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.

Finding Out One Was Adopted

Above is a segment of my Dad’s original adoption papers. He was actually adopted twice (his adoptive mother divorced the first husband and remarried, changing my Dad’s name when he was already 8 years old). Upon discovering one of my Hempstead relatives, the first thing she noticed had entirely been missed by my own self, the Salvation Army appeared to “own” him and his mother’s name was nowhere to be found on the document.

I don’t know how old either of my parents were when they learned they were adopted but I believe each was as old as they needed to be told. I think they always “knew” even before they consciously knew.

There are many ways an adoptee can learn they were adopted. They might accidentally overhear a conversation. They might develop a serious illness that requires accurate medical information. They may discover papers in their adoptive parents’ files after their death or a stranger may come into their life (thanks to DNA testing) and claim to be related.

Most human beings have a need for love and a sense of belonging, also for self-esteem and a recognition of their value. It seems the almost all emotional wounds need these and some also highlight safety and security and I believe that is true of adoptees as well.

There are so many sad, false beliefs that filter into the heart of an adoptee – something must be wrong with me because my “real” parents gave me away, I don’t belong anywhere, I probably never should have been born, I don’t know who I am and if my “real” parents could abandon me, anyone could.

An adoptee seeking reunion with their original family fears another rejection. If they were adopted into a family with children already, they may believe they are loved less and many fear they could be taken away from their adoptive family and even fear that it might be the original family recovering them.

Adoptees suffer many side effects of having been adopted. They may be subject to mood swings, they feel less equal within a family unit, they may be obsessed with the past, struggle with a sense of identity, see how they are different than the adoptive family they are living within, have a hard time saying good-bye, may be always trying to prove their worthiness, may expect to be deceived or engage in risky behavior and may exhibit behaviors indicating a subservience.

That is a lot but it actually is not the end of it – they may experience anxiety or situational depression, they may need to double-check facts for accuracy, they develop various insecurities, they may be cynical and reject the adoptive family. An adoptee may fantasize about a reunion with their “real” family and actually seek them out.

On the plus side, an adoptee respects honesty and openness. It may have been emphasized to them that they were chosen, even if they had a hard time accepting that as a positive aspect of having been adopted. They are adaptable, analytical, appreciative, centered, curious, diplomatic, easygoing, empathetic, happy, private, sentimental, supportive and wise.

They are as complex as any human being could be.

Changing My Perspective

For most of my life the secrets blocked any backward knowledge of our family’s origins. My parents were both adopted. It was simply a fact of life.

Now that I know more of the stories that preceded my parents’ adoptions and have informed myself more accurately about the practice itself, my perspectives have changed – for the better, I believe.

During my parents’ own childhoods, I doubt they were much inclined emotionally to go into the secrets that caused their adoptions. They were dependent on their adoptive parents, after all.

It’s a horrible, scary place. If they thought carefully, it was hard to rationalize it. How could a woman, who they had been told all of their young life, loved them so much, that she wanted them to have a better life, and motivated by that, place them into the arms of strangers, who then raised them ? It doesn’t really add up.

As maturity enters into thought processes, they could not but come to realize the simplicity of the truth – they were taken from their mother’s arms and placed with strangers. It is not hard to understand how this would throw them for an emotional loop, should they deeply contemplate it at all.

How much more the complicated paradoxes must have weighed upon my mom as she became pregnant with each of her daughters. The feelings that any mother to be has about her developing baby would have triggered thoughts about her own original mother.

Then, she is cradling that babe in her arms for the first time. Watching the
precious one sleep . . . can it be any surprise, that an adoptee might wonder “how in the heck did adoption ever happen to me ?”

People Still Buy Babies

In this day and time so far away from the scandals of Georgia Tann stealing and selling babies, I never expected to see someone actually talking about “buying” a baby. It troubles my heart though realistically, one doesn’t come by a baby without cost, even when that child is gestated in their body.

The bit of advertisement above came from a FB group called “Mothers United Against Anti-Adoption”. I removed the more personal, identifying information.

I’m not joining and I am NOT “anti-adoption”. I have simply come to understand that being adopted is way more complicated than I understood growing up or for most of my life (both of my parents were adopted).

I agree that regardless of how you become a mother (or father), the common thread is love. And whether we are natural or adoptive parents, we all go through the same kinds of challenges of feeling like an utter failure. As one adoptive mom said in a Huffington Post article –

“Some days I get tired of it all and just want to be a family. Not the adoptive family … just a family.”

A young woman approached the adoptive parent (it is a transracial adoption and so it was rather obvious), “I was adopted as a baby and it has been a wonderful thing. We need more families like yours.” I stared at her, stunned.

“She didn’t think what I assumed everyone was thinking. She saw beauty and love and hope and family. She thought we were wonderful and it made her smile.”

There are children who need alternative parents for whatever reason. What is perceived as “anti-adoption” issues are really mainly related to two core issues –

[1] Identity and Genetics – let your adopted child keep their original name and don’t have their birth certificate altered.

[2] Family Preservation – whenever possible, the natural parents should be supported in locating the resources to parent their children and given every encouragement.

For those times when a child actually does need alternative parents, then adoption fills a need.

Why Go Looking ?

Someone once asked me, if the adoptive family was a good one, what’s the issue ?

People not affected by adoption often struggle to understand what would motivate an adoptee to go searching for their original family. If one knows where they came from, it can be hard to relate to not knowing.

An adoptee that grows up in a loving, supportive family, will be strong enough to search for who they came from. If their adoptive family was a very good one, they might even expect that they would not like what their search found once they arrive there.

Maybe it would help to understand that this kind of experience was never intended to replace the adoptive family the adoptee grew up in. Yet any adoptee will feel that they have a few “missing” pieces. It is only natural. And once a puzzle has been revealed, completing it makes sense.

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.

Considering Adoption ?

Too often adoption facilitators are more concerned with socioeconomic factors than psychological, emotional or intellectual considerations. There are better indicators for adopting a child than providing a nursery or having enough money in the bank for a college education.

What there is a need for is emotional stability, honesty, and the willingness to become truly informed about what this process means for the adopting parents and the child they adopt.

Prospective adoptive parents can help by making certain the child they are considering REALLY needs to be adopted.

~ The Primal Wound

When asking how to best raise an adopted child, the experts in the 1980s said there were no unique needs and that being adopted (though I should be told as soon as possible) would mean nothing to me.

There is no post-adoption support.

You will not know why I feel so drawn to the ocean if my original family is from Tennessee.

I will tell you that you are not my “real mom” a handful of times out of frustration and not feeling understood.

I will make you prove over and over again that you love me.

I will spend too much time with people who don’t care about me because I will not be able to stand rejecting anyone.

When I become a mother, the adoptee in me will awaken. You will be bewildered when I start talking about being adopted, missing my first mother and my interest in my roots.

When I embark on reunion, you will support me, but feel as though I am rejecting you. I will have to tell you over and over again that I am not leaving you, but regaining part of me that was left behind.

~ Letter to my Prospective Adoptive Parents in The Declassified Adoptee

Much that I have read resonates with what I have seen in my own family. Both my parents were adopted and each of my sisters gave up a child to adoption. Inform yourself. Don’t create a false identity for the child you adopt. Be prepared for perhaps the hardest choice to parent a child. Apply love liberally.

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.

A High Price

While adoption may “succeed” in one sense, providing the financial aspects of a child’s survival and in the best cases even love, it comes at a high price.

A price so high that I question why the practice is used so cavalierly.

I think we could reduce the incidence of children removed from their original parents without ending the value of adoption for the children who will do better if they are raised by other surrogate “parents”.

Many adult adoptees believe the particulars (birth name, birth date, actual parents) of a child’s original identity should never be changed. That the surrogates should not be “parents” but guardians instead. The process still needs to be “better” than the average “foster care” which seems to result in less than optimum outcomes at times.

A Mother’s Love

This is my paternal grandmother later in life looking happy and sweet and loving as a person can be. Yesterday, it hit me quite deeply how much she actually cared.

My elbows were supported at the table where I sat working on my writing. I closed my eyes and put my hands together as if in prayer. My fingertips touching my nose, my thumbs touching my lips. With my face turned upward, I poured my feelings out to her. Thinking that somehow she would receive my feelings wherever it is that one goes when they leave their physical body.

“I love you, Dolores, for what you did for me. You may have hoped it would help your son someday but I am as close to that hope as it was possible to come. I am so deeply grateful that you cared about recording it in photos, with names. Without that effort on your part, I would not be whole today.”

To me, what she did was nothing short of a miracle and I recognized the importance of that act by a mother who lost her child for the rest of her life.

Thanks to how she named my dad, to a photo of her holding him in her lap on the front porch of a Salvation Army home in El Paso Texas, and the proximity with which she placed the head shot of my dad’s original father to that photo, along with the man’s name and the word “boyfriend”, I was able to do something I had thought impossible.

I am able to identify the man who impregnated my grandmother. He was married. He may have never known about my dad but she knew who the culprit was and recorded it for some future unveiling that she could never have imagined.

Ancestry had identified a cousin for me 8 months before I knew who this man was. That cousin did not respond to my inquiry for that long and when he did, based upon the “other” surnames I knew at the time I contacted him, he could not imagine how we might be related, though he accepted we must be. When I gave him the “new” name, he came back immediately – your grandfather was my grandmother’s brother. A perfect confirmation of the truth.