Chosen Parents

There is a poem common among adoptive parents and often framed and hung on the wall. There is actually more than one version out there.

“You’re a chosen child
You’re ours, but not by birth
. . . Chosen above the rest.”

“I had to tell you, Dearest Heart,
that you are not my own.”

This concept of being “chosen” is often disturbing for an adoptee. This is not a supermarket where people go to buy commodities. Adoptees are human beings with feelings and so many of the messages they receive are contradictory statements and confusing.

When my sister learned she was pregnant, she also knew that without a willing father to help her raise her son, she needed to give him up for adoption. This being a “modern” version, her son wasn’t chosen so much as the parents to raise her son were chosen.

Couples submitted applications, glossy proposals of why they would be the best choice. I was with my sister as she tried to make a decision. She sent these packages to me for my opinion – though the ultimate decision was one she made for herself.

The messages adoptees receive are paradoxical – they were unwanted, abandoned, and yet chosen, special and lucky. They rarely feel the “yets” as much as the more obvious facts. Their original mothers are often marginalized as “incapable” but oh, they were heroic to give up that baby to a mother who could raise a child no other way.

Adoption is a legal contract to which the child never agreed. They are made to appear “as if born to” with their identity amended to hide their true origins. An adoptee is asked to live their life split off from their true identity. They become masters at people pleasing – sometimes compliant, other times defiant.

The Original Mother

There are a total of 4 women in my immediate family who have relinquished a child – both of my grandmothers and both of my sisters. I have a lot of compassion for every one of them.

The level of pain that such a mother may feel depends a lot on the time frame and reason for the relinquishment. I know for certain 2 of the mothers were coerced or forced. I know that 3 of the adoptions were “closed” and only one was “open”. That last one was my youngest sister who made the decision to relinquish from the moment she knew she was pregnant and vetted prospective adoptive parents and utilized private attorneys to facilitate the process.

Many such mothers have accepted some seriously false beliefs about themselves –
I would have been a terrible mother and my child is better off.
My child must hate me.
My child will never forgive me.
My child will never believe how much I wanted them.

These mothers also carry with them understandable fears –
Meeting their child and disappointing them.
Facing their child’s anger.
Never knowing what happened to the child.
If it was a secret, family members finding out.
Finding out the child was mistreated or needs help.
The child showing up one day at one’s workplace.
The child never trying to find them.

Within these mothers are many possible responses –
Feeling guilt and regret.
An inability to move on.
Breaking down and crying when thinking about one’s child.
Angry outbursts (caused by bottled up feelings).
Feeling guilty when others talk about their children.
Wondering what one’s child looks like.
Fantasizing about a reunion.
Anger at those who didn’t help them when they needed it most.
Jealous of the adoptive parents but wishing them well for the child’s sake.
Depression around the time of the child’s birthday, as well as the day they were given up.
A deep sense of loss that never abates.

Even so, such women have some admirable strengths – they are idealistic, private, protective, resourceful and unselfish

Sometimes, their deep pain is triggered, even after many years, if they happen to run into their child’s father. Certainly, birthdays and holidays will always be difficult reminders. TV commercials featuring babies may move them to tears and thoughts of their own child. And movies about adoption, depending on the emotional content, may be impossible to watch through to the end.

There is one important opportunity that such a mother should not neglect, regardless of the fears connected to it – that is, allowing contact by their relinquished child.

I’ll Cry If I Want To

It is quite common for an adoptee to be sad on their birthday, even when they can’t understand why. It has been noted by therapists that adoptees often sabotage their own birthday parties, even when they were looking forward to them.

Each of my parents were with their original mothers for months before they were taken away and given to other people to raise through adoption.

Consider what a birthday means to an adoptee.

An adoptee often cannot help but think of the woman who gave birth to them on their birthday. Many hope that the mother is also thinking of them on that date.

A child who was adopted may have a hard time understanding why they are so inconsolably sad at a time when they should be happy. Tears, emptiness, fear and despair might seem a bit over the top to observers. Maybe they could consider the symbolic meaning of that day to an adoptee.

A pre-verbal child will experience bewilderment at the sudden absence of their original mother. They have become attuned to the sound of her voice, the smell of her body and the way she touches them (unless removed from her at birth, when only the sound of being in her womb is left in their deepest memories).

A child adopted as an infant may lack conscious memories of their loss and so can’t make sense of it. A reunion with the original mother can make the birthday triggered emotional wound worse.

If the original mother was unwed, there were no excited visitors or phone calls of congratulations. No one was there taking sweet or silly photos of those first days. All of these an adoptee has lost from their earliest days.

If healing is able to occur, then the hurt and anger that take over an adoptee’s emotions around the time of their birthday may lessen. If not, then it will only be the passing of time that changes the focus and makes possible the ability to move forward again.

Death Is Even Harder

Facing the death of loved ones is difficult for many people. I remember the first dead bodies that I saw as a public schoolchild. Two friends died while yet school age and my uncle died when I was a senior in high school. My young sons saw dead bodies at a very young age as their paternal grandparents died at home. We have also taken them to local visitations. It is good to view death as a natural part of life.

For the adoptee, especially while yet a child, death can trigger pre-verbal memories of abandonment. There was a first mother who gave you away to an adoption agency and then went away. The adoptive parents came and got you. Death can really drive home to an adopted child that their first mother has gone away and never came back.

Coming face to face with death can also create fears related to the adoptive parents – will they go away and never come back? There are other kinds of death – What happens then, if one of the adoptive parents does leave because they have filed for divorce ?

Under such circumstances, many families break apart and become dysfunctional. An adoptee may take this kind of loss harder than a non-adoptee would. If the result of the divorce is leaving and selling the place that was always home, this can also be harder for an adoptee – “I always thought I’d have some place I could call home and now I don’t.”

Loss is often a lifelong difficult place for an adoptee.

Approval

I came across a perception recently that adoptive parents are always hungry for stories coming from adoptees. That what they are really seeking is approval that they are doing the right thing.

As adoptees are speaking up more in these modern times about how adoption has impacted their lives and affected their choices, the people who always had the privileged position in the adoption triad are now questioning their motives (or should be, if they aren’t).

What’s been done cannot be undone and the results are a fact of life. That is the case for all of the adoptees in my own inner family circle.

But caring people should be paying attention because prospective parents could still seek to help a life be more stable by looking to the foster care system and offering a permanent solution for the older youth incarcerated within it.

Society could find it in it’s compassionate heart to be supportive of young women who find themselves pregnant with inadequate resources to parent their child. We could find ways to help them rather than leave them at the mercy of a profit focused business model seeking to effectively sell their babies away from them.

Every person and every action affects the whole collective. It is said that the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can cause a tsunami of good around the world. Adoptees are fluttering their wings these days.

One-Sided Reunion

On her deathbed, she made her family promise to never forget her only child, whom she knew would someday return. When I spoke to her youngest brother’s son, he vaguely remembered knowing that she had had a daughter.

Was this my grandmother as well, who used her “childish nickname” Lizzie on her gravestone ? Her second husband survived her – did she make certain he knew ?

What I do know is that my mom was almost a decade too late in attempting to locate her natural mother. Though she learned about the Georgia Tann scandal as a teenager, for the most part, growing up, she didn’t let herself think about her natural mother, there seemed to be no use, but as an adult when stories of reunions hit the national awareness, she began dreaming about finding her. Learning that she had already died devastated my mom, destroyed her dreams of reunion.

In my 60s, I made it to my grandmother’s grave and sat on the ground speaking to her. I did the same at my grandfather’s grave and at my mom’s half-sister’s grave.

I have discovered in my own life that Life has a way of coming full circle. I am whole now. I believe also that my mom finally got that reunion with her own natural mother – after she died. It’s what my heart believes and I know in my heart that my mom knows even more of “her story” now than I have yet to discover.

“The day I realized I had two mothers, I was cut in half . . .One half of myself resided here with my family, and the other half was lost, lost to a shadowy woman floating somewhere out there in the world. You see, I’m adopted.” ~ Anne Bauer, The Sound of Hope

“But there’s a story behind everything . . . behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begins.” ~ Mitch Albom, For One More Day

Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ?

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

I’m not thinking of the famous movie but of the author. Like my grandmothers, she lost her own mother at a young age. I was encouraged to read her book “To The Lighthouse” by Jean Houston when I attended a week long Salon at her home in Ashland Oregon. There is an element of her personal story to speaks to that loss of a mother.

Virginia Woolf was concerned about the injustice of patriarchal domination of women, the horrors of incest, the consequence of a social system which places no value on educating women and the astonishing liberation of moving from acceptance of a Victorian sentimental notion of marriage to easy and tolerant attitudes toward sexuality.

She was a genius at conveying inner experience. At age 25, she wrote a set of reminiscences for her sister’s child, though it is actually a memoir of her childhood and adolescence. In it, she sets out to convey how the death of her mother when she was twelve affected the family.

Shortly after her mother’s death, Woolf became violently emotionally ill – hearing voices, physically violent, racked by physical pain, unable to sleep or rest. Neither her half brother’s forced physical intimacy or her bout of insanity – form any part of the story of her coming of age.

In “A Sketch of the Past” (written when Woolf was 60 yrs old) she speaks more directly. Her stepbrother’s abuse gave her such a fear of male sexuality that she had another breakdown and was in a nursing home for a long spell.

Finally, she retrieved her self-confidence enough to take up her writing career, and even marry, though she remained sexually frigid. Woolf went on to write some of the strongest feminist fiction and nonfiction to be produced in the twentieth century. She became an icon of the liberated female consciousness – sensitive, ironic, detached, capable of profound human insight because she embodied the androgynous blending of reason and intuition.

Woolf would have insisted that human affairs are much more complex than the confessional autobiography suggests.

You Only Have One Mother

. . . unless you were adopted or raised by a secondary “mother”.

An adoptee has two mothers – the one who gestated and gave birth to us and the adoptive mother who raised us. For adoptees in reunion, there was the initial relationship that may have been almost immediately terminated post-birth. Then that child shows up decades later ? This is one facet of the adoptive experience.

Some adoptees are closer to their adoptive mother and feel a kind of strain in their attempted relationship with their original mother. There is a lifetime of working on getting along and growing a lasting relationship with the adoptive mother.

For many original mothers, their “relationship” to the child they lost to adoption is rooted in heartbreak and loss. For both the adoptee and the woman who gave birth to us, there may have been a lifetime of loving someone from afar, someone we don’t really “know” in the usual sense – it can be hard to bring those lifelong fantasies down to Earth.

The in touch, in person reality will never match that fantasy we have harbored. It can take years before the original mother and her child – once separated – can feel a closer relationship.

For an adoptee, their two mothers will never be quite alike, they are simply different, that is the reality and they occupy different spaces in the life of any adoptee.

However, love is love and that is always true, even when one has two mothers.

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.

Lifelong Sorrow

It is clear in my mom’s adoption file that my maternal grandmother, shown above holding my mom for the very last time, never intended to surrender her. She was pressured and exploited by circumstances and the expert manipulation of that baby thief, Georgia Tann, in Memphis.

I read a statistic that said that more than 30% of women who have relinquished children never have another – either because they chose not to, or could not. There is an increased incidence of secondary infertility among natural mothers.

I know that my grandmother never had another child. I know that while her birth name was Elizabeth, my mom’s birth certificate had her name as Lizzie. I saw her sign Elizabeth to a note and a postcard she sent to Georgia Tann after losing my mom. Yet, when she died in her 60s after marrying a second husband, Lizzie is what is on her gravestone. I can’t help but believe she hoped my mom would find it someday. My mom died without fulfilling her desire to know about her original mother. I was the one to find the gravestone and sit beside it and talk with her soul.

There is no way to know why my maternal grandfather left my maternal grandmother in Memphis four months pregnant. It seems her widowed father sent her away to Virginia to have my mom and I doubt she was supposed to bring my mom back to Tennessee. It is clear my great-grandfather was unwilling to take the two of them into his home.

It appears that the only time my maternal grandmother had any communication directly with my maternal grandfather (after he left her alone and pregnant) was when he decided to go ahead and divorce her 3 years after they married and two years after my mom was born. The divorce papers also show her name formally as Elizabeth. I believe that having lost their child, my grandmother was so filled with shame, she could not face him. The divorce freed her up to remarry and not long after that he remarried. My heart is glad they didn’t die alone.

My mom’s adoption file is a constant reminder to me of what they had not done, of the courage they somehow lacked to fight back and of the child in the middle (my mom) they both lost. I come close to tears every time I revisit this story in my heart’s mind.