Closing The Gap

When an adoption has already occurred and given the importance of identity issues, what is an adoptive mother to do when the original mother doesn’t respond very much to efforts to reach out and keep that mother connected with her natural children ?

This was a question in a group I belong to this morning.

Some good advice that came from another adoptive mother was this –

Educate yourself on issues of generational poverty vs privilege and learn to identify what pushback actually indicates.

Get out of your bubble and be willing to have genuine relationships with people who are not like you. (All of us in this polarized society could actually benefit from that advice.)

Humble yourself.

I remember an issue that came up. My youngest sister gave up her son for adoption. She gave me a lock-box full of mementos that illustrated her experiences and thinking at that time to deliver to her son someday as I was the contact in a registry somewhere.

It did come to pass. As he read some letters out loud to his adoptive mom on their way home from our first meeting in person, she was startled to hear that she had some attitudes towards my sister. She admitted later that she probably was projecting feelings of superiority.

Not to dismiss that the woman has done a fine job of nurturing my nephew. She was very supportive of him when he was seeking to know who his true father was (turns out my sister lied about that one but indications from certain post-birth contacts indicate that she actually did know the truth).

Definitely, class differences can be intimidating. In fact, this was mirrored to me growing up by my two sets of adoptive grandparents (yes, both of my parents were adoptees). One set was well-off, socially prominent. The other set lived in capable poverty. I say it that way because they seemed to manage the situation without complaining.

When this class difference exists between the adoptive parents and the original parents (which is quite common or else the original parents would raise their own child 99% of the time) subtle messages are transmitted such as –

We are better than you and we know it.

Which can leave the original parents feeling they have to walk on egg shells. They know the adoptive parents have all the power and money to do what they want including withhold information and contact if they so choose.

Protecting Children

There has to be some kind of balance that safeguards a child without destroying family. We should care that children are loved, sheltered, clothed and fed and in some manner instilled with values beneficial to society. Money should not be the sole determinant of where the child’s welfare is best served and society really should do more to preserve a family’s ability to stay together.

Child Protective Services strikes fear into the hearts of many parents. When my sons were young and difficult to keep civil in public, sometimes requiring a strong response from me, I did worry some well-meaning person might misjudge what they witnessed, though I am certain that I pushed the envelope at times, I don’t believe I ever was entirely abusive. I did regret some reactions and there is one in particular my youngest son will never let me forget and that I more than deeply regret – though love was not destroyed and we remain very close. I suspect he also understands that one can push their parent over whatever boundary restrains them. I often think that if my children do not learn about going too far with me, who loves them, someone else could kill them someday for acting ignorant of their potential danger.

My grandmothers lost my parents (both of them) to adoption during the Great Depression (1935 and 1937) due to no other awful reality regarding their life’s circumstances than simple poverty. Sadly, in the modern times we live in, society discounts the importance of natural parents and thinks they’re replaceable, especially if they’re poor. This is something that is and should never be. In most cases, even flawed natural parents are better for a child than moving them into the home of someone totally unrelated (in the genetic sense).

Who among us, that has ever had the difficult and challenging job of parenting another human being, is pure enough to cast the first stone ? Yet some do precisely that with the best of intentions. I never try to judge another parent because I have not walked a mile in their shoes nor to I know all of the circumstances behind whatever behavior I may be witnessing. I’m not suggesting to stand there and do nothing if a child is being SEVERELY beaten. Discipline is a controversial subject in which parents are becoming more enlightened but for which there is no consensus.

Family Is Important

Whether genetically related or adoptive, family is important. Both of my parents were adopted. All of the “family” I knew growing up was not at all genetically related to me (beyond my mom and dad of course). My grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were actually not related to me. I marvel at this now.

My adoptive grandparents were influential in my life. No doubt about that. My maternal grandmother lived in wealth and taught us good manners and what an abundant life might be like. I remember fondly sleeping in my mom’s old canopy four-poster bed and coming to a breakfast table set impeccably. My grandmother also made possible my only trip outside the United States beyond occasional forays into Juarez growing up on the Mexican border. Thanks to her I had an experience of attending Clare College in Cambridge England. She was metaphysical actually. I learned that at some point and she expressed gratitude for her financial comforts by being generously charitable.

My paternal grandparents modeled hard work, entrepreneurial spirit and humble surroundings as well as country living as I was growing up in a dense suburban environment. I remember going out into the cotton fields to pick boles and now know that my genetic maternal relatives (grandmother and grandfather lived such a life of necessity). I remember harvesting food from their property – pecans, peaches and asparagus. I remember the trains that traveled right across the street from their rural home.

I also believe I owe my granny (my dad’s adoptive mother) for preserving me in my parent’s loving care and not allowing my unwed high school mom to be sent off to have me and give me up for adoption. Later on in life, my granny caused me to realize a romantic relationship I had been in for some years was not a healthy one and I left it. Her questioning openned the way for me to meet and marry my husband and to have two wonderful sons with him.

Young and Foolish

There is a raging debate in an adoption group I belong to over what it is like to be young and foolish causing one not to be a good mother. Part of the debate has to do with how much time it could take for a 21 yr old, unsupported and drug addicted, partying mother to get her act together. Fortunately, the baby in question that was taken by Child Protective Services is currently in place with a relative who has worked hard to keep the child in contact with the mother and wants to maintain family care for the infant so that the child can know the child’s grandmother, great-grandmother and other extended family.

I wasn’t a good mother when I was in my early twenties. I gave birth at 19 and was divorced by age 23. My marriage had involved drug use. My perspective was still wild and free and partying. I did manage to hold down a job and pay rent but I struggled financially, often going to my mom for inadequate $20 handouts and had an ex-husband who refused to pay child support because he believed I would just party on that money. He never seemed to give any consideration to the cost of child care, pediatricians, much less food and clothing.

So, in desperation I took my child to her paternal grandmother (not expecting my parents to approve of my plan to head out on an 18-wheel truck in order to make some real money). Eventually, her father remarried a woman with a child and they conceived another child together. This ended my plan to come back and continue to raise my daughter because I could not give her the family he could and I was still struggling financially.

I am totally in favor of maintaining family ties when a young mother isn’t mature enough or financially sound enough to support her child. Adoption by strangers should ALWAYS be the absolute last resort. Eventually, I matured. I married a man when I was 33 and we went on to have two sons together. I truly had felt like a failure at parenting. I was simply too young and too unsupported to have done better. I know now that was the truth of it.

Stress Responses

Some adoptive parents mistake their adopted child’s compliance with the situation as a good outcome adjustment. What I have learned from adoptees that there is an even more intense reaction that is called fawning. Think of the kidnap victim that eventually identifies with their captors – like Patty Hearst did.

Every adoptee is an individual and each responds differently to the circumstances of their relinquishment and their placement in a new home.

Fawning is best understood as “people-pleasing.” Both of my parents were adoptees and I saw this kind of behavior in my mom and learned it from her. This kind of behavior can endear one to other people but it is not always healthy to be this way.

People with the fawn response are so accommodating of other people’s needs that they often find themselves in codependent relationships. Fortunately, when that has happened to me, I’ve found a way out – even if it took some time to get there.

Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others. They act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences and boundaries. It takes some maturity to take one’s power back.

Sadly, fawn types are more vulnerable to emotional abuse and exploitation. Abusers may suppress a survivor’s fight or flight responses by threatening punishment. The appease response, also known as ‘please’ or ‘fawn’, is a survival response which occurs [when] survivors read danger signals and aim to comply and minimize the confrontation in an attempt to protect themselves. I’ve been there, done that and I’ve seen my mom do likewise.

If you are an adoption survivor (adoption is definitely a form of trauma to a child), you are not alone in using this for safety. There is no shame in struggling with fawning. Fawning, like the other stress responses, is a self-protective armor. It has helped many adoption survivors live through being placed in a family that does not fit their nature naturally.

You Can Start Over

There is not much a child can do about the circumstances of having been adopted. When a adoptee matures into adulthood, there is a chance to reframe the experience, to find ways to make the unique experiences that an adoptee goes through – a strength.

There is not a universal agreement that adoption harms the self-esteem of adoptees. Studies seem to indicate it does not but adoptees will often highlight the ways that it did harm their own self-esteem. I trust the adoptee’s perception over that of a researcher.

Without a doubt, an adoptee suffers the loss of their natural family connection. This impacts the development of their identity. Often, as an adoptee matures they have an understandable interest in their true genetic information.

Compared to a true orphan who cannot regain the physical presence of their original parents, an adoptee will have a sense that out there somewhere are the people who are related to them genetically. It is like missing a limb that one knows should be there. There will always be an uncertainty and often a level of grief or anger over a situation the adoptee did not create. There is often a fear that if the adoptee does not live up to the expectations of the adoptive parents they could be rejected, abandoned or sent back to some place that is not a home.

In every person’s life there are emotionally charged milestones – marriage, the birth of a child, or the death of a parent – when the unique issues of having been adopted are more keenly felt. In fact, it is often in giving birth to their own children, that an adoptee begins to really want to seek their origin information and if possible, experience a reunion with the people they were taken away from.

It is not possible to undo a life that has always been informed by having been an adopted person. It is possible to seek a perspective that empowers rather than victimizes the adoptee. An adoptee can seek to take control over their life and it’s further direction, something most of them lacked (control) in their childhoods.

A Different Universe

Coming to terms with the loss of one’s natural mother within an adoptee’s awareness will not be complete in a lifetime.

This is what I believe is true.

On the surface, an adoptee placed within a decent family may not show any signs of deep though subconscious trauma but I believe this is always embedded deeply within.

From all I have unexpectedly learned, after discovering who my original grandparents were and something about their lives at the time each of my parents’ adoptions occurred, I now know the wound of separation is always there. It is unavoidable. It is the natural truth of the matter.

Often adoptees behave in ways while they are growing up that confuse the adoptive family and their closest friends. Some of this confusing behavior even occurs during their adulthood. I have seen it with my own parents.

The truth about adoption is that the wounds are not visible in the way a physical accident would leave obvious impacts. They are psychological, emotional and mental. You can’t see them by looking at an adoptee.

All the love that an adoptive parent is able to give will never touch this pain that will always be deep inside the adoptee – caused by having been given up by the one person most of us believe we will always be able to depend upon. It really isn’t possible to simply exchange one mother for another and life then goes on as though no disruption ever happened.

Being adopted is similar to being put into a forever box of different than, not the same as, all of the non-adopted people around you.

It is a good thing that adoptees are finally trying to understand the pain of relinquishment and speaking honestly and out loud about their suffering.

There isn’t really a solution to the situation but it is the beginning of awareness and that may yet bring about reforms to the practice of adoption that will spare at least some children in the future from suffering similarly.

Why do people adopt babies ? It comes from a deep desire to protect and love a being that is capable of loving you back. It is useless to expect from an adoptee what a parent expects when they give birth to a child naturally and then raise that same child.

Adoption is an entirely different universe. That is a story that may not be capable of delivering the happy ending you as an adoptive parent had hoped for. This is the reality. Time to accept the truth of it.

The Better Option

There is such a thing as privilege. It is a privilege to have enough wealth that if you can’t have a child naturally, you are able to adopt someone else’s. Is wealth a better option than keeping a family intact ? There are cases where a child is going to need a safer environment but no child needs to have their identity erased and cultural heritage hidden from them.

It is weird to grow up with all these relatives and then reach an age in advanced maturity when one knows who their true genetic relatives are. Both of my parents were adopted. That means the grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were never really my relations. It is a very weird feeling to know that with certainty now.

Of course, I acknowledge that there were these couples who provided for and raised my parents. They were the people I knew as grandparents growing up and they were without a doubt influential in my life. Now that I know who the real ones were, they are who I think of when I think of who my grandparents were, even though I never had the privilege of knowing them in life.

One of the expectations is that an adoptee is supposed to be grateful and acknowledge all the sacrifices their adoptive parents made to raise them. On the adoptees part there is this lifelong requirement to live up to the expectations of the adoptive parent. I know that my mom felt this and I know that she felt like she had failed to equal those expectations.

All parents expect something from their children but most children are quite free to ignore those parental expectations. An adoptee often fears being returned to a no-family state if they don’t live up to the expectations of the people who purchased their very lives.

It may be hard to read but it is a real thing for those who’s roots have been cut off from underneath them.

Complicated

I’ve been following threads this morning that touch on a topic that I have struggled with before. It is complicated. I am pro-Life in a pro-Choice way. I believe it is a woman’s right to choose and I am deeply concerned about efforts to overturn Roe v Wade. I just read yesterday that an amicus curie brief was released in which 205 Republican lawmakers, including 39 senators, have asked the Supreme Court to consider whether the 1973 protection of the right to an abortion “should be reconsidered and, if appropriate, overruled.”

Personally, I once resisted the suggestion to have an abortion. My husband was a heroin addict and had developed hepatitis. We had a nephew with severe birth defects. My husband was concerned that our baby would also have negative impacts. I don’t know why but I just knew she was perfect and defended her life. She is perfect.

Yet, then I became pregnant under worrisome conditions. I was taking exotic drugs of a psychedelic nature frequently. My partner was not the kind of man who was going to be a supportive father. I was not in a financial position to raise a child on my own. I had already voluntarily surrendered my daughter to her paternal grandmother while I tried to get on my feet financially. Shades of my maternal grandmother and how she lost my mom to adoption.

I had an abortion because it was safe and legal. It was not an easy decision to live with, I will admit that. It haunted me a bit. I remember a message coming into my awareness that my son would come back when the timing was better. It would happen 25 years later. A son was born into a stable marriage with good circumstances. Interestingly, my daughter had a similar experience with a still birth and when she became pregnant again, had the same kind of knowing that this was the same son’s soul that was lost before.

I have some concern about a missionary zeal that takes babies from vulnerable young women in order to indoctrinate them into evangelical Christian orthodoxy. Yet, I also recognize that homelessness and drug use and a lack of financial and familial supports are a serious issue. I have concerns that Roe v Wade will be overturned and young women will return to back alley abortions in their desperation.

I don’t really have answers to any of this. Just concerns that are on my mind this morning. Personally, I believe we live these lives to learn and develop at the soul level and that there are no mistakes, no death and an eternity in which to expand our awareness.

Class Differences

I learned about the differences in social classes as a child growing up. My grandparents were the people who adopted each of my parents. Yes, both were adoptees.

On my mom’s side, her adoptive father was a banker and her adoptive mother a socialite. There was opulence and wealth in their household. My grandfather died relatively young. My grandmother then did whatever she wanted to – traveling the global and doling out charitable largess.

On my dad’s side, they were entrepreneurial and poor. They lived modestly. The contrast was always obvious.

In the family I grew up in, my dad was a union worker and my mom held jobs outside the home before I even entered public school. Eventually, she was able to talk my dad into letting her get a degree in music, supplement the family income by teaching music lessons and working on her own compositions. Though she never sold the sheet music she offered for sale, she died doing what she loved and was passionate about.

In learning about my original grandparents, there wasn’t really any wealth there. One of the first stories I heard was that my mom’s father’s family existed in such poverty that the chickens under the house could be seen under the floorboards and sometimes her half-sister went to bed hungry.

My dad’s mom had a hard life. Both grandmothers lost their own moms to death early in their childhoods.

Many of the children who end up adopted are surrendered due to poverty and a lack of financial resources. While some extended families actually do assist a vulnerable mother, that was not the case in any of my family’s experiences. As a society we could do much better and even fewer children would end up relinquished for adoption.