When The Next Baby Come Along

It’s a longish story, so I’ll try to summarize it. A woman with 2 biological sons was approached by a couple at church to adopt their grandchild. At first, she expected the biological mother to change her mind but it didn’t happen and she ended up with the baby girl. However, it was all a very open adoption until . . .

That little girl is now 9 years old. Her first mother has had another baby and has ceased all contact. She plans to never tell her new daughter that she gave up a previous baby for adoption. Her husband is supportive, even though he knew this other daughter existed before they got married. The grandparents and other extended family vehemently disagree with this decision and remain very much involved with the adoptive mother and this older daughter. However, the adopted daughter asks regularly about her biological mother and her “baby sister.” The rules were changed for us in the middle of the game. What can I do to prevent her from feeling abandoned, causing more psychological and emotional damage to her? The involvement from her biological mother’s extended family complicates things. It brings questions every time there is any interaction with them.

From an adoptee – There’s nothing you can do about the damage her first mother is doing to her. Don’t focus on it. Give your daughter all the love and support she deserves. At this point, speaking hard truths with grace about her mom and drawing boundaries to protect her will take wisdom. I’ve had to walk this road from 10 to now. I’m 40. My natural parents gave me up for adoption with some expectations that I did not meet. Sometimes, if I look at the cold hard facts, there is a sadness and anger that comes, but my adopted parents loved me. I am so thankful for that. It had made me strong enough to look at the hardness of life but also taught me mercy so that I don’t lash at people because of the hurt done to me. Truth and mercy. They should always go hand in hand.

From a trans-racial international adoptee – having lovely adoptive parents doesn’t necessarily mean there is no trauma. When we refer to as “adoption is a trauma”, we’re talking about the relinquishment (especially at birth), the removal from biological family (even with “open” adoptions) & the legal severing of all biological ties. You can be the most trauma-informed adoptive parent who centers the adoptee and the adoptee can still have trauma. For example, your daughter refers to the baby as her “baby sister” but legally speaking, they aren’t sisters. You should consider that to be trauma. You can’t prevent adoption trauma from happening, when the adoption has already taken place.

From a woman adopted by kin – relinquishment is trauma, even when done as carefully as possible. THIS is a whole other level of heartbreak. It makes me sad and angry for her, that she now has to face being completely abandoned by her mother… especially with the reason being that she now wants to lie to the younger baby and pretend the other daughter never existed. She’s doing a major disservice to them both. The young mother also has some trauma. Even if she pulled herself together and got on with her life, even if she says she’s moved on, even if she acts like a giant brat – in spite of all that – it was trauma for HER to give away her baby. She gives clues when she mentions not wanting the new baby to know. She is judging HERSELF for what she did. Whether she deserves that judgment or not, isn’t the point. The point is that we live in denial and continue to make more bad decisions, when we refuse to face the judgment we make against ourselves. She feels like a horrible person for giving away her child, but she isn’t allowing herself to acknowledge that feeling. It comes out in her fear of being judged by her new baby. She can’t stomach the idea of that. So she’s hiding her mistakes. The option of therapy was avoided and stigmatized by the people who raised me. I stuffed it all down and put on the good, grateful face. It all began bubbling up when I became a mother. Figuring out trauma as a new parent is FAR from ideal, but it often comes to the surface when we become parents. Go ahead and get help for the child long before that. Brace yourself. Her mother has fully abandoned her and is planning to pretend to have a happy, perfect family with a new baby. It’s a multi-layered loss. Not only is she losing her mother, she’s also losing the chance to know the new sibling. You are the mother figure in her life. The chances that you will catch the fall-out and flack from the onslaught of emotions is pretty high. Please prepare yourself to recognize that trauma responses are NOT misbehavior.

The adoptive mother says – I would rather her not have known about the baby had I saw this coming. But the kinship adoptee responds with the hard reality – I can understand why you say you’d rather she not know about the baby, since it’s causing additional pain. As mothers, we want to help them avoid big pains like this whenever possible. But I’d like to gently caution you against that thought as well. Her sibling is part of her truth. For right now, it is extremely painful to know about the baby… but not knowing would be the greater injustice. The people who raised me hid parts of my story from me. They thought they were doing the right thing, I guess because they thought I couldn’t handle knowing. Every time some new part of my story came out, it was a huge blow – not just because it was new information, but also because they’d kept it from me. It destroyed all of my confidence in them. They were still withholding my truths from me when I was in my 30s!

One last one from the child of an adoptee – Is it possible that her family coerced her into placing her first born up for adoption? How much contact did you have with your daughter’s mom before she went into labor? You said the grandparents approached you at church – of all places. It sounds like the kind of family that would pressure and talk her into something like that. My dad was adopted at birth, his mom was 13 (that is literally all we know). The first mother definitely has trauma, if that were the case. The adoptive mother answers – I really don’t know. When we arrived at hospital 48 hrs after the birth, we talked to the mother and she said she was too young and didn’t know who the father was … but I can’t say, if she was coerced.

The Regret Never Ends

Sharing the feelings of one birth mother today –

I dropped my son I parent off at school yesterday, and switched to my playlist for the drive home, on shuffle, as per usual, cause I like to not know what’s coming on next, and My Little Love by Adele came on as I pulled into my driveway. This song typically makes me cry, so not unusual that I started to, especially with this weekend upon us and how many feelings come with Mother’s Day, as a 2x mother of relinquishment, who has had two miscarriage and is now a parent to one, and with the fact that “Birth Mother’s Day” is giving me full ick this year, the cry turned into a bawl.

And I found myself yelling in my car that she didn’t deserve what I gave her.

I’m so…I don’t even know, sad mad? Angry and heartbroken? Over twenty years ago I gave her two pieces of myself and they celebrate her this weekend, typically relegating me to today, the day before, and I’ve come to realize, she didn’t deserve any of it, she didn’t deserve to raise my babes, and it makes my whole body hurt and my heart ache to have not realized these things until my kids were adults and I can’t do a damn thing about it.

This is the first Mother’s Day weekend since I cut their adoptive mom out of my life last year and I feel like I’m in mourning extra this year, as now that I’ve experienced life without her the last seven months, I’m realizing I gave way more than she ever did, she got way more out of our “relationship” than I did, and, in the end, she still made me feel like I owed her more, and that’s who my kids celebrate as their mom, in my place, and I hate it so much. Can we just skip this weekend all together?

Relinquishment Regrets

Written by a mother who knows. She says of the above poem – I wrote this yesterday and thought there might be some other first/natural/birth/mothers of relinquishment moms who feel the same.

I am coming up on 22 years since my first relinquishment (I placed twice, nineteen months apart, with the same couple, who are now divorced) and the things I would change, if I could go back with all I now know about the billion dollar industry of adoption and how it uses and spits out so many mothers and adoptees, just keeps piling up and adding on with the more I learn about what I participated in, twice, all those years ago.

Another woman with the same experience writes – I feel this so SOOO hard. I’ve been struggling with being stuck with this regret for years now. My son is 20. I’ve never spent time in regrets before this one because we wouldn’t be who we are without the experiences we’ve had and choices we’ve made. And right now, I love my life – and I can literally trace the steps and KNOW that if I had parented, I would definitely not be here. But it doesn’t matter. I would give anything to change it. To not be that woman who was scared and unsupported, who didn’t know everything I should have known about adoptee trauma, and who believed there was another mother out there who was better for my own son than I was.

Suemma Coleman Home for Unwed Mothers

Stumbled on 2 stories about this place today. Had not heard of this place – Suemma Coleman – before. One was from a woman who gave birth at the age of 14, 52 years ago. It was 1971 in Indiana USA. She wrote it on the 50th year after she relinquished her baby in order to share her experiences at a Facebook page called Adoption Sucks.

She writes – I’d spent the previous 6 weeks living among hostile strangers, a captive who was caught and shamed the one time I tried to escape. The home was run by a shriveled old matriarch, religious zealots/social workers and filled with self-loathing young pregnant women. There was no privacy. There was no freedom. There was an 8 foot chain-link fence around the top of the building to prevent us from throwing ourselves from the 3 story height, as others had done in the past. There was bland, starchy food served at a single huge table and forced servitude cleaning in the kitchen. There was a single pay telephone in a hallway shared by all the dorms.

My heart goes out to the young me who was sent by ambulance alone during the night to the county hospital. There I was drugged, strapped down and delivered of my precious baby boy. During his birth I was overcome with a feeling of power and overwhelming love I never dreamed possible; I never experienced it again with my subsequent children. Then they whisked him away. I was sent to the post-delivery room where a nurse viciously kneaded my abdomen to expel the placenta, while telling me I deserved the pain.

I never expected to see him again. But the orderlies on duty that night didn’t want to bother with these pariah babies so he was brought to me to feed and change. I remembered thinking I had no idea how. They’d given me a drug to dry up my milk and another caused a splitting headache when I sat up. But all that mattered was that he was miraculously in my arms. He was perfect and beautiful. Everyone commented that his long, black eye lashes gave the impression of a baby girl but his long fingers and toes predicted the 6’3″ man he grew to be. He would briefly visit me one or two more times that night before we were separated for good.

I have a memory of watching my parents standing in the hospital corridor, far away, saying hello and goodbye to their first-born grandchild in the nursery. They were crying. I felt no sympathy for them, knowing the price we were all going to pay because of their decision. My heart had already turned to stone and against them. I spent another 10 days or so for observation and recovery in the Home. Then, I was sent home with my parents, who promptly took me to get a puppy. At 14 days of age, my baby was sent to live with strangers who would be his adoptive parents. I never saw my son again.

I found another story about this home on WordPress at this LINK>JUST SOME INTERESTING HISTORY STUFF. She writes – Today was just a rough kind of day. A fellow Coleman adoptee had emailed that she finally got in contact with her natural mother. I met this gal through one of the many Indiana adoptee groups on the internet. We have kept in touch for last two years. She knew my horror story with St. Elizabeth’s/Coleman and their confidential intermediary, Katrina Carlisle. I had advised her not to use this individual. She had gone with Omni Trace which ended up ripping her off. She emailed me about a month ago about LINK>Kinsolving Investigations. I said that this company was great as long as you can afford them. I unfortunately can’t at this time. Well they found for her. Katrina had told her not to search without her assistance. Katrina did everything she could to discourage this friend from searching period. Well she recently contacted her natural mother. Low and behold, all of the information that Katrina gave her was a lie. Not surprising really. Katrina had lied to me about the law, about who I could and could not use as a CI, and other bits and pieces of my own information. I worry daily what my own natural mother has been told by this woman. I worry whether or not she was even contacted. I worry about whether or not that she took my money and fed me a line of bullshit. I worry that she tried to get more money from my natural mother. I worry that because she could not get the information that my mother wanted about me, she assumed my mother refused contact. All of these are very real worries. I have heard them from all over the country.

This was written in 2008 and she adds – “Indiana enacts a law that makes it the most restrictive state in the nation in regard to keeping adoption records confidential.” She goes on to lay out a review of history re: adoption in Indiana and St. Elizabeth/Coleman specifically, and their part in it. It begins with – 1894 The Suemma Coleman Home is founded for “erring girls and women who had been living lives of shame and had no homes.” (Today, it operates as Coleman Adoption Services.) There is more there at the link.

No point in posting all this – except – yeah, it was pretty much the same everywhere. My dad’s mom gave birth to him at the Door of Hope Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Ocean Beach, California back in the mid-1930s.

She Loved Me So Much

At least the woman in this photo got to hold her baby before handing her son over to another couple to raise. Like many young women who surrender their newborn to adoption, this young woman was at rock bottom and living in her car. She had no familial support and was alone with her pregnancy. One common perspective is – God wanted me to take this path. Religion often plays a role in couples wanting to adopt and in biological, genetic mothers making that choice to surrender their baby. Maternity homes are often linked to a religion.

An adoptee shares her experience – My mother left me at the hospital, when I was born. I was told – she did it because she loved me. After a brief stay at the hospital, where I (and others) were denied the comfort of being held, I went to a foster home. There I learned to walk and use some words. I had developed 2-3 word sentences, when the social worker took me from my foster home and dropped me at a stranger’s home. These became my adoptive parents. By the time I was in 3rd grade, my adoptive mother was “sick”. She stayed in bed with the door closed a lot. She always seemed mad.

I would learn 22 years later, it was because she had discovered alcohol took her arthritic pain away. Then Cortizone became available but that shot every 2 weeks didn’t change her alcoholism. So she also became addicted to steroids. I grew up thinking addiction issues were “normal”. Growing up, I wasn’t taught there was anything wrong with my mother leaving me. She did it because she loved me. My parenting skills were warped by my reality. I never received the therapy I needed as a child. If I had, I’m pretty sure I would have chosen to not procreate. I was left in the dark world of popular adoption narratives that never matched my reality.

Another adoptee responds – I never did completely buy that BS about “your [biological] mother loved you SO much she gave you away, so you would have a better life.” Then when I had my own first child, at 25, same age as my biological mother had been when she had me, whatever shred of the BS I had wanted to believe was somehow true was blown out of the water, as soon as I held my newborn infant. There are some biological mothers who gave their babies away that have convinced themselves that this narrative is true. Some of them have told me the reason adoptions were closed is to “protect” the mothers from “adoptees like me” who don’t buy that line, and who are angry with them, rather than grateful for having been “loved so much.” Adopted adults have been experiencing reunions, after finding their biological, genetic family, since the 60’s. There are no credible stories of an adopted person who has injured or killed their biological mother. That “excuse” is just a part of the industry propaganda.

One woman notes – When are people going to wake up that adoption is NOT for the child. My adoptive mother had SEVERE mental illness and NEVER left the house after I turned 6 – literally NEVER!

And the truth is, they won’t as long as the adoption industry propaganda continues to be the acceptable narrative. Sort of tongue in cheek – it would help if babies had a vocabulary and could use their words. As it is, by the time they could, they’ve been pretty much brainwashed into a kind of Stockholm syndrome. They have developed a fear of expressing anything that might be interpreted by the adoptive parents as displeasure in them, as parents.

Emotional withdrawal or neglect is just another form of abandonment…and it is not an expression of love, no matter how adoptive parents spin it. Only my adopters didn’t stay confined to their rooms; they constantly violated my boundaries. I was the one who tried to isolate as much as I could. My room wasn’t safe enough, so I’d escape by running away.

Another considers herself lucky enough to have been abandoned or emotionally neglected. She notes, “It’s a wonder I function pretty well and cover it up. However, I’m just numb to most of life.”

Someone else says, I had one of those kind of “moms” who stayed in her bed in her room. No wonder I feel guilty for staying in bed when I actually have a real illness.

Lastly, yet another adoptee shares her story – I started to doubt the “loved you so much she gave you away.” line when I was still young. People would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up and I said a birth mom. I wanted to have kids and give them away to people who couldn’t have kids, so they could be happy. (Just repeating the crap I had been told.) And I was met with silence. Or “oh, you don’t want to give your babies away, your such a good little babysitter”, etc. Nope. I am going to give them away because I love them and want them to have money for the doctor. I’d say. Their faces were so unhappy. I was so confused. I look back at that little me and just cringe….

She was reassured – the fact that all the adults in our lives pushed the same narrative results in our blaming ourselves for the confusion we feel emotionally towards adoption.

Unrecognized Trauma

I came upon this article – LINK>The Unrecognized Developmental Trauma of Early Relinquishment in Adoption by Meggin Nam Holtz in Visible Magazine. The link was shared due to someone else’s interest in researching both the positive and negative effects of adoption and that resulted in someone pointing to this link as one they have found useful.

In response to the initial research interest, one adoptee noted – unfortunately I think it’s harder to find the studies and statistics because no one wants to crush the pretty package of “adoption is beautiful.” However, if you check out the statistics of children raised by their biological parents vs raised by unrelated people, the kids raised by unrelated people are more likely to be abused, suffer various issues and not have the greatest outcomes.

The challenge is – We can’t even fully use that research since as soon as the child is adopted, they no longer fall into the “unrelated” category. My personal opinion is that, if research was honest, we’d see a lot less “natural” parents and their children listed under abusers or abused, in the mental health statistics. But again, society doesn’t want to acknowledge that taking someone else’s child and claiming it as your own might not be so great for the kid in the long run.

Also, if using google to research, I’m fairly certain you will be pulling up what everyone else is, ultimately, it’s a matter of what you’re willing to accept. You can go pretty much anywhere in the internet world and see undeniable proof of the negative outcomes of adoption, I hope all of those lived experiences that adopted people are telling the world aren’t secondary in your mind, due to them not being the result of technical studies done.

In other words – a Google search will give you the rainbows and unicorns story most of the time.

The link above is from a paper used in a Master of Social Work graduate school professional seminar related to child trauma. She notes that she is a female adopted person who was adopted in infancy and a clinical social worker working with the adopted population. VISIBLE Magazine® is an online publication committed to making storytelling accessible and inclusive. The publication actively privileges the work of those whose voices have been intentionally ignored or suppressed by traditional media outlets.

Meggin Nam Holtz notes – Permanent physical separation between birthing mothers from their babies is commonly referred to as “relinquishment” in the context of adoption. This discussion article will explore developmental effects of relinquishment occurring at birth and in the early days of an infant’s life. Examination of neurological, attachment, and developmentally positive outcomes attained through maintaining physical interactions between mothers and their infants during the first hours and days of infant life sheds light on what is missed if a separation occurs. Contrary to conventional beliefs and attitudes that a baby will not remember or be affected by early life experiences, the neurological impacts of stress in very early life such as relinquishment should be re-framed, acknowledged, and understood as a form of developmental trauma.

She goes on to frame the issue (and cites papers & studies) – there is a misconception in conventional attitudes that young children cannot and will not remember traumas experienced in their first few years of life. It is commonly believed that children “removed at birth may be spared the impact of ACES” (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and although adoptions that take place at an earlier age are often associated with better outcomes, adoptees who experience relinquishment at all ages are vastly overrepresented in mental health and substance abuse clinics, are at higher risk for mood disorders, mental health issues, and are four times more likely to commit suicide than non-adoptees. Adoptees are an unrecognized marginalized group deserving of specialized services that are currently lacking.

She hopes that her article debunks the myth that when placed into the best of circumstances, adoptees separated from their birth mothers in early life, do not face challenges due to long lasting developmental, emotional, and behavioral effects. The truth from the adoptees themselves is otherwise.

From there, she shares some of the history of adoption – From 1937 to 1965, the number of adoptions in America grew from 8,000 to over 70,000 due to the fact that newborns, as opposed to older children, became available. [blogger’s note – Actually, my parents were born and adopted in the 1930s.] And then adds that in the present day, there is often no waiting period at all between the actual birth and placing a newborn into the arms of an adoptive family. [blogger’s note – My parents DID spend at least the first months of their lives with their birth mother before being given to unrelated persons to raise.] She indicates that denying a newborn the smells, tastes, movement, and sounds of its birth mother creates a stress response.

There is much more in her paper, and if you are at all interested, I would suggest reading it.

It’s Not A Couch

I’m in a natural birthing group and a woman who’s 30+wks pregnant has been married for over 5 years. Both the woman and her husband come from a conservative community where procreation is expected, even though neither of them felt drawn to parenthood. They decided to give it to God. After so many years of marriage, they are expecting and neither is excited nor do they feel connected to the baby.

The amount of COMMENTS FOR ADOPTION in that group were INSANE. She didn’t come for that suggestion. She asked if anyone else had issues before delivery with feeling attached to their child – if anyone wasn’t really a kid person – if those feelings changed when they delivered their own child, etc. She was looking for emotional and mental support from a group THAT DOESN’T UNDERSTAND THE HORMORMAL AND BONDING PROCESS and YET, people were STILL SUGGESTING IF SHE DOESN’T FEEL IT, JUST GIVE THE BABY AWAY! The poor mother hasn’t even had the bonding chemicals come into play yet. This “give the baby away” suggestion was WELL LIKED .

(blogger’s note – what is written above and below this is NOT my own story but because adoption is encouraged in evangelical circles, the above really does NOT surprise me.)

The woman writing about this incident is a former foster care youth and adoptee. She continues – Y’all I freaking LOST IT. I told them to NOT suggest TRAUMA to a mother, which will last throughout her LIFE as well as impact their baby, when the couple just needs the TOOLS TO HELP THEM PARENT.

Boy did I get attacked. I was actually quite nice about it all, and people told me I was shaming her (I didn’t, I actually told her I also struggled with bonding and attachment due to the ADOPTION AND FOSTER CARE INTERFERENCE) and wasn’t being harsh with the woman at all. I was harsh with the insane notion that before birth, these folks who are supposedly seeking to help, are just like – “oh, don’t feel attached ?, oh well, just give it to someone who wants it.”

It’s not a couch that you got that didn’t fit though the door and you’re pawning it off on your neighbor. It’s a child, who will look for you one day (most likely) and wonder why they weren’t wanted.

Betrayal Trauma and Attachment

Two of my friends have recently drawn my attention to issues of attachment and betrayal. One wrote in response to a self-betrayal graphic – The thought to comes to mind is that from a young age children are likely to experience examples of this when parents are perceived (rightly or wrongly) as not acting in their best interest. The possibility of this type of ‘betrayal’ is then opened in their minds and then acted out.

The other provided a LINK> to a Neurobiology of Attachment pdf and specifically pg 4 re:the infant’s brain. Families can recover from childhood emotional wounds when all members discuss openly the mental conditions of the parents as a regular family health routine… growth & compassion for all. We learned that ‘communication’ could actually happen through the placenta, in which the adrenaline and cortisol that’s coursing through the mom’s veins wind up crossing the placenta and affecting the development of the brain. “Our connections with other people are critical for being able to tolerate and regulate our own emotional responses.” “This sense of connection occurs through nonverbal communication.”

This caused me to reflect this morning on my two adoptee parents who were relinquished in infancy by their mothers into closed adoptions. They both died without knowing much of anything about their origins – which fortunately, I now know quite a lot about the people and circumstances, though clearly with the passage of time and the deaths of all 4 of my genetic grandparents, I can never fully know.

In trying to put myself into my parents hearts/minds and inner beliefs related to their adoptions, how could they not feel betrayed by their first/original parents ? They had no way of knowing their mother’s stories or challenges or reasons including being coerced (and yes, I will always believe that BOTH of my grandmothers were coerced in the 1930s into giving up their firstborn children) that resulted in my parents being adopted. I sincerely believe that no adoptive parent can truly undo this sense of betrayal by the parent in the child they conceived and birthed. In the case of my grandfathers, it is more complicated. Definitely, one never knew he fathered a son and it turns out he never had any other children (it was the same for my mom’s mother who never had any more children).

I’ll never be able to know exactly why my mom’s father abandoned her and her mother (when my grandmother was 4 mos pregnant, nor why he did not come back to rescue her, infant in tow and financially destitute). So, the line above about communication through the placenta could definitely been my maternal grandmother’s mental/emotional struggles without her husband (they were married, in the case of my dad’s parents, they were not – his father was a married man having an affair with a much younger woman).

No matter the reasons, being relinquished for adoption and never knowing why, is betrayal trauma for the adoptee. I do believe modern trends that keep birth parents in the loop or the effects of reunions instigated by adoptee searches are some mitigating factors to the sense of betrayal that, whether they acknowledge it precisely as that or not, exits within the adoptee.

Besides the pdf linked above, I found two articles via google search that may be useful to some of my readers. [1] LINK>The Effects of Attachment and Developmental Trauma and Ways to Heal the Adoptee from the Adoptions from the Heart’s WordPress blog. (Basically, they are an adoption agency). [2] LINK>From Abandonment & Betrayal to Acceptance & Forgiveness: The Gifts of Memoir by Julie Ryan McGue and Judith Ruskay Rabinor at Adoption & Beyond (a 501c3 non-profit child placement agency licensed in both Kansas and Missouri). The reader is welcomed to consider the source when reading either of these.

Grieving Many Times Over

Today, I share a piece by LINK>David B Bohl, who is an author, speaker and addiction & relinquishment consultant. It is titled On Grieving Many Times, And Many Times Over. I was attracted to this because yesterday was my deceased, adoptee mother’s birthday. I don’t suppose we ever get over the grief. I don’t think she ever got over the grief of never being able to communicate with her birth mother, who Tennessee told her in the early 1990s was already dead.

David writes his adoptive mother’s death was the fifth death of a parent he’d had to go through. He explains that he – hadn’t learned of the first two until much later after they’d occurred. The first one to go was my birth father, who died 32 years before I learned about it, the second one my birth mother whose death I did not learn of until 8 years after it happened (very similar to my own mom). Then there was my adoptive father 12 years ago, and now, Joan Audrey Bohl who died twice —first when the dementia robbed her of her mind and memory, subsequently rendering me a stranger when she would fail at times to remember who I was and why I was visiting. There she was another mom who had no idea I was her son. In those moments, in a most sinister coincidence, she was like my biological parents who relinquished me and existed in this world without any specific knowledge of me.

He wants us to understand “What all of this means to someone like me—a relinquishee and adoptee who now has two sets of deceased parents–is that I must face twice(?), five times(?) a yet-to-be determined amount(?) of grief and confusion. Add to that losing my adoptive mom to dementia, and there is plenty to process, a great deal of loss, and certainly much to grieve. I am, of course, not blaming any of my parents for dying or getting sick, and I’ve made peace with my biological parents for giving me up a 62 years ago. But it would be disingenuous to say that I am no longer affected by these losses and that my mother’s recent death doesn’t trigger some new layer of grief where all of those people who contributed to my existence must be acknowledged in how they shaped my life. And so, I think about mothers. The mother I knew and the mother I’ve never met. And then the mother I knew who no longer knew me. I think of fathers, the one who had never even met me, and the one who raised me and provided me with a life filled with opportunities. And I of course, as a father, I think about my children.”

When I try to talk about my own family, my youngest son says to me – you have a very complicated family. It is true. And it is true for adoptees as well. As I have learned who my original grandparents were and have made contact with that novel new experience of genetic relatives that never knew each other existed – it has actually given me a new sense of wholeness – while at the same time totally messing me up with the adoptive relatives and the feelings I have (and still have) and each of them. Very complicated indeed.

There is much more in his very worthwhile article – see the LINK.

The Cost Of Hidden Stress

The trauma that afflicts many adoptees occurred pre-language and so the source of it’s effects can seem mysterious but the impacts are very real. Today, I learned about this man – LINK>Dr Gabor Mate. It seemed to fit what I am posting so often in this blog that I thought I would make today’s about him.

For example, one of his books is titled When The Body Says No – “disease can be the body’s way of saying no to what the mind cannot or will not acknowledge.” Dr Mate also believes that “The essential condition for healthy development is the child’s relationship with nurturing adults.” And yet, time and again, I read from adoptees that their adoptive parents were really not prepared to be the kind of parents this subset of our population needed. Under Topics, he has many articles related to LINK>Trauma.

During the pandemic, in April 2021, Dr Mate hosted an online event with Zara Phillips. She is the author of LINK>Somebody’s Daughter, subtitled A Moving Journey of Discovery, Recovery and Adoption. The event information noted that adoptees and children who are fostered are over-represented in the prison system, addiction clinics and are 4 times more likely than their peers to attempt suicide. This talk considered why that would be and what, if anything adoptees and their caregivers can do about it. For many, when we talk about adoption, we talk about placing children in need, into loving homes to parents that want them. The assumption behind these conversations is that love will overcome all challenges and obstacles. What we don’t talk about, or rarely, is that the adoption in the new home comes about because another home has ended, or perhaps not even begun. We forget that all adoption is formed from loss. Love is essential but it is not enough. They discussed what it means to carry the trauma of being relinquished. How adoption is not a one-time event but has a lifelong impact. They considered how unresolved trauma can lead to addiction and suicidal thinking. Also what, if anything, an adoptee (and those that support them) can do to heal and recover.

Often adoptive parents think that their love will be enough but time and again that is proven wrong when it comes to adopted children. Dr Mate brings up the myth of the blank slate baby which Georgia Tann used to highlight in selling babies.

There is a LOT at Dr Mate’s website. I believe much that is there could prove helpful to the people who read and follow my blog. Absolutely, he is about how to heal.