Acceptance

My adoptee mom shared with me before she died that she had to stop working on the family tree at Ancestry that she had been creating from the lineage of the adoptive parents (my dad was also an adoptee). She said “It just wasn’t real to me. I am adopted.” Then she added, “Glad I was.” because she had reached a place of acceptance that she would never know her origins and whether having been adopted was actually a “good” thing or not.

Acceptance is a phase of grieving. My mom grieved that her original mother had died before her search began. Arriving at acceptance can feel lighter, more balanced and has the ability to realize what all of our experiences have brought to us.

Adoptees will likely struggle with what it means to belong to two families. Coming to terms with that, could also make comfortable – duality, complexity and ambiguity. An adoptee may be able to see both/and rather than either/or.

What will always be true is that an adoptee can never be not adopted. That’s a given.

Adoption can add an element of compassion. There is no getting around the reality that the adoptee was given up. Taken in by strangers. There are consequences to both.

Healing can happen when an adoptee can accept that what happened, happened. This was their fate. They were surrendered by one mother and raised by a different one. An adoptee can’t avoid the pain that is part of that experience.

Platitudes such as “everything happens for a reason” or “it’s all part of God’s plan” are not helpful. Nor are attitudes that an adult adoptee should simply “move on” or “get over it” or “stop dwelling in the past”. These are not helpful either. The past is an adoptee’s history, their identity, their connection to a concept of family.

Babies adopted shortly after birth experience a trauma so early in life that there is no “before” the trauma to return to. Consider that. Add to it the pain adoptees experience by being mostly invalidated by society.

So better words don’t include a non-adoptee’s judgement of what would have been better or worse. A simple acknowledgement of fact is enough. Adoption can’t be undone.

Even so, an adoptee can know that they are also a survivor with those kinds of strengths and gifts. The adoption system is deeply flawed. Seeking to reform it is a worthy outcome for having gone through the experience.

An Inconvenient Truth

Adoption is not the gray area it is often portrayed by the industry as. It is more black and white, with that overlap of gray.

As difficult as it may be to fully realize, in order to adopt, on some level you are okay with taking someone else’s child from them. You may not even be willing to consider the pain it causes the original mother and/or father.

This the inconvenient truth at the heart of becoming an adoptive parent. You may want to “believe” you are some kind of heroic savior but you really are simply wanting something (a child) that for whatever reason you don’t believe you can have any other way.

Some people can do this and function adequately to parent that child. Many adoptees, even though they have LIVED that condition, can’t reconcile the thought that this was okay with their adoptive parents.

This is not to judge or dismiss the reality that some children may actually fare better than they would have with their original parents. I can see this in my own family dynamics. Because I have the kind of faith that believes given a long enough view throughout time, it all works out – both at the physical level and in the soul karmic level.

There are always excuses on the part of adoptive parents. What if this ? What if that ? But I did this or I did that. If I had not, then what MIGHT have happened to that child ?

I respect ALL of the adoptive parents that are a part of my family’s life story. The adoption reform movement wishes only that adoptive parents recognize that their decision to adopt a child was driven by a desire to fulfill their own “selfish” motives. To be honest about that. They can admit simply that they wanted kids and couldn’t have them using their own reproductive capabilities. It was always about what they personally wanted for themselves.

It’s not the only thing that would make adoption concepts more honest but it is a beginning on the adoptive parent side of a complicated equation.

Impact Of Adoption On Health

Every adoption is unique and every situation is different. There have been well studied impacts on mental and emotional health for an adoptee that other people in the general population are less affected by. Most have to do with a sense of abandonment or rejection. No matter how much the adoptive parents try to convince their adopted child that they are “special” because they were “chosen”, nothing seems to shake that initial feeling of having been unwanted or not wanted enough for the original parents to work things out. This is mostly a child’s perspective because they lack the mature experiences of life that most adults acquire.

My dad (both of my parents were adoptees) often accused my mom of being a hypochondriac because of her constant and evolving health problems over the long decades of their marriage. They were married over 60 years at the time of my mom’s death. I never judged her that way. She did have a LOT of health problems from her heart to her kidneys to her pancreas and beyond. She had a intervention scheduled for a blockage in her esophagus pending when she died just a few days before.

I am a believer in mind/body health implications. I do believe my mom suffered from low self-esteem. There is no way to know for certain whether her adoption had an impact but given her belief that she was stolen from her parents and then denied her adoption file and told at that same time that her mother had already died, denying her once again the reunion she desperately desired, there is a good chance that her mental/emotional state of being played a role.

Statistics tells us that 80% of visits to primary care doctors are the result of emotional distress. Stress kills. My mom had several interventions for her health beginning younger than I am now. First a bypass and then angioplasties and stents. My mom died of a massive heart attack that no one could have saved her from quickly enough. The coroner said it was instantaneous and thankfully that she didn’t suffer.

Sadly there is a lack of financial incentive for doctors to prescribe stress reduction instead of surgery, drugs or other expensive medical procedures. I continue to do battle on that front with my own doctors for my own best health as I age.

Not Only Genes

A child inherits more than physical attributes as well as general interests and tendencies from their parents. They can also inherit the wounds that their forebears were inflicted with.

In my own family, I see how my parents separation from their original parents was passed down through me and my sisters, not only in regard to a bit of distance in parenting and concern for our well-being and ability to provide for ourselves but because of that perspective on the part of our parents, our ability to parent our own children was also impacted.

Patterns repeat – lack of familial support for a young mother and her baby, lack of financial resources, whether from family or society, and a definite lack of understanding about the wounds caused by separation or the effects of being raised by strangers (through adoption or foster care) are all evident in my own family’s history.

Legitimacy

“In the soul of every adoptee is an eternal flame of hope
for reunion and reconciliation with those he has lost
through private or public disaster.”
~ Jean Paton, Orphan Voyage

The blankness of our past is like a constant gnawing at our heart. It creates a hole that can’t be filled, a vacuum for which there is no substitute, it is a piece of our soul that was taken from us. It is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing, the center of a wheel missing two spokes. My mom was not unique in her yearning to know who her original mother was.

The withholding of birth information from adoptees is an affront to human dignity. Most Americans assume that the falsification of adoptees’ birth certificates arose from well-meaning social workers anxious to relieve adoptees of the stigma of illegitimacy.

However, my mom’s parents were married at the time of her conception and her birth and at the time she was taken for adoption by my adoptive grandparents.

Of greater concern was the possibility of the original family tracing such a child and disrupting a well established adoptive relationship. Especially if the surrender had been forced, as was the case with my maternal grandmother.

The rationale was that in order to be secure in the position of adopting children, anonymity was essential.

“We never tell the natural mother or reveal to others where the child is and where it is being placed for adoption,” Georgia Tann told a reporter for the Commercial Appeal in 1948. Her letter to my original maternal grandmother certainly revealed nothing about my mom having been taken from Memphis to Arizona.

Empty Reassurances

After Georgia Tann had taken my mom away from her mother and sent my mom almost 1,500 miles away, she tried to reassure my grandmother (who never intended to lose custody of my mom) that it was all for the good (and judging by some truly horrific stories about Georgia Tann’s rule over children, my mom was lucky she was removed quickly and ended up with decent people to raise her).

On August 30, 1937, Georgia Tann wrote to my grandmother – “The baby has been placed in a lovely home where she will have every care and much love. Any time you wish to hear from her, we will be glad to write you.”

My grandmother disappears from the adoption file after she received that letter. After being pressured into signing the surrender papers (either sign these or we’ll ask Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley to declare you an unfit mother), she tried to undo the damage. Telephoning the Tennessee Children’s Home office and speaking to Helen Rose, she said “I heard from my friend in New Orleans. She said she will take me and the baby. I need to come and get her so we can leave.”

They had a paying repeat customer in my adoptive grandmother, there was no way they were going to let my mom go back to her mother, no matter what. They told her that she was to bring the names and addresses of her friends to their office. They could not let her recover custody of my mom until they investigated the people who would help them first.

My grandmother’s name was Elizabeth Lou but when she had my mom she went by Lizzie Lou. In letters to Georgia Tann and in the divorce papers filed by my mom’s father, she is shown as Elizabeth. But when she died, she had Lizzie Lou put on her gravestone. I believe she waited all of her life for my mom to be reunited with her. She had no other children.

My Birthday Is About My Mom Too

These are things I found among my mother’s stuff after she died that I keep. The photo is probably close to how she looked when she conceived me less than 3 years later (I was born in 1954 and turn 65 today). The card and cross remind me that she is as close to me always as my heart’s mind.

It is fitting, I believe, to think of one’s mom on their birthday. This holds true whether or not our mom was able to witness our growing up after leaving her body.

I have learned that the time in utero is a sacred period of total union between a mother and her child soon to be. They share a bodily space that as human beings we will never achieve again in our limited physical lifetimes – though many try through sexual relations.

I believe I remain in contact with my deceased mother. I feel her especially strong today and know she is proud of me – not only how I handled the difficult family responsibilities after she died but also how I have retrieved my family’s origin identity since then (both of my parents were adoptees).

I love you mom. Thank you for gestating my life’s body for me.

For The Mother Whose Child Was Taken

On this Mother’s Day, I am feeling a deep empathy for every mother that has lost custody of her child. I acknowledge the deep pain that a day like this one causes. She has lost a very real part of herself, though independently living. Her child is gone and yet she must go on – somehow.

Each day without her child is a painful reminder that the child yet lives with someone else the child must call mother. She may have unending fears about what is happening to her child, out of her sight and control. She may cry often, lonely silent tears that no one else can understand.

On this day, my heart sends love and understanding to each woman thus affected. Yours is the hardest part of a day when many of us are grateful for the mothers who gave of themselves that we might live.

I Don’t Really Know

Even though both of my parents are adoptees and even though I have one niece and one nephew who were given up for adoption, I was quickly put in my place in a FB group that is intended to be a safe place for adoptees to tell their truth. Just stop, I was told. Stop thinking you know how adoptees feel.

To be honest with you – growing up I knew my parents were adopted and it mattered to me only in the sense that I didn’t know my heritage – what country did my genes originate in ? After I became an adult, my mom shared with me both that she was searching to learn who her parents were and said “as a mother, I would want to know what became of my child” and was devastated when she was told her mother had died a few years before. End of my mom’s reunion dreams. As a practical person, she had learned her father was much older than her mother and figured that even though Tennessee couldn’t determine whether he was alive or not, he was probably dead. She gave up.

Recently I bought a book by Amanda H L Transue-Woolston titled The Declassified Adoptee – Essays of an Adoption Activist. I’ve only read two essays so far. In her second essay, she writes about adoptees who never talk about being adopted. That would be how my dad was. I never heard him say anything about it. My mom once told me that when she was searching he warned her that she might be “opening up a can of worms”. That speaks volumes to me. I believe he was afraid to know what the truth might be.

Adoption was just a fact of life in my family. Accepted. The way things were. Not a bad thing and not unusual, though I didn’t have any friends growing up whose parents were both adopted.

It is interesting to note – I have been reading A LOT – from all sides of the issue now. I want to understand it all – how my original grandparents may have felt, how being adopted may have impacted my parents and my sister’s children and how my adoptive grandparents may have felt.

It may be true that because I am the child of adoptees and because I am the aunt of adoptees that I am absolutely impacted by the adoption experience. I just wanted to make clear today that I also realize I will never truly know how it feels to be one.

In in the words of Transue-Woolston – “There is no one cookie cutter mold that defines what being adopted is or that can be used to exclude other adoptee narratives from ‘counting’.”

Other Ways To Rob A Mother

With my sister in 2014

While I have a lot of sadness for my maternal grandmother’s separation from her child, I also have a lot of sadness for my sister’s lot as a mother. Interestingly, when I first saw the photo of my grandmother I thought of my sister and coincidentally, she carries my grandmother’s name of Lou.

My sister has given birth to two children and was not able to raise either of them but had more time with her first born son. When she became afraid her husband was going to hurt her, she left him and sued for a divorce. Her child was mixed race, partly Mexican in the predominantly Mexican town of El Paso TX. His Mexican grandparents fought her for custody. The court was afraid he would lose contact with his culture – as though it only came from that part.

When I first pulled together the details of our family’s history into a long saga, I included an exchange with my nephew that highlighted the damage that had been done to him by his paternal grandmother who raised him. I won’t argue the fact that they could afford to support him much more easily than my sister. What I can’t forgive them for is how that woman poisoned him against half of his family. And he is a very wounded person – married three times and not that long ago suffered some kind of breakdown.

I knew I was risking his anger by sharing that heartfelt private exchange with him in a very limited edition of 10 copies distributed to family members only but I simply felt it was too important to an overall understanding of our family dynamics not to include it. And he has since disowned our whole side of the family over it – though my sister isn’t angry with me over it – she says it was headed that way because she knew he didn’t want her in his life. So sad. I do regret the loss of his feelings towards me.

My sister also lost her daughter. Our adoptee mom convinced her to give up the baby shortly after birth. And similarly to my nephew’s situation, the adoptive family probably could afford to support her better than my sister who waitressed her entire life, mostly at Denny’s.

My sister has had opportunities to spend time with all 3 of her grandchildren and in today’s world where we are all so scattered out over this country, I don’t really have all that much more in person time than my sister does, nor did I have much longer to raise my daughter as she ended up being raised by her father and step-mother. Her removal from my life was voluntary but not intended. He refused to pay child support and I was financially desperate.