The Politics of Herding Cats

My own reunion journey has had many stages: anxiety mingled with anticipation, the euphoria of discovery, a bottoming-out in long-delayed grief, inchoate anger.  There is no way I could have circumvented or shortened any of these stages, nor in retrospect would I want to.  Each has taught me valuable lessons, and I am still learning.  Today I'm more committed than ever to unsealing all adoption records and giving adoptees access to their original birth certificates, as 14 (I believe that's the correct number) of states have already done.  Anyone familiar with adoptionland is aware of the arguments (overwhelming) in favor of complete access and the resistance of a relative handful of legislators, adoption "professionals," and adoptive parents who want these records kept locked away permanently.  My intention here is not to rehash those arguments but to consider how we can best proceed with what is ultimately a political issue.

Social change is often glacial: slow but inexorable.  It is not inevitable and requires vigilance and commitment to change that may take generations to reach fulfillment.  What I see now is not yet a movement, though I hope and expect it will soon become one, just as Occupy and Black Lives Matter have.  We begin with raised awareness, then lean our collective shoulders against the closed doors of the past.  There is never unanimity among political groups, but such entities that are well-organized around a few easily articulated goals have the best chance of succeeding. 

I'm not an activist.  I've supported various causes over the course of my life--opposition to the Vietnam War, support for civil rights, natural childbirth, adoption, and now adoption reform--but I've never marched in the streets or held a candle in a nighttime vigil.  In any drama the protagonists take center stage, but, as in Greek tragedy, the chorus plays an important role as well.  I consider myself part of the chorus, and I believe that if enough of us shout loudly enough we will be able to push the central actors (legislators, lawyers, adoption agencies) to do the right thing.

Today people who are essentially on the same side, who want access to OBCs, family preservation rather than separation of mother and baby, the removal of the financial incentive in adoption, and total transparency, sometimes quarrel about whether it's better to work within the system or attempt to kick it down.  I'm of two minds about this myself.  In the 'sixties I often heard the arguments, "It's too soon; the nation isn't ready for full equality."  Or "You can't legislate morality."  I also heard, "If not now, when?"  And "Justice delayed is justice denied."  I've often wondered how we can accept an evil today that we know will be anathema tomorrow, but we do it all the time.  St. Augustine understood this: "Lord, make me chaste.  But not yet."  Is it better to compromise in order to get something or to stand on principle and risk gaining everything or losing it all?  This is the very conflict we're witnessing now in our politics with the Iran deal and climate change.  When I look at the problems facing our nation and our world, I favor compromise, anything that will move us toward our goal rather than keep us stuck in an untenable present.  I must conclude, then, that in adoption reform compromise must be accepted.

(I wish there were another phrase than "adoption reform."  I want reform, yes, but what I really want is an end to adoption as we know it.  That's why "family preservation" seems more appropriate.)

Everyday I read posts where people call each other out for not toeing some line or other.  Some cheered when Gov. Christie signed a bill granting limited access to OBCs in New Jersey; others railed against the bill for not going far enough.  Of course, it makes no sense that what is legal in one state should be illegal in another, but that is an inconsistency that has plagued our nation from the beginning.  I don't see Christie as any kind of hero.  He's obstructed adoption reformists at every turn and only gave in when he was forced to.  But he did sign the bill, and that's something.  Many people worked long and hard to get that much.  I don't believe they deserved to be called "sell outs."

It is naive to think change can come without compromise.  Principled intransigence may be emotionally satisfying and morally gratifying, and in extreme circumstances (in Nazi Germany, the struggle for voting rights or gender equality) intransigence may be an effective or necessary strategy, but in the complex world of adoption, with all its exceptions and ambiguities, a monolithic stance is more likely to be an impediment to change than a conduit.  We need to stop squabbling among ourselves, stop seeing our own personal experience as exemplary.  One swallow does not make a summer, and one successful adoption is not an argument for adoption in general.  Whatever the circumstances, it all boils down to civil rights and human dignity, what our country was (supposedly) founded upon.  All citizens have the right to full information about their family of origin.  Adoption (I prefer legal guardianship) should always be the last resort in extraordinary circumstances, and there should be no money exchanged for a child.  Now, what do we need to do to achieve these goals? 

Why I Once Worked for an Adoption Agency

If you've visited my blog before, you know that in 1968 I relinquished my firstborn son to adoption and in 1974 I (along with my then-husband) adopted a baby boy from Vietnam.  I also have two more children born to me, a son and a daughter.  This blog is my attempt to explain my own actions in relation to adoption in hopes of better understanding myself and the adoption industry.

When my first raised son was about two years old, his father and I became friends with a couple who had adopted a baby from Korea through Holt International.  When we first went to their house for dinner, we entered a huge, turn-of-the-century stone house with turrets and a giant verandah.  Downstairs was the art gallery K. owned and where she planned to give my artist-husband a one-man show.  The family, that included a little girl about my son's age and the baby, lived upstairs. After looking around the gallery, we followed our hosts upstairs, where the children were waiting. There are moments that remain crystalized in the memory, and my first glimpse of little P.L., their eight-month-old Korean child, stays with me.  That was when I knew what I needed to do: adopt a child myself.  

I realize now that I was motivated by my own deep grief and sense of loss, that I wanted to fill the hole in my heart left by my firstborn and restore balance to my life, but at the time those motivations remained opaque.  It wasn't that I didn't make the connection between my first baby and my desire to adopt.  I did, but I failed to see it for what it truly was: an effort at redemption or atonement, a desire to mother a baby in expiation for my failure to mother my own.  It would be interesting to know what motivated my husband to go along with me.  He had made it very clear that he didn't want to raise my first son and in fact felt betrayed by the fact that I'd been with someone before meeting him.  We never talked about my lost baby, and this untouchable topic eventually destroyed our marriage.  Our financial situation was precarious.  I was teaching high school English while B. sold a painting every now and then, just enough to encourage him to keep trying to make it as an artist.  Our friends with the art gallery were his most generous patrons, so it wasn't as if we had a surplus of wealth to find a purpose for.  B. hadn't wanted my baby, but now, barely three years later, he was eager to adopt one.  We decided to adopt a black or mixed-race infant, in part because we figured white babies had plenty of families that would want them, in part because we wanted to break down racial barriers.  I was aware that some black social workers disapproved of placing black children with white families, but I thought they were just demonstrating reverse prejudice.  Eventually we adopted a baby through Holt, the agency our friends had used.  When asked what kind of child we'd like--rather like placing an order in a restaurant I now think--we specified an infant under a year old, a boy (we knew they were harder to place), and part black (also harder to place).  B. sold a painting just in time for us to pay the $10,000 fee, and our son came to us when he was nine months old.  I was as passionate about adopting this baby as I'd been when expecting our older child.  He was adorable, and as a young mother I had no idea the of depth of trauma he'd suffered in his brief life or how profoundly affected by it he would be.  Surely love would be enough, and we would be an example to the world of what a loving family looks like.  In short, I believed in adoption and saw myself as one of its most enthusiastic proponents.

 What made me change my mind?  

I taught at a state university for nearly thirty years, always part-time or as an adjunct, never with the security of tenure.  During one period of budget cuts by the state legislature, I was one of the lecturers let go to save money.  My life was teaching, and I was devastated.  I believed the career I'd worked so hard to achieve, precarious though it was, was now closed to me.  I was only in my forties, nowhere near retirement, and I had to find a way to make some money.  But more than that, I needed to find another career that would be as fulfilling as teaching had been.  My new husband was retired and, though I didn't know it at the time, deeply in debt.  I had to find a job.  I considered getting a degree in social work; I knew I wanted to help people.  Returning to the editorial work I'd done when first out of college wasn't an option; I'd hated what seemed like drudgery to me.  I wanted human interaction, not a desk beneath flourescent lights.  What do I believe in? I asked myself.  Adoption.  That was something I could embrace and for which I felt eminently qualified.  After all, I'd had lots of real-world experience, so I called around to various agencies that I found in the phone book.  I was willing to start at the bottom, stuffing envelopes if necessary.  A small, independent international adoption agency, which consisted of the director and one part-time social worker to do home studies, hired me to be a secretary/receptionist.  I would not be involved in the actual adoption process, but I would be able to interact with prospective parents, share my story, and offer advice if asked. 

At first I was grateful to the director for hiring me.  I was a lousy secretary, but apparently I had a good telephone voice, and I made people feel comfortable, but it didn't take long for things to begin falling apart, quite literally.  The first week I pulled too hard on a desk drawer and damaged it so much it wouldn't close.  It soon became clear to me that for the director the agency was a business, not a service.  She had plans for me to eventually travel to Guatemala, where many of the orphans she placed originated from.  She had contacts with orphanages and lawyers there, and part of my job was faxing information to them.  I read the guidelines for adoptive parents traveling to Guatemala to pick up their children and was not encouraged.  Leave all your he jewelry at home.  Don't go out at night.  Don't travel alone.  Be prepared for the unexpected.  It was I who typed up the home studies and kept all the files in order, so I became familiar with the adoption process from beginning to end, including the tens of thousands of dollars it cost.  The office was filled with brochures and albums, chock-a-block with photos and bios of available children.  So many beautiful children, and because of us some would have a chance at a "better" life in America.  That was what I thought.  The rampant corruption in the Guatemalan adoption business had not yet risen to crisis level, leading to the complete shutdown of adoption there.  I've often wondered whether the agency I worked for  contributed to the abuses, the kidnappings, the outright buying of babies from desperate mothers. 

Most of the prospective parents seemed like genuinely good people.  Their desire for a child was painful to see, and I could tell that some were terrified they'd be turned down, something that almost never happened.  Because I was privy to all the financial statements, I knew that no one even started the process who didn't have the money to afford it.  I remember one family in particular.  It was the husband's second marriage, and he had a twenty-year old son who was schizophrenic.  The father was a tobacco company executive, and the son lived in his own house next door to his parents'.  The wife wanted a baby, so they were planning to adopt from Latin America, Paraguay, I believe it was.  I never met these people in person, but I heard from the social worker what their home was like.  Everything in their enormous house was white, including the wife's pet poodle.  The dog wore a faux-diamond collar (I assume it was faux) and was obviously the center of attention.  I tried to picture a young child in that environment and couldn't do it.  A schizophrenic older brother, a spoiled mother, a frequently absent father, and a world of white to not despoil.  How would a little child from an impoverished orphanage cope with all that? And how much more could have been done to support the orphanage with what the adoption cost?

I worked at the agency for about eight months, and when the fall semester rolled around, I was rehired at my old university as an Assistant Director of the Honors Program.  I had my old life back, and it was even better than before.  By then I'd grown very uncomfortable with my job and was relieved when I was able to give my notice.  I settled back into academia and as time went by I had time to reflect on my experience.  I was glad to have had the opportunity to see the inside of an adoption operation, but I became increasingly uneasy about it.  My own adopted son had not had an easy time of it, and I was aware of other adoptees who had struggled.  It was one thing when my son was very young and we socialized with other families with internationally adopted children.  Babies, toddlers, and young children are like kittens; it's hard to see anything wrong with them.  But as my son approached adolescence, life was not so candy-colored.  My husband and I divorced when my children were fourteen, ten, and eight.  Let's just say that the next ten years were the most difficult of my life, which means, of course, that they were difficult for my children too, my adopted son especially.  What I had once believed was a near-perfect family had become something very imperfect indeed, and I began to realize that the source of much, if not all, of the difficulty was adoption, beginning with the relinquishment of my first son.  At the time I tended to blame my adopted son for the disruption in our household.  He had difficulties at school, and I was called in for teacher conferences many, many times.  Eventually he got in trouble with the law and thus began years of repeated arrests and incarcerations. 

Through all this chaos, I believed there was something wrong with him.  His first months with us were a nightmare of screaming, clinging, and constant diarrhea.  No one had told me that many Asian children are lactose intolerant, and I poured milk into that child like there was no tomorrow.  He couldn't be alone in a room and was easily frustrated, which frustrated me.  Until he was four, he suffered from night terrors that woke the entire family.  Thinking he would outgrow these behaviors, we remained hopeful.  Seeking help would have seemed like an admission of failure, and there was no one to consult anyway.  I was a good parent to our older son, but the parenting techniques that worked with him were no good at all with our adopted son, and I was too uninformed about adoption to know what was really going on.  Now that he's grown up and there's nothing I can do about his childhood, I realize that his behavior was exactly what one might expect from a black child adopted into a white family.  Not all transracial adoptees end up in juvenile court, of course, but one of my son's counselors told me that most of the kids he dealt with were adopted.  I found that astonishing then. I don't now. 

It's very hard to let go of a belief you've cherished for decades.  It's incredibly difficult to admit that sometimes love is not enough, that patience has limits, and depression is not something you can switch off like a light.  My depression probably began while I was in college, but when I lost my son to adoption it became a constant companion.  Anyone who's suffered from depression knows how hard it is to carry on, but it wasn't until the end of my second marriage that I sought professional help.  My children were raised by a depressed mother, my career was impacted by my illness, and my judgment was in many ways compromised by desperate emotional need.  Now that I'm nearing 70 and am in a third, happy marriage, I can look back at those bleak years and wonder how I managed to get us all through them.  The one consistent element for the past 47 years has been adoption.  It would be impossible to understand anything about me or my family without taking that into account.

Plenty has been written about the corruption in international adoption.  See especially The Child Catchers by Kathryn Joyce.  Books and articles like hers are important to raising awareness, and they need to be supported and augmented by the individual stories of those who have lived adoption.  Fortunately more adoptees are coming forward, writing blogs and books, and exposing the truth that has been kept hidden and that the adoption industry is still trying to suppress.  The adoption industry and adoptive parents have controlled the narrative for so long most people don't even realize there's another side to it.  Martin Luther King, Jr., said that the arc of history bends toward justice.  I'd like to say that the arc of adoption bends toward truth, but it can't so long as adoptees are denied their birthright and their identity and women with a "crisis" pregnancy are fed the adoption Kool Aid.  I drank the Kool Aid, and I drank deeply; I nearly drowned in it.  But old beliefs can be shed and a more honest life is possible.  If only I'd known then what I know now.  How many times have I told myself that? 

What do I know now?

I know that every mother deserves to raise her own child, and every baby deserves to stay with his own mother.  Shame, poverty, youth, even drug addiction, are all temporary and subject to amelioration.  Adoptive parents aren't better; they're just different, as prone to dysfunction as any other family. 

I know that culture matters, and plucking a child out of his original familial and cultural environment is an insult to his identity and abrogates his autonomy.

I know that natural mothers never forget their children, and most adopted children suffer a loss they often cannot identify, understand, or get over.

I know that some people have children who don't deserve to be parents, and some wonderful people who would make great parents won't have children.  Life can be unfair in that regard, but taking babies from their own families is a cruel remedy.  I feel sorry for anyone who longs for something her very soul seems to need, but I now know that babies are not transferable. 

I know from my own sons how adoption affects adoptees, and there is nothing I can do now to alter their experience or completely alleviate their resulting pain.

I won't try to tell my sons' stories.  Each of my children undoubtedly has a different story to tell, and it would be presumptuous of me to try to speak for them.  I don't pretend to speak for all mothers-of-loss, but I'd feel remiss if I didn't share what it's taken me nearly 50 years to learn.  I fell off the track of my life when I was barely 22, and I never fully regained my footing.  Like anyone with a secret tragedy, I learned to manage, to go on and make the best of things, but rather than being fully present in my own life, whether it was parenting my children or building a career, I was like a marathon runner with one leg or a swimmer with one lung.  Adoptees, I am told and have read, learn to fit into an alien family, to be a human chameleon.  A mother-of-loss learns to imitate wholeness.  Historically, various marginalized groups have struggled to remain invisible: the disabled, minorities, and those impacted by adoption.  It isn't so long ago that a child with Down syndrome was immediately shuffled off to an institution, African-Americans were refused service in restaurants, adopted children were not told they were adopted, and their mothers were told to forget and never speak of their past.  We have made lots of progress in this country when it comes to social justice, but we still have a long way to go to protect adoptee rights and offer adequate support to all mothers.

Part of me is ashamed that I ever thought working for an adoption agency was a good idea.  It strikes me now as rather like working for a tobacco company.  Just because something is legal and common doesn't make it right, and I feel as if I should have known better.  But if I were ashamed of working there, I would have to be just as ashamed of relinquishing one son and adopting another.  The thought of anything shameful being associated with any of my children is extremely painful to me.  I feel guilt for not knowing enough or being strong enough at critical junctures in my life, but I did what seemed best in the moment.  The hardest thing is trying to forgive myself.  When I hear other mothers' stories, I never condemn them because I know what decisions made in desperation can lead to.  Maybe forgiveness isn't ultimately the issue.  I remember a scene from the TV mini-series "Lonesome Dove."  A young prostitute has been captured by Indians and repeatedly raped (if memory serves).  She is rescued by the Robert Duvall character, and they sit together around a campfire in the dark.  "They shouldn't have done that," the young woman says.  "No," says Duvall in his laconic way.  "They shouldn't have done that.  But they did."  For some things there can be no redress, but it's important for there to be acknowledgement.

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.