An Adoption Plan Gone Wrong

I recently read about this situation –

I fought tooth and nail to get my daughter’s original birth certificate. It finally came. I was horrified when I looked at it. Her first dad isn’t listed at all. Her name is stated as “*** [mom’s last name]”

I watched her first mom fill out the birth certificate form (pre signing… I now understand there are so many issues about my presence there to begin with and I’m hoping the silver lining is that I did at least get to see, on behalf of my daughter, that she completed this form and what exactly she wrote). This birth certificate is not representative of what first mom named her! And she gave her her first dad’s last name and listed him as the father.

What on earth happened?! Did the hospital know she was making an adoption plan and just ignored the form? Did the terrible social worker at the hospital drop the ball?! How could this be legal? She has a name… her mom gave her one! What will she think when she’s older? Obviously we will explain that this BC is a huge problem and we will be giving her all of the information that would have been on it (her full name with original last name and first dad’s full name and date of birth).

I just wanted to be sure no one withheld that that piece of her life and that she could hold it in her hands… and I feel like she was cheated out of a complete record. I’m angry on her behalf now and I’m angry on behalf of her future child/preteen/teen/adult selfs who will have to process this.

Birth mothers and adoption buyers beware !!

Why One’s Name Is Important

This is an actual homework assignment. Now, imagine you were adopted. How do you answer these questions in a classroom where most of the other children were not adopted ?

One of the reforms most mentioned in the adoptee community is the importance of a child keeping the name they were given at birth. My mother, really cared about her birth name, once she learned what it was. My father discovered his birth name when his adoptive parents died and was surprised by it.

Changing a child’s name after adopting them is taking away their legitimate identity in an effort to pass them off as having come directly from you – as though you gave birth to them. In fact, adoptee’s birth certificates are changed to further the false story of their origins.

Certainly, in a more morally judgmental time, the idea was that adoptees were bastards who needed to be protected from the cruelty of being outed. Now single mothers give birth to children intentionally. Times have changed and so should how we protect and nurture a child who’s parents are just not ready to be fully supportive of them.

Every child has a right to their authentic identity and to their actual conception and origins stories. The time is now for a good reform.

Owning The Truth

Regarding adoption, as one dives deeply into the practice, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that either you are OK taking someone else’s child – regardless of the pain it causes them – or you’re not OK with that.

At some level, it really is that simple. Some people can do that and function and some can’t fathom the thought.

Many adoptive parents make excuses. What if this ? Or what if that ? Or I did this ? Or I did that ?

Or even more honest and direct, if not me, what would happen to that child otherwise ?

But there are some adoptive parents who recognize and own their personal motives – I wanted kids and couldn’t have my own. It was about my need to experience motherhood.

It doesn’t make it a positive thing for the original mother or the adoptee but owning it is something. Many adoptive parents can’t bring themselves to accept that truth.

In case you misunderstand this – no one, absolutely no one, is advocating that children should ever remain in truly abusive situations. No one!

Motherhood Rights

What about women who do NOT want to know the children they gave up for adoption, do they have the right to not have their identities revealed ?

No, you have a child, you owe them an identity, you owe them at least this – their place in the chain of life.

Does such a mother have a right to be free of the trauma of confrontation ?

I don’t believe a confrontation would be traumatic.

No right to that privacy. Once you are a mother, you are a mother – even if you don’t raise that child. The issue in reform is when the rights of the original mother infringe on the rights of an adoptee.

Second Choice

It could be the worst thing about being adopted.

Everyone’s first choice is to pass their genes down to a biological child.

Even before I knew so deeply about all the complications of adoption, my husband and I considered adopting when he wanted to become a father (I had already become a mother at age 19). We rather quickly rejected the idea and never seriously pursued it. We chose a novel method that is not without its own complications now that DNA testing is so inexpensive and matching sites out the truth, at least privately between the affected individuals.

Adoption has often been the solution for a couple when their first choice died young and subsequent efforts to conceive have failed – known as secondary infertility. Whether the woman has previously had a successful pregnancy or never could, some of these couples decide to adopt when all else has failed for them.

Just last night in a Season 6 episode of The Simpsons about the conception of their youngest daughter, Maggie, Dr Hibbert says to Marge – a healthy baby can bring in $60,000. Yes, the comment did not passed but caught my attention.

Betrayal

It may seem harsh but for a lot of adoptees, the giving up was a betrayal. The handover that can be felt by the adoptee, continually felt throughout their life. The rejection. The abandonment. The unanswerable questions.

It is a forever loss – permanent.

Even in the pre-verbal infant – adoption – is “remembered” on an emotional, cellular level. This in turn causes lots of behavioral and self-worth related issues. Often the adoptee can not explain why they feel as they do. Why they act out like they do. Their anger is in a very deep place that cannot be released because the adoptee is unable to express the emotional context of their feelings in language.

It is impossible to proclaim adoption good or bad in all circumstances. There are true orphans and then there is the exploited single mother. There is the profit motive to take her baby and sell it to a couple who has the means to meet the demanded price.

All children are priceless but the adoptee has been priced and that price paid, not only by the adoptive parents but by the original parents and their kin – and most especially, always, by the adoptee’s own self.

Freed From A False Story

So very much like Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, the author of this month’s Science of Mind Daily Guides, Dr Temple Hayes, describes her family’s lifelong belief that a great-grandmother was Native American. Eventually, an inexpensive DNA test revealed the truth that they were not.

Such advances in what was once expensive medical technology are freeing people from false stories that they have been told all their lives. This allows the newly liberated person to create a new, bright and dynamic existence.

When we believe a false story we feel disconnected from our family. On an energetic level, we may simply feel that something does not add up, the shoe doesn’t fit. My mom believed she had been deceptively “stolen” from her original parents. While the story she concocted wasn’t accurate, the general circumstances of exploitation to take away a baby were the truth. The story I had made up about my dad’s origins – that a Mexican woman named Maria had left him on the doorstep of the Salvation Army – also turned out to be false.

I never expected to know what I know now. My parents had to be taken away from the families they were born into, in order to come together from the families they were adopted into, so they could marry, so my self and my sisters could be born. I cannot regret my very life.

I am happy to have had my false stories proven to be the mistaken ideas that they were. I am now more interested in everything to do with Denmark or Scotland than I was just a very few years ago. I prefer reality. Most people honestly do. Adoptees deserve to know their reality. All efforts at reform are seeking that outcome.

Every Adoptee Is Unique

We are all unique and so are our adoption stories. There is no one size fits all as to the experiences of any individual adoptee.

We should play close attention to our adoptions stories. Because being adopted is still relatively rare among the people of society, our stories matter as a window on a practice that takes the children of one mother and places them with a mother with whom they have no genetic connection.

As writers, we must polish the imagery with which we tell our stories so that they can receive the attention they are due.

In my own family’s numerous adoption stories, I seek to find their positive rather than their negative aspects, while not denying nor hiding from that. It is a reality and so, acceptance is an important part of healing any wounds that have occurred.

I search for the ways in which we have experienced life differently from those who without thought live the inherited version. As I discover the truths within my own family’s stories, I edit the plot accordingly because the truth has become even more important to me as a result of it’s having been hidden for so long.

I also keep my eye on the philosophical implications of the changes to the experience of having been adopted that reformers and activists seek to make.

Approval

I came across a perception recently that adoptive parents are always hungry for stories coming from adoptees. That what they are really seeking is approval that they are doing the right thing.

As adoptees are speaking up more in these modern times about how adoption has impacted their lives and affected their choices, the people who always had the privileged position in the adoption triad are now questioning their motives (or should be, if they aren’t).

What’s been done cannot be undone and the results are a fact of life. That is the case for all of the adoptees in my own inner family circle.

But caring people should be paying attention because prospective parents could still seek to help a life be more stable by looking to the foster care system and offering a permanent solution for the older youth incarcerated within it.

Society could find it in it’s compassionate heart to be supportive of young women who find themselves pregnant with inadequate resources to parent their child. We could find ways to help them rather than leave them at the mercy of a profit focused business model seeking to effectively sell their babies away from them.

Every person and every action affects the whole collective. It is said that the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can cause a tsunami of good around the world. Adoptees are fluttering their wings these days.

It’s Better To Know

Searching for where an adoptee came from requires a special kind of courage. It might be opening up a “can of worms” has my dad always believed. There could be disappointment. The relatives one finds are real people with real flaws and also a kind of beauty because they are a connection. It is better to know who you are rather than live in a mystery.

For an adoptee, the connection to one’s ancestors has been broken. That matters. When adoption is in one’s family history, those impacted only want answers and the truth. There isn’t a desire to disrupt anyone’s life. If relatives want to meet – wonderful – those I have met have been very helpful in filling in the understandable gaps in my ancestry. Sharing the stories we weren’t there for can help us to heal.

Loss of the most sacred bond in life, that of a mother and child, is one of the most severe traumas and this loss will require long-term, if not lifelong, therapy. If not therapy, then answers and a knowledge of something that is real and not falsified.

Finding one’s roots does not deny the love and value that one gives to the people who were there in life thanks to adoption. The aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents in my own life are treasured and held precious even if there is no true genetic bond with these.

A life can be symbolized by a circle – birth, maturity, old age and death – completion, rebirth or heaven. Coming to know my roots has also been a kind of completion, a bringing the arc of my life full circle.