I Am Now My Own Parent

I’ve told some version of this story before and can’t promise I won’t again, though with evolving perspectives, these likely do change over time. My dad died only 4 months after my mom. She died first in September 2015 and he followed in February 2016. It was a profound event in my own life as I am certain it is in many lives. After my dad died, my youngest sister said, “We are now orphans.” I remain estranged from her. The cruelty she expresses towards me when we are in contact with one another causes me not to want to be involved with her. Not long ago, the state of Missouri informed me that they held some abandoned asset of my mom’s and I jumped through hoops and ended up with a whopping check for $20. Because I needed to provide my sisters names and addresses, so they could receive their own shares, I contacted my youngest sister’s conservator, who had been appointed to manage her funds. Turns out, he has been free of her for 2-1/2 years and no longer has that responsibility. The judge turned him loose and I understand. My sister is difficult and uncooperative and so, she is on her own now. So be it. I never wanted to take her freedom away from her. It was her own lawyers and the need for a family member to ask the court to look at her circumstances that forced my own involvement.

The topic today was inspired by a Daily Guide for Sunday, July 10 2022 in the Science of Mind magazine written by Rev Dr Jim Lockard. That phrase that is my title today comes from an affirmation he put at the end of his essay. He mentions that some people have never known their family of origin. That was certainly true for BOTH of my parents – as each of them was adopted and they died knowing next to nothing about their origins. I was conceived out of wedlock by a teenage mom. I could have so easily been given up for adoption but thankfully, I was not. It seems that one of my purposes in this life was to reconnect the threads of my parents own origins and I have now made it as far as is necessary for my own peace of mind. I know who all 4 genetic grandparents were, something of their stories and am aware of quite a few living, genetic relatives now that I am in contact with.

After my mom died, I came into contact again with an aunt. She is the widowed wife of my dad’s brother (my uncle was also adopted). A profound experience for me in high school was witnessing my uncle’s slow decline from Lou Gehrig’s disease. She is a nurse who met him when he was a Marine and hospitalized due to an auto accident. I had been thinking about this aunt for several days. It seems we do have a “spiritual heart connection” and so, she had been thinking about me and called me recently. It has been true since my mom died that she still calls me to check in from time to time – mostly to hear the latest for me and adds a few insights into her own life. Mostly, she just listens. I find her easy to talk to, honestly, though she is much more conventionally religious than I am. She usually asks about my sisters and how are they doing. She used to tell me she was praying for my estranged sister and I but she no longer tries to reach me that way. She had only one child with my uncle and he died a few years ago, too young and somewhat unexpectedly. She lives with an elderly sibling and that sibling’s spouse. My aunt is now 90 years old and I never know how much longer she will be in my life but she is totally lucid and I am always happy to hear from her.

Mine is a strange reality to live. Learning who my genetic relatives were and are, has to some extent, distanced me from the ones I grew up with. Even so, I remain fond of the adoptive grandparents I grew up with (now deceased) and with the aunt just mentioned and one other (my dad’s step-sister, who he acquired when his adoptive mother remarried after a divorce). My mom also had a brother who was adopted through the Tennessee Children’s Home before her. I am not all that close to him but did see him at my mom’s memorial service. It was his daughter’s receipt of his adoption file that had her call to tell me – I could get my mom’s. That opened the door for me to become genetically whole again and fulfill an intended life purpose.

Abandoned Babies

Will there be more with Roe v Wade being overturned ?

A story making national news recently is about a baby found, wrapped in a towel in a stroller outside of an apartment complex, by a Coeur d’Alene Idaho resident when they left for work around 6 am.

A woman, identified as an adoptee named Webster, in this youtube news story, is quoted saying “We are living in a time where people feel like they are alone and they don’t have a support system or a net under them.”

If you are considering abandoning your baby, you likely are experiencing many different thoughts and emotions as well as being faced with one of the toughest decisions of your life. You might have one or more of these factors occurring in your life –

Have a history of substance use and are afraid to share that information
Not have proper documentation to live in the United States and fear being deported
Be living with a mental illness or facing postpartum depression
Be afraid of the baby’s father or worried about what your loved ones might say

If you are desperate for help, you may see no other option but to abandon your baby. Perhaps, you even wonder what happens to abandoned babies after they’re found?

There are really only three ways a woman can abandon her baby:

A prospective birth mother can work with an adoption agency to make an adoption plan for her baby. This is one legal way a woman can release her baby from her responsibility to care for it.
With Safe Haven laws, women have the option to safely, legally, and anonymously leave their baby, unharmed, at a safe haven location — like a hospital, fire station, or a church.
Even so, some women, feeling completely overwhelmed and unaware of the first two options, will take drastic measures, such as the case with this abandoned baby, leaving them in an unsafe condition.

The way a baby is surrendered will affect what happens to the infant afterwards. Babies who are abandoned in an unsafe location often have tragic outcomes because help comes too late. Babies that are found safely, after they’ve been abandoned or surrendered to a safe haven location, become a ward of the state.

Safe Haven babies are typically checked out by a doctor and, if necessary, given medical care. Afterward, the state’s social services department is contacted. Once that happens, the baby will be placed into foster care and become a ward of the state. In some situations, a private adoption agency might be contacted.

When a woman does not contact an adoption agency for assistance or use the Safe Haven law locations, if she can be located and identified, criminal charges will be filed against her. That is why the police in Coeur d’Alene Idaho are actively seeking information about who the woman may have been.

Guilt

Today, I’ll let the feelings and thoughts speak for themselves. (Not my own personal experience.) From blogger – At The Willow Tree.

Today marks one week since I had to give him away.

You’ve probably heard that being a foster parent is rewarding. You’ve probably heard that it is challenging. You’ve probably heard that there is grief in saying goodbye. You’ve probably heard that there is joy in knowing we were there when it counted.

But have you heard of “foster parent” guilt?

I hadn’t. In fact, since I’ve been fostering, I still haven’t heard anyone mention it. This is the first I’ve spoken of it.

You see I had this sweet little love until Thursday of last week.

He came to us at three weeks old. He had to have an extended stay in the hospital to help his little body detox, followed by two failed placement attempts with relatives… they gave him back to CPS, TWICE.

I remember his perfect little face, fingers and toes on the day he came HOME. Now he’s almost six months old. He’s finally sleeping through the night, two weeks ago he rolled over for the first time and he’s almost sitting up on his own! He’s devouring any solid food he can get his cute, chubby little hands on. He is a real smiler, it literally goes from ear to ear. He can’t help it. He is my happy boy. He looks to me for comfort and security. You see, I was his constant. I was his safe place. I was his everything, until last Thursday.

My home was the only one he’s ever known. My arms were the ones that he’s happiest in. My voice is the one that calmed him. My family was his family. He trusted me totally, completely, utterly, unquestionably.

And what shatters my heart is that I had to betray his trust. He wasn’t mine to keep. I know that – BUT HE DIDN’T.

This last week has been a blur. The long awaited court hearing has come and gone. I found out that the home approval had last minute been approved for another relative. The judge approved moving my boy again to yet more relatives. I had two hours after the court hearing to pack what I could, say goodbye and drop my baby off in an unfamiliar town, in a strange parking lot with more caseworkers. I watched as they drove away with him searching for ME! The guilt is crushing.

I had to give him away.

And as much as that hurt me, the thing that I can’t bear is how it has hurt him. How his little innocent heart, which believed I would protect him from everything, is now so deeply and irreparably hurt by me.

Please don’t be quick to jump and tell me not to feel guilty. Don’t say it’s not my fault. Don’t remind me of the good I’ve done and how that will set him up so well. Because in my head I know these things. I know them. But however true they are, they can’t change the facts.

Foster care will always, always be second best. And moving these already broken little people on to yet another home will always, always cause even more trauma. It’s unavoidable. It’s not my fault, yes – but I am still caught up in the process. And it is still me who had to look into those sparkling, big brown beautiful eyes, so full of trust and love – and then hand him over to strangers, and leave.

I’m sure he has cried for ME. He has searched for ME. He feels abandoned by ME.

So yes, I am guilty. And I am heartbroken. And so incredibly sad and sorry for the unfairness of this world.

But there is hope. And faith. And love. And in the truest, wisest book ever written we are told that love is the greatest.

There Is No “Just”

I’m short on time today. Coming on the heels of the blog yesterday, this from The Adopted Chamelon seemed perfect –

I hear pro choice people say, “how many kids have you adopted?” Then you have these comments from people who have no understanding of adoption, “You can always adopt if you can’t have your own kids.” “If you don’t want to parent just put the kid up for adoption?”

There is no “just” to it. It is a complex decision that will affect you and the child for the rest of your lives. Adoption is trauma. People treat it like it is a simple solution. “Just” means they have put no thought to what happens after adoption. Children are not born blank slates. We have our family’s heritage, intact, inside us.

The adoption industry has done such a good job dehumanizing children that people think you can “just” put adoptees in the family that had the money to pay for them and everything is great.

The truth is that separation causes a lifelong trauma that could be prevented. We need to see this trauma first and foremost. Stop treating adoption as the answer. Adoption is a lifelong struggle that often gets ignored. If we are going to continue treating children like property at least acknowledge the harm it has done. Stop saying “just” adopt. Stop bypassing the very real trauma that has to happen for a child to be put in the situation where they are permanently being removed from their family to be put with strangers.

We don’t “just” get over it either.

#adoptedchameleon

The Wrong Pro-Choice Response

I’ve probably been guilty of this, to whatever extent, over the course of writing so many blogs here at WordPress but today, I was really made aware of how problematic this argument feels to some who have been in foster care and they have a valid point.

Someone posted that the pro-Choice argument that goes something like this is problematic. [1] it makes some former foster care youth feel like a rescue dog or a commodity. [2] It can be misinterpreted by some (it is a stretch but it has happened) that foster children should have been aborted. Former foster care youth object to the weaponizing of their trauma to support the pro-choice argument.

To be fair to my own intentions (and I don’t actually know if I was guilty or not but I could have been because nuance is tricky) – it’s a good argument. Pointing out the hypocrisy of a society that only wants to help a fetus and not actual children. Pointing out how social service systems are already underfunded. However, it also dehumanizes foster youth by lumping them into a monolith in need of rescue.

The recent overturn of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court will cause a flood of pregnant and parenting teens into the system. One pro-Choicer writes – I’m not comfortable weaponizing a trauma I haven’t experienced personally, but I believe the point they are trying to make (harmfully, to note) is that pro life people aren’t actually pro life, they just want to control women and people with uteruses. It’s not about life with them, it’s about control. They don’t actually put effort towards improving the quality of life of those struggling. I once read a post where a woman convinced a mother to keep her child, but when the mom needed financial support, the lady basically said “tough luck.” Meaning they only value what decisions that can control of a pregnant person, and they don’t care about the struggles of those already born and alive. Especially considering a lot of people forced to give birth or were given no other option might consider to put up for adoption because having a kid wasn’t something they wanted OR they might keep the kid and the child might be raised in an environment where they aren’t wanted or abused. But most pro lifers don’t care about providing resources or voting for increased accessibility to resources for those who need it.

I agree that it’s not right to use someone’s trauma as an argument. Instead of using that kind of argument, we should just argue it at face value – people claiming to be pro life don’t allow access to resources that living people need. Instead, they vote AGAINST accessibility and governmental help for those in need. Instead of focusing on current foster children, we should be asking questions such as – what they would do to help mothers who aren’t in a position to raise children, instead of them saying, “Well if you don’t want kids, just close your legs or put the baby up for adoption.” I believe the pro lifers make children more of a commodity than pro choicers do because they act like adoption is an easy solution and decision- “just adopt your baby out! Just give your kid up! But don’t you dare have an abortion!” And yes, not every foster child is the result of such a decision or dilemma but pro lifers act like adoption is easy for everyone involved, and it’s really not.

Neither side should be using the adoption community as a weapon, but one side brings it up and the other side fires back, and it’s making this whole situation ugly. They’re fighting with feelings instead of facts.

Letting Go of Expectations is Liberating

Today I offer you a not uncommon adoptee challenge –

For so many of us, birthdays suck. And I’m realizing it doesn’t get easier with age. So many complicated emotions. For me this is the day I was born and the day I was separated from my birth mom. I‘m not resentful for the choice she made, she’s a wonderful human.

I think it has to do with expectations that birthdays are supposed to be happy. I never want to be the center of attention but if someone overlooks me, or my feelings, I get super sad. It feels like a rejection thing. I might prefer celebrating my adoption day… but that would be difficult to explain.. to people who could never comprehend.

I’m sick of crying every single birthday (and having to hide it) and faking it for the rest of the day. I’m (hopefully) going to have at least 50 more of these and I don’t want to look back hating every single one and dreading the next. Therapy is great (I’ve had awesome therapists for over 7 years) but certain topics like these don’t feel solvable in therapy. I wish I could talk to others that understand from life experience.

An inspirational message from Agape that I listened to yesterday focused on Expectations and how to make peace with them. You can watch the July 3rd 9am Service HERE (fast forward to the 37 minute point, if you want to only listen to her message).

Only In America

Some thoughts from a birth mother –

Only in America is the for-profit business industry of adoption disguised as non-profit god work, that saves babies and is the answer to abortion; greed, trafficking and coercion will now be standard practice. This isn’t about women or babies. It’s about money and control.

When things like this happen, there is no rest. Only exhaustion, heartache, devastation. I am not pro-abortion, I am pro-INFORMED choice, the one that every human should have the right to make themselves and have access to safely. This is about controlling women and making money off their offspring, calling it “saving babies”, “orphan care”, “better lives”. THIS is a war on families, particularly on family preservation. Giving children to people deemed more worthy than biological parents, then selling it to the masses as “creating families”…that had to be broken first.

Billions stand to be made by the adoption industry with this ruling; to an already billion dollar a year industry that disguises itself as the hands and feet of Jesus. Commodifying women and children in crisis could not be less of Jesus. Seeing posts claiming how the church will step up, pushing their congregations more to take these “unwanted” babies, feels so dehumanizing as a mother who was in crisis, not fully informed about the ramifications and traumas involved in choosing placement, and then used by the church as the poster child for adoption. It’s lifelong trauma being separated from your children. Even though I did the best I could with what I had to go on, I was still failed. Most of us are. Women will now be forced to endure pregnancies either dangerous physically or possibly detrimental emotionally and psychologically, in the name of domestic infant supply, for the demand required. And there is nothing in place for these women in the aftermath.

Money in hand, baby secured, they have no need for us anymore. Millions more of us will now suffer these traumas. This is a sisterhood I never wanted to be apart of. It is something I wouldn’t wish on anyone and yet, people are shouting from the rooftops, without any lived experience or knowledge of the traumas we live daily, they’ll take our babies, like they are a pair of shoes at a garage sale we are looking to get rid of. Nope.

Did You Know ?

Did you know that among the many hurdles that parents face when their children are removed (often due to poverty mainly) and placed in foster care, that these struggling parents are also hand a bill for the costs of that foster care of their children ? This has been the way that it has been handled but that may change over the coming weeks and months.

According to Aysha Schomburg, the associate commissioner of the Children’s Bureau which is the agency that provides federal funding to state and county child welfare agencies, their “default position” now is that states should stop charging the child’s parents and “find innovative ways to support families.” She adds, “When a state child support agency takes what little funds a parent has when a child enters foster care, it makes it harder for that parent to pay for gas or bus fare or to get to work; harder to get or keep stable housing. That’s not what we want.”

Impoverished families keep getting those bills until they’re paid off completely. Some parents still get billed for years — even 20 years or more — after being reunited with their kids. So this is a financial burden that can stick with families for years — and decades.

Examples of how big these bills can be . . . a Minnesota mother’s tax refunds were garnished after her three children were placed in foster care. That bill was over $19,000 after her children spent 20 months in foster care. One couple in Washington state had the horrendous experience of having their son taken from them due to the husband being charged with assaulting their 4 year old son. Eventually, all charges were dismissed but it took 13 months to get their son came back home. The state sent the couple a bill of $8,000 for the boy’s foster care and garnished their paychecks.

The policy changes will only apply to parents coming into the system now in some states. In reality, some states will be more generous and other states will not. A 1984 federal law requires state and county child welfare agencies to, when “appropriate,” collect the money and return part of it to the US Treasury to reimburse the federal government, which pays for a large percentage of foster care.

There is more where the content for today’s blog was sourced – “The federal government will allow states to stop charging families for foster care” by Joseph Shapiro posted at NPR’s website.

Always The Question

From The Huffington Post – I Was Adopted Before Roe v. Wade. I Wish My Mother Had Been Given A Choice by Andrea Ross.

“Would you rather have been aborted?” This is the question some people asked me when I publicly expressed horror at the June 24 overturning of Roe v. Wade.

This question is not only mean-spirited and presumptuous, it’s a logical fallacy. The notion that adopted people should not or cannot be pro-choice simply because we were born ignores the possibility that we can value being alive at the same time we value the right to make decisions about our bodies, our lives and our futures.

My birth mother was 18 years old and partway through her first year of college when she discovered she was pregnant. Her parents arranged for her to go away to a home for unwed mothers once she started showing. My birth mother had limited choices; abortion was illegal, so her options were to keep or to relinquish her baby. And maybe it wasn’t she who decided; perhaps her parents made that decision for her. Maybe she had no choice at all.

Either way, the right to choose to have an abortion has nothing to do with what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention crudely referred to in 2008 as the need to maintain a “domestic supply of infants” available for adoption, a notion that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito referred to in the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade.

I was born in the home for unwed mothers, whisked away into foster care within a day, then adopted by yet another family three weeks later. I was shuffled between three families in my first three weeks of life.

The logic of the anti-choice, pro-adoption crowd is that I should be grateful for the fact I wasn’t aborted. After all, I didn’t languish in foster care for 18 years. And my birth mother got to finish college and pursue a career, to have kids when she was ready. It was a win-win, right?

Not by a long shot. Psychology research shows that women who relinquish their children frequently exhibit signs of post-traumatic stress disorder. And children who have been relinquished frequently develop relinquishment trauma ― a kind of trauma that “changes an individual’s brain chemistry and functioning … and can elevate adrenaline and cortisol and lower serotonin resulting in adoptees feeling hypervigilant, anxious, and depressed.”

What’s more, the institution of adoption denied me the right to know anything about my heritage, ethnicity or medical history. My birth certificate was whitewashed, amended to say I was born to my adoptive parents, in “Hospital,” delivered by “Doctor.” As a kid, I agonized over what I had done wrong, and worse, how as a baby, I could have been considered so intrinsically deficient as to be unworthy of being kept by my original parents. My life has been marked by self-doubt. I also have a constant and abiding fear of abandonment. I struggle with depression and anxiety. I’ve spent countless hours and many thousands of dollars on psychotherapy.

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett argues that “safe haven” laws allowing women to relinquish parental rights after birth are adequate to relieve the burdens of parenthood discussed in Roe v. Wade, implying that providing a ready avenue for adoption substitutes for the need for safe and legal abortion. Her claim is also a logical fallacy. Adoption is not a substitute for choice.

I’m now past childbearing age, and I don’t have daughters, so the overturning of Roe v. Wade will not affect me directly. But I think of my beloved nieces and female students at the large university where I teach. I am furious that they no longer have the constitutional right to bodily sovereignty, and I’m terrified by the possibility their lives might change for the worse if they are forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. I do have a young-adult son, and if he impregnated his partner, I would want them both to be able to decide which option made the most sense for them. The circumstances that dictated my birth have no bearing on their rights.

No, I don’t wish I had been aborted, but I do wish that all those years ago, my birth mother had possessed the right to make her own decisions about what to do with her own body, the same right we all deserve.

Hanger Baby

My sister is a hanger baby. My mother was terrified of giving birth after then seven children. When she was pregnant for my sister, she tried to abort her using a hanger. It was one of those secrets of the family.

My sister was born normal but as she grew, she was more street smart than book smart. My mother favored her terribly because of the guilt in what she had attempted to do. She thought she made her stupid.

My mother had three nervous breakdowns, suffered with debilitating alcoholism, and we lived in incredible poverty our whole lives. The only pride we were afforded was knowing we our father was a good catholic who used that at every turn to borrow money using his ten children as collateral.

There were little joyful experiences in my childhood. One friend asked me once to think of my happiest moment when I was a child. I have a photographic memory but could not think of one happy experience. I am sure there were some, but they were usually times that were devoid of trauma, so they were happy in comparison.

I was cursed on my birth by my mother. She delivered me in a drunken stupor.. She hung on to the doorway frame of the wall when they tried to take her to deliver me. She just screamed how much she hated me. I lived my life in galvanized numbness. I don’t think I have been able to fully shake it. I was well in my twenties before I realized that some parents love their children.

People always say they are speaking for the unborn. But they are not. They are speaking for their religious bias. They are speaking for a conditioning to bring babies into the world for some kind of political numbers game. The unborn would be better off if they landed in a place of love for them. It worked out well for my sister being born because of my mother’s guilt, she had an advantage in life.. I was not so lucky.

Every child has the right to be loved. I did not have to endure such a loveless existence. As I grew, I have had many memories bleed through about my past lives. It was not a thing that was in my belief system and yet the memories bled through.

If I had past lives, then I know I have future lives. I have the knowing that all of who I am doesn’t depend on this one lifetime. Nor does it with any fetus. I have had sessions with clients who brushed people’s lives by being their miscarried baby. It was all the interaction they needed to complete the transaction between parent and child.

What I have endured, I would not inflict on an innocent baby. There is the starving, being poor, being unloved and trying to thrive through incredible dysfunction. It is not something I think of everyday but the trauma of being a “have not” in a world of “haves” is the most cruel fate you can thrust on a baby. It would be different if it was merely a material thing. A mother’s love can help a child through any disadvantage. But without the love between a mother and child, the fate of both seems an unnecessary fate.

I know everyone who says they are pro life think they have the most scrupulous vantage point. But if they lived the life of a loveless baby, they may be much more agreeable to allowing there to be a choice. Perhaps they can trust Love to make the best choice for each soul and take their discretion out of the equation.

~ this personal experience was shared my Facebook friend – Jen Ward. Her website is – Jenuinehealing.com