Adoption Does NOT Make It All Better

I was reading about one of the common sticky situations that often appear in my all things adoption group. This part really got my attention – “Everyone is like ‘this is going to be so great!’ and I am just feeling like… yes and no. They will be safe, but adoption doesn’t just make it all better.”

The standard narrative in society is to celebrate and be joyful when anyone adopts. Truth is the yes and no part is probably closest to being the truth for the adoptee themselves.

Today would have been my mom’s birthday but she died back in 2015. She never was entirely comfortable with how she ended up adopted. Trying to be polite, she would say she was inappropriately adopted. Since Tennessee rejected her effort to get her adoption file (a file that I now possess in its complete form), she really couldn’t know for certain. She did know that Georgia Tann had been involved in her adoption in 1937. She knew something about the scandals surrounding Georgia Tann’s placement of children and she had a had time reconciling the fact that she was born in Virginia but adopted at less than 1 year old in Memphis Tennessee.

I will forever be disappointed that Tennessee promised my mom to do everything in their power to determine if her original parents were alive but only sent an inquiry to the Arkansas Driver’s License Bureau who could find no record of her natural father. No wonder, he had been dead for 30 years at that point and was buried in Arkansas. Could they have at least checked Social Security death records ? But they did not.

Instead, they broke my mom’s heart by telling her that her natural mother had died several years earlier. My mom had to have seen some of the many adoptee/mom reunions on TV in the early 1990s when she was seeking to obtain her adoption file. All Tennessee gave her for the $180 she paid them was a NO and heartbreak. That I cannot forgive Tennessee because having seen her adoption file, I know in my heart that how hard her mother was fighting to keep her when up against a master baby thief would have been important to her.

Even so, in her moment of accepting all that would never be, she said she was glad she was adopted. I never truly believed that she was – glad. Being adopted was not “better,” just different. However, if she had not been adopted, she would not have had me. It causes in me conflicting feelings because I am glad that I am alive and that I had my mom (and my dad) in my childhood growing up and until death did us part. I can hope that my mom and her mom had that reunion after death that many people believe in.

Family Breakdown

Some reading I was doing today in a book titled Healing the Split by John E Nelson MD caused me to reflect on my mom’s adoption from a new perspective.

He writes – “While there remains much to learn and study, schizophrenogenic mothers bring a sense of incompleteness to child raising. This is not the same as that mother rejecting her child.”

“Quite the contrary. She regards him as particularly close and significant for her. She needs her child in a distorted way as much as her child needs her.”

This causes me to reflect on my maternal grandfather. His very young mother gave birth to him AFTER her husband, his father, has died. He was her first born (even as my grandmother was her father’s first born and his wife had died but only after the 5th child was born) and remained extraordinarily close to her all her life.

As much as I have blamed my maternal grandmother’s widowed father for not supporting her and my mother, when it appeared that my maternal grandfather (whether this was entirely true or not) had abandoned her at 4 months pregnant – there remains this question in my own heart that can never be answered now. Why did he leave her and why did he not come to her defense when she returned to Tennessee from Virginia after my mom had been born and reached out to him through the Juvenile Court in Memphis.

With the same kind of destructive failure to be supportive that I blame my maternal grandmother’s family for, I do also believe that my maternal grandfather’s mother was not supportive of him. I believe she was not happy he had married my grandmother nor did she want anything to do with the child they conceived while married.

I can never know this for certain but why didn’t he take her back to Arkansas with him, when his WPA job in Memphis ended ? It could be because he was dependent upon his mother since she was caring for his children after their mother, his wife, had died – so that he could go to work in Memphis.

So, I believe the deck was stacked against both of my mom’s natural parents raising her – by her very own grandparents, their father and their mother, one on each side of the parental equation.

Dr Nelson notes in his book – “Any movement toward autonomy leads him to feel that she cannot survive without him, added to his certainty that he cannot survive without her. For him to individuate would destroy them both.” Just the thoughts percolating in my own mind this afternoon related to my own familial adoption stories.

No, I would not give you false hope
On this strange and mournful day

Oh, little darling of mine
I can’t for the life of me
Remember a sadder day
I know they say let it be
But it just don’t work out that way
And the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

~ lyrics in Mother and Child Reunion by Paul Simon

Mother And Child Reunion

The truth is that the connection between a child and its first mother is profound.

The pull to repeat a pattern of giving birth and then relinquishing is common down the line from first mothers/adoptees to their children or grandchildren. I certainly believe that as I have seen it in my own family. Repeating the pattern is unconscious, yet very real.

It is often an attempt to condone the original relinquishment. With two parents who were both adoptees, relinquishment was seen as a “natural” occurrence within my family. By repeating that pattern, we were in effect, making valid what happened to our own parents. By encouraging my sister to give up her daughter for adoption, my mom may have been unconsciously trying to validate what happened to her own self as an infant. To make it somehow “right”.

The reunion of a child with its natural mother often has a calming effect. I believe that meeting her genetic family allowed my niece to feel more “right” with her own body image. Both my mom and my niece had similar disconsonant relationships with their adoptive mothers due to a difference in their natural body types.

There is a release of tension and a renewal of life in reconnecting with one’s origins when they have been cut assunder. Reunions can help all of the adoptee’s relationships including that with their adoptive parents.

One should know that searching for the natural mother IS in the best interest of the adoptee. There may be anxiety and the outcome may not match expectations. Searches are difficult for everyone
concerned but I am grateful that my niece’s adoptive father supported her need to know. All adoptees have been hurt and all are suffering, even if the situation was good and the suffering is largely unconscious.

Musician Paul Simon has a song on the theme. Some of the lyrics are –

No I would not give no false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away

Oh, little darling of mine, I can’t for the life of me
Remember a sadder day, that now they say let be
Just don’t count on me and the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again

No I would not give no false hope
On this strange and mournful day
But the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away

Oh, little darling of mine, I just can’t believe it’s so
Though it seems strange to say, I never been laid so low
Such a mysterious way and the course of a lifetime runs
Over and over again