It may be rough going but it is OK to ask for help. Today’s story –
When I was first pregnant, I was terrified and reached out to an adoption agency! I just turned 20 weeks (today) and have mostly changed my mind but still unsure.
Today, the adoption coordinator has been harassing me! It’s been a few weeks since I have decided to reach out but I haven’t felt the need, have been busy working (I work 3 jobs to save up for birth, etc) and also need space! I also HAVEN’T signed anything. Today, she sent me a text, had the prospective Mom send me a text, called and sent an email. I’m feeling a little trapped at the moment, already feel guilty.
I have most things ironed out, other than my living situation and expectations and arrangements with the dad (we’re not together and he was emotionally abusive when together) which also weighs on why I don’t have a solid decision yet.
Some encouragement from someone who has been there and made it work –
I was homeless and moved 4 times while pregnant and 3 times since having my son – I was a waitress during Covid (he was born in 2021) and my hours were very low/tips were bad. We had a 1 room basement bachelor apartment. I didn’t have a car until I was over 20 weeks along.
We managed to make it. He is 2 now and thriving with me. I do think that a lot of people, had they known the extent of my situation, would’ve absolutely pressured me to put him up for adoption or called Child Protective Services on us. But I was determined to be his mom.
A lot of my success was due to the kindness of other people – who passed down hand me downs, baby clothing, furniture, etc. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and accept free stuff.
I’m in Kansas. From age 2 to 18 I was in and out of the foster system. I aged out 4/27/2022, 11 days after my 18th birthday. The state aged me out and left me with nothing. I stayed living with my kinship placement for awhile. The night before graduation she kicked me out and the day of graduation texted me telling me she expected me to come home and get ready for graduation. She kicked me out again, after I told her I was taking a semester off before starting college. I spent the hottest part of summer homeless and couch surfing. I came back to her house 9/21/2022 and it’s been rocky. She continuously threatens to kick me out, which would be fine but I have nowhere to go. I have a Div of Child and Family Services worker at the moment, who is somewhat helping me out but she is hard to get ahold of. I am currently working as a server and about to become a manager as well as starting college this month. I don’t have many options right now and don’t really know what to do.
One adoptee offered this advice (which I agree with) – Don’t go back to that house. And honestly if u make more as a server don’t take the management position unless it’s more money. I’ve only taken lead server roles where I made more hourly and got to keep my tips also. Look on LINK>Roomster – it’s an app for roommates. That way you can at least get a room of your own. While you work on yourself. And it turns out that the management position is $2 more than what she is making now. And if she get tips while being a manager, she gets to keep them.
Since she indicated transportation issues, one person suggested that in some states, the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation will provide Driver’s Education classes for people who need to be able to drive themselves to and from job searches/work. She wrote back – I passed the driver’s education class, but had to be medically cleared. By the time I was finally medically cleared I had to retake to test and haven’t been able to.
Re: the housing issues, after someone suggested Catholic Charities (and talking to an advisor at the college about what might be available to share), she adds – “I did have rapid rehousing with Catholic Charities but when I worked at Amazon, I lost it because I made too much.”
And I didn’t realize Reddit could be helpful – there was this – Reddit is more anonymous and you can post on your local sub (probably r/”city name” as well as r/assistance, r/almost homeless, r/ex_foster and r/fosterit.) Your college might also have some resource suggestions, google “college name” + “counseling department.” Assuming you’re in the US, call 211 as well.
I rented rooms in apartments and houses from age 19-28 with roommates I found off of Craigslist, despite it’s bad rap. Many rooms do not require a credit score (I moved countries once, and credit scores don’t transfer.)
Also look up YMCA Host Homes to see if that’s a thing in your city, it’s a small program but could be an option.
All this, just to give you an idea of what these young people are up against. There is much more and I am hopeful that somehow my group which is so resourceful will be able to help this young woman somehow.
Though the podcast has been live since Feb 6th, I was only able to finish listening to my interview yesterday. I had gotten through the first 41 mins previously. Life is busy and it is long and so I do forgive anyone who doesn’t want to listen to me talk about my experience of being the child of two adoptees for an hour and a half approx. Though my satellite quality of transmission is inconsistent, it seemed to me that somehow the audio zoom file was able not to lose words but after a disruption continued where it would have been anyway. I am happy to say I was not embarrassed when I listened to it. Though most listeners would not notice my only big blub – giving the wrong part of my dad’s birth name as it relates to his father’s actual name – I can accept that as mistakes go, it wasn’t significant to the quality of listening to my interview by Ande Stanley of The Adoption Files.
For those who don’t want to listen to such a long interview, I’ll try to hit on the key or more significant points.
Though both of my parents were mid-1930s adoptees, their individual responses to having been adopted could not have been different. My mom always felt like her adoption had been, in her effort to be polite, inappropriate. She knew a bit about Georgia Tann and from what she knew and from a weird quirk in what she did NOT know (having been born in Virginia but having been adopted still technically an infant in the first year of her life from Memphis TN, how did she get there ?) she had crafted a story to explain what she was never going to be allowed to know.
I say that because she did try to get her adoption file in the early 1990s from the state of Tennessee who rejected both her initial and subsequent appeal because they could not determine the status of alive or dead for her father (who had actually been dead for 30 years by that time). Basically for $180 dollars she had the privilege of being told the mother she sincerely wish to reassure as to her outcome as an adopted child had been dead for several years. It broke her heart.
No one ever informed her that just a few years later, by the end of the 1990s, she would have been given her adoption file as Tennessee changed the law of closed and sealed adoption records for the victims of Georgia Tann (who bought and sold babies for 30 years). That is why for less money ($150) I received over 100 pages of her adoption file (which thankfully was intact though minimally inaccurate – deliberately) plus 4 black and white negatives of photos taken the last time my maternal grandmother held her baby.
Had my mom been given her adoption file, it would have cleared up misunderstandings caused by a lack of information and given her a lot of peace. She would have seen how hard her original mother fought to keep her and the obstacles against her. She would have seen how over the moon her adoptive mother was to have received her (though in life they had a difficult relationship). Though not stolen, her mother had been exploited. More importantly, my mom could have reconnected with her genetic, biological family and learned a lot of first hand impressions and lived experience regarding both of her parents.
Closed, sealed adoption records continue to be an issue that turns adoptees into second class citizens in these United States. I encountered this in Virginia, Arizona and California. I believe the main impediment is money – who has it and who stands to gain from keeping adoptees from their own valuable personal information. These parties are the adoptive parents, the adoption agencies and the legal system including adoption attorneys. They are the ones with the money to hire lobbyists to impress upon legislators the need to keep secret adoptees records. It is a big money business.
My dad was never interested in knowing his origins. I tend to believe he was afraid of what he would find out as he didn’t much like my mom searching and warned her against opening a can of worms. For $100, the Salvation Army gave me one paragraph of information, which even so gave me something important – my dad’s full name at birth and that the Salvation Army had hired and transferred my paternal grandmother from Ocean Beach CA (near San Diego) to El Paso TX with my dad in tow. I do believe they coerced her into giving him up. They had legal custody at the time he was adopted. Also, my dad was adopted twice due to his adoptive mother’s divorce and remarriage. Therefore, he experienced a name change at the age of 8 (he also was originally adopted as a infant less than one year of age).
The aspect of my story that seemed to interest Ande the most was how being the child of adoptees had affected me personally. Adoption does not only affect the adoptee but their children as well and even more so when both of the parents are adoptees. There was only a black hole of familial and medical history information beyond my two parents. Just as my mom had made up a story of being stolen from the hospital in which she was born and transported to Memphis, I had made up a story that my dad was left in a basket on the doorstep of the Salvation Army in El Paso TX by an unwed Mexican national mother because her child was mixed race with a white American father.
I readily admit that I got lucky in my own attempt to learn the truth of my parents’ adoptions. Nothing we believed due to our lack of true information has proven to be true but the truth is definitely preferable. Not all efforts at learning an adoptee’s origins are as productive or end as happily as mine with acceptance by my genetic biological relations. Persistence and determination are important. And getting one’s DNA tested can make all the difference. I had mine tested at both Ancestry and 23 and Me. Also noted in the interview however, without actual names, just finding DNA matches does not yield very much useful information as my own story shows.
My Origin Story. Certainly, discovering that has been true for me as I learned about my adopted parents origins and meeting biological, genetically related family for the first time at well over 60 years old. Learning this became more real than anything else that I had previously believed about my life. And this had indeed changed my focus as far as writing goes.
Before I chose to be born of these parents, I must have known they were both adoptees and that they had been separated from the parents who conceived them. This then really is my origin story. This became the north star of my day, constantly pulling me and allowing me to bring this eternal something into time.
I know not all attempts at a reunion for people impacted by adoption turn into happily ever after stories. Mine didn’t really. I mean it didn’t turn into relationships with a lot of substance but they were real ones – after living a deception really – all my life.
If you embark on this quest, you will see there are these little, tiny moments along the course of your lifetime that have allowed you to see beyond the story you could not know before. It impresses upon you all the time and encroaches upon your awareness. It is the real reality and while these may seem like little tiny moments, they are not really little. Fall in love with these moments. Yes, a part of you will probably be nervous about how you will be received. That’s not the truth of what your quest is really about, even if it seems that way. These moments of touching your origin story, will guide your steps, your thoughts, your conversations, your deeds and you will bring into everything you are doing, this love, beauty and intelligence that is seeking to move you to your goal.
Notice when suddenly, grace appears.
I was always interested in knowing where my parents actually did come from. Then, one day, my cousin called to tell me that she had obtained her father’s (my uncle, my mom’s brother) adoption file. This was something I had long wanted to do regarding my mom, who had been denied her own adoption file when she was seeking that. Now, I knew that it was possible.
So, suddenly, something happens and the wall is gone and regardless of how it actually turns out okay you are still here, okay, and still alive with a wholeness you lacked before. It was that moment when I knew that I had achieved this goal.
If you embark on this journey, you will have to do something but an energy will also be pulling you forward. You will find that the obstacles, hindrances, and the obstructions you thought were there, actually have no power over you. With persistence and determination, you will get where you are hoping to go.
The vision of becoming whole becomes more real than the circumstances you knew before you began. I know. I didn’t expect that to happen to me but it did. While I still love the people who played the role of grandparents in my life until they died, when I think of “my” grandparents now, I think of those people (and the people they came from and the people who have come from them) as my “real” family. Even if I lack that lifetime of experiences with them.
I’m not personally in favor of either international nor transracial adoptions and I really have no right to an opinion on either but I do realize they are both fraught with complexities that no one should enter into unaware.
Adoptees are not a monolithic variety of human being. They differ as much as any individuals do. Jillian Lauren is both an adult adoptee and an adoptive mother. With her husband, Scott Shriner, the couple adopted an Ethiopian boy.
She says that she does not love adoption because it is one long Disney happy ending. She loves adoption for the way its struggles have defined her life and made her strong. This is a realistic perspective.
Here’s her adoptee story –
My story began with my unwed birthmother stranded alone in a snow-blanketed Chicago, feeling terrified and foolish. Across the country, my soon-to-be-mother had cried herself to sleep in her West Orange, New Jersey apartment every night for years, longing for a child. A deal was struck, a baby passed from one set of hands to another. I was adopted just barely before the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973. My mother says she did not once put me down during the entire trip home.
To be so unwanted and so wanted at the same time can carve a fault line in you.
She admits that at one time, her perspective on adoption was similar to what Laura Barcella once wrote – “Being forsaken by my biological mother has burdened me, for as long as I can remember, with a sense of inborn exile — a gaping hole where my identity should be.”
Indeed, adoption does not give any one who has been adopted a life that is always comfortable or easy.
Jillian Lauren goes on to describe what it has been like with her adopted son’s profound anxiety and fear. It is derived from having survived malnutrition, illness and unimaginable loss in his first year of life. For almost the entirety of his first three years with the couple – he ate little, slept less and had violent tantrums roughly 10 times a day. Lauren admits that during this time, he often bit her until she bled.
Adoption is a narrative that begins with loss and definitely trauma.
She shares that through the trials with her son of the past few years, she has come to understand herself as selfish, vain, petulant and unequal to the task of mothering. To be certain, she has also found resiliency, determination and resourcefulness.
Each person grows through their challenges. The good and the bad both have qualities that can serve our ongoing journeys.
I understand this as the child of two adoptees. The adoptions for both of my parents were closed and my parents both died knowing very little about their origins or the details behind why they ended up adopted. Since their deaths, I have been able to recover a lot of my rightful family history. I now know of genetic relatives for each of the four grandparents. It has been quite a journey. It wasn’t easy (though maybe easier for me due to our unique circumstances than for many) and it required persistence and determination to see it through.
Certainly DNA testing and the two major matching sites – Ancestry as well as 23 and Me – were instrumental to my success. Since the genetic relations I was coming into first contact with had no prior knowledge of me and I am well over 60 years old, seeing the DNA truth that I was related to them, I believe it mattered. It is hard to refute when it is right there clear and certain.
My mom had four living half-siblings on her father’s side when she was born. One died young of a sudden heart failure. I barely missed getting to meet my mom’s youngest half-sister by only a few months. I was lucky to connect with her daughter who had all of her mom’s photo albums and possession of a lot of family history, including written accounts. One afternoon with her and I felt like I had lived my Moore family’s history. The family photos I now have digital copies of are precious treasures.
Though my Stark family was the first I became aware of and within a month, I had visited the graves of my grandmother and her parents east of Memphis in Eads Tennessee, those living descendants were the last I finally made a good strong connection with. The reality is that I simply can’t recover 6 decades of not living with the usual family interactions with my true genetic relatives. All I can do is try and build relationships with whatever time each of us has left. The personal memories of my grandmother that my mom’s cousins possessed (she was our favorite aunt, they said) made her come alive for me.
The Salvation Army was somewhat forthcoming with information about my father’s birth at one of their homes for unwed mothers in the San Diego California area just walking distance from the beach and ocean. They were able to give me my father’s full name and the missing piece of how he got from San Diego to El Paso Texas where he was ultimately adopted. Once I knew my grandmother’s first married name (born Hempstead including my dad, later Barnes, Timm at death) and a cousin did 23 and Me, my discoveries were off and running. Her mother, my dad’s youngest half-sibling, was living only 90 miles away from him when he died. Mores the pity.
I thought I’d never know who my dad’s father was since his mother was unwed but the next cousin I met who I share a grandmother with had her photo albums and she left us a breadcrumb. Clearly she had no doubt who my dad’s father was. His father, Rasmus Martin Hansen, was an immigrant, not yet a citizen, and married to a much older woman. So, he probably never knew he was a father and that’s a pity because I do believe my dad and his dad would have been great friends.
I now also have contact with my Danish grandfather’s genetic relatives. If it had not been for the pandemic, they would have had their annual reunion there in Denmark. I haven’t heard but I would not be surprised to know it is postponed. My relative (who I share a great-grandfather with – my dad being the only child of my grandfather) planned to make the Danish relatives aware of me.
To anyone who thinks not knowing who your true relatives are – if the adoptions were more or less good enough, happy enough and loving enough – I am here to tell you that not knowing anything about your family (including medical history) and being cut off from the people you are actually genetically related to DOES matter. Adoption records should be UNSEALED for ALL adult adoptees at their request. Sadly over half of these United States still withhold that information. I know from experience as I encountered this problem in Virginia, Arizona and California. If my mom’s adoption had not been connected to the Georgia Tann, Tennessee Children’s Home Society baby stealing and selling scandal, I would not have gotten my first breakthrough.
It is a story as old as humanity. The rebirth through time of the species. Every child spends time in its mother’s womb. Every child carries the seeds of its father. Every human being is precious.
Sadly, many children are born into humble beginnings. Just as the old Christmas story tells us of the struggles of the young family who give birth in a stable for animals because there was no room for them at the inn.
All of us who live have reason to be grateful. No one promised us a rose garden on being birthed into physicality but many many humans have proven to us that anyone with enough persistence and determination can change the circumstances of their life.
When times are exceedingly difficult, we can be comforted with knowing that change is constant. When times are abundantly good for us, we should remember that this too is likely to pass into something else.
Christmas Eve is a time when the whole world hopes for peace, goodwill towards men. However you celebrate and whether you celebrate or not, may your holidays be blessed with warmth, loving souls around you and harmony for at least some few moments so that you too know that it is possible.
Missing Mom 