.

Something that many adoptees have commented upon is the difficulty of truly fitting in with either the adoptive family or the biological one after reunion.  It makes me think of Sandra Bullock drifting off into space in that movie, no longer tethered to earth but an alien in the hostile environment of the vast unknown.  When I was very young, I was invited to spend the night with a friend I didn't know all that well.  Our parents were friends, and I suppose that's what led to the invitation.  I remember having dinner at their house, then going to bed in a strange bedroom and longing to be back in my own house, in my own bed, with my own parents in the next room.  What if I'd had to stay in that strange house indefinitely?  What if I'd never seen my parents again?  My friend's parents were kind to me, but I felt no connection to them whatsoever.  Is that how an adoptee feels, amplified a hundred or a thousand times? 

As a "birth" mother in reunion with my first son, and as the adoptive mother of another son, I am trying to see the world from their perspectives.  I know that being a "birth" mother is like being an emotional amputee.  A part of my very self was missing for over 40 years.  I didn't feel like an alien in my own life, but I did feel I was breathing with one lung.  Did my sons look around them, searching for something that was undeniably their own and never finding it?  I've had jobs that twisted me into someone I didn't want to be, and I remember feeling I was in the wrong place where nothing fit.  I worked in offices that enclosed my spirit like a straight-jacket, and I taught in schools that felt populated by hostile forces that I had to control by being a very different person from what I normally am.  Until I settled into  teaching at a congenial university, I never felt I fit in anywhere.  Most people undoubtedly share those feelings at one time or another, but not fitting in at work and not fitting into your family are not comparable.  As Robert Frost wrote, "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."  But "home" for an adoptee is always provisional.  Ties of blood are indissoluble, no matter how disrupted the relationship might be.  But adoption is a contract, and everyone knows deep down that contracts can be broken.  Love is not enough to ensure permanence, as any divorced person can attest.

Is it possible for a family to reconstitute itself, for a mother and child long separated to reconstruct Home?  I want to believe it is, but I know now how difficult that will be.  Beginning a mother-child relationship when the child is an adult is rather like building the second floor of a house first.  Until the substructure is strong enough, you have to keep it aloft by sheer will, a will comprised not of bricks and beams but of love.  Somehow I believe love will prove sufficient to the task, that despite lacking blueprints, the new structure will endure.

Flying Blind

Adoption reunion.  Two little words; a vast, uncharted territory.  I remember reading What To Expect When You're Expecting when I was pregnant with my two raised babies, and there were plenty of other books to get women prepared for the rigors of birth that I read too.  I practiced Lamaze exercises and learned breathing techniques as I "rehearsed" for childbirth.  The preparation didn't eliminate the pain, but it did help me at least know what would happen and give me ways of coping with it.  I can't imagine giving birth without those preliminaries.

Finding the son I lost to adoption was a different sort of birth, the beginning of a new relationship that had virtually nothing to go on.  The few days I spent in the hospital, when I was able to hold my son and feed him, were precious and irreplaceable, but a 44-year old man is not a tiny baby.  How is a mother supposed to relate to a child she never knew?  I had no idea.  I was flying blind.

Two books were invaluable to me in early reunion: Primal Wound and Coming Home to Self, both by adoptive mother and therapist Nancy Verrier.  The first helped me understand the trauma David and I had suffered as a result of our separation and its lasting consequences, the second gave me insight into the mind and heart of the adult adoptee.  Both are essential to an understanding of adoption, but when it came to reunion I was a deer in the headlights.

I'd been warned.  The wonderful women from SunflowerFirstMoms have been with me every step of the way, and without them I'd be even crazier than I am, without a doubt.  Still, like childbirth, nothing can substitute for the lived experience.  I had to go through my reunion, which would be like no other, in order to incorporate it into my self.  Every reunion is unique, but the same cast of characters is involved every time.  A mother and her child.  This is what is happening with mine.

First Stage (early labor, if you will):  One day it floated into my head that there was nothing stopping me from searching for my son.  My parents were gone, my husband was understanding,  my raised children were grown, and I was retired from teaching.  The time seemed right, and I immediately took to the internet and began sending out feelers.  A woman who seemed nice actually called me from Florida and offered her services as a searcher--for a hefty fee.  I was willing to pay and had considered hiring a private investigator, but fortunately I stumbled upon N.Y. Liberty Angels and discovered that there are Search Angels who search for family members lost to adoption, and they charge nothing.  I made contact, was assigned a Search Angel, and in no time at all, she came up with a name.  "Look on Facebook, and see if he's there."  I did, and he was, but he didn't get my message until three weeks later, when he finally went on Facebook to check his birthday greetings.  He responded to my earlier email, "Hi, Mom.  Call me."  And the rest is history.  I had found him and heard his voice.  He was real, and he sounded amazing.

Second Stage: (still early labor).  Hey, this is really happening.  Those first flutters were indeed the harbinger of things to come.  Now we're really into it.  Frequent phone calls and long emails.  "We can't talk on the phone every day," I told him.  I didn't talk to my other kids that often.  "Why not?" he replied.  Why not, indeed?  My husband was the soul of patience, watching TV in another room while David and I talked and talked and talked.  We had so much to say, forty-four years' worth of living and wondering, while never imagining we'd ever be together.  It was the euphoria of early love, when all thoughts turn toward the beloved like iron filings to the north pole.  Everything still seemed unreal, or surreal, like a 3-D dream.  I'd read about things that could go wrong in reunion--pullbacks, rejection, anger, the "roller coaster of reunion"--but that wasn't going to happen to us.  We were going to prove the skeptics wrong.  David was thrilled to be found, I was thrilled to have my son, and I couldn't imagine a greater happiness.

Third Stage (transition):  If grief is a mountain, and the grief over losing a child to adoption is like a mountain that adds layers as the years go by, it is inevitable that at some point that mountain will fall on you and bury you alive.  During the first few weeks, David emailed me photos of himself from the age of 3 weeks, when his adoptive parents first took him home, through his toddler and young childhood years, then into the teen years, and finally young adulthood.  There's one picture of him at age six where he looks a lot like I did at that age.  In fact, David looks more like me than any of my children.  Saskia has my eyes, but she and Tanner take more after their dad's side of the family.  It was like an electric shock when I saw David in person for the first time.  He looked so much like me.

I  poured over these pictures, arranged them in chronological order, and studied them so closely I memorized every detail, but gradually it became more and more difficult to look at them.  Those precious images ground it into me that the child in them was lost to me forever.  No matter how wonderful having David was now, there were 44 lost years that could never be recovered.  I felt completely shut out of his life and could no longer maintain either the denial that had helped me endure or the joy of his discovery.  I felt emotionally like those Chilean minors who were trapped underground for so long and as isolated as an island seen through the wrong end of a telescope.  Sadness clung to me like a cobweb.  I don't know how to describe feelings except through metaphor, yet no words can adequately capture what I felt.  I wrote about it all as I lived through it, yet when I go back a re-read what I said, the emotion that I thought I was pouring onto the screen seems drained away.  I went crazy with grief.  The mountain crumbled, which meant it was breaking up and could one day be carted away, but I was stuck in the avalanche.   

Post-partum (I'll end this strained analogy here): Mothers who have experienced post-partum depression--and I am one--know that for no apparent reason a time that is the highlight of your life can also be a descent into darkness.  You have what you've wanted and thought about for nine months.  You can look into your baby's face, smell her hair, and feel her warmth beating against you, and nothing has ever been as wonderful.  But you feel like a peeled egg, with no protective layers.  You are in a tunnel and everything seems to be coming at you from a great distance.  These feelings have no reason behind them and are deeper than a mere mood.  Even your own mind seems to be turning against you, and you are afraid to be alone.

I don't know how it is for other mothers reunited with their long-lost children, but my reunion was a time of both euphoria and despair.  Perhaps the emotional upheaval of reunion triggers a hormonal response similar to that following a birth.  Whatever is happening, it certainly takes over every part of you--physically, emotionally, psychologically.  I felt as if I could barely be contained within my own skin, as if I desperately needed to escape my own body but was trapped.  Sitting quietly was a torment, but movement brought little relief.  I turned to friends, my therapist, and sometimes my kids, though I hated to pull them into what was consuming me.  I thought about my son every moment of every day, and my obsession split me in two.  I felt as if half of me were 700 miles away with my son, while the other half was in my comfortless home.  I wanted to relax, but I was as tense and edgy as an unbroken horse new to the bridle.  Everything became an effort, and I stopped writing my blog, saw only a couple of old friends, and found even the social interaction required by a visit to the supermarket an almost unbearable strain.  My husband was patient, but I knew I was neglecting him, if only because I was so distracted.  I felt completely out of control of my emotions and more than a little crazy.

My son was enduring his own emotional trials, compounded of shock, joy, and a feeling quite new to him: love.  But for him, as for me, reunion unleashed torrents.  Decades of the self-discipline adoptees exercise had left him isolated, lonely, and living on the surface of his life.  Now that surface was broken, and he fell through to a new reality, overwhelming in its power and strangeness.  To compress a long story into a manageable tale, he plunged deeper into his chronic alcoholism and suffered a nervous breakdown that led to hospitalizations and eventually AA and several stints in rehab.  It's my belief that, just as post-partum depression is often a real consequence of childbirth, "adoptee syndrome" is a frequent response to adoption, reunion, and the inherent instability of the adoptee's life, no matter how "successful" the adoption might appear.  A confused sense of self and identity, a feeling of worthlessness and a fear of abandonment, unfocussed anxiety and hyper-reactivity, and relationship difficulties have all been extensively documented in the adoption literature.  Some adoptees in reunion cannot tolerate these extreme emotions and keep their distance from their mother, even though they are often more willing to engage with siblings or more distant family members.  Denial is a powerful coping strategy, and while it's perhaps presumptuous of me to attribute denial, anger, or a feeling of incompleteness to individuals who stoutly deny them, I maintain that all adoptees must at some level experience the strain of knowing their identity is an assumed one, not who they really are.

It's been almost three years since that first phone call, and a lot of the reunion rubble has been cleared away.  Just as I had to accept the loss of my son to adoption and still manage to live, I've learned to accept that I can never retrieve the past.  I have mourned, incorporated the loss, and reached a place of acceptance that not so long ago I never expected to find.  In many ways, the Kubler-Ross stages of grief apply to adoption loss and reunion as well.  There is denial, anger, depression, and eventually acceptance, which must come if one is to move forward.  But acceptance doesn't mean acquiescence.  

When I gave birth to my daughter, my youngest child, I suffered post-partum depression for the first time.  Why didn't anyone warn me about this, I wondered.  I thought I must be crazy and was afraid to tell anyone, not even my then-husband.  To this day I cannot listen to music that was popular in the weeks after my daughter's birth; it's too reminiscent of overwhelming emotions.  Now I can recall that happy time and remember the joy rather than the craziness, but a song by Roger Whitaker will trigger a response I'd rather not feel.  I believe it's important for mothers-of-loss who are in reunion with their children to let others know what this uncharted territory is like.  Images in the media of the first face-to-face meeting of mother and child are heart-warming to be sure, but they gloss over what should never be forgotten.  The mothers we celebrate with today would not be in this position if they'd been treated with as much compassion then as they are now.  Reunion is Janus-faced, and we must not forget the tragic side to adoption, because every reunion, no matter how happy, is like every adoption, no matter how successful, infinitely more complicated than fleeting images of balloons and embraces.  Without that knowledge, every mother and adoptee entering reunion will be flying blind. 

The Insufficiency of Optimism

I read a column written by an adoption attorney/adoptive father named Bill Pesch, who apparently lives and works in Guam, which is interesting.  I've actually been to Guam, but that's another story.  Mr. Pesch plans to write four columns about adoption to follow up this first, extremely simplistic one  .http://www.guampdn.com/article/20141020/OPINION02/310200012/Reasons-many-choose-to-adopt-a-child

If you don't want to bother reading Mr. Pesch's comments, I can easily summarize them for you.  Adoption is, as he puts it, a "win-win," that brings love and happiness to everyone involved.  He loves his adopted sons, and they are grateful to him, which is as it should be.   (Snarky emphasis mine.)  The world is flooded with such bromides: adoption is a beautiful way to build a family, adoption gives a child a forever family,  adoptive families are just as happy--even happier-- than biological families, adopted children are special because they've been chosen.  The list of cliches is endless, and most people believe them because if you repeat a lie often enough, most people will come to believe it.  (Hitler knew something about this.)

When I relinquished my first son to adoption in 1968, I felt I had no other option.  I did not take this step lightly.  In fact, I agonized over it for months and turned for reassurance and guidance to a kindly social worker whom I trusted.  She knew all the cliches by heart and told them to me over and over: If you love your baby, you will want to give him a good future.  If you love your baby, you will let him have a family with two parents and more money than you have.  If you want to be a good mother, you will let someone else raise your child.  I was told these things again and again, always with great kindness and apparent compassion.  Nothing was said about how I would feel afterwards, and I didn't ask because I didn't want to think that far ahead.  Getting through the days and weeks before my due date took all my energy and concentration.  I knew I wanted to do what was best for my child.  I had long since stopped caring about what was best for me.  I had recently graduated from college, and while I'd had to cancel my plans to go to graduate school, I wasn't worried about my education.  I was only going to grad. school because it seemed more attractive than getting a job, even though I was licensed to teach high school.  But I was pregnant.  Would the university even accept me now?  Surely no school would hire me.  My parents had made it abundantly clear that they weren't prepared to take on any role in my baby's life whatsoever.  "You got yourself into this, you'll have to get yourself out."  That's what I was told--in the kindest possible way.  And so I was pushed, gently but firmly, toward the devastating moment when I signed away my motherhood.

What if I had been told the truth about what actually happened to my son?  Of course, no one could have predicted such an outcome, but just what if I'd been granted a glimpse into the future?  My son was adopted by a surgeon and his wife, who was a maternity nurse.  They believed themselves incapable of having a child, so they had already adopted a little girl.  Now they were ready for another child, and wasn't it lucky for them that I happened to have a boy?  A doctor in a college town.  An intact family with plenty of financial means.  A solid, respected family with a secure place in the community.  I was a frightened barely-22 year old young woman.  It seemed that there were more items in their "pro" column than in mine.  But by the time my son was six, he already felt isolated and unloved.  His older sister was mean to him; his adoptive parents never hugged him or told him they loved him.  He tucked himself in bed at night, and when he misbehaved, he was punished with extended periods of isolation, including having to eat his meals alone.  He was forced to strip down to his underwear and wash the playroom walls when his allowance money went missing, even though he hadn't taken it.  By then there were three adopted children, and all had to strip down and scrub until the guilty party confessed.  My son was innocent but confessed just to end the ordeal.  The others were let off; he was made to continue scrubbing.  When he broke his arm at hockey practice, his adoptive parents didn't want to believe him and delayed getting him treatment.  When it turned out that he had indeed broken his arm, they were annoyed rather than sympathetic.  When he was a teenager, his adoptive father told him if he didn't get a haircut within 24 hours, he could move out of the house.  He took the threat seriously, as his sister had already been placed in a foster home.  The adoptive father was an alcoholic, leaving my son with an enduring sense of dread.  His adoptive mother punched him in the face and broke his nose when he attempted to defend his younger brother from his sister's teasing.  She then made him return to the dinner table and finish his dinner, even though his nose was still bleeding.

And what about me?  How did I fare in the years after losing my son?  I shut down emotionally and lived a surface life.  I married, had other children, even adopted a son, and tried to live as if my life had not been broken in two.  No one in my family ever mentioned my son, and I never referred to him.  So far as the world was concerned, my son didn't exist, but I thought about him everyday.  I love my raised children, but no child can be a replacement for another.  This is, perhaps, the greatest fallacy in adoption: the idea that taking someone else's child can make up for the one you lost or couldn't have.  I adopted because I hoped that somehow I could balance the scales, that by raising another woman's child I could somehow make up for not raising my own.  Others adopt because they can't have a child and desperately want one, and that desperation leads them to convince themselves that one child is as good as another, and if it's a baby, who will ever know the difference?  That way of thinking has been proved wrong over and over again by mothers of loss and adoptees whose sense of self is forever compromised.  I didn't know that day when I signed the final papers and walked away from my social worker's office (this social worker whom I had trusted and confided in and whom I never saw again) that I had signed my own life sentence, as well as my son's. 

Now middle-aged, my first son struggles to overcome alcoholism and serious emotional distress, while my adopted son struggles to rebuild his life after yet another incarceration.  The offspring of an African-American soldier and a Vietnamese mother, he had to try to adapt to a strange white family and an endemically racist society.  Had he been raised by a black family who could have helped him negotiate the racism in this country and thus been spared at least some of the difficulties he faced growing up, would that have made a difference?  We can never know, but my guess is it would have helped.  Had my first son been raised by  affectionate, encouraging parents, would he have the persistent issues with self-esteem and and existential loneliness that plague him?  Both these men have intelligence, talent, and character, and I can't help but believe that given better childhoods they would have accomplished amazing things, and I don't just mean economically.  As it is, surviving has been their primary occupation since birth.  My raised son and daughter who were born to me have all the "normal" flaws every human being has to some degree.  No one is perfect, but if the security of a loving mother who was nurturing from their births means anything, then it shows in them.  We can't experiment with children, B.F. Skinner notwithstanding, but my own family is a kind of test case, in that each child had a very different childhood.  Two sons were adopted, and both have suffered and struggled.  Two were not, and they have much more resilience.  I ask myself, what are the common factors they share and what are the different experiences they had to deal with? 

My own conclusion is that babies separated from their mothers suffer permanent emotional damage that manifests itself in various ways, depending on life circumstances.  My evidence is anecdotal, admittedly, but I believe it is compelling.  I look at my children not as a scientist or an outside observer but as someone intimately connected with each of them in various ways and at various times.  I was there for my adopted son's childhood, and I'm now present in my first son's life and can get his adult perspective on his past.  So far, I have concluded that adoption was not good for either of them.  Granted, my adopted son might not have survived had he been left in Vietnam, and I have no regrets there, but I wonder if he's ever asked himself the question I ask myself.  Would he have had a better time if raised in a black family?  I see the similarities between my first son and myself, and I intuitively understand him in a way I've never understood my adopted son.  Despite a lifetime apart, I recognize myself in him and he in me.  This recognition is, I believe, what makes for good mothering, for the instinctive mutual dance between mother and child.  It cannot be imported or imposed from without.  I'm not talking about love.  I love my adopted son, in some ways in a similar manner to the way I love my husband, but neither will ever be instinctively comprehensible to me; whereas, with my biological children, no matter what they do or feel, I can always empathize with them.

Today we need a corrective to the adoption mythology promulgated by the adoption industry and even by well-intentioned adoptive parents with what appear to be successful families.  There should never be the assumption that adoption is an easy option or a human right or merely an alternative way to have a family.  Adoption is never easy.  Sometimes it works, and sometimes it is the best option for a child, but the circumstances leading to it are always tragic.  It is impossible for me to convey the enormity of the loss my son and I experienced, but I know that I am not alone.  I am far from the only woman who amputated part of her soul in order to do what she thought was best for her child.  And mothers today, in the era of "open" adoption, who willingly, even eagerly, relinquish their babies are in a denial so deep it will drown them once they wake up to what they've done.  So what can we do now?  Now that we know what separation does and how adoption affects adoptees?  One of the first steps should be the opening of all adoption records and the restoration of original birth certificates to adult adoptees and their mothers or other family members.  The knowledge of one's own biological identity is fundamental to one's sense of self, and it is a crime to deny it.  We also need greater acceptance of and support for women with crisis pregnancies.  No mother should lose her child because of youth, poverty, or lack of education, temporary conditions that can be ameliorated with adequate family and/or social support.  This will require an enormous shift in attitude, but we have seen such shifts in the recent past when it comes to civil rights, equal opportunity, and marriage equality.  The days of the paternalistic imposition of anonymity on mothers and babies must end, and our assumption that adoption is "beautiful" must be replaced by a more realistic understanding of what it really means. 

I will not be celebrating or honoring November as Adoption Month.  We've seen how Columbus Day has become problematic, because we now acknowledge the reality of what the "discovery" of America meant to indigenous peoples.  How in good conscience can a country celebrate the importation of smallpox, the removal of whole peoples from their own land, and the subjugation of populations for the benefit of invaders?  How in good conscience can we celebrate the severing of the maternal/infant bond so that someone else's desires can be fulfilled?  We memorialize the Holocaust with sorrow.  We sanctify the battlefields of the Civil War, not because we are happy about what happened there.  To celebrate adoption as pure joy is a moral abomination.

Religion as Explanation? Or Excuse?

I keep running into comments from some adoptees who say that God put them in their adoptive families because it was part of a divine plan.  The idea of predestination has been around for a very long time, its very persistence a sign of how deeply human beings want their lives and experiences to have meaning--special, God-given meaning, meaning that transcends the apparent chaos and randomness of the lives we actually live.  I don't want a theological debate, but I must say, if I were in fact religious, that I would find it very hard to believe in a God that would allow a baby to grow inside one woman for the purpose of giving it to another. 

One of the most pernicious lies prospective adoptive parents (PAPs) tell themselves is that God wants them to have someone else's baby.  Taking another woman's baby "wet from the womb" is such a heinous act that the best way to make it palatable, perhaps, is to get permission from God himself to allow you to do it. 



I do not believe that God makes "adoption plans," and I argue that those who claim he does are indulging in a comfortable (for them) delusion.  There is absolutely no sense to the notion that God has a plan for you to adopt this or that baby.

Personally, I can't promote abortion, except in some unfortunate cases that should remain the purview of the pregnant woman and her doctor.  So far as I'm concerned, a healthy woman who becomes pregnant has become a mother, whatever her marital, financial, or educational status.  I have friends who have had abortions because they "weren't ready."  I would never condemn anyone for making the decision to terminate a pregnancy, but I don't see how it can be viewed as anything other than ending a human life.  Liberals, like me, may find the right-wing, anti-abortion lobby ridiculous and/or intrusive, but they are right about one thing: terminating a pregnancy is ending a human life.

That said, I believe there are other choices that can be even more problematic.  An early termination presumably leaves only the mother to feel the weight of what has happened.  I would like to think an embryonic fetus doesn't suffer during an abortion, but surely a fetus is as sentient as an amoeba or a beetle.  Poke an amoeba, and it recoils.  Threaten a beetle, and it tries to run away.  If those creatures felt nothing, sensed nothing, why the reaction?  A fetus is not dead matter waiting for the flame of life to be lit; it is a creature, still unformed but definitely alive.  If you choose to kill it, you should have a damn good reason--something more than embarrassment, youth, or your desire to do something other than be a parent to your own child.

Adoption is offered as the solution to the problem of abortion, and many Christians and others urge a pregnant girl
 or woman with an unexpected pregnancy to "choose life" and give her child to a couple just waiting to give that baby a picture-perfect life, a life that she might not be able to provide for many years to come, if ever.  The implicit argument is that this stable, financially secure couple would be better for a child than his own mother, as if material comforts were the measure by which we judge families.

The desire to have a child can be very strong.  For many humans it can feel like a basic need, like food, sleep, or love.  We will go to almost any lengths to meet these needs, sometimes even committing crimes or telling lies to get what we so desperately want.  Potential adoptive parents (PAPs) tell themselves lies when something in nature denies them what they want: a child.  And they buy into the lies told by adoption agencies and other adoption professionals (doctors, lawyers, politicians) who depict adoption as a "beautiful way to build a family" or simply as one alternative among several.  The desire for a child can even be couched as a whim, as when a mother of boys decides to adopt a girl so she can have a daughter.  A designer child, if you will.   When the element of choice is brought into the picture, what is to stop PAPs from ordering up exactly what they want?  Age, sex, race--they all become options.  There is something inherently dehumanizing and debased about this way of thinking.

My real objection is to infant adoption, where a newborn is taken from his mother and given to another woman to raise "as if" he were her own.  It is this kind of adoption that has become a booming business, because so many PAPs want a baby and are willing to pay to get one of the relatively few who are available.  The shortage of domestic adoptable infants has led to an increase in foreign adoption, which has in turn led to widespread corruption and exploitation.  Kathryn Joyce explains how evangelicals and international adoption have become mutually reinforcing in her book The Child Catchers.

Is there not something ghoulish about a couple (or anyone, gay or straight) procuring a child, waiting anxiously for a woman to go through the pain and anguish of her thwarted motherhood so they can be assured of a child's arms round their necks and an identity as "Mommy" and "Daddy."  It's like the parents of a sick child, hoping for an accident that will take the life of another child so they can have one of its life-saving organs, only instead of taking a liver or a kidney, they take the whole child.  A dead child who can save another is one thing, a baby denied his mother is quite another.  In both situations, the parents might be happy, but they must realize the tragedy their joy is rooted in.

Thankfully, the stigmas of unwed motherhood and homosexuality have greatly lessened in recent years, and we have grown to accept that human beings can live joyful, purposeful lives under circumstances that fifty years ago would have been untenable.  We are, in fact, more free.  But with that personal freedom there has come a retrenchment on the part of those who see life differently.  As more and more single women decide to parent their babies, fewer are available for adoption.  The strategy, ingenious when you think about it, is to get God on board.  After all, if adoption is a divine plan, how can there be anything wrong with it?  It is only a "divine plan" because certain groups of people have decided it is, and if that isn't a perversion of faith for self-interest I don't know what is.

Adoption should always be about doing what is best for a child, not what adults who want to be parents feel entitled to.  No one has a right to be a parent.  Parenthood is a gift--from nature or from God, depending on your point of view--it is a privilege, not an entitlement.  I imagine people with disabilities often wonder at the unfairness of life, just as unhappily childless people bemoan the unfairness of being denied something they want so desperately.  Those of us with sound bodies and minds are fortunate and should be grateful, even as we recognize that nothing can be done to make a blind man see.  We should no more pluck an infant out of his mother's arms than pluck the eyes out of a sighted man. 

Can Complex Adoption Issues Be Made Simple?

The older I get, the more I feel like Socrates: the only thing I know is that I don't know anything.  Having lived adoption for 46 years, as a mother of loss to adoption and an adoptive mother myself, I thought I knew just about everything there was to know.  For most of those years I was a strong advocate of placing children in need in families that wanted and could care for them.  Sounds simple, doesn't it?  What I have learned is that it is far from simple, and what I didn't know proved to be the source of much suffering--for my lost son, for me, for my adopted son, and for my other two children who grew up in the fallout.

I was told by people I trusted that relinquishing my son would be for his benefit, that, even though I was an adult with a good education, I was not fit to be a mother simply because I was unmarried.  To protect my family and provide for my son, I should do the "right thing" and give him to strangers to raise.  So far as my family, the adoption agency, and the adoptive parents were concerned, a problem was solved.  I'm sure they all felt certain that I'd "get over it" and proceed with the rest of my life untroubled and unencumbered.  That didn't happen.

I believed that love was all you needed to raise a healthy child.  I loved my first raised son and knew I could be a loving mother to a child in need.  I didn't feel capable of dealing with a disabled child, but I could easily love a child of a different race.  I would promote racial equality and rescue a baby from desperate circumstances by adopting a Black/Vietnamese child at a time when U.S. troops were scrambling to get out of Vietnam, leaving thousands of mixed-race children behind.  More problems solved.

Today I am in reunion with my first son and have discovered that there is nothing simple about forging a relationship with a stranger who just happens to be your own flesh and blood and who looks just like you.  There is nothing simple about the mother-child bond that persisted through 44 years of separation or the flood of grief that reunion unleashed.  There is nothing simple about my son's psychological and emotional difficulties or my adopted son's turbulent life.  There is nothing simple about my raised children's growing up with a single mother and no money because my first marriage broke apart, in large measure because of the role adoption played in it.

During the past three years I have had a crash course in adoption--its history, effects, and policies.  The more I learn, the more I realize the terrible complexities that arise when good people follow good intentions into thickets of unforeseen difficulty.  On one side (though, in truth, there are many sides), you have the pro-adoption advocates: infertile couples hoping to build a family, gay couples hoping for the same, altruists who want to make a real difference, and evangelicals who see adoption as a divine mission.  On the other you have the adoption-reform activists working toward legislation that would grant adult adoptees the right to their original birth certificates, mothers of adoptees who want to find their children, adoptees who want to find their mothers,  those hoping to curtail the rampant corruption in foreign adoption, and those who want to see an end to adoption altogether, at least as we have come to know it since the era of closed adoptions began in the 1940s.  There are many sub-groups, but these are the major categories of those pro- and con-adoption.

It's only human to stake out an opinion about a vexing issue, then marshall all your resources to defending your position.  Often this involves demonizing your opposition.  Despairing mothers-of-loss (MOLs) accuse their children's "adopters" or "adopteraptors" of greed and selfishness, and potential adoptive parents (PAPs) see themselves as heroes in a fight to save children from drug-addicted, juvenile, or rejecting mothers.  I follow several blogs and read many others, and I am amazed by the vitriol expressed on both sides.  MOLs feel their babies were stolen from them, and adoptive parents tend not to think much at all about the women who gave birth to their children.  Many contemporary PAPs assuage their consciences by opting for "open adoption," whereby they keep the mother informed about her child's progress and perhaps even permit some visits. 

Tolstoy famously said that all happy families are alike, and for decades adoptive families have presented a facade of typical domestic happiness.  Adoptive families were held to a higher standard, what with all the home studies and intrusions by social workers to determine their fitness, so the stories that got told were filled with sweetness and light.  What adoptive parent was going to admit there were difficulties?  Adoption was beautiful, even noble, and adoptive parents were special people.  Adoption was a story with a happy ending--every time.  That's what most people believed, and that's what most people wanted to believe.  But we live in more transparent times now, and adoptees who were helpless infants when they were placed are now able to speak for themselves, and not all their stories have happy endings. 

It turns out that adoption is more complicated than anyone knew.  Mothers who lost their babies suffered grievous, life-long consequences, and many adoptees, even "happy" ones, were left to wonder who they were and how they came to be with people they weren't biologically connected to.  Knowledge that most people take for granted was denied to those most intensely involved, and this abyss of unknowing and alienation was papered over with pretty pictures and sappy commercials that portrayed adoption as so beautiful it would bring tears to your eyes.

What I find regrettable these days is the inability of the various factions in adoptionland to understand each other and find common ground.  In my enthusiasm I became completely anti-adoption.  I still cringe when I hear the word, but I realize my reaction is personal and emotional.  I know that not all adoptive parents are selfish, and I know that there are children born into circumstances that require an alternative.  Perhaps adoption is a Gordian knot that cannot be untangled.  If it must be simplified, then let's determine the few things both sides can agree upon and proceed from there.

There are three things I believe all parties of good will should be able to agree to: 1. equal rights for adoptees, ie., easy access to OBCs, 2. an emphasis on family preservation and the end of adoption for profit, 3. the elimination of corruption in international adoption.  The first is easy and could be accomplished tomorrow with a Presidential order.  Failing that, we should work state by state to overturn antiquated adoption laws that discriminate against adoptees and their mothers.  Ending adoption for profit will be more difficult, because many agencies and lawyers have a vested interest in the status quo.  There is big money in adoption, and there is big money promoting it.  It is a David and Goliath contest, and Goliath has all the stones.  The corruption in international adoption is the most problematic for obvious reasons, but the United Nations, UNICEF, and the Hague Convention are all making efforts to ameliorate the desperate plight of too many children around the globe.  Much more needs to be done.

It's easy for me to feel overwhelmed by the enormity of the adoption problem (for lack of a better term).  For things to change, I believe society itself will have to change.  The Left will have to give up its conviction that everyone has a right to be a parent, and the Right will have to concede that God does not make adoption plans in a game of cosmic bait-and-switch.  Mothers who relinquished babies in the BSE (Baby Scoop Era) will have to come to terms with the fact that they were never promised anonymity, and if that was their understanding at the time, well, times have changed.  Adoptees must own their own stories and not be afraid to tell them, and no one should assume that because Aunt Sally or the neighbor next door had a successful adoption there can be no other kind.  Those who abhor adoption, as I admit I do, must understand that for some children it is far and away the best option, but no one should be able to maintain the delusion that adoption is anything other than a tragedy for the child and, yes, for his mother.  Happy adopted children grow up to be adults with gnawing questions about identity, and relieved mothers who leave their babies behind may well wake up decades later, finally fully aware of all that they have lost.  We must create a space where everyone can feel free to tell the truth and free to determine the course of her own life, without the interference of "professionals" who profess to know better.  Shifting social attitudes is never simple or easy, but it can and does happen when enough people see the right thing and do it.  Slavery, racism, gender inequality, discrimination, adoption.  One down, at least four to go.