Profound and Mystical

Painting by Nazar Haidri

At the time my parents were given up for adoption, not as much was known about how the initial relationship of a child to his mother contributes to a healthy self-esteem. My parents were each with their mothers for 6 months or longer and that was a good thing. My mom seemed to me to have less self-confidence than my dad but she had a difficult adoptive mother who I doubt my mom ever felt she lived up to the expectations of that woman.

My niece and nephew who were given up for adoption were taken from their mothers shortly after birth. I don’t really know what effect that had on them and it is difficult to know which was worse. I think my parents probably suffered more because they had that time of closeness with their mothers and then suddenly she was gone. They were pre-verbal. How to explain that the sun has ceased to shine and won’t be back ?

The success of human beings on this planet has much to do with the ability to adapt to changing conditions. There is yet much to learn about the cost of having to adapt, regarding the attempt to substitute an unrelated mother for the original natural mother. I would suspect that at the least there is a wariness about what is happening.

The relationship of a child to their mother is profound and mystical.

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.

Out From The Shadows

Later this week, I’ll be pitching my work in progress to literary agents at Gateway Con – a conference for writers and readers in St Louis Missouri taking place over this coming weekend.

It is a nonfiction, memoir style story of loss, conflict and the redemption of my roots.

How I had to quickly mature after both of my parents died only 4 months apart, in order to close their estate and cope with the legal challenges of a brilliant but delusional sister.

It is also a mystery. I share what I had to do in order to discover who my original grandparents were (both of my parents were adoptees).

There is a surprising realization for my own self at the end. Maybe it should have been obvious but it took learning the story of my parents adoptions to understand my own humble but fortunate reality.

I think I’m probably 3 to 6 months away from completing this story satisfactorily. Probably a couple of years away from publishing if I am so fortunate.

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.

Gratitude

Sadly, there seems to be an unreasonable standard that expects an adoptee to be grateful to the people who adopted them for having saved them from a worse fate.

Generally speaking gratitude is an important spiritual practice in my own life but I get it.

In truth, while parents are mostly grateful to have received the children born to them and to have the complicated, difficult and ultimately satisfying job of mentoring the next generation into the ways of the world until they are able to navigate it on their own, that does not mean that their children are obligated to be grateful to their parents for having done what parents are supposed to do.

An adoptee has a complicated situation. They are expected to give up any attachment to the people who gave them birth, allowed to have the basic details of their identify changed and more accurately falsified and then expected to be forever grateful to the strangers who took them in and raised them.

This is not a realistic expectation. I understand so much, so much better now, that learning about my own parents’ adoptions has also encouraged me to learn more deeply about all aspects of this human practice.

Torn Apart

I was really out of it when my daughter was born. Thankfully, though I had a c-section with each of my sons, I was at least awake from the very first moments they drew a breath.

The feeling of becoming a mother was amazing. I’m certain it was the same for both of my original grandmothers who had months with each of my parents before their first born child was taken from them. I’m certain my own mother experienced the same amazing effect – a kind of euphoria that comes with giving birth to a new human being.

Everything changes for a woman when she becomes a mother. Everything is taken away when she loses her child. I struggled for years to come to terms with not raising my daughter. I don’t know if I have fully overcome the feeling of not being there for her as she was growing up. For years, I could not find a commercial birthday card that could express what our actual relationship was like.

I continue to progress in tiny steps but I don’t think I will ever forgive myself, even if I know all the reasons why. So, I can only imagine the pain my grandmothers felt or my sister feels. It is like not feeling worthy of having one’s own child. It is horrible.

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.

Breaking The Cycle

Both of my parents were adoptees, so it is no wonder really that the pattern of giving up children to adoption continued in the lives of my sisters and I. Both sisters gave up children to adoption. While I did not and while one of my sisters experienced a horrific outcome through the courts that I will always believe was biased, two more children were not raised by us because of circumstances, including financial hardship, beyond our control. I even understand now that it was a minor miracle that I wasn’t given up for adoption when my teenage mother conceived me out of wedlock.

Happily, I have optimism that our children, who are raising their own children successfully, are breaking the cycle that has fragmented my childhood family both on the parental side and through our own children.

I believe that the general perspective is shifting now, though not yet entirely ending mothers losing their children to adoption, to encourage more mothers not to chose that deeply painful loss that too many mothers have suffered and too many children have been damaged by.

There will always be some need for surrogate parenting but it may be time to allow adoptees not to become a false identity but to be supported in order to grow up as whole and integrated selves with their original identities and family trees known and intact.

Overburdened By A Need To Be Grateful

The adopted child has many challenges but one of the most unique may be this sense that they should be grateful to the adoptive parents for having taken them into the family.

Often unacknowledged is the loss that precedes all adoptions.

That loss is profound regardless of the reason the child was separated from its original parents to begin with. In that separation the child experiences many complicated emotions. There can be differences between the child and the adoptive family that become ever more obvious with the passage of time and that no one is at fault for – other than the fact of the adoption.

Such differences can include – ethnicity, physical features, preferences, and intellectual abilities, or being told they are somehow “special” or the “chosen one” by the family. Simply being adopted sets the child apart from most of their peers.

A syndrome referred to as being caused by the adoption itself leads to a strong desire to understand the mystery of having been adopted in the first place. A desire to know the people one has been born of and the conflicted feelings about wanting to know people who it seems to the child they have been rejected or abandoned by.

Even when the adoption is “open” (both sets of parents are at the least in contact with one another) or a “reunion” with the biological family occurs, differences in nurturing and life experiences may make even one’s genetic relations seem alien.