Denying The Father

I came across a question posted by a pregnant woman. The baby she is carrying will be a daughter. She asked, “Is it unethical to leave a potentially dangerous father off of a newborn’s birth certificate ?”

The immediate response was honest – Every person has a right to know their true identity. In fact, among adoptees this is a significant and primary issue.

Someone suggested the expectant mother put him on the birth certificate but terminate his rights. This expectant mother offered – He’s never done anything to me so far except be an asshole but he has a felony charge that is relevant to the situation. I spoke to a lawyer and he said he’d give it a 50/50 chance that a judge would allow termination of rights without a stepfather around to adopt. And the father would have to willingly be there and declare he wants to terminate rights.

Doesn’t seem fair but this is the reality we as women often have to cope with.

Then came this caution – The reality is, if he’s on the birth certificate and you file for public assistance, he’ll be charged child support. That system is crappy and may share your address. Don’t let people pressure you into any move with your abuser you’re not comfortable with.

Someone offered what seems to be a rational alternative – She can always establish paternity later. All she has to do is file for child support and give his name and the state will take care of finding him and doing paternity test. You can’t take him off birth certificate once he’s on but you can establish paternity and get child support without him on birth certificate.

And I do believe this is an important consideration – Not putting his name on the birth certificate makes it harder for him to just take her. That would be proof that the child is indeed his daughter and does have legal rights, unless you go through the court to have it documented in the way you wish. Not putting his name he would have to go through court for paternity and visitation.

It does appear that the father is aware. In fact, the expectant mother says he wants to co-parent and she wants only full custody and that any visitation be supervised.

My sympathy and compassion go to the expectant mother wanting to protect her daughter. She says she does intend for her child to know ALL of her family. At this time, this is not an adoption issue but it is a family separation issue.

Reproductive Rights

The woman on the left is Norma McCorvey, the woman who was Jane Roe in the legal case that came to be known as Roe v Wade and made it possible for women to have an abortion. I did not know it until this morning, but the pregnancy that caused her to seek an abortion, ended up in adoption.

Norma grew up poor and abused. She was the daughter of a single alcoholic mother. She got into trouble frequently and at one point was sent to a reform school. She married and became pregnant at 16 but divorced before the child was born; she subsequently relinquished custody of the child to her mother. In 1967, she gave up a second child for adoption immediately after giving birth.

At the age of 22 and unwed, she was mired in addiction and poverty, she was desperate for a way out of an unwanted pregnancy. It was her third child and she was so desperate to have an abortion, that she made up a story that she was gang raped, thinking that might legally entitle her to one. To my own perspective, she is the sad example of the trauma a birth mother experiences as Norma repeatedly lost custody of her natural children.

Roe v Wade became law in 1973, just after I graduated from high school. In the latter part of the 1970s, I benefited from a safe, medically induced and legal abortion. It has surprised me how many adoptees will say they wish they had been aborted. That tells you something about how not happy becoming an adoptee can be for many, not all, children as they become mature adults.

Roe v Wade built on earlier decisions legalizing contraception. The right to plan wanted pregnancies (and in my own experience a wanted child is loved and treated better in general, I say that because all of my children were wanted, and my reasons for having an abortion, while haunting me most of my life, I still believe were the right ones) and the right to end unwanted ones has freed women to pursue more fulfilling lives than the old barefoot and pregnant model of married life.

When women are able to choose when and whether to have children, they are more likely to finish their education, more financially stable and less likely to remain in and endure abusive relationships. In states that have fewer abortion restrictions, there are lower rates of maternal and infant mortality.

In 1984, Norma McCorvey revealed herself to have been Jane Roe. This resulted in the ugly side of the Pro-Life movement as she was harassed and someone even shot at her through her window. Even so, she was undaunted for years and remained an abortion-rights advocate. However in the 1990s, she announced she was 100% pro-life. One has to wonder after what she suffered, if she just wanted safety, security and peace. She died in 2017.

Today in 2020, the right to choose is under a strong attack and given the increasingly conservative nature of our judicial system thanks to the Republican party, young women may once again only have the option of illegal and unsafe access to ending an unwanted pregnancy. Women could be forced once again to have children against their personal desire to bear a child.

Without Us

It is difficult being a woman. It is difficult being a mother. It is difficult being a wife, a daughter or a sister. Sometimes it is difficult having women friends. Today is International Women’s Day.

I was in a difficult romantic relationship with a dangerous man. He lived in dangerous ways and he was dangerous for my own self to be with. More than once he physically hit me. I’m not denying that my own behavior may have pushed him over the edge those times but I also know that whatever holds a man back from harming a woman, if he is able to break through that barrier even once, the risk then exists that it will be easier for him to go through that same barrier the next time. So eventually I left his physical presence. I planned my leaving carefully to be able to safely go. I saved money from what was allotted to me for groceries by buying wisely over a long period of time and I left without saying goodbye. After I was safely at a distance, I notified him that I wasn’t coming back.

It took that courage of leaving to put me into alignment with meeting my husband, so I could live in this deeply nourishing place where I feel very safe and am contented. And it took other actions too, like being brave enough to place a personal ad in a weekly entertainment newspaper in St Louis, without which I would have never come in contact with the man I married a little over a year later. Traveling through life is a lot like being in a car where I always know that I can never actually get truly “lost”. All roads eventually go somewhere and one can always backtrack and find a “somewhere” that we recognize. Leaving can be like backtracking to where you were comfortably confident in your own self, after the damage an abusive relationship can inflict upon a person. I know that all experiences – the good and the bad – end up somewhere else eventually. In that there is a great deal of comfort and a real confidence for living through it all.

My family supports the regional women and children’s shelter. They support women and their children to survive domestic violence and end up in a better place. They help keep mothers and their children together. If you have the opportunity to do anything that will keep a mother together with her children, please consider doing so. The future of our humanity depends on us being here.

The Broken Birth Mom

This sculpture speaks so strongly to my own heart. I empathize with my grandmothers who gave up my parents to adoption. In a sense, though less permanently, I am one myself. Each of my sisters truly are. There are no words for how this haunts a person. No mother should have to live without her child, even though I do understand that sometimes the safety issues are so strong because that mother is so broken as a person, the child isn’t safe with her. I get it.

Adoption isn’t just a one-time event and it’s over. It is never over, it can’t be and it isn’t. It is something that follows an adoptee and their original parents throughout their lives.

I have obsessed in my guilt for not raising my daughter. Just like my maternal grandmother, I never intended to leave her daily life permanently. In my effort, just as it was in my grandmother’s effort, to work things out financially, circumstances changed and it was no longer the best outcome for her to take her back. Both my maternal grandmother and myself would have, if it had been possible or truly made sense to step back in.

There were no role models for absentee mothers in the early 1970s though one read a lot of stories about absentee fathers. I realize I caused the situation for myself. My grandmother stepped into a serious trap without realizing it when she turned to Porter-Leath Orphanage in Memphis TN for temporary care of my mom.

The superintendent there betrayed my grandmother and my mom to a master baby thief. Miss Georgia Tann was backed up by her good friend, the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley, in her pressure campaign to exploit my grandmother and wrest my mom out of her possession so that she could sell her to my adoptive grandmother.

Being a birth mom who permanently surrenders her child is not a club you should want to join. It is a grief that lasts a lifetime. The pain of that wound will change over time but it will never go away. It will always be there. I have spent years trying to resolve my own. I know the reasons and the causes but there is no recovering lost time and those precious memories of your child growing up.

If you are an expectant mother, especially a single and financially challenged young woman, seek out the help that will make it possible for you to keep your baby. You will be glad you did. Here’s one place – https://savingoursistersadoption.org/

Stress Responses

Some adoptive parents mistake their adopted child’s compliance with the situation as a good outcome adjustment. What I have learned from adoptees that there is an even more intense reaction that is called fawning. Think of the kidnap victim that eventually identifies with their captors – like Patty Hearst did.

Every adoptee is an individual and each responds differently to the circumstances of their relinquishment and their placement in a new home.

Fawning is best understood as “people-pleasing.” Both of my parents were adoptees and I saw this kind of behavior in my mom and learned it from her. This kind of behavior can endear one to other people but it is not always healthy to be this way.

People with the fawn response are so accommodating of other people’s needs that they often find themselves in codependent relationships. Fortunately, when that has happened to me, I’ve found a way out – even if it took some time to get there.

Fawn types seek safety by merging with the wishes, needs and demands of others. They act as if they unconsciously believe that the price of admission to any relationship is the forfeiture of all their needs, rights, preferences and boundaries. It takes some maturity to take one’s power back.

Sadly, fawn types are more vulnerable to emotional abuse and exploitation. Abusers may suppress a survivor’s fight or flight responses by threatening punishment. The appease response, also known as ‘please’ or ‘fawn’, is a survival response which occurs [when] survivors read danger signals and aim to comply and minimize the confrontation in an attempt to protect themselves. I’ve been there, done that and I’ve seen my mom do likewise.

If you are an adoption survivor (adoption is definitely a form of trauma to a child), you are not alone in using this for safety. There is no shame in struggling with fawning. Fawning, like the other stress responses, is a self-protective armor. It has helped many adoption survivors live through being placed in a family that does not fit their nature naturally.

Reproductive Justice

I believe in this concept – the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.

The truth is – most women do not want to give up the children they birth. Most women do not lose the children they have because they are wantonly abusive. If the support, encouragement and financial resources were there – most children would be raised by the people who gave birth to them.

Access to reproductive health is affected by many other factors – race, religion or sexual orientation. Also the financial, immigration or disability status as well as environmental conditions.

I have heard that families waiting in the squalor of make-shift refugee camps on the Mexican border, sleeping on the ground in flimsy tents meant for weekend camping in mild weather, are sending their children ALONE across the border in the hope of their being granted asylum. In most cases, the parents could see no other way to get their children the medical help they need or safety from being preyed upon by gangs.

In the United States, every new wave of immigrants (from the Chinese to the Irish and Italians) has faced hatred and difficulty before being accepted as yet another kind of American. We would do well to remember that always has it been that the resident population has feared the impacts of the arriving masses.

Death Is Even Harder

Facing the death of loved ones is difficult for many people. I remember the first dead bodies that I saw as a public schoolchild. Two friends died while yet school age and my uncle died when I was a senior in high school. My young sons saw dead bodies at a very young age as their paternal grandparents died at home. We have also taken them to local visitations. It is good to view death as a natural part of life.

For the adoptee, especially while yet a child, death can trigger pre-verbal memories of abandonment. There was a first mother who gave you away to an adoption agency and then went away. The adoptive parents came and got you. Death can really drive home to an adopted child that their first mother has gone away and never came back.

Coming face to face with death can also create fears related to the adoptive parents – will they go away and never come back? There are other kinds of death – What happens then, if one of the adoptive parents does leave because they have filed for divorce ?

Under such circumstances, many families break apart and become dysfunctional. An adoptee may take this kind of loss harder than a non-adoptee would. If the result of the divorce is leaving and selling the place that was always home, this can also be harder for an adoptee – “I always thought I’d have some place I could call home and now I don’t.”

Loss is often a lifelong difficult place for an adoptee.

Leaving Family And Home

Both of my grandmothers found as they came of age that they had to leave their family and home. Women in a more stable home environment in the 1930s probably would not have made the choice these women did.

My paternal grandmother, Dolores, certainly wasn’t leaving a place where she felt safe and secure. She was looking for one where she could belong and she found that, I believe, with her Aunt Laura and girl cousins – Gertrude and Eunice.

For my maternal grandmother, Lizzie Lou, once she left her family behind in Eads, there seems to have been no going back for her – even after she lost her daughter and husband. She found a new husband but never had any other children.

For each of them, there was no one to fall back on because they both lost their mothers at a young age. There was nobody to catch them, it wasn’t an option. They had to be relatively self-reliant.