Leave Those Moms Alone

I don’t know these people and they are not the point. Among the reforms I have learned about in the private Facebook group for original parents, adoptees and adoptive parents that I belong to, and one of their missions, is to support expectant mothers. One of the reforms they advocate, and I agree with, is for the prospective adoptive parents NOT to be present in the delivery room during birth nor for the first few days after the birth. The goal is for the new mother to bond with her baby and perhaps change her mind about giving the baby up for adoption.

The problem is the coercive effect of the adoptive parents’ presence on the new mother. So it is today that I read the story of a hopeful adoptive mother and the problems that have occurred at the last minute in the new mother’s intention to give her baby up. This is a teenage unwed mother who at the tender age of 15 had previously expressed a desire to go back to her pre-pregnancy life and be educated to become a nurse. She also was not living with her parents, had been raped (perhaps by a family member) and did not believe her own mother was capable of helping her parent.

Flash forward to her difficult 3-day delivery and she informs the hopeful adoptive mother that she does NOT want her there because her mom (who opposes the adoption completely) is trying to help her through it and the new mother doesn’t want drama. She gave birth and due to the C-section, she is in the hospital for longer than expected.

Well, she begins to breastfeed the baby while in hospital and of course, breastfeeding does encourage the bonding of mother and child. The result is that three days before the surrender papers are to be signed, the new mother has decided to parent. The struggles of any new mother are temporary, placement is permanent, which is the message this Facebook group attempts to convey.

The result is a very mad hopeful adoptive mother who is blaming everyone from the social worker to the hospital to hormones and drugs and the immature age of the new mother and to the new grandmother as well for losing the “perfect baby-these don’t come by often” which echoes in my own mind like the words the Tennessee Children’s Home used to describe my mom to her adoptive parents.

Lacking Permanency

After I learned who my original grandparents were (both of my parents were adopted and died knowing effectively nothing about their own familial roots), I began to learn about the impacts of adoption. I read a really good book on this subject – The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier (definitely highly recommended for anyone else who is interested in understanding). I also joined a group about adoption that is all about facing the realities. Member of the whole triad of original parents, adoptees and adoptive parents belong to this group and I have learned a lot about the issues from the diversity.

From letters written by my adoptive grandmother in the late 1930s to the Tennessee Children’s Home staff – Fanny Elrod and Georgia Tann – there are indications that my mom had been upset the whole time she was being taken by my adoptive grandmother by train from Memphis to Nogales Arizona as a 7 mos old infant and that she may have been drugged by a doctor upon arrival there to calm her down.

Though letters from my adoptive grandmother in the early years of my mom’s life indicate that she was over the moon happy with my mom as her adopted child, I know that my mom never felt she lived up to my grandmother’s high standards. I understand this personally as she was a phenomenal woman and I had my own run-ins with her opinions about me that were deeply hurtful.

My grandmother grew up not far from me in Missouri. Her mom was lazy by my grandmother’s accounts – only interested in her bible and not in her household – and both her mother and sister were fat (confirmed in photographs of the whole family together). My grandmother maintained a very trim figure all her life to match the trim figures of her sisters-in-law and worked hard at that by denying herself fattening foods to maintain her figure. She criticized me once in a public place quite loudly for taking a dinner roll and putting butter on it. I didn’t even speak to her for a whole 24 hours I was so upset.

Adoptees do not feel special because someone chose to adopt them. They always feel at risk of being rejected and abandoned all over again if they don’t live up to their adoptive parents’ expectations. For that reason they become people pleasers as my own mom definitely was. She was described very positively after she died by the people who knew her but I wonder now – at what price internally did she accomplish that high regard ?

The Baby Thief

I first read the book by Barbara Bisantz Raymond just after my dad died in 2016 but before I had my mom’s adoption file from the state of Tennessee. Yes, my mom was adopted from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society at Memphis in 1937. I only really noticed the horror stories which left me grateful about who adopted my mom and uncle.

I got that file in October 2017 and I am now thoroughly familiar with what is there. I thought, I really ought to read this book again and that is what I am currently doing. Having educated myself about adoption issues and mother/child separations now, the content is getting more attention from me at a deeper level.

My mom tried to get her file from Tennessee in the early 1990s – before the state passed legislation that would have allowed her to have it in the late 1990s. Sadly, she never knew that it became available for her but it is my gift that it has come to me. She claimed in her effort that she had been inappropriately adopted. Though her made up explanation of how she got from Virginia, where she was born, into the hands of Georgia Tann has proven to have not been the case (she wasn’t exactly “stolen”), it now appears the “inappropriately” was accurate.

It appears that my mom’s adoption violated Tennessee law at the time it occurred. In 1937, Tennessee adoption law did not allow out of state adoptions and even after it was changed, it would have been necessary to finalize such adoptions in Tennessee. My mom’s adoption was finalized in Arizona.

At the time her surrenders were signed (under threat by Georgia Tann of court action), they were supposed to be verified by a judge (though of course, since the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley was in cahoots with Tann it probably wouldn’t have changed anything). The law wasn’t changed until 1941 to simply allow notarized surrenders (which is all my mom’s parents’ surrenders had and those were notarized by – you guessed it – Georgia Tann).

And Fanny Elrod who my adoptive grandmother seems to have had the most correspondence with, allowed herself to be bullied by Georgia Tann and they were both there when my mom was placed in my adoptive grandmother’s arms.

Finally, back to 1917, child placing agencies were supposed to be licensed by the state but the Tennessee Children’s Home Society never applied for a license until after the scandal broke in 1950 and Georgia Tann was dead and the Memphis branch permanently closed.

So, my mom was right – her adoption was actually ILLEGAL for several reasons as described above.