Out From The Shadows

Later this week, I’ll be pitching my work in progress to literary agents at Gateway Con – a conference for writers and readers in St Louis Missouri taking place over this coming weekend.

It is a nonfiction, memoir style story of loss, conflict and the redemption of my roots.

How I had to quickly mature after both of my parents died only 4 months apart, in order to close their estate and cope with the legal challenges of a brilliant but delusional sister.

It is also a mystery. I share what I had to do in order to discover who my original grandparents were (both of my parents were adoptees).

There is a surprising realization for my own self at the end. Maybe it should have been obvious but it took learning the story of my parents adoptions to understand my own humble but fortunate reality.

I think I’m probably 3 to 6 months away from completing this story satisfactorily. Probably a couple of years away from publishing if I am so fortunate.

Legitimacy

“In the soul of every adoptee is an eternal flame of hope
for reunion and reconciliation with those he has lost
through private or public disaster.”
~ Jean Paton, Orphan Voyage

The blankness of our past is like a constant gnawing at our heart. It creates a hole that can’t be filled, a vacuum for which there is no substitute, it is a piece of our soul that was taken from us. It is like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing, the center of a wheel missing two spokes. My mom was not unique in her yearning to know who her original mother was.

The withholding of birth information from adoptees is an affront to human dignity. Most Americans assume that the falsification of adoptees’ birth certificates arose from well-meaning social workers anxious to relieve adoptees of the stigma of illegitimacy.

However, my mom’s parents were married at the time of her conception and her birth and at the time she was taken for adoption by my adoptive grandparents.

Of greater concern was the possibility of the original family tracing such a child and disrupting a well established adoptive relationship. Especially if the surrender had been forced, as was the case with my maternal grandmother.

The rationale was that in order to be secure in the position of adopting children, anonymity was essential.

“We never tell the natural mother or reveal to others where the child is and where it is being placed for adoption,” Georgia Tann told a reporter for the Commercial Appeal in 1948. Her letter to my original maternal grandmother certainly revealed nothing about my mom having been taken from Memphis to Arizona.

Empty Reassurances

After Georgia Tann had taken my mom away from her mother and sent my mom almost 1,500 miles away, she tried to reassure my grandmother (who never intended to lose custody of my mom) that it was all for the good (and judging by some truly horrific stories about Georgia Tann’s rule over children, my mom was lucky she was removed quickly and ended up with decent people to raise her).

On August 30, 1937, Georgia Tann wrote to my grandmother – “The baby has been placed in a lovely home where she will have every care and much love. Any time you wish to hear from her, we will be glad to write you.”

My grandmother disappears from the adoption file after she received that letter. After being pressured into signing the surrender papers (either sign these or we’ll ask Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley to declare you an unfit mother), she tried to undo the damage. Telephoning the Tennessee Children’s Home office and speaking to Helen Rose, she said “I heard from my friend in New Orleans. She said she will take me and the baby. I need to come and get her so we can leave.”

They had a paying repeat customer in my adoptive grandmother, there was no way they were going to let my mom go back to her mother, no matter what. They told her that she was to bring the names and addresses of her friends to their office. They could not let her recover custody of my mom until they investigated the people who would help them first.

My grandmother’s name was Elizabeth Lou but when she had my mom she went by Lizzie Lou. In letters to Georgia Tann and in the divorce papers filed by my mom’s father, she is shown as Elizabeth. But when she died, she had Lizzie Lou put on her gravestone. I believe she waited all of her life for my mom to be reunited with her. She had no other children.

Gratitude

Sadly, there seems to be an unreasonable standard that expects an adoptee to be grateful to the people who adopted them for having saved them from a worse fate.

Generally speaking gratitude is an important spiritual practice in my own life but I get it.

In truth, while parents are mostly grateful to have received the children born to them and to have the complicated, difficult and ultimately satisfying job of mentoring the next generation into the ways of the world until they are able to navigate it on their own, that does not mean that their children are obligated to be grateful to their parents for having done what parents are supposed to do.

An adoptee has a complicated situation. They are expected to give up any attachment to the people who gave them birth, allowed to have the basic details of their identify changed and more accurately falsified and then expected to be forever grateful to the strangers who took them in and raised them.

This is not a realistic expectation. I understand so much, so much better now, that learning about my own parents’ adoptions has also encouraged me to learn more deeply about all aspects of this human practice.

For The Mother Whose Child Was Taken

On this Mother’s Day, I am feeling a deep empathy for every mother that has lost custody of her child. I acknowledge the deep pain that a day like this one causes. She has lost a very real part of herself, though independently living. Her child is gone and yet she must go on – somehow.

Each day without her child is a painful reminder that the child yet lives with someone else the child must call mother. She may have unending fears about what is happening to her child, out of her sight and control. She may cry often, lonely silent tears that no one else can understand.

On this day, my heart sends love and understanding to each woman thus affected. Yours is the hardest part of a day when many of us are grateful for the mothers who gave of themselves that we might live.

Other Ways To Rob A Mother

With my sister in 2014

While I have a lot of sadness for my maternal grandmother’s separation from her child, I also have a lot of sadness for my sister’s lot as a mother. Interestingly, when I first saw the photo of my grandmother I thought of my sister and coincidentally, she carries my grandmother’s name of Lou.

My sister has given birth to two children and was not able to raise either of them but had more time with her first born son. When she became afraid her husband was going to hurt her, she left him and sued for a divorce. Her child was mixed race, partly Mexican in the predominantly Mexican town of El Paso TX. His Mexican grandparents fought her for custody. The court was afraid he would lose contact with his culture – as though it only came from that part.

When I first pulled together the details of our family’s history into a long saga, I included an exchange with my nephew that highlighted the damage that had been done to him by his paternal grandmother who raised him. I won’t argue the fact that they could afford to support him much more easily than my sister. What I can’t forgive them for is how that woman poisoned him against half of his family. And he is a very wounded person – married three times and not that long ago suffered some kind of breakdown.

I knew I was risking his anger by sharing that heartfelt private exchange with him in a very limited edition of 10 copies distributed to family members only but I simply felt it was too important to an overall understanding of our family dynamics not to include it. And he has since disowned our whole side of the family over it – though my sister isn’t angry with me over it – she says it was headed that way because she knew he didn’t want her in his life. So sad. I do regret the loss of his feelings towards me.

My sister also lost her daughter. Our adoptee mom convinced her to give up the baby shortly after birth. And similarly to my nephew’s situation, the adoptive family probably could afford to support her better than my sister who waitressed her entire life, mostly at Denny’s.

My sister has had opportunities to spend time with all 3 of her grandchildren and in today’s world where we are all so scattered out over this country, I don’t really have all that much more in person time than my sister does, nor did I have much longer to raise my daughter as she ended up being raised by her father and step-mother. Her removal from my life was voluntary but not intended. He refused to pay child support and I was financially desperate.

Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day 2010

Ever since my oldest son was born, we go out every year to take photos among the Wild Azaleas we are fortunate to have an abundance of here on our Missouri farm. Only in one year, were there no flowers and we had to settle for a waterfall backdrop. This year, I can no longer endure a long hike due to knee issues and so my husband has suggested I drive our John Deere tractor while he and the boys walk alongside to area where he knows there are a lot of blossoms. He also wants to collect a couple of large rocks in the bucket that are on his mind while we are there. The last time I drove the tractor I got it stuck in a wetland. He reassures me that will be impossible in the area he has in mind.

Mothers are very much on my mind at this time. No surprise. Yesterday, I struggled with a lot of sadness about my maternal grandmother. I have this awful paradox. I was never able to know my original grandparents because both of my parents were given up for adoption. Yet, if that had not happened, I would not exist at all. Therefore, it wasn’t ever possible to have both – a relationship with them and life itself. Of course, if it weren’t for the disconnect adoption causes, maybe my parents could have enjoyed reunions with their original parents in adulthood and maybe I could have known these people. But it was not to be.

I also miss my mom a lot at Mother’s Day. I would have had a wonderful long conversation with her had she been alive. She died two months before I expected to see her again (we were separated by 1,200 miles). Her death changed my life. Discovering my original grandparents did as well.

Happy Mother’s Day !!

Losing A Mom

Many of us have lost our mothers. Whether we had her for a short time, almost no time at all, like my paternal grandmother who lost her own mother at age 3 mos. Or whether we had her for a bit longer, like my maternal grandmother who lost her own mother at age 11. Or whether we had her for much longer. I lost my mother in 2015 at the age of 61.

My mom carried a deep unhealed wound that was caused by the unintended (unintended by her own mother) separation from her mother when she was exploited due to financial desperation. When my mom tried in the early 1990s to get her origins information and reach out for contact with her original parents, she was told her mother had already died and that devastated her.

There was an emptiness that my mom carried her whole life and it was real and not imagined. She was alone in a real sense with the issues that her life presented her with and we all are in reality.

Death is inevitable. I accepted that almost 20 years ago when I learned I was positive for hep C but would never be treated for that. Even though I knew nothing about my original grandparents and my own parents were still alive, my OB said he was more worried about my heart than my liver. It seems he was intuitive.

Having now located who all 4 of my original grandparents were, I also know they all died of heart related causes. Both of my own parents also died of heart related causes. So I have to take my own health seriously in the aspects related to that.

Even so, no one can save my life. We are all born to die and the timing of our death is never known until it is upon us. What matters to me is the quality of the lifetime that I have available to me. I do my best to honor that gift.

Breaking The Cycle

Both of my parents were adoptees, so it is no wonder really that the pattern of giving up children to adoption continued in the lives of my sisters and I. Both sisters gave up children to adoption. While I did not and while one of my sisters experienced a horrific outcome through the courts that I will always believe was biased, two more children were not raised by us because of circumstances, including financial hardship, beyond our control. I even understand now that it was a minor miracle that I wasn’t given up for adoption when my teenage mother conceived me out of wedlock.

Happily, I have optimism that our children, who are raising their own children successfully, are breaking the cycle that has fragmented my childhood family both on the parental side and through our own children.

I believe that the general perspective is shifting now, though not yet entirely ending mothers losing their children to adoption, to encourage more mothers not to chose that deeply painful loss that too many mothers have suffered and too many children have been damaged by.

There will always be some need for surrogate parenting but it may be time to allow adoptees not to become a false identity but to be supported in order to grow up as whole and integrated selves with their original identities and family trees known and intact.

Fathers and Daughters

My great-grandfather, Raphael,
holds his infant daughter, my grandmother Dolores,
with her sister, Eleanor, seated nearby

My grandmother’s mother died when she was only 3 months old. It is said that when the mother dies, a good indicator of where the father-daughter relationship will ultimately end up is what kind of relationship they had developed, when the death occurs.

The mother’s absence can change the way a father relates to his daughter. This period can affect a daughter’s feelings of security and self-worth as well as her ability to form satisfying relationships as an adult.

There is a lot I cannot know about such things. These circumstances happened so many years ago and we were cut-off by adoption from our original families. I know that he remarried and the step-mother was not kind. I know that they moved to Asheville, North Carolina, when she was a young girl and they put her to work in the rayon mills.

I know they went out to California to visit Raphael’s elderly father Austin who lived nearby his daughter, Laura. My great-grandfather would have been, at least in part, influenced by his own identifications with his parents. Certainly, Austin seemed important to Raphael in adulthood. I’ve no indication what his relationship with his mother was like. Did he have any memories about how his father treated his mother ?

Austin seems to have been closer to his daughter, Laura, than to Raphael. If my great-grandfather didn’t have any comfortable memories to draw on, then he may have lacked a firm bedrock for relating to his daughter. I have discovered through Ancestry that he was of an advance age when he still living with his parents.

What I do know at this point is that my grandmother Dolores’ home life was so unhappy, that she refused to go back to North Carolina with her family and they dis-owned her over it. It seems that her Aunt Laura and her girl cousins were important to her going forward in California.