Economic Pressures

“When a mother is forced to choose between the child and the culture,
there is something abhorrently cruel and unconsidered about that culture.
A culture that requires harm to one’s soul in order to follow the culture’s
proscriptions is a very sick culture indeed.”
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Young, unmarried mothers are often at the mercy of their parents and society. Jobless – they have no income. The general view in the past was that economic pressures were only secondary factors to the moral sin of becoming pregnant out of wedlock.

If financial resources were more generous for single mothers, fewer babies would be given up to adoption. There will always be some children who’s mothers simply are not prepared – physically, mentally and emotionally – to be good parents but I believe they are the rare exception.

Simply Grateful

With a deep compassion, sympathy and understanding the best I can for all adoptees and all original parents who lost their children, I have no other choice – unless I would deny my very existence – but to be grateful for all that happened.

But for Georgia Tann exploiting my grandmother – for who knows NOW why her husband abandoned her 4 mos pregnant and did not reply to the Juvenile Court regarding his obligations to her and my mom ? – and due to her falling into a trap laid by her own survival desperation (not intending to lose custody of her one and only ever child). And but for, my dad’s mother ultimately giving in to what was most likely pressure from the Salvation Army to release him to adoption.

But for all of these sorrows and then for the wounds inflicted upon my parents by their separation from mothers who clearly did love them as much as I have loved every child I have born within me, but for – I would not exist.

And because I love life – I am simply grateful – and humbled by the losses that facilitated my birth.

Arrested Development

The loss of a mother creates a significant
developmental challenge for a child.

My maternal grandmother was 11 years old when her mother died and the oldest of 5 children. I suspect that Lizzie Lou was forced to take on responsibilities not only for herself but for the whole family very quickly.

It is known that in such cases the daughter advances some areas of development quite quickly.

At the same time, it is also known that she may identify with her earlier stage of maturity, the age when her mother was still the guiding light of the family’s life,
as a way of maintaining a relationship with her mother in an effort to deny
the finality of the death.

The result can be an adult who is stuck at an earlier developmental stage. I don’t know if this happened to my grandmother but my grandfather, I am told, described her as very young – indeed she was 20 years younger. She was, however, already 20 years old when they married and 21 years old when my mother was born. Hardly a child, though I understand that maturity is more of an issue than a young person of that age may believe.

Ever since I heard this assessment, that this is what my grandfather said about my grandmother, that she was very young, I have wondered, exactly what did he mean by that ? I have to consider that maybe she was a “little girl” in emotionally significant ways. Did she expect too much of him ? Did she throw temper tantrums ?

I’ll never know why he left her 4 months pregnant after only 4 months of marriage. I am left simply to consider the possible reasons and I come down on the side of believing there is a “positive” perspective I could apply.

Mother Loss

I don’t know why but my mother is on my mind this morning.

No matter who you have in your life (father, siblings, husband, children) when your mother dies, bottom line is you don’t have her any more.

I understand – my mom was like “If I have to live like this, I just want to die.” And I really don’t want to die, I just don’t want to live like this. In my own decline, I have felt similarly. My mom said to my husband before she died “don’t get old, it’s horrible”.

It was a Sunday morning when my mom died. I got a phone call from my youngest sister – “Your mother has died. We need you to come and do your work.”

Later as I transferred from one flight to another around dinner time in Chicago the details were served to me which left me unsettled all the way to New Mexico.

She died in her bathtub. She was found, face down in the water, by my dad the next morning. He tried but couldn’t lift her out. My youngest sister had to clean up the mess left behind.

From the official responders – neither my sister nor my dad handled it well.

I remember thinking, why the bathtub, why not her bed ? Then I thought actually it was my mother’s last thoughtful act – to die in a place easily clean-able.

The cause of death influences how the family reacts, what type of support system is available and what kind of stressors the children have experienced before the actual loss. My dad was like woulda – coulda – shoulda, until the autopsy came back that it was sudden and complete and he couldn’t have saved her. She had a massive heart attack.

It is interesting and a commentary on modern life – of 149 motherless
women surveyed – 44% died of cancer, 10% of heart failure, 10% in accidents and 7 percent by suicide. A small percentage, 3% by pneumonia, infectious diseases, complications of childbirth, abortion or miscarriage, kidney failure and cerebral hemorrhage – and the remainder due to alcoholism, overdose, aneurysm, stroke or complications of surgery.

It really matters not how it comes. Every cause of death is a different kind of hell. Every cause is painful, every loss leaves us wondering how we might have prevented it.

I miss my mom.

Bottled Up Grief

Ever since I learned about my maternal grandmother, my heart has broken for the grief her life gave her. She died at an age decades younger than her 2 sisters and 2 brothers. They did not have her heartbreak. They were all much younger than my grandmother when their mother died. My grandmother was 11 years old.

Grief doesn’t vanish when we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer, yet I am relatively certain that is how my grandmother coped. She didn’t talk about the pain but it didn’t go away.

The thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died, or that you lost custody of your child – both of which happened to both of my grandmothers actually. It is that you can’t talk about it.

You just want to run away, but you don’t know where you can run to. There isn’t any where to go.

The Unknown

From an adoptee – “It’s not as easy as everyone thinks, growing up and never knowing the truth about yourself.”

And it isn’t easy for the child of two adoptees because the feeling is the same – there is an emptiness, a void, a gap in the family history story and it hurts somehow in some deep place that is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t felt this.

Having gotten my mother’s adoption file from the state of Tennessee, due to her having been adopted through the Tennessee Children’s Home Society – Memphis branch – under the direction of Georgia Tann (who would have been indicted on criminal charges had she not died first), it was clear that my maternal grandmother never intended to lose my mom.

When my mom tried to get that adoption file herself in 1990 (and was rejected by the state of Tennessee), she said – as a mom, I would have wanted to know what happened to my child. My mom yearned for a reunion she would never have, since her mom died in 1984. My mom was devastated.

I also believe her mom always hoped my mom would find her. Though her given name was Elizabeth and it shows up in the adoption file and later in the divorce papers from my maternal grandfather 3 years later, she reverted to the name on my mom’s birth registration in Virginia – “Lizzie Lou” – and even her gravestone bears that name.

What Makes You Crazy

The thing that makes you crazy isn’t that your mother died,

or that you lost custody of your child,

it is that you can’t talk about it.

~ Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman

It is incomprehensible that BOTH of my grandmothers lived such similar circumstances – both lost their own mothers at a young age and both lost custody of their firstborn child to adoption.

There probably was no time to really grieve for her mother in my mom’s mother’s life – there were 4 younger siblings to be cared for and the enormous labor required of any woman without servants living in the early 1900s. There were likely no words for my dad’s mother since she was an infant of only 3 months old and pre-verbal.

But what of the deeper wound ? The loss of their firstborn children ?

Who could they talk to about it ? Who wanted to hear anything about what happened at the end of their pregnancies ? Most simply wanted to pretend that none of that had happened and just move on with Life.

Yet, it is unlikely that the wound ever healed or that my grandmothers didn’t think about their lost child every single day of whatever life remained for each of them.

The Wound Never Heals

In her book – A Hole in My Heart – Lorraine Dusky notes “You would be surprised how many little blond girls there are in the world when you are not looking for them. They are everywhere, filling your sightline like a chorus line of charming little dolls, reminding, mocking, making you aware of what you are missing, what you have done.

You stare at them, check out their clothes, absorb their little-girl movements and words.

The girl in the coffee shop with her mother. Another at the supermarket. Creating a scene at the mall. The daughter of a friend of someone you are dating, you can’t take your eyes off her, blonde, fine-bones and only a few months older than yours.”

Questions haunt a mother who has given up her child to adoption – Are my daughter’s parents good to her ? How is she ? Who does she look like ? Is she blonde like me ? Does she have my flat feet and his blue eyes ?

It is more than the girls themselves – an invitation to a baby shower. A picture of a baby in a magazine. Forsythia in a flower shop window. A family reunion.

I have this secret that makes me – different. Alien. Deep inside me there is a gnawing sense that I must find my daughter one day. Surely I am not the only one in this private hell.

It is good that the trend now is for – at the least – open adoptions. And there are activists among those who were adopted themselves trying to reform the system to make adoption rare, if at all.

It is good. It will stop some of the pain . . . as a society, we should care about our mothers and children more than we do.

Losing A Mom

The Dead Mother painting by Edvard Munch

I was talking to a woman in our county seat day before yesterday. She’s is an older woman and she seems to be of a very like mind to myself politically, which puts both of us in the minority here in the county where I live. So, she enjoys having someone who speaks her language to talk to. We really don’t communicate with one another that often but as I was leaving it came out that she had lost her mother at the age of 9.

I was almost finished reading a book by a woman, Mary Sue Rabe, that I met at Jean Houston’s home in August of 2016. Her book is titled “Stand There and Look Pretty Darlin’: Don’t You Worry Your Pretty Little Head ’bout Nothin'”. An important segment in her book was about losing her mother at age 9.

Back in my original grandmother’s childhoods in the early 1900s, mothers dying seems to have been a rather common phenomena – at least it happened to both of my grandmothers (one at age 3 mos and one at age 11). Also, my husband’s great-grandmother died after giving birth to her third child. That child was turned over to an unrelated couple to raise. His great-grandfather could barely manage the two older children he was left with in widowhood, one of whom was my husband’s grandfather.

Just after my older son was born, my mother-in-law made it her mission in life to get a memorial stone for Edith Morgan Yemm (my husband’s great-grandmother). Her husband was an impoverished coal miner when she died and so she was put into a pauper’s grave without a marker in the cemetery across from the church. He moved to another state after she died.

Not long ago, I read a book Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. The impact of losing one’s mother during childhood upon a daughter is profound.

I Miss My Mom

Mom as a young girl . . .

Today would have been her birthday but she died in September 2015. She died knowing only that her parents were Mr and Mrs J C Moore and that she was born in Virginia. Not very much to go on. She died believing she had been stolen to profit Georgia Tann of the Memphis branch of the Tennessee Children’s Home Society. She died heartbroken that her own mother had died before my mother could have the live reunion she yearned for.

The true story is sad, romantic and tragic. I have now uncovered as much truth as I will ever be able to know because the state of Tennessee gave me what they denied my mother. My mom wasn’t stolen but she might as well have been. Her parents were married and separated by a catastrophic flood on the Mississippi River in 1937. There is much I do know about their stories, including that my maternal grandmother was pressured and exploited into losing her only and firstborn child.

On the anniversary of my mother’s birth – I am both sad and joyful. I am grateful to know the truth she died not knowing and sad she was not given the answers she needed to be at peace before she died. Mostly, I just miss being able to pick up the telephone and have a marvelously long chat with her.