Both of my parents were adoptees, so it is no wonder really that the pattern of giving up children to adoption continued in the lives of my sisters and I. Both sisters gave up children to adoption. While I did not and while one of my sisters experienced a horrific outcome through the courts that I will always believe was biased, two more children were not raised by us because of circumstances, including financial hardship, beyond our control. I even understand now that it was a minor miracle that I wasn’t given up for adoption when my teenage mother conceived me out of wedlock.
Happily, I have optimism that our children, who are raising their own children successfully, are breaking the cycle that has fragmented my childhood family both on the parental side and through our own children.
I believe that the general perspective is shifting now, though not yet entirely ending mothers losing their children to adoption, to encourage more mothers not to chose that deeply painful loss that too many mothers have suffered and too many children have been damaged by.
There will always be some need for surrogate parenting but it may be time to allow adoptees not to become a false identity but to be supported in order to grow up as whole and integrated selves with their original identities and family trees known and intact.
Missing Mom 