Without Us

It is difficult being a woman. It is difficult being a mother. It is difficult being a wife, a daughter or a sister. Sometimes it is difficult having women friends. Today is International Women’s Day.

I was in a difficult romantic relationship with a dangerous man. He lived in dangerous ways and he was dangerous for my own self to be with. More than once he physically hit me. I’m not denying that my own behavior may have pushed him over the edge those times but I also know that whatever holds a man back from harming a woman, if he is able to break through that barrier even once, the risk then exists that it will be easier for him to go through that same barrier the next time. So eventually I left his physical presence. I planned my leaving carefully to be able to safely go. I saved money from what was allotted to me for groceries by buying wisely over a long period of time and I left without saying goodbye. After I was safely at a distance, I notified him that I wasn’t coming back.

It took that courage of leaving to put me into alignment with meeting my husband, so I could live in this deeply nourishing place where I feel very safe and am contented. And it took other actions too, like being brave enough to place a personal ad in a weekly entertainment newspaper in St Louis, without which I would have never come in contact with the man I married a little over a year later. Traveling through life is a lot like being in a car where I always know that I can never actually get truly “lost”. All roads eventually go somewhere and one can always backtrack and find a “somewhere” that we recognize. Leaving can be like backtracking to where you were comfortably confident in your own self, after the damage an abusive relationship can inflict upon a person. I know that all experiences – the good and the bad – end up somewhere else eventually. In that there is a great deal of comfort and a real confidence for living through it all.

My family supports the regional women and children’s shelter. They support women and their children to survive domestic violence and end up in a better place. They help keep mothers and their children together. If you have the opportunity to do anything that will keep a mother together with her children, please consider doing so. The future of our humanity depends on us being here.

What Makes It Matter ?

My husband said to me yesterday that even though he did years of research and knows a lot about his lineage, his ancestors don’t really matter all that much to him. I would hasten to add he only ever cared about the paternal line that carries the surname. I find it interesting that I focus on my maternal line. Maybe it is a gender difference. I don’t really know.

However, this is how I answered him. You always knew you could know if you wanted to. Nothing was kept un-accessible to you. With adoption, we know that we don’t know. There is a void we can’t get beyond. I think it is the knowledge that we should be able to know that hurts us. I told him that most people have the right to know their origins but adoptees are treated like 2nd class citizens with rights removed from them. I continue to believe this is very wrong.

A friend recently made a starting discovery that her assumed father was not her real father and yesterday she had an interesting discussion on her page. She shared – “When I was two weeks old I came out of the body and saw the man I was told was my father – and I didn’t like him! I saw the back of his head and I asked, ‘who is this man?’ That was right after I asked, ‘how am I thinking with an adult consciousness at two weeks old?’ ….and for all my life I kept bringing up the fact that it is strange you have to ‘learn’ who your father is.”

The discussion entered a decidedly metaphysical perspective that I do not disagree with. She went on to admit – “This long-term frustration sometimes eats at you. You HAVE to find the right place for all that has taken place. By working with the truth you put yourself at least back in line with truth. And even though you missed out on what YOU might have chosen, you feel back in line with it.”

A commentor on that thread said, “We sell babies (our most valuable and precious treasures) away to complete strangers! And people cheer for this and view it as a proper solution. Imagine the trauma of that infant (yes, with an “adult consciousness”) trying to work out the confusion of the lost mother? The lost voice and heartbeat and body rhythm and smell that he or she knew as THEIR OWN? And of course we know our fathers as intimately too! What a missing to be deprived of that!”

This is the inconvenient truth – adoption is SELLING babies.

She added, “Our family bonds are strong, eternal and unbreakable. We are linked in a timeless and beautiful way. I desire a society that KNOWS this. Honors this. Teaches this. Pregnancy and birth is not to be feared or hated. At the moment we live in an opposite world that is deeply out of alignment. It breaks my heart.”

There was more in that discussion, such thoughts as –

I come back to bloodline. It goes further back than your “father” or your “mother,” there are ancestors probably checking on you. You belong to a line of people – so I believe. There are things in the blood. You do have a different intelligence and inclinations according to what family you are born from. It is plain to me that your heritage is what you are and a deep and significant part of who you are. Knowing what is natural to you, what is making you you, what you can draw on, what is TRUE to your origins does matter.

Serious irreparable psychological damage could be done to a child / adult if they don’t know for certain who their biological father or mother is. What’s the first thing adopted kids do when they discover they’ve been adopted. They try to hunt down their biological parentage. It’s like a instinctual drive. People seek out their biological parents to iron out and get the real story, make a picture that is TRUE, creating images where there is a blank. and I think there can be hopes to heal.

What most stands out to me is how little EVERYONE cares about the child itself. The child’s reality and truth. People seem to think they can draw whatever they want on the child and do what they wish and that child will simply accept it. Babies and young children are NOT a blank slate.

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.

Questioning A Choice

There was a woman in my mom’s group that I became close to. We were all undergoing assisted reproductive methods of varying degrees and gave birth to our children during a four month period in 2004.

This woman was not typical in our group. She was actively being treated for cancer and used a surrogate to conceive and birth the boy/girl twins she left as a legacy for her husband. She was anxious about having to wear a head covering to hide her hair loss in the delivery room.

It came to pass that she died when the twins were about two years old. The couple bought a house directly across the street from the one the twins lived in to buffer them from some of the most distressing aspects of her dying.

It is fair to ask – What does it mean to create new life when one parent is dying?

The reality is that there are countless parents who don’t live to see their children grow up, but most of those tales involve unforeseen tragedy. Among my own acquaintances two other women have died of the complications of cancer after giving birth to children that are left to their husbands to raise.

In the face of a certain ending, some couples chose to create a beginning. The number of people who confront this exact extraordinary convergence of birth and death is small enough that no one knows precisely how many are out there. There are outliers facing terminal illness who have forged ahead with plans to have children.

Perhaps I know more of them than most people do. Because of my own circumstances of conception and the circumstances of my parents’ conceptions that ended their parental relationships by their becoming adopted, I have developed a different philosophical view that also does not deny a woman’s right to choose.

That right is very broad in my own perspective – not only to choose to conceive by whatever method is available to any individual woman but to choose not to carry a pregnancy she doesn’t want to invest herself in. It is a brave new world and the rules are changing.

What Defines A Mother ?

Yesterday, sitting in the waiting room of our auto mechanic with an elderly woman, somehow the subject of our children came up. She seemed shocked to hear I gave birth to my youngest son at the age of 50. Honesty demands that I always admit that I needed medical assistance to do that and rarely do I feel that it is anyone else’s business as to exactly what that admission means.

Yet, as I contemplated writing my essay for today, I felt that I needed to be honest about the fact that my sons are donor assisted conceptions. We have faced the issue directly this year with 23 and Me DNA kits for each of our teenage sons. I knew that our egg donor had hers done and it is remarkable how close we are at the genetic level – as to cultural heritage and our maternal haplogroup – without actually being related at all.

I also gifted my husband with a 23 and Me kit over a year ago and then, knowing that the honest truth must be admitted to (though we have never hidden the unique details of our sons’ conception from them and told them their story at a level they could understand at a young age, as well as have taken them to meet their donor on more than one occasion) my sons were finally old enough and mature enough to get a more detailed understanding of what makes them special.

It is difficult for me as the woman who carried these boys in my womb and nursed them at my breast for over a year to see another woman listed as their genetic mother but that is the truth of the situation at a genetic level. It was my OB, who first made us aware of the possibility of conceiving the children my husband decided he wanted after 10 years of marriage, and we had tried and we even failed to jumpstart my very last egg with a hormonal injection, who then said – “there is another way.” It was either end a good marriage so my husband could marry a younger woman or take a leap and do something slightly unconventional.

My older son has not expressed what his feelings are about the situation. He was contacted by a relative of the donor at 23 and Me. I advised him to tell her to ask the donor about it. My younger son seemed disappointed to learn that he doesn’t have any of my DNA. My OB once explained to me, how much the gestating mother contributes to the development of the fetus – turning on or off genes and contributing to the nutritional preferences and emotional environment.

At the time my husband and I made this choice, I didn’t know anything about the issues all adoptees contend with nor about what a separation of mother and child does to an infant. Yet, given the reality that these fine young men would not exist in any other way, I think we did the best we could to fulfill their father’s desire to have children of his own and limit any deep wounding for our sons. I am the only mother they have ever known since their procreation started. And I do have a daughter and grandchildren that are genetically, as well as biologically, related to me and so, I do understand what it was that my husband was yearning for.