The Last Resort for Who ?

There is a contradiction in this statement – “adoption should be the last resort for the child” and yet adoption is the “last resort” for infertile people? It’s a selfish perspective that only serves the adoptive parent who couldn’t have children. They are only thinking about what is best for them and not what’s best for the child.

Think about how this would feel – knowing you are someone’s “last resort.” How does that feel ?

Adoption is trauma regardless the loving intent of the people who adopt.

It’s not the responsibility of a child to heal infertility loss for anyone or be a last resort. Children are not blank slates or interchangeable. Parenting is not a right, it’s a privilege.

It’s like hoping for a bad thing to happen to the child and it’s mother so a good thing can happen for you.

How about helping young mothers keep their babies instead of hoping they will lose their baby. The majority of babies are given up by kind loving mothers who are too young and poor to care for them.

There should be more resources and programs for single mothers with little income, so that they can help keep the child. Why should we look at helping find the child a better home, rather than taking care of the immediate problem for the mother, and helping support that mother. It’s like putting a bandaid on a dirty wound. You’re only fixing the outer problem by hiding and ignoring the problem beneath. Thus the wound becomes infected. That infection is causing trauma to the child and the mother.

A very sad example – I placed my only child after trying to raise him for nearly two years. I was an excellent young mother until two men broke into my apartment and raped me. I had a nervous breakdown and no longer felt capable. I wish someone would have been there to help me. He also ended up being sexually abused for six years, so it’s not all rainbows and butterflies, and he is messed up from it.

The 100% percent pro-adoption industry narrative, brainwashes the culture’s general view and is a very harmful form of coercion. What is the implication ?

That you are not good enough to parent your own child. Yet by giving your child up, you receive the deepest respect because you have proven that you are a loving, selfless person who only wants what best for your child. You do that by allowing someone else who is much much much more more qualified, stable, etc etc than you are, to raise your child. In other words: it’s selfish to keep your child. Be a loving mother and make a loving adoption plan with glitter and rainbows to boot. This is a very dangerous and insidious narrative and coercion tactic. It is the dominant strategy within the adoption industry.

Instead, “let’s minimize trauma and support families in keeping kids safe.” This is the healthy way forward.

PS – in case you are wondering, though generally against adoption almost all the time, the group I belong to group has never advocated for children to stay in abusive situations. They may however, support family reunification after therapy and counseling for the parents and the affected children. If the family can make it through all of the hurdles, they will be better parents due to learning how to parent better and children always prefer their original parents, they are resilient and with time and therapy may yet overcome their early challenges.

A worker in a residential treatment center noted – It’s an ugly world for some kids and their symptoms are ugly from what they suffered. Most of the kids that we worked with did come from adoptive family and were adopted at birth. The children who were adopted later in life, did have less problems. It’s never a “better than” problem. In this person’s history was their adoption at 3 days old. Her biological mother lived in the same town as she did – yet she never knew it. From her perspective, her adoptive parents were pretty selfish. Not only for that reason but the feeling was that it was her job as an infant to solve the problem of their infertility. Of course, that wasn’t possible. Not every person has the same adoption experience. The fact remains, every infant adopted has trauma from having been separated from their mother. And that feels like a life-threatening situation to a child who has no words and no language.

Adoption is actually *never* the only option. Legal guardianship doesn’t sever all genetic ties and create a false birth certificate. Here is an example of some of the complications of being adopted. She applied for a “Real ID” (you know, the one we are all going to be required to have soon, if we want to travel even within the US). The online system REJECTED her birth certificate information, because it is a FALSIFIED LEGAL DOCUMENT. This is just one of the issues adoptees face for the rest of their lives, because somebody decided they couldn’t adopt a child without altering their true identity.

Genetic Mirroring

People often see what they expect to see. It is natural to expect to see some resemblance among family members. I remember comments flowing from my adoptive maternal grandmother to the staff of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society about how much alike the two children, one boy and one girl, she adopted from them looked like “real” brothers and sisters, ie had a family resemblance.

Today, someone in my all things adoption group wrote –

A frequent occurrence throughout my childhood was that someone would stop and tell my to my adoptive mother how much I look like her. Now, I’ve seen pictures of moms and daughters, who look like each other. But me?? I don’t look much like my mother, aside from dark hair and pale skin and glasses. I can’t see my features in anyone, or in my mind’s eye even. I may have connected with a biological uncle and I’m looking through his friend’s pictures and I can’t see me anywhere. I don’t know what I look like well enough to try to compare. I’m about to take a selfie to try to help myself out. I usually think about genetic mirroring more in the context of TransRacial Adoptees (which I am not), so this is really messing with me.

One response, totally mystified, writes – Why did this happen to me too??? My mom is white and I’m native with dark skin and dark hair.. she is white with light skin and blue eyes, like why did people say that….

I have seen this said of husbands and wives, who obviously are not genetically related, that they grow to be more alike in appearance the longer they are married. So one comment noted – Children will take on the facial expressions of their caretakers, which can make them appear more like adoptive parents than they would otherwise. I believe that this is possible. Genetically, often mannerisms and personality traits are more similar among biological family members.

So, I do agree with this person’s perspective and experience – People will see things, if they think they have to. I remember my adoptive father telling someone I was his son, when they asked who I was. I couldn’t be more different than him and this guy squinted his eyes and looked at me for a while before saying, yeah I see the resemblance.

I do look like my brother who is a biological child of my adoptive dad and stepmom. I’m the adoptee. We are 17 years apart. I helped raise him and he also mimics me a lot. I’ve heard everything from jokes that my adoptive dad had an affair and adopted me so my adoptive mom wouldn’t suspect, people laughing their asses off when they say we look alike and I reply I’m adopted, then finding out – it’s true – and of course, that’s awkward… or adoptive mom getting jealous and trying to find traits to pretend we look alike and “it’s just the same”. To me it is messed up because they fail to acknowledge my difference. They’re trying to fit the square peg into the round hole with all they have, instead of celebrating my differences.

Celebrating our individuality and differences. Isn’t that what we all should always be trying to do ?

Contemplating Death

Yesterday, I was stung on my little finger by a Red Wasp. Whether we simply collided or it came after me as I passed by the wooden post that has become nest – through a knot-hole opening into a large hollow space, I do not know. It happened so fast, I never saw it. I only felt the hot iron pain. All I could do was put a couple of ice cubes on it at the time where I was.

It brought back memories of the time when my adoptive maternal grandmother gifted me with a trip to England with her. We were going to attend a 4 week long summer session at the University of Cambridge and it was a lifetime experience that I do not regret. That morning I was stung on my middle finger also by a wasp I never saw. There was no time to do anything about it, even if we would have had some remedy.

My hand became painfully swollen over the time it took to make the transatlantic journey. My grandmother pretended not to notice my suffering and I knew better than to make a issue of it. In my dorm, not even having washcloths and towels yet, I used my socks to make compresses and by dinner time it was bearable. Last night I reflected on how it must have been for my mother growing up with such an emotionally cold woman. I do know that when she died, lots of appreciative comments about her mother came my mom’s way and simple reminders of her perfume on her clothing were bittersweet for my mother. My mom yearned for a reunion with her birth mother but she had died several years before my mom’s effort, which came months before the state of Tennessee changed its own perspectives to allow the adoptees or their descendants to have the adoption files related to the scandalous Georgia Tann. I now have that file that would have brought my mom so much peace. In my own spiritual perspective, I believe she was reunited with her birth mother after death and now knows even more than I do.

In my all things adoption group this morning I read –

I was surprised at how many adoptees truly loved their adoptive moms and were devastated when they died. Is it strange to not seem to feel much of anything? Some days I think I might be sad and then I realize it might just be residual feelings from long ago. I’m so confused and feel so cold.

A soothing comment followed – Know that your feelings, whatever they are, are valid.

The next comment was this – My adoptive mother and I were not close. I loved her, but didn’t much like her.

One honest adoptee admitted – My adoptive mom was an awful person. I only felt relief when she died. Yet another wrote – I won’t grieve, I have no relationship with my adoptive mom or adoptive dad, as cold as it sounds ill feel like a weight will be lifted from my shoulders when they pass. They still think they haven’t done anything wrong and blame me for everything

I could appreciate this perspective – I think how people grieve and process loss depends on their relationship with that person, whether it’s adoptive family, biological family, friend, coworker. If you’re close to someone and love them, you might feel sadness, a sense of loss, emotional pain. If you weren’t close to them, you might not feel much at all. None of these feelings are bad, they’re just a reflection of your relationship to that person. Not missing or grieving someone doesn’t make you any less of a person with emotions.

The original commenter went on to share – It’s sad because I could never connect with her. She had bipolar disorder and always asked me why couldn’t I just love her. She tried to live her life over through me and it seemed to suck the very soul out of me. It’s hard to love someone when it’s only one sided. It’s like we are baby dolls meant to fulfill all their dreams instead of human beings with our own destiny, personality, and dreams to explore.

Another wise perspective was this – I think every relationship is unique and one should always honor whatever they feel, or don’t feel when dealing with death. Try not to compare your experience with loss to others. This also, grieving is different for everyone, and the way you grieve (or seemingly don’t) is valid.

There is this sad story – The last few months of my moms life were difficult. She was difficult (in general). Our relationship was difficult. I had to step in and took over care the last 4 days of moms life. She had a rapid health decline. I didn’t know for sure I was adopted at that point. And I never got that moment. My adoptive mom was a broken person. The Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents book helped me see that this year. I’ve been able to see her different and with a kindness that wasn’t there before. We had a hard relationship. And it’s helped me reach some of the grief that I’ve had shoved down inside.

And yet another sad story – My adoptive mom is still alive but I feel absolutely numb towards her. I think it’s the abuse and bullying and constant threat of sending me away as a child. I had one moment once where I felt for her, it was some random moment by myself that made me realize that perhaps underneath the hurt, I did care for her, but I am unable to feel it because of how much she has hurt me.

Another perspective – As adoptees, we have *all* lost our mother, during our formative years. So when my adoptive mother died, I felt that pain of losing a mother again. My adoptive siblings don’t quite understand why I reacted so strongly (and they also don’t realize how deeply her death impacted me, because I never really showed my grief in front of them). They are all her biological children, and also much older than me. So while we all lost our mother, I was losing *another* mother. As adoptees, we have difficult relationships with our adoptive parents, and however you felt is completely understandable.

My Unorthodox Life

This program is being discussed in my all things adoption group this morning. It is said that “The whole storyline was so upsetting. The adoptive family is awful.” And also this, “One of the characters is looking for his “birth person” and is scared to hurt his adoptive mom by calling her his birth mother. Adoptive mom says stuff like “I thought I’d be dead when you start looking” or “Can’t you ask your private investigator to ask questions to her rather than make contact?”. So much insecurity, jealousy and emotional blackmail.

One adoptee notes – My adoptive mom did the exact same thing . As if it’s about HER “trauma“ (which honestly is self inflicted).

And there is this about the show – The adoptive mom also got pregnant shortly after adopting, and begs him to not change his name, even though she falsified his birth certificate! She’s like “I want you to stay happy,” when he is obviously depressed, tormented, hasn’t dated anyone in years, etc. The biological son (his brother by adoption) is calling him an idiot for doing it because “we have the best parents in the world” and “you’re the one who started this problem.” Then hangs up the phone on him. They are doing all they can to sabotage any reunion. His poor birth mom. He doesn’t even pick up on the fact she wanted to keep him.

I haven’t see this one but last night we suffered through A Serious Man – written, produced, edited and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. All we could figure out by the end of the movie was that it was the Coen’s revenge on their Jewish upbringing. I kept thinking – if I was Jewish, it might make sense. There is no adoption thread in that movie.

In my mom’s group, there are more than the usual number of Jewish people. So, I have been exposed to some of their experience. The one that stands out large for me is the mom who had famously large breasts and then developed breast cancer. She had boy/girl twins the same age as my youngest son. Though she had a great attitude going into the experience, she died rather quickly. I was somewhat impressed by the way her Jewish community was there for the whole family throughout that ordeal.

My paternal grandmother died of a heart attack the day she was to be released from the hospital following breast cancer surgery. She was originally from Long Island NY and my understanding is that there are a lot of Jewish people there. I have a smidgeon of Ashkenazi Jew. I suspect I may have gotten that from her. Another mom in my mom’s group lives in the town on Long Island with the same name as the surname of my paternal grandmother – Hempstead. The family goes way back with historically significant sites in New London, Connecticut (a diary covering a period of 47 years from Sept 1711 to November 1758 by an ancestor, Joshua Hempstead, is still in print).

Without My Brother

When I first saw this image, I thought of my Aunt Daisy. I don’t think she knew about my dad until after her mother had died. Her older sister did. My cousin, who is the daughter of that older sister is how I came by pictures of my grandmother holding my dad and one of him when he was a toddler.

When my Aunt Daisy’s daughter discovered me thanks to 23 and Me, her first question was – is your dad still alive ? Sadly I had to tell her no. In fact my Aunt Daisy was living only 90 miles away from my dad in the very same state at the time he died. Such a pity. I see him in her photos.

I am told my paternal grandmother never really got over “losing” my dad to adoption. It certainly wasn’t her intention to give him up. His father was a married man, still un-naturalized as a citizen at the time my dad was conceived, having immigrated from Denmark. I would guess my grandmother never told him – IF she even was still in contact with him at the time. But without a doubt, she did know who his father was and it is thanks to her own effort to leave us breadcrumbs that I know who my dad’s father was. She quietly handled her pregnancy through the Salvation Army home for unwed mothers at Ocean Beach CA. It was such an appropriate birth. My dad, a Pisces, the son of a Danish fisherman, who himself was in love with fishing and the ocean. Their resemblance to one another makes it unmistakable and lately, my reconnecting with Danish relatives still living in Denmark due to our shared genes is the proof, that didn’t exist back in the day. She obtained employment with the Salvation Army and migrated with my dad in tow to El Paso Texas, where she was pressured to give him up for adoption at 8 months old.

My slightly increased risk of breast cancer probably comes from my paternal grandmother. The day she was due to be released from the hospital after surgery for breast cancer, she suffered a fatal heart attack. I have a smidgeon of Ashkenazi Jew which I suspect comes from my paternal side – if not my grandmother, then my Danish grandfather.

It still amazes me that after over 60 years totally clueless in the dark, I know so much about my family origins. Never would I have predicted that such a possibility would actually become real.

A Belief That Enables

When you make a decision, you make that decision consciously for only 5% maximum, the rest of your decision (95%) is controlled by your subconscious mind. The decision to adopt a child is conscious but there are subconscious factors below that which are influencing or will influence your experience as an adoptive parent. Some couples adopt for the same reason some couples decide to have a biological child – in order to save a marriage by bonding it with a child. Of course, the couples who adopt generally have other factors – most especially an experience with infertility and failed attempts at using reproductive medical assistance to have a child biologically. In other words, many adoptions actually start out on shaky ground to begin with.

So today, I came across something else that is more than a little bit disturbing. I hasten to add a trigger warning at this point for anyone for whom child abuse discussions might be too emotionally upsetting to continue. Having done my due diligence in this regard – you can proceed reading or leave this blog warned and saved the painful recollections.

It is sometimes asked – Why did they adopt just to abuse them. There is an assumption that adoptive parents wouldn’t abuse their adopted children because they went to so much effort to adopt them. All parents are capable of some degree of abuse – even with a great deal of love and often from ignorance or poor examples growing up. Therefore, it is dangerous to put any adoptive parent on a pedestal because sometimes adoptees are abused. It is a sad fact – and sad anytime any child is severely abused by any adult person for that matter. When the abuse starts… the people around them often say: well, those kids are very troubled and acting out. The adoptive parents are doing the best they can. Who can really blame them for doing what they have to do in order to control that child ?

One reason that it doesn’t shock or confuse me that some adoptive parents might harm their adoptees is that I have become aware of how common a trait of narcissism is among adoptive parents. Wanting a child doesn’t mean you’re going to treat them well. Adoption is inherently a selfish act – regardless of what you believe is motivating you. An adoptive parent may expect their adopted child to be compliant with any of their expectations or demands. That parent may lash out at their adoptee when they don’t meet those. Adoptive parents are not exempt from having anger issues and abusive tendencies.

Sometimes this abuse doesn’t begin immediately but when that cute baby becomes a rebellious teen. One adoptee shared her example – my adoptive mother actually said to me when I was 7 yrs old – “We wanted a baby, and you’re not a baby anymore.” That is how she explained they were going to adopt a baby boy.

Abuse is about possession and control. And in a weird, twisted kind of logic many abusers don’t actually think are they abusive. An abusive narcissistic parent may think they are a really good one. Being abusive goes against the savior narrative that so many adoptive parents have accepted as their reason for adopting. Adoption seems to be a process that attracts people who need to feel good about themselves. And once they’ve completed the adoption, they feel effectively immune from criticism because, after all, it was such a “selfless” act to rescue a child in need.

People adopt simply because they want kids. However, they may not actually have any idea of how to raise those children, once they have achieved that primary goal. These kinds of adoptive parents may have difficulty accepting that the child they adopted is an individually separate person with ideas of their own, desires, wants, and needs that do not necessary mirror the adoptive parent. In fact, often don’t While nurturing plays a role in the kind of person we each become – adoptee reunions with their birth parents after they reach maturity often prove – there is more to the genetic influences than many in the adoption industry want society to believe.

Another example comes from an adoptee with an emotionally immature mother – “She wasn’t able to have children and I think she thought a child would fix her. I was adopted at birth. I believe she thought I’d be a mini version of her but when I had my own emotions and interests, she couldn’t handle it. In came the weird emotional games.” It is way too common for adoptive parents to adopt a baby as a way to fix their own issues. It never works that way.

The abuse somehow feeds into these adoptive parents’ need to feel like they are doing something good. They are a “strong” parent and showing these troubled kids “tough love.” And then, there’s always the go-to excuse so many adoptees have hard – They should be grateful. They could have it so much worse. Never say to an adoptee sharing their experience something like – Just because you were abused by your adoptive parents, that’s why you hate adoption. Or sorry you had a bad experience. An experience sounds like a short term event. Adoption is lifelong.

Dismissing any adoptees’ discontent and trauma is victim blaming, also called gaslighting. It is an attempt to control the adoptees’ story in order not to break their happy, little “adoption is rainbows and butterflies” illusion.

With Privilege Comes Judgment

Growing up, I remember being told not to judge, to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes before judging them. I need to understand the other person’s experiences, challenges, thought processes, etc before judging their own personal choices or lived stories. It is true that judgments keep us safe, help us make friends, accomplish our goals, and all sorts of wonderful, important stuff.

The idea of privilege has become really controversial in some circles, even offensive. Usually the people who are offended by the idea of privilege are the people who have it. And when someone who has had some experience – maybe they have experienced being judged, as being inferior, because they were living in poverty, or they had a bad experience in foster care or in their childhood while being raised by adoptive parents – we should do our best to listen to their stories with compassion, realizing that because we did not have that experience ourselves, we cannot really know how bad it was for them. We need to simply give them the benefit of the doubt and open our heart to their pain and/or trauma.

So, too often when people are simply trying to share whatever awful experience they have lived through, someone will feel triggered and quickly counter this person’s lived experience with the words “not all” – which is simply meant to shut the person up and not allow them to revel their own experience honestly. Maybe you are a foster parent or an adoptive parent or do social work or work for the government in some kind of child welfare or government assistance office and you are feeling judged by the story you are hearing. You are desperate to point out that you are not one of those kinds of people yourself. And it’s wonderful if you are not. However, you should restrain yourself at such a time, take comfort and be confident in the knowledge that the story you are hearing is not about you but about the person telling it and their experience. Allow them to revel their own truth without dismissing it by inserting why you are such a good person (and in fact, maybe look long and hard at your own heart to determine is what it actually is that is being triggered. Is it your sense of being some kind of savior to some segment of humanity ?).

Privilege is something your life gives you that is good. By being able to see those aspects as a privilege, you should also be able to realize that you have had access to something that some other people didn’t. Often in adoption land, as in real life, those with privilege and those in government service too often treat the underprivileged poorly and that is un-necessary. They have it hard enough without you piling on.

The truth is, adoptive parents hold the dominant view in society. Their perspectives rule when it comes to creating the perceptions that people with no experience with what adoption is like in general, believe it to be. Adult adoptees are too often either silenced or dismissed. Money rules. The financially privileged hold the power in society over the less fortunate – who are too easily overlooked or not seen at all. Adoption is almost always a case of allocating a child. Taking a child out of a poverty stricken family and placing that child into a rich one. Georgia Tann didn’t hide her belief that doing this intended engineering of a child’s life led to better outcomes for that child than leaving them in their original poverty-stricken family. So the truth is, money matters.

Just as it was with Georgia Tann, money continues to be the motivation in our modern times. There are people making a LOT of money by taking money from rich people, in return for giving them the opportunity to experience parenting. An experience that infertility or the tragic death of their biological child may have robbed them of. Money can buy you the opportunity to parent a child. Only people with money can afford a domestic infant adoption. This is the reality. And some determined people without financial good fortune will even set up a Go Fund Me page or some other kind of charity outreach to get the money to adopt a child. But the fact remains – the adoption industry is doing very well at generating a lot of revenue for itself.

Adoption Reform as a Social Movement

Today I read a opinion that Progressives support judicial reform (including changes in the nature of policing), oppose separating children from their parents at the Mexican border, care about minorities and other marginalized communities of people and are concerned about wealth inequality. The criticism is that Progressives show no understanding when an adoptee says – The adoption system is broken. It is a multi-billion dollar industry which exploits mothers in need of aid instead of aiding them financially or emotionally, commoditizes children, separates them from their families leaving long-lasting emotional and mental scars, denies them basic human rights and needs, and then sells them to rich families. The whole system should be dismantled and rebuilt from scratch. The first 4 “supported” issues can easily be combined through the lens of the adoption system to be relatively the same. Why the lack of understanding ?

I am a progressive and I have tons of adoption in my family background. I have now spent almost 4 years intensively educating myself about everything related to the adoption industry which includes foster care. So, I know that what this adoptee was saying about the adoption system is the truth. So, next I thought – is the accusation against Progressives fair ? I did a little google search and sure enough – very little on that topic comes up. I did find one paper in the Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare titled “Adoption in the US: The Emergence of a Social Movement” that I thought might be promising but I am left with mixed feelings about it because I am suspecting it won’t go far enough. It is 21 pages and I will try to find time to read it (I admit, I haven’t read it yet – it’s long, okay ?).

I do know that drop by drop of clarity into the muddy waters of the unicorns and rainbows fantasy myth about adoption IS taking place. I belong to a Facebook group that has over 6,000 members – almost all of them sharing personal stories and most are VERY reform minded. That is significant and they are not the only ones shedding light on everything related to adoption and changing hearts and minds. This group of caring individuals has certainly brought me out of the fog of believing adoption is a good thing and helped me to see the very problematic aspects it honestly entails.

Adoption is one of the few issues that seem to have strong with bipartisan support. I was shocked at how much the federal government supports adoption – when I found out my Republican Senator Roy Blunt and Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar are both the co-chairs of a committee that encourages – and legislates financial support to foster adoption.

Certainly, there is no excuse for the ignorance. If someone with a direct experience of adoption – either a birth mother who lost her child to the system or an adoptee who has learned about how the trauma of being separated from their mother has affected them and will have lifelong lasting effect on them – says the system they came from is broken, as a Progressive who cares, you should listen to them. Then, do the work of researching the issues for yourself but by all means – listen. Then, if you are truly a caring individual, find something you can do to help reform the practice. Do something about the problems that cause unwed expectant mothers to lose their child in the first place.

I Try To Stay Humble

Before I began to know who my original grandparents were (both of my parents were adopted) – adoption was the most natural thing in the world. How could it not be ? It was so natural both of my sisters gave up a baby to adoption. So, in only the last 3+ years, my perspective has changed a lot. I see the impacts of adoption has passed down my family line, ultimately robbing all three of my parents daughter’s of the ability to parent. Though I did not give my daughter up for adoption, finding myself unable to support myself and her financially, I allowed her father and step-mother to raise her without intrusion from me. To be honest, I didn’t think I was important as a mother. I thought that a child only needed one or the other parent to be properly cared for. Sadly, decades later, I learned that situation was not as perfect as I had believed. My sister closest to me in age actually lost custody of her first born son to her former in-laws when she divorced their son. He has suffered the most damage of all of our children and is currently estranged from his mother’s family, viewing us all as the source of his ongoing emotional and mental pain. I love him dearly and wish it wasn’t so but it is not in my control nor my sisters.

I realize that not every adoptee has the same experience. We are all individuals with individual life circumstances. Right and Wrong, Better and Worse – such exactness doesn’t exist. Everyone heals in different ways. We all begin where we begin. I began where I was when I started learning some of the hard truths and realities about the adoption industry as it operates for profit in this country. I also know that the adoption practices of the 1930s when my parents were adopted are not the same overall in 2021. There are only a few truly closed adoptions now and many “open” adoptions. I put the “open” into quotation marks because all too often, the woman who gives birth and surrenders her baby for adoption because she doesn’t feel capable of parenting, just as I didn’t feel capable in my early 20s, discovers that the “open” part is unenforceable and the adoptive parents renege on that promise.

Those of us, myself included, have become activists for reforms going forward. Society has not caught up with us yet. Certainly, there are situations where the best interest of the child is to place them in a safe family structure where they can be sufficiently provided for. No one, no matter how ardently they wish for reform, would say otherwise. The best interests of the child NEVER includes robbing them of their identity or knowledge of their origins. In the best of circumstances, I believe, adoptive parents are placeholders for the original parents and extended biological family until their adoptive child reaches maturity. Ideally, that child grows up with a full awareness and exposure to the personalities of their original parents.

Any parent, eventually reaches a point in the maturing of their child, when it is time to allow that child to be totally independent in their life choices, even if they continue to live with their parents and be financially supported by them. It is a gradual process for most of us and some of us are never 100% separated from our parents until they die. Then, regardless, we must be able to stand on our own two feet, live from our own values and make of the life that our parents – whether it was one set with a mother and a father or two sets of mothers and fathers (whether by adoption or due to divorce) – made possible for us as human beings. I do try not to judge but I do try to remain authentic in my own perspectives, values and beliefs. Those I share as honestly as I can in this blog with as much humility as I have the growth and self-development to embody.

Michael and Robert Rosenberg

Anne Meeropol, adoptive mother of Robert and Michael Rosenberg

Ethel Rosenberg was a 37 yr old mother when she became the first and only woman ever executed for espionage in the United States. Her sons were only 3 and 7 yrs old when their parents were arrested. They were 6 and 10, when their parents were executed. Now mature men, Michael and Robert took their adoptive parents’ surname (for obvious reasons).

It would appear that their mother was scapegoated and treated very unfairly. The prosecution laid all of the blame on her as the older spouse. Ethel’s younger brother, David Greenglass, had been arrested first for that same crime of espionage. A month after her husband, Julius was arrested on July 17 1950, Ethel was seized by the FBI and charged. She called Michael at home and told him that she, like his father, had been arrested.

“So you can’t come home?” he asked.

“No,” she replied.

The seven-year-old screamed.

Historian Anne Sebba (author of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy) likes writing about women who have been misunderstood and she says, few have been more misunderstood than Ethel Rosenberg. Her brother, David Greenglass had briefly worked as a machinist at Los Alamos. He was arrested as a link in the chain of persons passing secrets about atomic technology on to the Soviets. David quickly admitted his guilt. His lawyer advised him that the best thing he could do for himself (and to give his wife immunity) would be to turn someone else in. And actually, it was his wife, Ruth Greenglass, who said that Ethel had typed up the information David had given Julius to pass on to the Soviets. David then changed his story the week before his trial to corroborate his wife’s version.

Michael and Robert never saw the Greenglasses again after the trial. Robert says that when he thinks of his family before his parents were arrested – he has, “this feeling of a golden age, of a wonderful loving family before it was ripped apart.” Ethel Rosenberg was a particularly devoted mother, with a progressive interest in child psychology. Though at first the boys were sent to live with Ethel’s mother Tessie, she resented the situation. So the boys were sent to a children’s home. Julius’s mother Sophie tried to rescue them but she was too frail to handle young boys.

On June 16 1953, the children were brought to Sing Sing prison in New York State to say goodbye to their parents. Ethel kept up her usual brave appearance, but on this occasion Michael – who was 10 yrs old by that time understood what was happening. Her outward calm upset him. Afterwards, Ethel wrote a letter to her children: “Maybe you thought that I didn’t feel like crying when we were hugging and kissing goodbye huh… Darlings, that would have been so easy, far too easy on myself… because I love you more than I love myself and because I knew you needed that love far more than I needed the relief of crying.”

Because no extended family was willing to look after the boys, they were eventually adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, an older leftwing couple. They could finally grow up in anonymity among loving people who told them their parents had been brave and admirable. On this Juneteenth, it is interesting to know that Abel Meeropol wrote the civil rights era song Strange Fruit. The boys enjoyed a happy, academic, leftwing upbringing as Meeropols. They told almost no one their real surname, and Robert, who was a toddler when his parents were imprisoned, never considered reverting to it. It was more complicated for Michael, who could remember playing ball games with his father in their apartment.

In 1973, local media unmasked the boys’ identity, ignoring pleas to respect their anonymity. The boys then wrote their memoir, We Are Your Sons. They sued the FBI and CIA under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained more than 300,000 pages of once secret documents. In 1995, the Venona papers were declassified. These were messages sent between Soviet intelligence agencies that had been intercepted and decrypted by US counterintelligence from 1943 to 1980. It is clear that Julius Rosenberg and the Greenglasses were definitely spying for the Soviets. There was very little about Ethel. She didn’t have a codename like Julius and the Greenglasses. She was simply “a devoted person” (ie a communist) but it was stressed that “[she] does not work” (ie she was not a spy). With these, the boys began to believe in their mother’s innocence.

The boys realized reading the Venona transcript that Julius and Ethel didn’t do the thing they were executed for. Ethel didn’t work for the Soviets and Julius wasn’t an atomic spy but more accurately a military-industrial spy. Although Julius passed on weapon details, he wasn’t passing on details about the atomic bomb. Morton Sobell – who had been convicted for espionage along with the Rosenbergs, served 18 years in Alcatraz – eventually he gave an interview to the New York Times. He said that he and Julius had been spies together, and confirmed that Julius had not helped the Russians build the bomb. “What he gave them was junk,” Sobell said of Julius, probably because he didn’t know anything about the bomb. Of Ethel, Sobell said, “She knew what he was doing, but what was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.”

In 1996, David Greenglass finally admitted he lied about his sister: “I told them the story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar? My wife is my wife. I mean, I don’t sleep with my sister, you know. I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.”

Robert launched a campaign for Ethel’s exoneration in 2015 – not for a pardon, because that would suggest she had done something wrong, but a full exoneration. Anne Sebba says, “I think she just had other concerns: she was looking after her children and trying to be present for them. She gave up activism when her children were born. Her main identity was as a wife and a mother, and that’s what mattered to her.” In 2019, Michael’s daughter, Ivy, made a documentary about Roy Cohn, who was the prosecutor of the Rosenbergs. In Bully Coward Victim, she made the connection between her grandparents’ execution and Trump.

“There’s a very binary idea of the political world, in which people are guilty or innocent, right or wrong. But understanding nuance is essential to understanding how politics work and how society works,” says Robert. He is hoping that President Biden will look at exonerating Ethel favorably. “That the US government invented evidence to obtain a conviction and an execution is a threat to every person in this country, and to not expose that is to become complicit in it. The personal stuff is obvious, but the political stuff is equally powerful,” Robert says.

Anne Sebba finds the two sons delightful to talk to: wildly intelligent, always interesting, completely admirable. She wonders how on earth did they triumph over such a traumatic childhood? Sebba says the two men have an extraordinarily high level of intelligence. Second, she finds that they had amazing adoptive parents. And now knowing how important those early years of life are, she believes Ethel must have given those two boys so much in the few years she had with them, enough to last all their lives. She believes that Ethel must have been an extremely good mother.

I love history and found this story fascinating and in that it intersects with adoption made it irresistible for me to share with you today in my blog. The much longer story, from which this blog was excerpted, can be read here in The Guardian by Hadley Freeman, The Rosenbergs were executed for spying in 1953. Can their sons reveal the truth?