Grandmother

The photo is not the person I wish to acknowledge. I know a woman who is a grandmother and her role in her grandson’s life was crucial. Her youngest son impregnated a young woman. The couple was not only unprepared to marry but not actually ready to parent either.

Into this young family’s support came the grandmother. For four years, she was the dominant support in this young child’s life including where he slept at night – most nights. This gave time for the young couple to mature without being entirely out of their child’s life. I was the fortunate witness of the grandmother’s devotion to her grandson.

Just before the boy was to enter kindergarten, his parents brought him great joy by deciding to marry. Making that commitment to one another official, changed the young mother seemingly overnight. In my friend’s perspective, the young woman became a Super Mom heavily involved with her child’s public school. The young boy lives full time with his parents now.

This is the difference a strong familial support can make in a young person’s life. This is family preservation as it ought to be, though sadly not always.

Adoption – Open or Closed – What’s Best ?

Today, in modern adoption, there are more open adoptions than there were in the past.

In an open adoption, a young adoptee may grow up alongside the parents who conceived them and gave birth, though these parents are not part of the family household the adoptee grows up within. Even so, there is sharing time together, visiting and writing to one another. In an open adoption, you see and get to know your original parents but you don’t have them as your parents.

Up until recently, most adoptions were closed and so, in order to know the people an adoptee was born to, they had to seek a reunion after they became an adult; or at the least, a much older child, as in a teenager.

If it were actually possible for any adoptee to compare the outcomes they would have experienced with each method, what would they choose in full awareness ? Would they want to know their original parents throughout their whole lives ? Do they think that knowing them would make their lives better or worse ?

Of course, there is no such choice for adoptees. Open adoption seeks to make the adoption experience better by taking away the secrecy and shame.

Are the issues the same for an adoptee whether it was an open or closed adoption ? Or does an open adoption simply create a whole new set of issues that didn’t exist within
the close adoption system ?

In a good reunion process, the adoptee is able to explain to the original parent(s) – their feelings of hurt, abandonment and/or anger – which were all caused by the decision of their original parents to surrender their child for adoption.

Can any child go through something as traumatic as being given up and still process it all at the same time – are they able to talk to the original parent about the feelings common among all adoptees at the same time as they are being experienced ? This is not an answerable question as the two kinds of adoption experience do not allow such comparisons.

It can be quite painful for an adoptee to hear about a birth mother who is satisfied with having relinquished her child for adoption. Yet, many such mothers were absolutely convinced at the time they made that choice that they were doing the best thing for their child.

Years later, many birth mothers wish they had kept their child, and that is why there are groups of adoptees actively working to encourage young unwed or troubled expectant mothers to make an effort to parent first before making a decision to relinquish their child to adoption.

The fact is – adoption exists – and it will likely always exist because there is a need and/or desire for that in some circumstances. The hard truth is that not all parents to be actually want to devote themselves to raising a child.

In seeking to reform the practice of adoption, the more we are able to ask piercing questions, explore with those involved the reason for their decisions and just plain understand at a very deep level all aspects of the experience, the better we will be able to shape the future of adoption into better outcomes for all concerned.

In Memoriam

I am now reading a book titled – Lost Daughters: Writing Adoption From a Place of Empowerment and Peace. I read an essay yesterday by Susan Perry and felt such a connection with her that I was seeking to reach out to her and discovered sadly that she had died some years ago.

She is quoted as saying –

“Sealed record laws afford more rights to the dead than they do to the
living and they bind the adopted person to a lifetime restraining order.”
~ Susan Perry

Just like my paternal grandmother and paternal grandfather, she was the product of a married man and a woman not his wife. They were both of Danish ancestry, just as my paternal grandfather was. An immigrant, not yet a citizen, married to a woman 20+ years his senior.

Susan’s adoptive mother had no idea how often her interior thoughts had turned to her ancestors. Who were they, and what was her story ? My own mom had similar questions.

Mrs Perry did know that her adoptive parents truly loved her, and that love
and support helped to make her the person she was in life. I believe I can say the same about all of the adoptive parents in my own family’s lives.

Yet, our genes are some part of what makes us the person we each are as well.

It is only natural that any adoptee that reaches adulthood (if not sooner) will want to know who passed those genes down to them.

I have bumped up against sealed records in three states – Virginia, Arizona and California. I realize how incredibly fortunate I am to have uncovered ALL of my original grandparents. I have the DNA tests that no one saw the inexpensive cost and prevalence of even 20 years ago as well as the matching sites Ancestry.com and 23 and Me to thank for most of my own success.

So many adoptees are never that fortunate. Sealed records are unjust and damaging to so many people. They encourage unhealthy thinking, repression, and denial as the means for coping with life.

I wonder if, because of adoption, my own mom did not feel empowered to take charge of her own story, just as Susan wrote in her essay.

Even so, every adopted person’s journey is unique.

It is difficult for me, as the child of two adoptees, to understand why as a culture we continue to shackle adopted people to an institution that is governed by such archaic and repressive laws, when the data clearly shows that most original mothers are open to contact. Those who are not, can simply say “no”.

Once an adoptee becomes an adult – they do not need outside agents supervising their own, very personal business.

Repressive laws set the tone – either/or thinking. There is a belief that adoptees who search are expressing disloyalty to their adoptive parents, or that the adoptee should just “be grateful” and move on. Attitudes of this kind are hurtful and dismissive.

Here’s the TRUTH, adoptees have two sets of parents – and a unique mix of DNA and upbringing. It is belittling and unfair to tell adoptees that they are not entitled by law to access their own original birth certificates. Every other American citizen has no such restriction.

This is institutional discrimination and there is no really good reason it exists. Adoptee rights bills have accumulated plenty of evidence that they are beneficial for the majority of persons for whom adoption is some part of their personal story.

Always A Child

My Mom After Adoption

Children grow up into adults. That is their only real occupation through almost 20 years of life. Some children have to grow up early. My mom gave birth to me at the age of 16. I married at the age of 18 and had my first child at 19.

When I look at my 18 year old son, I can’t imagine him married with a child. He is intelligent and has an abundance of common sense but as his mother, he is still a bit of a child to me, though the maturing is obviously taking hold and he spends much of his daily waking life doing men’s work with his dad on our farm.

There is a subset of humanity that is never allowed to grow up – adoptees. Certainly, they pile on the years and mature, just like any other human being but society and governmental agencies treat them as though they were still a child.

Why do I say this ? Because they are denied rights that any other citizen takes for granted. When their adoption is decreed by a court of law, their identity is stolen away from them. Often, their name is changed and their original birth certificate is amended to make it appear that their adoptive parents actually gave birth to them. Sometimes, even the place where they were born is changed.

Then, when they become an adult at 18 or 21 years of age and because they know they were adopted (or for some who were never told the truth and take a DNA test and receive the unpleasant and sudden surprise that they do not derive their origins from the people they believed were the source), when they attempt to learn the truth of their identity, origins and heritage – they are denied the very normal and simple human right of knowing who they really are.

It is time for the LIES to end and for ALL states in this country (United States of America) to open their files to the adults who were once a child that was adopted by strangers to raise as their own.

Arrested Development

The loss of a mother creates a significant
developmental challenge for a child.

My maternal grandmother was 11 years old when her mother died and the oldest of 5 children. I suspect that Lizzie Lou was forced to take on responsibilities not only for herself but for the whole family very quickly.

It is known that in such cases the daughter advances some areas of development quite quickly.

At the same time, it is also known that she may identify with her earlier stage of maturity, the age when her mother was still the guiding light of the family’s life,
as a way of maintaining a relationship with her mother in an effort to deny
the finality of the death.

The result can be an adult who is stuck at an earlier developmental stage. I don’t know if this happened to my grandmother but my grandfather, I am told, described her as very young – indeed she was 20 years younger. She was, however, already 20 years old when they married and 21 years old when my mother was born. Hardly a child, though I understand that maturity is more of an issue than a young person of that age may believe.

Ever since I heard this assessment, that this is what my grandfather said about my grandmother, that she was very young, I have wondered, exactly what did he mean by that ? I have to consider that maybe she was a “little girl” in emotionally significant ways. Did she expect too much of him ? Did she throw temper tantrums ?

I’ll never know why he left her 4 months pregnant after only 4 months of marriage. I am left simply to consider the possible reasons and I come down on the side of believing there is a “positive” perspective I could apply.

The Parallels Are Surprising

Learning at an early age that dependent relationships can be impermanent,
security ephemeral, and family capable of being redefined, the
motherless daughter develops an adult insight while she is still a child,
with only juvenile resources to help her cope.

Early loss is a maturing experience, forcing a daughter to age faster
than her peers – both cognitively and behaviorally.
The death of a parent marks the end of a childhood.

~ Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

What are the odds ? These two women are my grandmothers. Both lost their own mothers at a young age. My dad’s mother when she was only 3 mos old. My mom’s mother when she was 11.

They both lost their first born children to adoption. Both children were conceived with the assistance of much older men.

It may be because my grandmothers were more mature than the men their age and so they were instead attracted to men closer in age to their own fathers. It is unclear that they were unusually close to their fathers. Whether they were or not, is lost in the mists of time.

Why Older Men ?

And why were they both attracted to such older men ?

I think, because, they were motherless. As young twenty-somethings, they found men their age immature, too unaware of how serious life could be. Too full of optimism about the future, too unaware of how life can come crashing down upon one’s self.

But the older men, they knew. Yet, they dismissed these young women and their concerns as insignificant simply because they were so young.

Maybe it is that in having lost their mothers, the father became more important in their own life, even if he wasn’t able to be as nurturing as their mother would have been.

Somehow, I just don’t feel that the fact that they chose older men, who would end up fathering their child but not take responsibility for it, is insignificant.