Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day 2010

Ever since my oldest son was born, we go out every year to take photos among the Wild Azaleas we are fortunate to have an abundance of here on our Missouri farm. Only in one year, were there no flowers and we had to settle for a waterfall backdrop. This year, I can no longer endure a long hike due to knee issues and so my husband has suggested I drive our John Deere tractor while he and the boys walk alongside to area where he knows there are a lot of blossoms. He also wants to collect a couple of large rocks in the bucket that are on his mind while we are there. The last time I drove the tractor I got it stuck in a wetland. He reassures me that will be impossible in the area he has in mind.

Mothers are very much on my mind at this time. No surprise. Yesterday, I struggled with a lot of sadness about my maternal grandmother. I have this awful paradox. I was never able to know my original grandparents because both of my parents were given up for adoption. Yet, if that had not happened, I would not exist at all. Therefore, it wasn’t ever possible to have both – a relationship with them and life itself. Of course, if it weren’t for the disconnect adoption causes, maybe my parents could have enjoyed reunions with their original parents in adulthood and maybe I could have known these people. But it was not to be.

I also miss my mom a lot at Mother’s Day. I would have had a wonderful long conversation with her had she been alive. She died two months before I expected to see her again (we were separated by 1,200 miles). Her death changed my life. Discovering my original grandparents did as well.

Happy Mother’s Day !!

Teen Mom

Many natural mothers who give up their babies had very inadequate counseling, they are pressured and coerced. They never feel any worth related to motherhood. They have difficulty experiencing that their child is “real”. She has no opportunity or encouragement to mourn her loss.

Most of these mothers are in some stage of unresolved grief their entire life. A mother who has surrendered her child cannot undo what has happened.

If a reunion occurs, it brings with it the realization that the mother can never recover those lost years.

Breaking the silence of a secret pregnancy or surrender, means that the wounds have to be opened for everyone. This is healthy in the long run – secrets are one of the most debilitating aspects of any person’s life.

It is a DOUBLE LOSS when the pregnancy also brings an end to the relationship between the original couple – mother and father.

The source for these perspectives come from the book – The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier and resonated with me from personal observation in my own family.

Fathers and Daughters

My great-grandfather, Raphael,
holds his infant daughter, my grandmother Dolores,
with her sister, Eleanor, seated nearby

My grandmother’s mother died when she was only 3 months old. It is said that when the mother dies, a good indicator of where the father-daughter relationship will ultimately end up is what kind of relationship they had developed, when the death occurs.

The mother’s absence can change the way a father relates to his daughter. This period can affect a daughter’s feelings of security and self-worth as well as her ability to form satisfying relationships as an adult.

There is a lot I cannot know about such things. These circumstances happened so many years ago and we were cut-off by adoption from our original families. I know that he remarried and the step-mother was not kind. I know that they moved to Asheville, North Carolina, when she was a young girl and they put her to work in the rayon mills.

I know they went out to California to visit Raphael’s elderly father Austin who lived nearby his daughter, Laura. My great-grandfather would have been, at least in part, influenced by his own identifications with his parents. Certainly, Austin seemed important to Raphael in adulthood. I’ve no indication what his relationship with his mother was like. Did he have any memories about how his father treated his mother ?

Austin seems to have been closer to his daughter, Laura, than to Raphael. If my great-grandfather didn’t have any comfortable memories to draw on, then he may have lacked a firm bedrock for relating to his daughter. I have discovered through Ancestry that he was of an advance age when he still living with his parents.

What I do know at this point is that my grandmother Dolores’ home life was so unhappy, that she refused to go back to North Carolina with her family and they dis-owned her over it. It seems that her Aunt Laura and her girl cousins were important to her going forward in California.

Economic Pressures

“When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture,
there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about that culture.
A culture that requires harm to one’s soul in order to follow the culture’s
proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed.”
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Young, unmarried mothers are often at the mercy of their parents and society. Jobless – they have no income. The general view in the past was that economic pressures were only secondary factors to the moral sin of becoming pregnant out of wedlock.

If financial resources were more generous for single mothers, fewer babies would be given up to adoption. There will always be some children who’s mothers simply are not prepared – physically, mentally and emotionally – to be good parents but I believe they are the rare exception.

A Never Ending Sorrow

Adoption is trumpeted today as a universal good thing. For infertile couples who wish to have a family, it is a solution. For religious organizations and fellow-travelers, agencies that use the mantle of religion – it is STILL a BUSINESS.

What is rarely talked about is the long-term mental and physical effect of surrendering a baby to others for adoption.

One expects short-term grief.

What of the long-term lasting impact – 4, 25 years later ?

We go on, have lives and live a code of silence with a toxic aftermath continuing.

Mothers compelled to search for their children are prone to lowered self-esteem, anxiety and worry about the child, required more doctor visits and attributed their physical and mental problems over the years to the adoption.

Many had parental pressure to surrender their child to adoption.

They had little or no emotional support during the pregnancy and relinquishment.

There were few or no opportunities to talk about their feelings related to the surrender and there was a lack of social support for their depression.

We should care more about mothers and their children as a society.

Losing My Mom

I was thinking about my mom this morning. No particular reason. I was reading something and the mother had died, yet she lived on as this significant presence that was influential in her family’s life.

My mom was like that.

I expected to see her at least one more time. Was in communication with her by email just before she died. Her death was a shock to my world, unexpected, and life changing.

It really doesn’t matter when our mother dies. It is the end of an era for us and we miss her terribly. No more long phone calls or in person visits. It’s all gone and done and no getting it back.

Many of my friends, in the same age cohort as I am, have lost their moms and it is clear they grieve them terribly, even many years later.

I am grateful I had my mom and that she was the one I grew inside of because she didn’t have that and she yearned eternally to know that one. I believe they reunited in death. No proof. I just like believing that all that was not known, now is.

Maybe someday, I will have that pleasure to meet my grandmothers. My original grandmothers. The ones I never got to know in physical life.

Motherhood – Post Adoption

An infertile couple unable to conceive are generally focused on their own needs. Some have a rescue complex. They hide their own issues behind a desire to save some poor child from a fate worse than death.

What is rarely talked about are the long-term mental and physical effects upon the original mother from surrendering her baby to others for adoption.

It would only be natural to expect a woman who has carried a baby in her womb for nine whole months to experience some short-term grief.

The reality is that there is often a long-term lasting impact. How long you ask – 4 years, 25 years, forever ? Just as every person is different, every mother who loses a child will have differing abilities to put the loss behind her and go on with her life. Never does she ever truly forget.

So, a relinquishing mother may go on, will certainly have some kind of life but she is generally forced to live a code of silence that carries with it a toxic aftermath of effects upon her physical and mental health continuing throughout her life.

Some mothers feel compelled to search for their child. These women may be prone to a lowered self-esteem, anxiety and may worry about the well-being of their child. These women may require more doctor visits and most will attribute their physical and mental problems over the years to the loss of their child to adoption.

Many of these women had parental pressure to surrender their child to adoption. Certainly, one of my sisters did. One of my grandmothers may have. The indications are there – she was married but separated from her husband for some unknown reason. She was sent away from Tennessee to Virginia to have that baby. I doubt she was supposed to bring my mother back to Tennessee with her but she did.

I would say that ALWAYS, these women had little or no emotional support during the pregnancy and after the relinquishment. There would have been few, more likely no, opportunities to talk about their feelings related to the surrender. There is overall a lack of social support for their depression.

In letters written by natural mothers post-adoption, there is an intensity of feeling and a need to describe the emotional pain they continue to carry within them.

Even when comfortable with their decision to relinquish, as my youngest sister definitely was, very proactive, very concerned about the outcome for her baby – I do not doubt that she still felt a loss, some pain and mourning (even if not consciously aware it was that) and based upon a letter she sent to her son during his teen years, she did have a continuing sense of caring for that long vanished child.

Many wounded mothers live then for decades with shame and a societally enforced silence over their “secret” children because no one really wants to hear about it after a short period of time. For the mother, there is no end to it except her eventual death.

Unacknowledged Ghosts

Deborah Hempstead

In the book, It Didn’t Start With You by Mark Wolynn, he asks – Is there a person no one talks about ?

Deborah was run over and killed by a teenager driver, a member of the Doubleday publishing family, while crossing the road with her younger sister, Eleanor. Her story does survive or else I wouldn’t know this but did the family talk about her ?

The death of my paternal grandmother Dolores’ oldest sister would have certainly left behind grieving parents.

My grandmother is born only about a year after that tragic event. Then Dolores’ mother dies 3 mos after giving birth to her. There is just the heavy sorrow in that family including in Eleanor, the middle child. She would have been very young when this happened, perhaps pre-verbal and maybe didn’t receive very much comfort or attention due to the intensity of all that happened. I don’t really know. She is a sad person, never married, died alone of tuberculosis in a state hospital and cremated.

So, this “ghost” is a painful thing for everyone in the family but more conscious in Eleanor, more unconscious in Delores.

I wonder how Dolores dealt with all that grief, that sorrow ?

Did she reject her father ? I don’t know. He remarried. Men of that era were not heavily involved in child care but it seems rather certain from stories and from her stepmother’s will that Josephine was not very fond of her step-daughters. It is likely that, Raphael, Dolores’ father would have been in a terrible grief and depression for some time, if he ever truly got over those losses.

It is no surprise that I am fascinated by Deborah. I was given the same name as the oldest daughter of my father, even though he never knew of his aunt’s existence.

The author as a young child.

Grief

Mourning does not have a straightforward –
beginning, middle and end
Grief goes in cycles, like the seasons,
like the moon.

In the midst of the initial shock and numbness,
we grieve the best we can at the time.

~ Motherless Daughters: The Legacy of Loss by Hope Edelman

There are many kinds of grief. The grief my adoptee mom felt when she learned there would be no reunion because her natural mother had died years before my mom knew she had gone. The grief I felt when I realized my mom believed a story about her adoption that simply wasn’t true. The grief my newly discovered cousin felt as first her mother, then her husband died.

Today, an online community friend openly expressed her grief about a debilitating illness with no hope of treatment and though she acknowledges that some acquaintances pity and some empathize, in reality grief is a path we each can only walk alone.

When my mom died, I was thrust into an intensity of huge responsibilities. When my maternal grandmother lost her mom at age 11, with four younger siblings that needed her care and attention, and who knows how her father responded but he never married again, I doubt she had much time to grieve at all.

Life doesn’t come with a guaranteed length for any of us. Some people never make it out of childhood. Others hold on until they are so old, their imminent death is clearly obvious, but the time of their leaving is not. What is certain is that I would suspect all of us will grieve at least once in our lifetime.

Be gentle with those who grieve. Their pain is real and time may or may not heal those wounds.

Cutting Ties

There is one simple and critical fact – the adoptee was there, experienced being “left” by the biological mother and handed over to strangers. It makes no difference if the child was a few minutes or a few days old.

For 40 weeks he shared an experience with a person with whom he likely bonded in utero, a person to whom he is biologically, genetically, historically and psychologically, emotionally and spiritually connected.

~ from The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier

If the above is true, and my heart tells me that it is so, then how much more intense was the separation for both of my parents who had been with their natural mothers for months.

In the picture of my maternal grandmother holding my mom for the last time, after she had already been left in the Porter-Leath Orphanage – only for temporary care while my grandmother tried to find some way to provide for them both – I see the joy on her face. I see her head craning in the direction of her mother as the nurse holds her so they can make some photos of her for my adoptive grandmother to approve as the little sister she was seeking for her previously adopted son.

I am told my dad’s mother was still breastfeeding him when my Granny took him home with her. What must he have thought the next time he was hungry?

I can understand the need for children to be adopted when they are true orphans without family or being honestly abused. However, poverty should not be the reason women lose their children. In my family, that was always the reason a child ended up adopted.

One reform that has been suggested (and based on comments by adult adoptees in a Facebook group I belong to, seems relevant to their own feelings in maturity) is that there be only a form of guardianship where the child keeps their own name and heritage but has the security of a permanent home.

My parents were forced into false identities with made up names and altered birth certificates and not allowed to discover the truth even after well into their adulthoods, and truly, they died not knowing anything about the families they were born into.

The flaw in that “reform” idea is that it would be too much like foster care, robbing the child of a sense of family. In reality, the only real solution is finding methods of keeping mothers and their children together whenever possible.