The Original Mother

There are a total of 4 women in my immediate family who have relinquished a child – both of my grandmothers and both of my sisters. I have a lot of compassion for every one of them.

The level of pain that such a mother may feel depends a lot on the time frame and reason for the relinquishment. I know for certain 2 of the mothers were coerced or forced. I know that 3 of the adoptions were “closed” and only one was “open”. That last one was my youngest sister who made the decision to relinquish from the moment she knew she was pregnant and vetted prospective adoptive parents and utilized private attorneys to facilitate the process.

Many such mothers have accepted some seriously false beliefs about themselves –
I would have been a terrible mother and my child is better off.
My child must hate me.
My child will never forgive me.
My child will never believe how much I wanted them.

These mothers also carry with them understandable fears –
Meeting their child and disappointing them.
Facing their child’s anger.
Never knowing what happened to the child.
If it was a secret, family members finding out.
Finding out the child was mistreated or needs help.
The child showing up one day at one’s workplace.
The child never trying to find them.

Within these mothers are many possible responses –
Feeling guilt and regret.
An inability to move on.
Breaking down and crying when thinking about one’s child.
Angry outbursts (caused by bottled up feelings).
Feeling guilty when others talk about their children.
Wondering what one’s child looks like.
Fantasizing about a reunion.
Anger at those who didn’t help them when they needed it most.
Jealous of the adoptive parents but wishing them well for the child’s sake.
Depression around the time of the child’s birthday, as well as the day they were given up.
A deep sense of loss that never abates.

Even so, such women have some admirable strengths – they are idealistic, private, protective, resourceful and unselfish

Sometimes, their deep pain is triggered, even after many years, if they happen to run into their child’s father. Certainly, birthdays and holidays will always be difficult reminders. TV commercials featuring babies may move them to tears and thoughts of their own child. And movies about adoption, depending on the emotional content, may be impossible to watch through to the end.

There is one important opportunity that such a mother should not neglect, regardless of the fears connected to it – that is, allowing contact by their relinquished child.

I’ll Cry If I Want To

It is quite common for an adoptee to be sad on their birthday, even when they can’t understand why. It has been noted by therapists that adoptees often sabotage their own birthday parties, even when they were looking forward to them.

Each of my parents were with their original mothers for months before they were taken away and given to other people to raise through adoption.

Consider what a birthday means to an adoptee.

An adoptee often cannot help but think of the woman who gave birth to them on their birthday. Many hope that the mother is also thinking of them on that date.

A child who was adopted may have a hard time understanding why they are so inconsolably sad at a time when they should be happy. Tears, emptiness, fear and despair might seem a bit over the top to observers. Maybe they could consider the symbolic meaning of that day to an adoptee.

A pre-verbal child will experience bewilderment at the sudden absence of their original mother. They have become attuned to the sound of her voice, the smell of her body and the way she touches them (unless removed from her at birth, when only the sound of being in her womb is left in their deepest memories).

A child adopted as an infant may lack conscious memories of their loss and so can’t make sense of it. A reunion with the original mother can make the birthday triggered emotional wound worse.

If the original mother was unwed, there were no excited visitors or phone calls of congratulations. No one was there taking sweet or silly photos of those first days. All of these an adoptee has lost from their earliest days.

If healing is able to occur, then the hurt and anger that take over an adoptee’s emotions around the time of their birthday may lessen. If not, then it will only be the passing of time that changes the focus and makes possible the ability to move forward again.

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.

One-Sided Reunion

On her deathbed, she made her family promise to never forget her only child, whom she knew would someday return. When I spoke to her youngest brother’s son, he vaguely remembered knowing that she had had a daughter.

Was this my grandmother as well, who used her “childish nickname” Lizzie on her gravestone ? Her second husband survived her – did she make certain he knew ?

What I do know is that my mom was almost a decade too late in attempting to locate her natural mother. Though she learned about the Georgia Tann scandal as a teenager, for the most part, growing up, she didn’t let herself think about her natural mother, there seemed to be no use, but as an adult when stories of reunions hit the national awareness, she began dreaming about finding her. Learning that she had already died devastated my mom, destroyed her dreams of reunion.

In my 60s, I made it to my grandmother’s grave and sat on the ground speaking to her. I did the same at my grandfather’s grave and at my mom’s half-sister’s grave.

I have discovered in my own life that Life has a way of coming full circle. I am whole now. I believe also that my mom finally got that reunion with her own natural mother – after she died. It’s what my heart believes and I know in my heart that my mom knows even more of “her story” now than I have yet to discover.

“The day I realized I had two mothers, I was cut in half . . .One half of myself resided here with my family, and the other half was lost, lost to a shadowy woman floating somewhere out there in the world. You see, I’m adopted.” ~ Anne Bauer, The Sound of Hope

“But there’s a story behind everything . . . behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begins.” ~ Mitch Albom, For One More Day

Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ?

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

I’m not thinking of the famous movie but of the author. Like my grandmothers, she lost her own mother at a young age. I was encouraged to read her book “To The Lighthouse” by Jean Houston when I attended a week long Salon at her home in Ashland Oregon. There is an element of her personal story to speaks to that loss of a mother.

Virginia Woolf was concerned about the injustice of patriarchal domination of women, the horrors of incest, the consequence of a social system which places no value on educating women and the astonishing liberation of moving from acceptance of a Victorian sentimental notion of marriage to easy and tolerant attitudes toward sexuality.

She was a genius at conveying inner experience. At age 25, she wrote a set of reminiscences for her sister’s child, though it is actually a memoir of her childhood and adolescence. In it, she sets out to convey how the death of her mother when she was twelve affected the family.

Shortly after her mother’s death, Woolf became violently emotionally ill – hearing voices, physically violent, racked by physical pain, unable to sleep or rest. Neither her half brother’s forced physical intimacy or her bout of insanity – form any part of the story of her coming of age.

In “A Sketch of the Past” (written when Woolf was 60 yrs old) she speaks more directly. Her stepbrother’s abuse gave her such a fear of male sexuality that she had another breakdown and was in a nursing home for a long spell.

Finally, she retrieved her self-confidence enough to take up her writing career, and even marry, though she remained sexually frigid. Woolf went on to write some of the strongest feminist fiction and nonfiction to be produced in the twentieth century. She became an icon of the liberated female consciousness – sensitive, ironic, detached, capable of profound human insight because she embodied the androgynous blending of reason and intuition.

Woolf would have insisted that human affairs are much more complex than the confessional autobiography suggests.

An Inconvenient Truth

Adoption is not the gray area it is often portrayed by the industry as. It is more black and white, with that overlap of gray.

As difficult as it may be to fully realize, in order to adopt, on some level you are okay with taking someone else’s child from them. You may not even be willing to consider the pain it causes the original mother and/or father.

This the inconvenient truth at the heart of becoming an adoptive parent. You may want to “believe” you are some kind of heroic savior but you really are simply wanting something (a child) that for whatever reason you don’t believe you can have any other way.

Some people can do this and function adequately to parent that child. Many adoptees, even though they have LIVED that condition, can’t reconcile the thought that this was okay with their adoptive parents.

This is not to judge or dismiss the reality that some children may actually fare better than they would have with their original parents. I can see this in my own family dynamics. Because I have the kind of faith that believes given a long enough view throughout time, it all works out – both at the physical level and in the soul karmic level.

There are always excuses on the part of adoptive parents. What if this ? What if that ? But I did this or I did that. If I had not, then what MIGHT have happened to that child ?

I respect ALL of the adoptive parents that are a part of my family’s life story. The adoption reform movement wishes only that adoptive parents recognize that their decision to adopt a child was driven by a desire to fulfill their own “selfish” motives. To be honest about that. They can admit simply that they wanted kids and couldn’t have them using their own reproductive capabilities. It was always about what they personally wanted for themselves.

It’s not the only thing that would make adoption concepts more honest but it is a beginning on the adoptive parent side of a complicated equation.

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.

Impact Of Adoption On Health

Every adoption is unique and every situation is different. There have been well studied impacts on mental and emotional health for an adoptee that other people in the general population are less affected by. Most have to do with a sense of abandonment or rejection. No matter how much the adoptive parents try to convince their adopted child that they are “special” because they were “chosen”, nothing seems to shake that initial feeling of having been unwanted or not wanted enough for the original parents to work things out. This is mostly a child’s perspective because they lack the mature experiences of life that most adults acquire.

My dad (both of my parents were adoptees) often accused my mom of being a hypochondriac because of her constant and evolving health problems over the long decades of their marriage. They were married over 60 years at the time of my mom’s death. I never judged her that way. She did have a LOT of health problems from her heart to her kidneys to her pancreas and beyond. She had a intervention scheduled for a blockage in her esophagus pending when she died just a few days before.

I am a believer in mind/body health implications. I do believe my mom suffered from low self-esteem. There is no way to know for certain whether her adoption had an impact but given her belief that she was stolen from her parents and then denied her adoption file and told at that same time that her mother had already died, denying her once again the reunion she desperately desired, there is a good chance that her mental/emotional state of being played a role.

Statistics tells us that 80% of visits to primary care doctors are the result of emotional distress. Stress kills. My mom had several interventions for her health beginning younger than I am now. First a bypass and then angioplasties and stents. My mom died of a massive heart attack that no one could have saved her from quickly enough. The coroner said it was instantaneous and thankfully that she didn’t suffer.

Sadly there is a lack of financial incentive for doctors to prescribe stress reduction instead of surgery, drugs or other expensive medical procedures. I continue to do battle on that front with my own doctors for my own best health as I age.

Profound and Mystical

Painting by Nazar Haidri

At the time my parents were given up for adoption, not as much was known about how the initial relationship of a child to his mother contributes to a healthy self-esteem. My parents were each with their mothers for 6 months or longer and that was a good thing. My mom seemed to me to have less self-confidence than my dad but she had a difficult adoptive mother who I doubt my mom ever felt she lived up to the expectations of that woman.

My niece and nephew who were given up for adoption were taken from their mothers shortly after birth. I don’t really know what effect that had on them and it is difficult to know which was worse. I think my parents probably suffered more because they had that time of closeness with their mothers and then suddenly she was gone. They were pre-verbal. How to explain that the sun has ceased to shine and won’t be back ?

The success of human beings on this planet has much to do with the ability to adapt to changing conditions. There is yet much to learn about the cost of having to adapt, regarding the attempt to substitute an unrelated mother for the original natural mother. I would suspect that at the least there is a wariness about what is happening.

The relationship of a child to their mother is profound and mystical.

Not Only Genes

A child inherits more than physical attributes as well as general interests and tendencies from their parents. They can also inherit the wounds that their forebears were inflicted with.

In my own family, I see how my parents separation from their original parents was passed down through me and my sisters, not only in regard to a bit of distance in parenting and concern for our well-being and ability to provide for ourselves but because of that perspective on the part of our parents, our ability to parent our own children was also impacted.

Patterns repeat – lack of familial support for a young mother and her baby, lack of financial resources, whether from family or society, and a definite lack of understanding about the wounds caused by separation or the effects of being raised by strangers (through adoption or foster care) are all evident in my own family’s history.