Thankful

One adoptee’s story –

I still struggle internally with how addiction and reunification should be handled.

My birthmom was not an addict but my birthfather was, and that factored hugely into her decision. She had actually changed her mind and decided to keep me, when at 3 months old, there was an incident with my birth father on Thanksgiving that scared her.

I am one of those with a “good” adoption story, so I have always been thankful for the life my adoptive parents gave me and the space they allowed in the semi-open adoption. This was the 90s, our “open” was more letters and pictures with direct communication starting at 12 and physical meeting at 16. I went to live with her at 17 with all parents full support.

My birth father is now finally sober but VERY brain-damaged from his many years of addiction and I do not have him in my life.

I don’t despise addicted parents by any means, and I do agree with the philosophy that not all people with addictions are neglectful parents. However, it is playing with fire IMO…. I think that if there has been no neglect or abuse then support should be given to keep family together as much as possible.

I personally feel that once actual neglect/abuse has happened then the child should have the right to decide for themselves the level of connection they want and that may not happen until age 8-13 depending on maturity level.

I do not believe that Termination of Parental Rights ever needs to happen, unless the child is truly wanting it. My anger toward both addiction and the system comes from the fact that kids aren’t given enough room or right to have their own voice.

I don’t really care what first parents, adoptive parents, or foster parents “want”. Anyone who actually loves their child in a healthy way wants them to feel safe and comfortable and connected with all the people in their life.

Reunion as teenagers and adults is different as their brains can cognitively understand addiction and how “using Mom” is not the same person as “Mom”. But a younger child can’t understand that and I personally am grateful for the stability I had and can see how damaging the inconsistency of foster care life can be.

I can’t speak for other adoptees but I have personally dealt with thoughts toward my birth parents like the following –

“You should have had an abortion then.”

“Why wasn’t I worth it?”

(Since having my son) “I get that being high is cool, but nothing is better than the love I have for my son. Why didn’t you feel the same?”

I want addiction de-stigmatized. I want drugs decriminalized. I also want kids to be safe and I think all kids deserve to go to bed knowing “I am the MOST IMPORTANT” things in my Mom’s life.

Today’s Teens Are A Lot More Understanding

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is believed to be caused by overwhelming experiences, traumatic events and/or abuse during childhood. This came up today in association with a former foster care youth who had a terrible experience in foster care, is now in her teens and wants to share that with others.

One mature woman shared her experience – I went into the system at 3, taken from mom at 5, and emancipated through marriage at 16. I tried to share my story. I got a lot of rejection from other teens. That was a different time, though. Teens these days are a lot more understanding of trauma and mental illness and they welcome the opportunity to hold space for those who have gone through horrific experiences.

Another person was very supportive of this teen’s desire saying, It’s her story and she’s old enough to share. Will she receive backlash….possibly. But I bet she’s going to get more support vs. backlash, which is what she is seeking. She’s seeking a community that says “I hear you and I understand”.

Foster care children have been stripped of everything. It is hard to understand why people would take children into their home for foster care and not intend to make them feel at home. Examples –

Only buying the child the bare minimum or giving them hand me downs. One mature woman who was once in foster care shares – It always made me feel less than or like a charity case.. often I was given her biological daughters clothes/school supplies from the previous year etc. I remember the first time I got my own winter coat at around 7-8 years old. It was like Christmas to me.

It is no wonder children subjected to these situations develop personality coping mechanisms. Schizophrenia and DID are often confused with each other, but they’re very different things. Schizophrenia is a psychotic illness: symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, disorganized thoughts, speech and movements and social withdrawal. It does not involve alternate personalities or dissociation.

People with DID are not delusional or hallucinating their alternate personalities. Individuals with DID may experience some symptoms related to psychosis, such as hearing voices, but DID and schizophrenia are two different illnesses. There are very few documented cases linking crime to DID. The idea of an ‘evil’ alter is not true. People with DID are more likely than the general population to be re-traumatized and experience further abuse and violence.

Personality disorders are a constant fixed pattern of feeling and behaving over time, usually developing in early adulthood. Personality disorders, like borderline personality disorder, involve extreme emotional responses and patterns of behavior which make it hard for the person with the disorder to have stable relationships and function in society.

DID is a dissociative disorder. Rather than extreme emotional reactions to the world, people living with DID lose contact with themselves: their memories, sense of identity, emotions and behavior. Unlike personality disorders, DID may first manifest at almost any age.

Modern Orphanages

From a generally anti-foster care perspective, a question was asked –

Why did the government move away from orphanages/group homes to children living with foster carers ? Bottom line is that it is about money. It is cheaper for the government to give foster carers a stipend than provide for the full needs of children in a modern orphanage or group home.

My mom spent a few months as an infant at Porter-Leath, an orphanage in Memphis TN. Her original mother took my mom there only for temporary care while she tried to get on her feet and estranged from her husband, the father of my mom, who was most likely tied up one state over fighting a SuperFlood on the Mississippi in 1937. He was in Arkansas working for the WPA and that was where most of his own roots and family were. That is how Georgia Tann got involved and my mom ended up adopted.

My family visited Porter-Leath in 2017. It is now an amazingly peaceful place and much changed but still provides some sheltering for runaways who need a safe place to go.

The discussion was not about orphanages of the past though. It was about facilities that are geared towards children’s best interests. A revamped system. An environment where the kid never has to become someone else to fit in with a family he isn’t related to. One that is very consistent and stable. That is vital for kids.

And no competition with a foster carer’s biological kids, or being made to feel like a burden or an inconvenience compared to the carer’s biological children. Modern orphanages are really structured. Everyone there is on the same playing field. It totally eliminates the foster vs biological conflicts. The experience of former foster youth is that biological kids are horrible towards foster kids. Full of disdain and resentment for these strangers being in their homes.

I was intrigued by the mention of modern orphanages, I found a link to an Atlantic article highlighting Palmer Home for Children in Mississippi that is fairly current.

Adding Insult To Injury

We are living through uncertain times. Many people feel un-moored from their usual sources of confidence that all will be well. Children who have been adopted or are in foster care find their worlds upended. Lacking consistency, routine, and an overall feeling of stability and security as their personal worlds are being shaken up again by the Coronavirus and the efforts to contain the spread of that infection.

Schools have closed and public community events through which diverse people usually bond are cancelled. Instead of joining together in common experience we are forced to isolate ourselves from one another. At least we have modern technology to keep us connected while maintaining a safe distance from one another but life is not routine or what we would conventionally expect as we wake up each day.

For those parents who still have jobs to go to while their children are alone at home, the struggle can be significant.

One of the responsibilities that foster parents face is transporting the children in their home to visitations with their birth parents and biological family members. Often times, visitations take place at child welfare offices, while other times, visitations may occur at public places, such as parks, restaurants, churches, and other public venues. Visitations are important as they help to maintain the relationship between both child and adult. Along with this, many foster parents have very strong relationships with the birth parents and during visitations, trust is built and children can grow and develop in a healthy fashion, as a result.

Yet, those public spaces are now closed to most of us in most locations throughout the United States. And coming out of the usual wintertime season of colds and flu can complicate things because many of us have all had one thing or another since Thanksgiving and our immunity is generally low. Essential services such as therapy sessions, drug counseling, and even court appearances have also been affected by Covid 19.

All families face difficulty at this time in our collective history and families with the additional challenges of trauma and regulations face an additional burden on top of the difficulties they face every day. All families are concerned, and confused, looking for answers and receiving little guidance. There is no school, foster care related visits are being cancelled, church services are cancelled, and generally all children are now isolated from the friends they depend upon in their everyday lives. The challenge in an era of social distancing is physical, and tangible, but can’t be solved by throwing dollars at it.

Stay safe, be well. Come together – though at a distance. Keep the efforts to slow the spread of this virus going until the assurance that it is once again safe to have greater contact with our fellow human beings becomes more certain. Patience is necessary and flexibility too.

The Search Is For The Truth

Tim McGraw with pregnant wife Faith Hill

This is how it feels to be adopted –

“I had a spirit that was completely outside what my family was. I didn’t know anyone I was related to, biologically, which gives you a sense of not knowing who you are.”
~ Audry Faith Perry aka Faith Hill

“There was a period of time when I first moved to Nashville, like the first couple of years, that I was just simply lost. That’s when I went on the search for my birth family.”

“The first time I met my biological mother, I just stared at her. I’d never seen anybody who looked anything like me. It was the awe of seeing someone that you actually came from. It fills something.”

While her adoptive family hadn’t shared her level of musical interest, her birth mother’s sister and mother had been members of their church choir, just like Hill. My own mom’s musical compositions tended to be religious and were often performed by a church choir. In addition, the discovery that Hill’s biological mother was an artist helped her understand why she’d been drawn to a creative career.

Meeting her birth mother also brought new facts to light. Her birth mother had gotten pregnant while having an affair with a married man. Sounds a lot like my dad’s adoption story.

“Meeting her birth mother was the most profound life-altering experience for her. After that, her world turned upside down. I was part of her old world, and she had to let that world go.”
~ Daniel Hill, ex-husband

Her second husband, Tim McGraw discovered that the man raising him wasn’t his biological father. Very much like a dear friend of mine who only recently also made such a discovery.

“Having been adopted, I really have a strong sense — a necessity almost — for stability. A foundation where my family is concerned.” Her close ties with the family that raised her didn’t change when her biological mother and brother entered her life. And when she and McGraw had three daughters together, Hill took time off from her career in order to be with them as they grew up.

Hill never forged a deep bond with her birth mother, who passed away in 2007. This is not actually an unusual result with adoptee reunions nor is how Hill appreciated her biological mother’s actions, at one point noting, “I know she must have had a lot of love for me to want to give me what she felt was a better chance.”

I believe that BOTH of my grandmothers were also motivated by such a love when they made those difficult choices.

Eye Of The Beholder

We need to talk to each other more. We each have a perspective but it is not the whole picture. We need to be able to hear the sadness, grief and anger. We need to be able to hear the needs and good intentions. We need to be able to hear the frustration of a young parent not receiving enough support to do what it is they were assigned to do when they conceived a child.

Perspective is everything but it need not be fixed in a rigid position. We can expand upon what we are able to understand by seeking to hear from those others with a different view on a situation.

Money tends to rule too much of what is considered the right perspective in this country. For too long, the rules have sided quite strongly with the perspective of those people with the money who desire for their position in the adoption triad to be inviolate. We’ve allowed the legal system to put up walls to deny 2/3s of the triad any kind of rights in the circumstances.

Maybe I don’t have all of the answers to how we go about providing for the welfare of children in our society but I do believe that denying people their right to know where they came from or what became of a child they gave birth to and then lost – often for no better reason than poverty – can’t be the best answer.

Adoptees are speaking out. Original parents who gave birth and then lost a child who is yet alive and living elsewhere are speaking out. And the motivations and needs for security by people who are investing their time and resources to provide a stable and secure home for a child should be heard as well – but not to the degree that we deny the needs of other two limbs of this triad of persons.

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.

Stability Matters

In contemplating how myself and both of my sisters lost custody of our children in a variety of ways, I realize that the main factor was instability and a lack of financial resources.

Though our parents were technically “good” parents, there was this attitude that once we were mature and more especially, once we married and had children, even if our marriages collapsed – we were on our own. Our mother even counseled one of my sisters to give up her daughter rather than face an indefinite period of time when they might have to support the two of them. The other sister simply accepted adoption as a reasonable solution to an inconvenient conception since both of our parents were adoptees.

Of course, we had no idea at the time of the wounds that separating any child from their natural mother, by whatever means, causes in a child. I also realize that many single mothers somehow manage to survive parenting without losing their children. I admire their fierce determination.

Today, is my oldest son’s 18th birthday. I may have spent the rest of my life accepting that my self and my sisters were somehow defective if I hadn’t met my second husband 30 years ago.

My parents were quick to recognize the stability that living with him brought into my own life and were eager to “give me away” in marriage. They were relieved to no longer have to worry about me. My sisters have not been as fortunate.

I have been in my son’s life almost every minute of every day since he snuggled into my womb, then fed at my breast. I now know it was the lack of stability and not that I was inherently defective that kept me from raising my oldest child, my beautiful daughter.

No Familial Support

Often the main drivers to a loss of custody for a mother is the lack of support from her own parents to keep and raise her child. They often prefer to release responsibility to a stranger than face the uncertainty of how long that support might be required of them.

In an adoptees group I am part of, it was noted that adoptees would have rather been raised by maternal grandmothers with the mother nearby and somewhat involved. Not every girl that conceives a child is ready to raise it. It may even be necessary in some cases for there to be a period of time when she lacks access to her child while she tries to stabilize her own life.

In my family, though my parents were good parents, they were both also adoptees. To deny adoption as a solution might have been similar to denying the rightness of their own lives. I don’t know.

What I do know is they had this attitude that once they raised us to adulthood and we had married and started having children of our own, we were pretty much on our own financially. They might grudgingly hand us a $20 or something along that order.

They were quick to encourage my sister to give up her daughter to adoption. Adoptees noted that when the grandparents give up pressuring their child to give up that grandbaby, they quickly fall in love with the child once it exists.

Something like that might have happened with my disappointed, maternal, adoptive grandparents after I was born, having been conceived out of wedlock.

However, as a cautionary note, based solely on my own observations, within my own family’s dynamics, a paternal grandmother who dislikes the mother and gets custody of her grandson is not a good outcome . . .