Secrets

Reflecting on another blog I wrote several years ago, I see how it applies to this one. I believe also that those that have something to hide from other people will divert one’s attention away from that secret anyway. However there is a current of support for truth in Life that will “out” what should or needs to be known. That is why secrets can’t be “kept”. Secrets are the answer to the question and the answer will out itself because a secret usually does not exist for any good reason. For some people it is only in the seeking for answers to questions deep within them that they have the courage to go on living. It is as though the impossibility of finding an answer is itself a motivation that keeps them keeping on in vitally alive ways.

Rainer Maria Rilke once wrote – “Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”

My mom had questions about how she ended up adopted because she did know that the Tennessee Children’s Home Society was the agency and that her conveyance to her adoptive parents occurred in Memphis. In fact, growing up we all believed she had been born in Memphis. At some point, she learned she had been born in Richmond VA. This puzzled her. How could she have been born there but then adopted as an infant at Memphis ? She had heard about the Georgia Tann scandal when it broke in 1950 and she was still a school girl. She worried then that she might have been a victim and her adoptive mother, while admitting that her adoption had taken place through that agency, said my mom was not “one of those” babies.

Life moved on. My mother gave birth three times, each time to girl babies. But the questions never really went away for her. Then in the 1990s, awareness of the Georgia Tann scandal hit the national consciousness 40 years later with features on 60 Minutes and on Oprah facilitating reunions between separated mothers and their children. My mom learned about Denny Glad in the 60 Minutes broadcast and did speak with her, learned some minimal information and received some advice. So, my mom requested her adoption file from the state of Tennessee. Sadly, this was premature in the sense that her inquiry occurred before the state was forced to open it’s files for the victims of Georgia Tann. They did offer to ask my mom’s original parents if they were okay with her receiving her file.

Sadly, they informed her that her mother had died several years before devastating my mom’s desire to let her mother that she was okay. As a mother herself, my mom felt her mother would want to know. She also had a mysterious health condition and no family medical history to assist in revealing whether this was genetic and even what the condition might actually be as a diagnosis was proving hard to come by.

The state had promised to make every effort to contact my mom’s parents. They did not. They only sent a minimal inquiry to the Arkansas Driver’s License Bureau to determine if my grandfather had a current Arkansas license. They replied “no record”. Of course they had no record. He had been dead for 30 years. They could have checked the Social Security Death Index but they never tried. This really vexed my mom (not that she knew he was dead but he was much older than her mother – my mom did know that much) because they denied her the adoption file on the basis that they were not able to determine whether he was alive or dead.

It is really a shame – these secrets that adoption has forced on it’s victims. Seeing her adoption file would have answered at least some of my mom’s questions. The question I can’t answer (since I now do have her adoption file) is why her father left her mother when she was 4 months pregnant because they were legally wed. I have to live with that question unanswered because there is no one alive who could answer it for me.

What Is Normal Anyway ?

Growing up in my immediate family, adoption was the most normal thing. After all, both of my parents were adopted and they were “normal” or were they ? Until recently, I didn’t know that being adopted could leave traumatic wounds at such a deep and pre-verbal level the person isn’t even conscious those feelings are there.

Now, my mom was a Georgia Tann baby and when she was a schoolgirl in the early 1950s, the scandal in Memphis broke into national news. Her adoptive mother admitted she had been adopted there but that she was not one of the stolen babies. Life went on and she got pregnant and married in time for me to be legitimate.

Fast-forward to the early 1990s and the Georgia Tann scandal hit national attention again with stories on 60 Minutes and Oprah among others. My mom learned that she had not been born in Memphis but had actually been born in Virginia. She could not reconcile the disparity of this in her own mind and learning about some of the most extreme atrocities perpetrated by Miss Tann, my mom knew at a very deep level that she never should have been adopted and that her adoption was somehow inappropriate – that last word was one she used when she tried to get her adoption file from the state of Tennessee but was rejected.

What is normal, anyway ? Normal is what you know. We knew adoption was real and we knew that our parents were being raised by people who did not give them birth. We knew that ALL of the relatives we knew as such, were not related to us. It is a bit odd to re-think that now but at the time it was what we knew as a reality.

“What makes us normal is knowing that we’re not normal.”
~ Haruki Murakami

Now, I do know that my parents being adopted was not a normal situation. And I even know that I have been a victim of adoption fog. Even as I was discovering who the people were that actually gave birth to my two parents.

Becoming Whole Again

Much of what I write here came as an unexpected side effect of discovering who my original grandparents were. Both of my parents were adoptees and both of them died without knowing what I know now.

The journey began because my cousin informed me she had received her father’s adoption file from the state of Tennessee. This came as a huge surprise to me. Back in the early 1990s, my mom tried and failed to get her own. I had hoped, since she had died, it might become available to me but that is not how sealed records work generally – and I have bumped up against them in 3 states – Virginia, Arizona and California.

What made Tennessee different was the Georgia Tann scandal. There would have been criminal charges lodged against her if she had not died before that could happen. The movers and shakers of Memphis political life were all too happy to let the wrong-doing die with Miss Tann.

The story had such potency, that it erupted on the public’s imagination in the early 1990s on 60 Minutes and Oprah. A movie was made by Hallmark featuring Mary Tyler Moore as a convincing Georgia Tann. Reunions of adoptees with their original parents started being seen on television and my mom wanted that for herself. It was not to be. No one told her that less than 10 years after her own efforts were denied, it would have been possible.

It was surprising to me how the dominoes began falling so easily, so that in less than one year, I knew who all 4 of my original grandparents were and made contact with some surviving descendants. Only a few years ago, I would never have predicted such a result.

It didn’t end there however. From that new wholeness, I also began to understand deeply the impacts of separating young children or infants from their mothers and original families, how this causes a deep traumatic wound in the adoptee and how even the most well-meaning of adoptive parents (my adoptive grandparents were totally that and good people in general) can not make up for what has happened to the victims of the process.

And from all that, has come this blog. No doubt I still have more to say as soon as tomorrow.

Reunions

In the early 1990s, my mom began a process of trying to obtain her adoption file in the hopes of reuniting with her original mother. The state of Tennessee was uncooperative but did tell her that her mother had died several years before. My mom was devastated.

The story of Georgia Tann’s baby stealing and selling scandal of the early 1950s had re-emerged in public awareness. There were programs on 60 Minutes and Oprah and even a movie about the woman’s life starring Mary Tyler Moore. Tennessee was compelled by an overwhelming demand for justice to unsealed the adoption files of those directly affected by Tann’s corrupt practices but no one told my mom.

After she died in 2015, my cousin told me that it was possible to obtain the file. She had managed to get her dad’s (my mom’s brother who was adopted from the same agency a few years before my mom was). In October 2017, I was able to obtain this and learned the truth that we never knew about our original grandparents.

Both of my sisters surrendered babies to adoption and they have been reunited in the sense that they know us now as their biological, genetic relatives. I have also reunited with cousins for each of my parents original family lines and so I have some sense of the complicated experience of growing up in adoptive families and then discovering the original ones.

I will be writing more generally about reunions in the coming days but this part is my own story.