Please Don’t Take Another One of My Babies

Reading these words – “Not another one. Please don’t take another one of my babies”.

This was in a tale of adoptions but not adoptions by strangers. The story was one about how a woman took two children from two different relatives. It is sad that “family” can be so cruel.

The first one – the mother was unable to have more children so she stole babies from family members. This child’s original mother was told that she was incapable of caring for her child and that she would be in much better hands in the woman’s household. That was all a lie. The adoptive mother would say things like “she is lucky to have us. I treat her like my daughter”. But this girl was not treated equally. Sadly, according to this woman’s one biological daughter, they were all abused but this adopted girl had the worst of the emotional and mental abuse.

Eventually, the original mother had an apartment and car and job and never did she stop loving her daughter. When this girl turned 15, the adoptive mother decided the original mother was actually “good enough”. In truth, the adoptive mother didn’t want to deal with the teenage years and so kicked the girl out.

Then, the second one elicited the quote and title of this blog.

A distant cousin had a new baby boy and the adoptive mother decided the original parents couldn’t care for him properly. The adoptive mother drove over to visit. Then, right after leaving, she called the Department of Child Welfare and reported her cousin. The very next morning, the adoptive mother had the baby boy in her arms. He was only 1 month old. He has 9 other siblings. The woman telling this sad tale said, “I’ll never forget his mother’s sobs as we drove off.”

The adoptive mother made herself out to be the hero of the story and of course, the biological parents were the awful people. This adoptive mother played the loving mother until the date for his adoption, at around 8 months of age.

Then the adoptive mother pushed all the “mother” responsibilities onto the woman conveying this story. She was 15 years old at the time. She did love the little boy with all her heart. She wanted to give him the best possible chance.

It may not surprise the reader to know that eventually the adoptive mother ended up having a mental breakdown and went into a treatment facility.

The Liar’s Club

It never ceases to amaze me how I end up reading books with no idea they are relevant to my interests here and then, near the end of the book, something happens and I’m like Wow !!

I don’t believe that what I will share with you would in any way spoil a reading of Mary Karr’s book. There is a mother/child separation and reunion story that occurs near the end of this book.

She writes – “Those were my mother’s demons, then, two small children, whom she longed for and felt ashamed for having lost. ‘It was like a big black hole just swallowed me up. Or like the hole was inside me, and been swallowing me up all those years without my even noticing. I just collapsed into it. What’s the word the physicists use? Imploded. I imploded’.”

“Mother did what seemed at the time the Right Thing, though had she Thought, she may have Thought Twice about how Right the Right Thing would wind up being, for surely it drove her mad. She tore up the papers giving her sole custody of the two minor children, Tex and Belinda.”

After she found a husband willing to take them, they were too big, “They didn’t want to come.”

And why hadn’t her mother told her subsequent daughters about the marriage and the lost children ? “It’s one of the more pathetic sentences a sixty-year-old woman can be caught uttering, ‘I thought you wouldn’t like me anymore’.”

Her sister hired a detective and they found those kids. They were damn eager to be found and within weeks arrived at her Mother’s house, bright and fresh-faced and curious as all get-out.

Karr tells her story with spunky narration that never fails to stay in a deep love for her admittedly flawed parents. Their flaws never seem to be a lack of love for these their children but more personal in nature, though impacting their ability to parent well. I do highly recommend her story. It is riveting and even scary at times. There is one significant sexual abuse episode that could be triggering for certain readers.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

I continue to unwrap the gift I have received late in life of knowledge about my natural grandparents, meeting my genetic relatives and understanding the impacts of adoption on my entire family. It is a gift that has not stopped giving to me more and more each day.

One year ago, I completed a family history as a gift to 9 of my relatives. Having recovered our unknown genetic history and having some additional family stories I felt were worth saving, I self published it economically in a spiral bound book. If something ended my life, I did not want the knowledge lost again.

Over the last year, I’ve been retelling the story of finding my original grandparents but soon realized I could not convey an accurate understanding of the final miracle in that journey without delving into something I did not cover at all in the family history. That is my journey as executor of my deceased parents estates and having to contend with a brilliant but delusional sister. It certainly adds an element of tension, uncertainty and conflict. Truth be told, two parts of my on-going story have only revealed themselves this last November.

Even so, I’ve decided I am now “complete” with a version that I hope will be commercially published and bring some modest amount of revenue into my family’s financial support while opening a door for me to publish whatever comes next (I have a couple of ideas in progress – one has waited 5 years for me to have the time to take the rough draft into a finished form).

May your own heart be warmed with the love of knowing family. No family is perfect and often they vex us and yet, they truly polish us into stars of shining light for others to be inspired by. May all your holidays be bright.

About Fostering Teens

This comes up frequently in adoptee discussion groups. The concern is the many older children in foster care who would benefit from the stability of being in one single home/family for the duration of their childhood – where the possibility of being returned to their original parents may never exist, for whatever reason that is the case.

That’s a whole different ballgame than adopting healthy infants or toddlers.

Nobody is stealing teens from their families. They’re just harder to place and most child welfare agencies would rather not have to bother doing the work, quite frankly. Teens who’ve been in the system since their younger years are even harder to place because of the continual trauma that being in the system has done/continues to do to them. The best (and possibly only) thing a Foster Parent can do for a teen Foster Youth is give them a safe, supportive place to land until they can be reunited with their parents or other biological family members; or if that isn’t possible, at least support them through to maturity and beyond the Foster Care Emancipation process.

In 2016, over 400,000 children were in Foster Care in these United States.

The Safe Families Act has been implemented in several American states.

There are three pillars of the Safe Families Act, all with the intention of returning children to their parents as soon as possible.

[1] Hosting – parents choose to allow certain approved families to care for their child until the parents are able to again.

[2] Befriending – providing a supportive environment for the parents of children in care. Support meant to return the ability of parents to adequately provide for their children.

[3] Resources/Physical Needs – rehabilitation services, job assistance and counseling. Food and childcare help. Community organizations willing to step in.

Especially because of the Opioid Crisis, the Foster Care System is overwhelmed.

It is heartening to know that there are so many people looking for better ways to ensure the well-being of our nation’s children.

Adoption – Open or Closed – What’s Best ?

Today, in modern adoption, there are more open adoptions than there were in the past.

In an open adoption, a young adoptee may grow up alongside the parents who conceived them and gave birth, though these parents are not part of the family household the adoptee grows up within. Even so, there is sharing time together, visiting and writing to one another. In an open adoption, you see and get to know your original parents but you don’t have them as your parents.

Up until recently, most adoptions were closed and so, in order to know the people an adoptee was born to, they had to seek a reunion after they became an adult; or at the least, a much older child, as in a teenager.

If it were actually possible for any adoptee to compare the outcomes they would have experienced with each method, what would they choose in full awareness ? Would they want to know their original parents throughout their whole lives ? Do they think that knowing them would make their lives better or worse ?

Of course, there is no such choice for adoptees. Open adoption seeks to make the adoption experience better by taking away the secrecy and shame.

Are the issues the same for an adoptee whether it was an open or closed adoption ? Or does an open adoption simply create a whole new set of issues that didn’t exist within
the close adoption system ?

In a good reunion process, the adoptee is able to explain to the original parent(s) – their feelings of hurt, abandonment and/or anger – which were all caused by the decision of their original parents to surrender their child for adoption.

Can any child go through something as traumatic as being given up and still process it all at the same time – are they able to talk to the original parent about the feelings common among all adoptees at the same time as they are being experienced ? This is not an answerable question as the two kinds of adoption experience do not allow such comparisons.

It can be quite painful for an adoptee to hear about a birth mother who is satisfied with having relinquished her child for adoption. Yet, many such mothers were absolutely convinced at the time they made that choice that they were doing the best thing for their child.

Years later, many birth mothers wish they had kept their child, and that is why there are groups of adoptees actively working to encourage young unwed or troubled expectant mothers to make an effort to parent first before making a decision to relinquish their child to adoption.

The fact is – adoption exists – and it will likely always exist because there is a need and/or desire for that in some circumstances. The hard truth is that not all parents to be actually want to devote themselves to raising a child.

In seeking to reform the practice of adoption, the more we are able to ask piercing questions, explore with those involved the reason for their decisions and just plain understand at a very deep level all aspects of the experience, the better we will be able to shape the future of adoption into better outcomes for all concerned.

Why Go Looking ?

Someone once asked me, if the adoptive family was a good one, what’s the issue ?

People not affected by adoption often struggle to understand what would motivate an adoptee to go searching for their original family. If one knows where they came from, it can be hard to relate to not knowing.

An adoptee that grows up in a loving, supportive family, will be strong enough to search for who they came from. If their adoptive family was a very good one, they might even expect that they would not like what their search found once they arrive there.

Maybe it would help to understand that this kind of experience was never intended to replace the adoptive family the adoptee grew up in. Yet any adoptee will feel that they have a few “missing” pieces. It is only natural. And once a puzzle has been revealed, completing it makes sense.

You Only Have One Mother

. . . unless you were adopted or raised by a secondary “mother”.

An adoptee has two mothers – the one who gestated and gave birth to us and the adoptive mother who raised us. For adoptees in reunion, there was the initial relationship that may have been almost immediately terminated post-birth. Then that child shows up decades later ? This is one facet of the adoptive experience.

Some adoptees are closer to their adoptive mother and feel a kind of strain in their attempted relationship with their original mother. There is a lifetime of working on getting along and growing a lasting relationship with the adoptive mother.

For many original mothers, their “relationship” to the child they lost to adoption is rooted in heartbreak and loss. For both the adoptee and the woman who gave birth to us, there may have been a lifetime of loving someone from afar, someone we don’t really “know” in the usual sense – it can be hard to bring those lifelong fantasies down to Earth.

The in touch, in person reality will never match that fantasy we have harbored. It can take years before the original mother and her child – once separated – can feel a closer relationship.

For an adoptee, their two mothers will never be quite alike, they are simply different, that is the reality and they occupy different spaces in the life of any adoptee.

However, love is love and that is always true, even when one has two mothers.

Lifelong Sorrow

It is clear in my mom’s adoption file that my maternal grandmother, shown above holding my mom for the very last time, never intended to surrender her. She was pressured and exploited by circumstances and the expert manipulation of that baby thief, Georgia Tann, in Memphis.

I read a statistic that said that more than 30% of women who have relinquished children never have another – either because they chose not to, or could not. There is an increased incidence of secondary infertility among natural mothers.

I know that my grandmother never had another child. I know that while her birth name was Elizabeth, my mom’s birth certificate had her name as Lizzie. I saw her sign Elizabeth to a note and a postcard she sent to Georgia Tann after losing my mom. Yet, when she died in her 60s after marrying a second husband, Lizzie is what is on her gravestone. I can’t help but believe she hoped my mom would find it someday. My mom died without fulfilling her desire to know about her original mother. I was the one to find the gravestone and sit beside it and talk with her soul.

There is no way to know why my maternal grandfather left my maternal grandmother in Memphis four months pregnant. It seems her widowed father sent her away to Virginia to have my mom and I doubt she was supposed to bring my mom back to Tennessee. It is clear my great-grandfather was unwilling to take the two of them into his home.

It appears that the only time my maternal grandmother had any communication directly with my maternal grandfather (after he left her alone and pregnant) was when he decided to go ahead and divorce her 3 years after they married and two years after my mom was born. The divorce papers also show her name formally as Elizabeth. I believe that having lost their child, my grandmother was so filled with shame, she could not face him. The divorce freed her up to remarry and not long after that he remarried. My heart is glad they didn’t die alone.

My mom’s adoption file is a constant reminder to me of what they had not done, of the courage they somehow lacked to fight back and of the child in the middle (my mom) they both lost. I come close to tears every time I revisit this story in my heart’s mind.

Motherhood Erased

There is a dirty little secret about the concept of “Open Adoption” and that is it is often not what it was purported to be. The wall was so thick the adoptive parents never knew the original mother would have wanted to know her child.

I think about how Lizzie Lou must have been hurt by never hearing from my mom, from my mom’s total absence from her life. The parties to adoption have often NOT been given the whole story about the situation, so that they could make informed choices.

The “story” about the original mother wanting to move on with her life in most cases was never true. Some original parents may have thought they had an open
adoption. They may have expected their children to reach out to them “someday”. I know that my youngest sister signed up for an adoption registry for just that purpose because she put my name on it as a contact that might help her son find her someday. She also told the adoptive mother how to locate us through our business. She wasn’t taking any chances he would be entirely cut off unless that was his own desire.

The adoptive parents may have been told that they could have no contact with the original family and that the original family didn’t want that. Some adoptive parents renege on their promise to stay in contact with the original parents.

This may have been how my mom felt – I didn’t know your name. Your name was hidden away in my adoption files, so was the name you gave me at the time of my birth. My birth certificate has my adoptive parents’ names on it as though they gave birth to me, your motherhood of me was erased by the system that has been adoption.

My mom could not find her mother because her records were amended and
sealed, so were my dad’s – he was also adopted. This falsifying of their identity is what many adoptees must overcome if they want to find their original parents.

It is wrong for a mother considering adoption not to be told about what will happen to her child’s original birth information. She should have this clearly explained to her before she consents to the adoption.

The original mother may not have anticipated that her motherhood was about to be erased as soon as she signed the consent papers.

A Sacred Duty

In discovering my original grandparents, I’ve learned to be a part of both the adoptive and original families. This may be disconcerting to some of my adoptive family, aunts, an uncle and some cousins but I don’t love them less. I recognize we share life experiences that I can never actually share with my original family relations no matter how much I learn about our history – and I have learned a lot.

Though I’m not an adoptee, I have experienced some degree of “reunion” and it has been much more than simply restoring a connection that was lost, it is about trying to become acquainted with “new” family members and nurturing relationships that will continue for me until the day I die.

There are reforms taking place within the practice of adoption today that haven’t stabilized but are allowing for more flexibility within the unique family system in which the adoptee is the center. Whether they opt for an open adoption or not – every adoptive parent needs to be aware that the possibility an adoptee will seek reunion fundamentally exists.

Closed adoption enforces a rigid boundary upon adoptees by automatically excluding the original family from the adoptive family’s boundaries. That was the case for my adoptee parents. Thankfully, that has not been the case for my niece and nephew (both given up for adoption by my two sisters). Not that theirs were open adoptions, they were not.

What changed is their adoptive parents accepted it as a sacred duty to assist these adopted children in discovering their original family members when they were ready to request that for themselves. Thanking all that is good.