Hard Questions

Adoption makes this true.

The questions carry a completely different weight than they did just months ago before we adopted. A place where my heart screams that he is mine forever but that same heart plummets into a deep ache knowing the gravity of loss he has already faced. The loss of the mother in whose womb he grew.

He will always know he’s adopted. I tell his story to him every night at bedtime. I ask all the normal questions.

I wonder about the day he will ask about his birth parents. Will there be a constant ringing in his ears to know them? Will he feel the guilt of reassuring us, as the adoptive parents, that the ringing has nothing to do with us?

Will I be able to honestly, deeply, and fully lock arms with him while he searches for answers?

I can wait for the hard questions but know when you start to ask, your worth is immense, your value is priceless, and I will always and forever, be right by your side.

A true story. One worth pondering if you are planning to adopt. Someday, that child will want to know where they come from and why they are not being raised by the people who conceived them.

Actually Not Related

This is the day my parents married in 1953 because my teenage mom was pregnant with me and my dad did right by her. They were both adoptees. As incredible as it may seem to the reader, it was only recently that I realized how miraculous it is that I did not end up given away and adopted.

Certainly, my mom’s adoptive parents could not have been happy about all their dashed hopes for my mom. No debutante ball, no marrying into the upper class. Instead her husband came from a humble and poor family. In spite of it all, they remained married for life, over 60 years, and died 4 months apart.

How to explain what it is like ? I chose to relocate myself to Missouri. Eventually, I would discover lots of connections to my chosen home state. Yet, they were not my own family connections, not really. There was the town in Missouri – Dittmer – founded by my mom’s adoptive father’s family. There was the town in Missouri – Eugene – founded by my mom’s adoptive mother’s family. There was the town in Illinois – Belleville – founded by my dad’s adoptive mother’s family. I could not claim any of these places had a real relationship to my family history. It is a weird black hole to spend one’s life within.

Now I really know what is important. Loss, betrayal and abandonment force us to let go of our attachments. When my parents died, I became an orphan. I also lost a close and loving relationship with my youngest sister, who’s mental illness that appears to be some kind of paranoid schizophrenia, caused her to distrust me as I attempted to close out our parent’s estate. I heard my mom’s voice in my head saying “finish the work.” That work was requesting the court to create a supportive situation for my sister since she could no longer depend upon our parents and was hostile towards me. A lifetime of being there for her was lost and abandoned by her. Sadly.

Trying To Do Better

Though fraught with its own challenges, Open Adoption is an attempt to do the process better by considering the needs of the adoptee and their original parents with equal compassion to the needs of the adopting couple.

Generally speaking, there will be a higher level of personal interaction among the parties. This interaction may take the form of letters, e-mails, photos, telephone calls and visits.

Some of the pitfalls that may occur include an abuse of the trust that the original parents have placed on the assurances of the adopting couple. Interactions may lead to a variety of disappointments. When the adopting couple has invested in the unborn child, financially and emotionally, the original parents may feel obligated to go through with relinquishing the baby. If the adopting couple changes their mind shortly before or after the birth, it may place the child in a state of limbo and cause a referral to foster care.

In agreeing to an open adoption, the adopting couple may find the original family has greater expectations than they anticipated in agreeing to the situation. Within the extended birth family may be individuals who are not conventionally stable which may even be part of the reason the child was surrendered.

Some of the original justifications of closed adoptions have included fears that having duplicate mothers, fathers, grandparents and other extended family would make it more difficult for the child to assimilate into the new family unit. If contact between the original and adopting families ceases for whatever reason, the adoptee could be left feeling even more rejected than is commonly the experience for adopted children. There can be social complications for the child among their peers.

Identity and family history are the most important reason for open adoptions. Denying the child access to that information violates basic human rights. Adoption will never be the perfect circumstance for any child but trying to do it better does matter.

Not Bad, Not Good, It’s Life

Even though I have learned so much about the process of adoption – how it affects an adoptee, how it affects the original parents and how it affects those adoptive parents who try to fill a void, it is the truth of my own family, the one I was born into and I would not exist if the adoptions had not happened.

One of the success stories in my own family is my nephew. When I met him and his adoptive mother, she admitted to me that for a long time, she felt that she should not have been in the picture. When she learned about my nephew’s mother, about her struggles in life with mental illness, this gave his adoptive mother a lot of peace about their situation.

She has been a champion for my nephew. She has been with him every step of the way as he sought to discover his origins. She has supported him in his desires and has even gone the extra mile, smoothing the way for him.

Yesterday was his birthday. I sent him greetings by way of her email. She replied to me last night with the good news that he has met his birth father and has discovered he has two half-siblings, a boy and a girl, who are only a little bit younger than him. All of them have welcomed his arrival in their lives.

His birth father is not who my sister named on the birth certificate. The kindest explanation is that she didn’t actually know who fathered her son. My nephew’s adoptive mother actually paid a private investigator who triangulates DNA to discover the true identity of my nephew’s father.

Beyond being probably the best adoptive mother I’ve known in my lifetime, within her nurturing, my nephew has become an amazing young man. He is the Assistant Emergency Management Coordinator in the town in which he lives. He is now a Lieutenant in the Fire Department and holds down a job at the local utility. I am very proud of the high quality person he has turned out to be.

Not Really Brand New

Too often in our approach to the newborn we deal with him as if he is exactly that – “brand new”. We neglect the fact that the neonate is really the culmination of an amazing experience that has lasted forty weeks. . . . By looking at the neonate as if he had “sprung full blown from the brain of Zeus” we are missing the opportunities that the newborn’s history as a fetus can provide. ~ T B Brazelton

I remember when my husband and I were contemplating becoming parents about 20 years ago, and I didn’t know about all of the issues surrounding adoption at that time, we briefly considered adopting. We were so uninformed that we didn’t even realize that one could adopt a newborn. We didn’t want an unknown back history and decided to have our family in a more natural way, though we did need medical assistance.

What I have learned in only the last year or two is how much bonding takes place within the womb of the mother. I did know that important developments were taking place and I remember my OB telling me that he believed the gestating mother turns on or off the genes that eventually express in the new person. He also said that what I ate, flavored the amniotic fluid, and that was how new babies had already received the food preferences of the family, even before they began to eat solid foods.

So it turns out that adopting a newborn is really not the best outcome for any baby. Their development is a continuum of physiological, psychological and spiritual events which began in utero but continue to further develop throughout the postnatal bonding period and that original mother is crucial to the best development of the infant.

Never True

Social workers believed that to save children they had to deny them information about their past. To help them, they unintentionally hurt them.

Some social workers believed that keeping adoptees’ identities secret allowed the adoptee to make a clean break with their past. Secrecy protected adoptive parents from intrusion by birth relatives. It protected the privacy of single mothers.

In the early 1950s, social workers believed that closed adoption worked. A social worker’s effectiveness was measured by how many unmarried mothers she could persuade to surrender their children – with a goal to persuade all of them.

Social workers believed that after surrender, the mother would simply go on with her childless life as though nothing had happened.

It was believed that “normal, healthy” adoptees would have NO curiosity about their roots.

All these things that social workers once believed turned out to be not true.

The Modern Foundling Wheel

Safe Haven Baby Box – Indiana

I first read about this concept in the book Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy while I lay in hospital having just delivered my oldest son. Mothers could abandon newborn babies anonymously in a safe place known as a Foundling Wheel. This kind of arrangement was common in the Middle Ages and in the 18th and 19th centuries.

A modern form, the baby hatch, began to be introduced again from 1952 and since 2000 has come into use in many countries, notably in Germany and Pakistan but exists in countries all over the world under various names.

Now in the United States, there is the Safe Haven Baby Box which is found in Indiana. Although every state in the US has a Safe Haven Law, anonymity is the benefit of the Baby Box. A Safe Haven Law requires the one relinquishing the baby to actually walk in to an authorized facility and physically hand the child off to a person. The one relinquishing is going to be asked some questions.

I am decidedly pro-Life because 9 months is a lot to ask of any woman who does not want to or cannot for whatever reason parent a child. However, if abortion is not accessible for whatever reason, an anonymous method of giving the child away safely is preferable to infanticide. And no, I do not think abortion is infanticide though there are plenty who would argue the point with me.

Although a baby left in a Baby Box is not going to know anything about their origins, inexpensive DNA tests and matching sites could still reveal some things about their origins in a future time once they reach adulthood. I know, it worked for me. No, I wasn’t relinquished but both of my parents were.

What Was And Never Should Be

~ 1997 ~

Growing up, I had something my parents didn’t, my real genetically related mom and dad. I don’t know at what age I first learned that both of my parents were adopted. It was just a fact of life and one that I never judged to be good or bad for my entire childhood. Their adoptive parents were my grandparents and aunts, uncles and cousins I acquired in that manner were just that.

Adoption was so accepted in my family that both of my sisters ended up giving up a child to adoption. Parenting was seen as something any adult human being with good intentions could do. So my nephew ended being raised by his paternal grandparents and my daughter ended up being raised by her dad when he remarried a woman with a daughter and they had a daughter together, thus creating a family for her that I could not give.

Though I felt a piece was missing in my life – my cultural heritage that had been passed down by those unknown people who gave my parents life – it wasn’t until my mom started investigating her own adoption – after learning in the early 1990s, the story of the scandal that surrounded Georgia Tann’s work – that I became aware that all was not as it should be in adoptionland.

By the grace of a loving energy, I have been able to discover who all 4 of my original grandparents were since my parents died. It saddens me that they didn’t have the opportunity to know about these people themselves. I now know of cousin and aunts that I am genetically related to. I still cherish the family adoption brought to me as well.

What I never expected was the education I would receive along with learning my genetic roots about the damage done in the name of a profit-motivated industry taking babies from their mothers and giving them to the people who had money and could not have their own children for whatever reason.

What once was accepted and “natural” in my understanding – adoption – is now seen for the travesty it has been but thankfully, even that is changing in this world that continuously does.

An Embarrassment Of Riches

It has become a bit complicated. And it is a mouth full to try and delineate family adding “adoptive” in front.

I have 8 grandparents. 4 – I never knew for over 60 years but at least I know WHO they were now and have aunts, uncles and cousins to become acquainted with.

4 of my grandparents were influential in my life – especially the grandmothers. It would take a book to describe all of the ways that they mattered. We were blessed to grow up in the same city with them and so had lots of opportunities for physical interactions.

I have aunts and cousins thanks to adoption with whom I have life experiences – including shared experiences with the adoptive grandparents. For most of them, the relationship may have been at least partially a direct genetic link.

I love them all. And I have to be grateful because if what happened to my parents had not happened, I would not be here today telling you my tales.

Second Choice

It could be the worst thing about being adopted.

Everyone’s first choice is to pass their genes down to a biological child.

Even before I knew so deeply about all the complications of adoption, my husband and I considered adopting when he wanted to become a father (I had already become a mother at age 19). We rather quickly rejected the idea and never seriously pursued it. We chose a novel method that is not without its own complications now that DNA testing is so inexpensive and matching sites out the truth, at least privately between the affected individuals.

Adoption has often been the solution for a couple when their first choice died young and subsequent efforts to conceive have failed – known as secondary infertility. Whether the woman has previously had a successful pregnancy or never could, some of these couples decide to adopt when all else has failed for them.

Just last night in a Season 6 episode of The Simpsons about the conception of their youngest daughter, Maggie, Dr Hibbert says to Marge – a healthy baby can bring in $60,000. Yes, the comment did not passed but caught my attention.