Fostering A Pregnant Teen

The girl in the photo is NOT known to me or who this blog is about today. It comes up from time to time how much a teen in foster care who finds herself pregnant can use support. The main thought is enough support to break the cycle she grew up within and parent her baby.

The discussion was in response to a video about someone who was doing that – creating a supportive environment for a pregnant teen still in foster care. I won’t be sharing that video here but the thoughts related to it.

The first comment was related to food – both foster kids and adoptees often have food issues. My adoptee mom had food issues and she passed those on to me. My dad (also an adoptee) had food insecurity issues, so we always had more food on the table than could be eaten at a meal. At 67 years old, I’m still trying to overcome my own food issues. That said, I remember being ravenous and able to eat stuff I wouldn’t dare to eat now, while I was pregnant with my sons.

Here is the comment – What bothered me was the amount of junk food offered as items of comfort. I have food issues and am working to reprogram my brain from emotional eating and using food to soothe emotional needs. While I understand she mostly has teenage girls placed with her, and teenagers generally prefer these kinds of snacks, I just don’t think think this is ok. Give them other outlets for comfort. But again, I’m an adoptee working on my own food issues; I understand and appreciate that this is a different situation than what I experienced.

A comment in response was this – I didn’t love the way she was like “of course I have healthier food but this is like a piece of home.” It rubbed me wrong. Like we’re better than this but you know how poor people eat.” However, someone else noted – “I am mixed about this. Honestly, it seems better than the crazy perspective of many foster parents that repress foster children’s food intake and then post complaints about how much they eat. Food security is important.”

Another issue had to do with TV. I do like the part about suggesting a TV in their room. I see a lot of foster parents angry about screen time and cracking down with their rules, especially if they also have biological children. If a kid is used to sleeping on a floor in front of a TV, you can’t just say “oh we don’t do TV at night here!” and expect them to sleep. Sure, you can phase it out over time if it matters that much to you, but foster parents need to calm down when a kid is going through serious trauma. The teen may just need to be comforted to sleep!

Actually, when I was single and living in the city, until I met my husband (who lives in a very quiet rural location), the white noise of the TV was always on in my home – waking or sleeping – but I was not usually actually watching it. When I was in New Mexico settling my parents estate – it was the same – always on in the motel room.

There were also a few appreciative comments too. “It seems like a foster home I would’ve been thankful for but it’s still a foster home. What I don’t like is how she goes about posting it. It seems like she is looking for praise from former foster care youth.” And this, “I wish one of my foster parents was as welcoming as this?” And another one – “I think it’s absolutely wonderful, she’s doing everything in her power to make them feel as comfy as possible.”

I think a realistic comment was this one – my first thought on it is, she goes to great lengths to “get to know them.” I’m pretty cool with most of this, but the part where she wants to spend time with them to get to know them sits strange with me. Putting myself in their shoes, I’d think that I wouldn’t want to talk to some stranger about *anything* and I’d just want to be left alone to deal with whatever feelings I was having, instead of having to bear all to her. That might just be me, because I’m a quiet, lonely griever, but I can’t imagine that every child she brings into her home feels comfortable with the “getting to know one another” part.

Yet that was just one perspective. It seems that the woman in the video is an emergency or short term placement foster home. In some of the other videos she has made, it seems more like the teen can play games and watch movies and not so much getting to know each other. That makes more sense. There are other videos by her, where she talks about letting them do whatever they want to do, so that they can process their situation.

Yet another one said – I don’t like to be around anyone or talk to anyone while I’m going through things. I also like to cry quietly in my room and not talk to people. I’m kind of antisocial to begin with. I am pulled in different directions though, because if left alone too long, especially as a teen, I would let myself feel bad and dissociate as long as I could get away with. I feel like she should leave them to grieve and process (with therapy, of course) and maybe after some time passed, then make an effort to take them out and get to know them? Just let them grieve their situation first and give them some space.

Given my own maternal grandmother’s experience of pregnancy with my mom, this one really spoke to my heart.

My mom was shunned back in the 60’s for being an unwed Mom. She was basically kicked out of town and told not to come back with the ‘bastard’ (me). She was very kindly taken in by a Home for Unwed Mothers. She was able to continue working, given counseling and advice on adoption etc. Long story short, that home was my first home. You could stay for 6 months after birth. All Moms helped and supported each other when moms had to go back to work. Essentially first time Moms were getting some hands on experience and moms and babies were safe, happy and content. Today I run a place of safety for abandoned babies and often think if there were still places like that, perhaps we wouldn’t have such a high rate of abortion and abandonments.

When A Child Kills

Learning about these statistics fascinated me the way a car accident often fascinates us (in horror) as we pass by and are grateful we are safe.

Adoptees are 15 times more likely to commit parricide (kill one or both adoptive parents) than biologic children. Of the 500 estimated serial killers in U.S. history, 16 percent were adopted as children, while adoptees represent only 2 or 3 percent of the general population.

Dr. David Kirschner has been an expert witness in 20 homicide cases in which the accused was adopted, usually as an infant, or in early childhood. In every case of these adoptees who killed, he found a remarkably similar pattern, including a history of sealed original birth records, a childhood of secrets and lies (re: birth parents and genetic history), frustrated, blocked searches for birth parents, and untreated, festering adoption issues of loss, rejection, abandonment, identity, and dissociated (split-off) rage.

This sub-group of adopted killers who he has seen consistently had a strikingly similar fantasy of the birth mother: That she was an all-giving, all-loving, nurturing, wonderful, perfect being. He had expected to find conscious anger/rage directed at a malevolent, rejecting bad mother – but instead there was this paradox of an idyllic birth-mother-fantasy image. The anger and rage toward birth parents was there – but deeply repressed, often dissociated and cut off from consciousness, and ultimately acted-out with violence toward the adoptive parents or others. In these extreme cases, the split, false, secret self described by many adoption experts, had evolved into a more malignant, clinical Dissociative Identity Disorder (aka Multiple Personality Disorder).

Adoption has long been neglected by mental health experts, as well as the criminal justice system, in the search for causes of eruptions of extreme violence. Some adoptees believe that they have been conceived out of wedlock in the back seat of a car or by a prostitute. One adoptee who has written about her search for answers was conceived in an act of rape. Regardless of the sad circumstances that lead to a person’s birth and relinquishment – truth is always the best policy. In the absence of truth (due to sealed adoption records and changes in identity details) an adoptee and even their children are left to make up stories to fill the gaps in real information. I know that happened to me and within my own family.

Not every adoptee will suffer in the extreme this way but every adoptee deep inside has issues of abandonment and rejection. For this reason, I do believe we have to find a better way to care of children who need a stable home with loving, caring parental figures. No identity changes, no hidden familial truths. Honesty is the best policy going forward.

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.