Secrets

Reflecting on another blog I wrote several years ago, I see how it applies to this one. I believe also that those that have something to hide from other people will divert one’s attention away from that secret anyway. However there is a current of support for truth in Life that will “out” what should or needs to be known. That is why secrets can’t be “kept”. Secrets are the answer to the question and the answer will out itself because a secret usually does not exist for any good reason. For some people it is only in the seeking for answers to questions deep within them that they have the courage to go on living. It is as though the impossibility of finding an answer is itself a motivation that keeps them keeping on in vitally alive ways.

Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote – “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

My mom had questions about how she ended up adopted because she did know that the Tennessee Children’s Home Society was the agency and that her conveyance to her adoptive parents occurred in Memphis. In fact, growing up we all believed she had been born in Memphis. At some point, she learned she had been born in Richmond VA. This puzzled her. How could she have been born there but then adopted as an infant at Memphis ? She had heard about the Georgia Tann scandal when it broke in 1950 and she was still a school girl. She worried then that she might have been a victim and her adoptive mother, while admitting that her adoption had taken place through that agency, said my mom was not “one of those” babies.

Life moved on. My mother gave birth three times, each time to girl babies. But the questions never really went away for her. Then in the 1990s, awareness of the Georgia Tann scandal hit the national consciousness 40 years later with features on 60 Minutes and on Oprah facilitating reunions between separated mothers and their children. My mom learned about Denny Glad in the 60 Minutes broadcast and did speak with her, learned some minimal information and received some advice. So, my mom requested her adoption file from the state of Tennessee. Sadly, this was premature in the sense that her inquiry occurred before the state was forced to open it’s files for the victims of Georgia Tann. They did offer to ask my mom’s original parents if they were okay with her receiving her file.

Sadly, they informed her that her mother had died several years before devastating my mom’s desire to let her mother that she was okay. As a mother herself, my mom felt her mother would want to know. She also had a mysterious health condition and no family medical history to assist in revealing whether this was genetic and even what the condition might actually be as a diagnosis was proving hard to come by.

The state had promised to make every effort to contact my mom’s parents. They did not. They only sent a minimal inquiry to the Arkansas Driver’s License Bureau to determine if my grandfather had a current Arkansas license. They replied “no record”. Of course they had no record. He had been dead for 30 years. They could have checked the Social Security Death Index but they never tried. This really vexed my mom (not that she knew he was dead but he was much older than her mother – my mom did know that much) because they denied her the adoption file on the basis that they were not able to determine whether he was alive or dead.

It is really a shame – these secrets that adoption has forced on it’s victims. Seeing her adoption file would have answered at least some of my mom’s questions. The question I can’t answer (since I now do have her adoption file) is why her father left her mother when she was 4 months pregnant because they were legally wed. I have to live with that question unanswered because there is no one alive who could answer it for me.

A Sad Holiday

For many adoptees, Mother’s Day is a complicated holiday. For many children in Foster Care it is the pits of unhappy reminders.

All my life, Mother’s Day has been a happy one. When we were young, we made my mom breakfast in bed. When I had my oldest son in 2001, that next Spring during the month of May in celebration of Mother’s Day, I began a family tradition of taking my children out among the Wild Azaleas that are at the peak of their annual blooming for “see how you grow” photos. It is cherished by me that we have not missed a single year with my oldest son now 19 years old.

Truth be told, it was my mom’s adoptive mother who started the tradition. She had grown up in Missouri. Her childhood location is some distance to the west but is very similar in rural wildness to where I live. One year she came to visit me before our sons were born and I took her on hikes around our farm. She cherished the experience because it brought back memories of her own childhood in Missouri.

When she learned the Azaleas were blooming, one morning she dressed up (though she was always fully dressed with jewelry and make-up before breakfast). She chose a pink blouse to wear and a spot to sit framed by the Azaleas blooming all around her. Later during that visit, she took me to see her own childhood home and I was surprised to see her farmhouse was very much like our own. We were fortunate because the owner of that house allowed us to go inside and my grandmother shared with me what remained the same and what had changed over time.

As an adoptee, my mom yearned to have a reunion with her own mother. She knew that Georgia Tann played a prominent role in her own adoption story. When news of the scandal resurfaced in the early 1990s, she contacted Denny Glad who lived in Memphis and helped the victims of Georgia Tann’s questionable adoption methods. My mom learned about her from watching a 60 Minutes special about the scandal that had aired on TV around that time.

Adoption records were still sealed in Tennessee as my mom tried without success to learn about her origins. Devastating news was delivered to my mom that her mother had died several years earlier and they would not release her adoption file because the status of her father, twenty years my grandmother’s age, could not be determined (in truth he had been dead 30 years but the state didn’t try very hard at all).

Mrs Glad was instrumental in getting adoption records opened late in the 1990s for Tann’s victims but no one ever told my mom. My mom died believing she had been stolen based on anecdotal stories she read or heard. That wasn’t far from the truth but in reality Tann’s network of suppliers made her aware of my mom and my grandmother, through only the best motivations of a caring mom, got trapped.

Since my mom was deceased before I began to learn so much about adoption overall, I can’t ask her the questions that weigh heavily on my own heart about how she honestly felt about a lot of the issues related to her adoption. She didn’t speak about it to anyone else in our family beyond acknowledging that she had been adopted. That is, except with me and with me her feelings about it were definitely conflicted.

The Loss Of What Could Have Been

In the early 1990s, the Georgia Tann baby stealing and scandal re-emerged into the national consciousness. She had been dead 40 years and narrowly escaped criminal charges when the complications of cancer took their toll.

60 Minutes did a feature on the scandal. They introduced a woman named Denny Glad who lived in the Memphis Tennessee area and was doing her best to assist Tann’s victims in relocating the families they had been taken from. At this time, adoption records were closed and firmly sealed behind the power of the state and kept from even adult adoptees. My mom did reach out to Mrs Glad and was only able to receive some minimal information which was still more than she had before.

My mom took the next step and contacted the state. They promised to do everything in their power to locate the parents my mom had been born to. It was a lie. There was definitely bureaucratic laziness in their less than motivated efforts. My mom’s father was 20 years older than my mom’s mother when they married. He had been dead 30 years at the time my mom made her effort to get her adoption file.

All the state did was inquire of the Arkansas Driver’s License about his status. In the adoption file, it is indicated that he signed a separate set of surrender papers after a sheriff showed up at his mother’s home in Beech Grove Arkansas with those papers along with a subpoena to Juvenile Court in Memphis for the very next day – not much time to prepare – and anyway, I’m certain he was told the mother had already signed these and if he did too, he would not have to appear in court.

Had the state of Tennessee confirmed he was no longer living when my mom inquired, she would have been given her file. She had at least 2 uncles and 2 aunts still living on her mother’s side and half-siblings on her father’s side.

My mom was devastated when the state of Tennessee told her that the woman who gave birth to her had died several years earlier. It ended her hopes and dreams. My mom was never told when the state of Tennessee decided to release the adoption files to victims or their immediate descendants in the late 1990s. Thanks to that change in the law, I finally received her adoption file in October of 2017.

The Right To Know

Denny Glad

My mom learned about Denny Glad when 60 Minutes did an expose in the early 1990s on the baby stealing and selling scandal related to the activities of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society’s (TCHS) Memphis Branch under the control of Georgia Tann. My mom was adopted through that agency in 1937.

Denny was able to give my mom a tiny bit of personal information and suggested she request her adoption records from the state of Tennessee, who rejected her because the living or dead status of her original father could not be determined (who by the way had been dead for 30 years). They didn’t try very hard.

It is thanks to the efforts of Denny Glad and her Right to Know organization in Tennessee that I now possess an extensive adoption file for my mom, with notes and letters from both her original mother and her adoptive mother as well as lots of insight into the operations of the TCHS in her particular situation.

Only about half of our 50 states allow any kind of access to once sealed records even today. I have bumped up against solid obstacles in Arizona, California and Virginia. Thankfully, inexpensive DNA testing and the matching sites – Ancestry and 23 and Me – have filled in the blanks, where the practices in half our 50 states would have prevented me from achieving success.

I would have thought, with both of my adoptee parents deceased and all of the grandparents (original and adoptive) also deceased, there would be no harm in myself as a descendant finally knowing the truth of my own origins. A fact many people simply take for granted.