Advocating

What I try to do with this blog is advocate for a change in the perception of people who are involved in adopting children or providing foster care for them. It is a small effort on my part to write something, anything, each day to keep the conversation going. Sometimes it gets noticed by someone and validates the effort.

One adoptee voice that I appreciate is Tony Corsentino who writes on Substack. His most recent post is LINK>Political Orphans and he makes a strong case for his perspective.

I saved some of his paragraphs for my own self –

“Many of us advocate on behalf of the adopted children of today: to change the legal and social landscape for them, to open the opportunity for a future that is better.” I thought, YES, this is what I am trying to do with the blog I write.

I found this fact sad – “Not even the country’s foremost civil liberties organization, the ACLU, recognizes adoptees’ rights to their original identities and genealogical histories.”

Being a Tolkien fan, this touched my heart – In politics, to paraphrase a wise old Ent, “I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side.” Many adoptees understandably feel this way.

Tony says, “Political change in the direction of justice for adoptees is maddeningly slow. . . . Powerful interests, mainly religious groups and the adoption industry, are opposed to justice for adoptees, because justice for adoptees is perceived to clash with their goals of providing clean-slate babies with minimal baggage from as large an infant supply pool as possible.”

It caused quite a stir when Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito added a footnote, to his draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade, from a government report on the demand for adoption in the U.S., which used the phrase, “domestic supply of infants.” Though it’s inclusion is often misunderstood and misattributed in social media, it originated as a footnote to the Supreme Court draft opinion and was a direct quote from a 2008 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In the decades preceding the report, societal changes led to a decrease in the number of children available for adoption. This is a fact. There is more detail at FactCheck.org – LINK>Posts Misattribute Phrase ‘Domestic Supply of Infants’ in Draft Opinion on Abortion.

One commenter, Jamie Scott, on his blog writes, “. . . real objection is that the adopted person is daring to challenge the myth that society adores, ie, that adoption is a wonderful thing. To suggest that adoption is less than wonderful is like suggesting Jesus was just a nice Jewish boy.” She also goes on to note – that whole “birth mothers were promised secrecy” thing is BS. I feel sad for her when I read, “Despite hearing me talk for years about the anguish of losing my child, . . . numerous friends and strangers tell me what a WONDERFUL thing I did in relinquishing my only child.”

I also write for the mothers who lost a child to adoption – both of my sisters are one of those – and both of my parents were adoptees. I have plenty of reason to participate in the effort to make things better for both adoptees and the mothers who gave birth to them.

Birth Identity Nullification

My adoptee dad used to like to tease my adoptee mom by calling her by her birth name of Frances Irene. It wasn’t until his own adoptive parents died that he knew his original surname – Hempstead – only he didn’t know if that was his mother’s or his father’s surname. It was his mother’s as she was unwed at the time she gave birth to him.

I was reminded of this by a Substack email notification from Tony Corsentino titled LINK>Falsification. I recommend reading his blog. He notes “There is a hanging file folder in my desk drawer that holds both my birth certificates.” Of all the potential “universal” issues that adoptees face, it is that they are denied the name they were born with and that was recorded on their original birth certificates.

My mom’s adoptive mother wanted to realize her fantasy of having her very own Jack and Jill, so she renamed my adoptive uncle “John” and my adoptee mother “Julie” – a touch of higher sophistication, as was her usual expression of personal taste. Adoptees, in effect, live a false or assumed identity, unlike most other human beings.

In considering this and looking for an image, I came across two things that I will share with you here today. The first is from Psychology Today titled LINK>A Guide to the Fantasy Bond. To my quirky intellect, it fit the circumstances. Lisa Firestone PhD is a clinical psychologist, an author, and the Director of Research and Education for the Glendon Association. She is also the daughter of Dr Robert Firestone, who’s theory became the book – The Fantasy Bond.

She writes – The fantasy bond acts as a defense, helping relieve anxiety and emotional pain at times of distress. It is a way of maintaining an illusion of safety and security at those times when we experienced overwhelming frustration, hurt, or even terror. Infants have a natural ability to comfort themselves by using images and memories of past feeding experiences to ward off the anxiety of being temporarily separated from their mothers. Fantasy helps reduce feelings of hunger and frustration. The child’s illusion of connection compensates or substitutes for inadequacies in the early environment. In an attempt to cope with the emotional pain and restore a feeling of comfort, infants merge with their primary caretaker (often the mother) in their imagination, magically believing they are one with that person—feeling like the all-powerful parent and the helpless infant, all in one. This fantasy of being connected to another can give a child an illusion of safety, even immortality, which later helps him or her cope with existential realizations and fears.

Then, I stumbled on the one that my image came from – LINK>Sometimes we need fantasy to survive the reality by someone named “Heather”. She writes – As Albus Dumbledore said, “It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to live.” However, there are moments in life you must tap into your fantasies to make it through tough times.

Unfortunately, our society often stigmatizes daydreaming and fantasizing as a lack of motivation or seriousness. However, that’s not always true. Fantasizing is a natural part of being human and it plays a significant role in building interpersonal relationships and manifesting future goals and dreams.

While Dumbledore’s words are wise, the truth is, sometimes we need fantasy to survive reality. If you find yourself going through a rough patch, some fantasy might be just the thing that gets you back on track. I have read that adoptees frequently fantasize about their first mother.

#notallmothers

I have been neglecting this blog, as I have been away and then once returned home, totally wiped out exhausted and behind on everything. There are so many blogs here that I wonder at times if I should continue to write them but something always appears that should be shared in this space. Today that something is by LINK>Tony Corsentino, an adoptee with his own Substack blog, from which I will borrow today as I try to get back into my normal routines (which are rarely normal anyway LOL). My blog title is his. His Substack is titled LINK>This Is Not A Legal Record.

He writes – “Mother’s Day is an occasion for breakfast in bed, a vase of flowers, brunch with mimosas. It is also an occasion to teach and reinforce a doctrine. It celebrates mothers who mother.” I remember when my sisters and I were children and we did the breakfast in bed for my own mother.

He shares many common expressions related to Mother’s Day but notes – “Cute, trite, sweet, banal, inoffensive—and no space for severed motherhood.” He goes on to note – “I asked my birth mother if she found my birthday a difficult date on the calendar. She replied that the date had become blurred in her memory. For her, the worst date on the calendar was Mother’s Day. It is an annual reminder to the severed mothers that they are the ones who were not there and therefore do not count.” Sadly, I can relate. I allowed my daughter to be raised by her father at the age of 3 because he was never going to pay me child support (and had told me so) but I could not financially, adequately, support us. So, he provided for her because he had to and no doubt he was happy to have her with him. However, when I would look for commercial birthday cards for my daughter, they never reflected what seemed to me the strange kind of relationship I had with her as an absentee mother.

Tony says – “Mother’s Day is a call for gratitude. Where gratitude is merited (not all mothers merit it), it is fitting to bestow it. But adopted people hear the call for gratitude differently. When I question why I am to call one woman ‘mother’ and not another, when I question why I was not even permitted to know the one I am not to call ‘mother’, I receive a question in return: Aren’t you grateful?”

“Thousands of women in this country have had their children disappeared, under a system that receives nearly universal praise—with a long waiting list of hopeful participants. Thousands of other women in this country have acquired the right, through this system, to the word ‘mother’ and, if they mothered well, to the expectation of cards, flowers, and morning cocktails this weekend.”

“Mother’s Day picks a side. To those severed from their children, it says ‘this is not your day.’ ”

In my case, learning about my adoptee parents (both were adopted children) genetic origins also made me aware of the minor miracle of my own childhood. Tony shares this funny greeting – “I’m so grateful you never put me up for adoption, though I’m sure there were times you were seriously tempted! Happy Mother’s Day!” I AM grateful that I was not put up for adoption because it is a wonder that my unwed, high school student, mother was not forced to do that to me. Thankfully, my dad left his university studies to marry her and support our family.

Refusing To Choose

I get notifications from Tony’s substack – LINK> “This Is Not A Legal Record – Irregularly timed dispatches from my travels in the world of adoption.” Tony recently got married.

He writes – “I invited him (his adoptive father) and my biological aunt and uncle to my wedding not to force a reckoning—neither to heal a wound nor to inflict one. I did it because they were among the people I wanted present. And I did it as a protest against the expectation that I would have to choose who my “real” family was. I was conscious that no one in the world was asking for this convergence of souls. There are no cultural expectations or rules governing it, no script to follow. If anything, the co-presence of my adoptive and biological families signaled a breach in the covenant that we assume closed adoption to represent: that the family of origin shall disappear from the life of the adoptee, who shall be “as if born” to the adopting family.”

I say – good for him, pushing back on expectations !! He goes on to share –

On his last night in town, as I was driving him to his hotel, I told him that not only was I thankful for his kindness to my biological family, but it healed something in me to see him in a literal embrace. He replied with what I later learned he had also said to my aunt and uncle that day: that he was grateful to them for giving me to him. This remark, generously intended and deeply unsettling (I am no one’s gift; they had no role in it; my birth mother did not relinquish me for his sake), reminded me that my father will never grasp the nettle of adoption.

He concludes with this thought – “The legacy of the trauma and secrecy of adoption is that I remain isolated in my freedom.” I understand from my own sadness. Learning the truth about my parents origins, while answering lifelong questions, left me bereft. Not fitting in with either the adoptive or biological families – in truth. The ties that bind get cut and like Humpty Dumpty can’t be put back together again. Sadly, this is the truth about it. He notes that “Every move is risky.” regarding reconnecting and risking alienation from the people who raised you.

Of course, he is right about this – “There is no such thing as the successful resolution, or closure, of an adoption.” And closing with “There is still much that I cannot say, hurts that I dare not inflame. There is still no inclusive we. There is only me, standing in particular relationships to the particular people I care about. It’s a kind of paradox: the further I go along the path of reunion, the more fully I perceive this atomism into which adoption fractures the idea of ‘family’.”

Tony Corsentino

I only just became aware of this person and thought I’d share that awareness. It was said “His posts critical of the adoption industry are thoughtful and should be amplified.” So, my first awareness was this graphic.

Finding him on Twitter, I found this LINK> Substack post – titled “Why Is That Controversial?” with a subtitle “Adoptees have a stake in the fight to protect abortion rights” by him which I will give you below some excerpts from.

He writes – “adoption services in the United States and other industrialized countries commodify children, treating them as social wealth that is transferred from the less resourced to the more resourced.” That is certainly the truth of the matter. Exploitation of the poor.

He goes on to note – I am a product of a closed domestic adoption, for which the reigning justification remains, even now, the idea, developed during the “Baby Scoop Era” (1945-1973), that relinquishing an infant under circumstances of secrecy solves several problems at once: a child gets a loving home; hopeful parents get a child to raise; and a “mistake” is “erased,” allowing the birth parent another start at making a better life.

I totally agree with him on this point – “There is an enormous moral difference, however, between relinquishment and adoption as intervening in a crisis situation for which there is no better alternative, versus instituting a de facto social system in which people are coerced into producing children for transferal to other, unrelated families.” The first responds to the death of the child’s parents (growing up, I actually did think my parents were both orphans – had no idea there were people out there that we were genetically related to) or in serious parental circumstances like unrelenting drug addiction. The social system we could find ourselves in now looks like it could become a regime of forced birth and subsequent child trafficking.

Women who relinquish children carry a lifetime of emotional impact. I read about that time and again. Here’s one comparison of both having an abortion and relinquishing a child to adoption – “It’s hard to convince others about the depth of it. You know, a few years after I was married I became pregnant and had an abortion. It was not a wonderful experience, but every time I hear stories or articles or essays about the recurring trauma of abortion, I want to say, ‘You don’t have a clue.’ I’ve experienced both and I’d have an abortion any day of the week before I would ever have another adoption—or lose a kid in the woods, which is basically what it is. You know your child is out there somewhere, you just don’t know where. It’s bad enough as a mother to know he might need you, but to complicate that they make a law that says even if he does need you we’re not going to tell him where you are.” ~ Ann Fessler from an interview for The Girls Who Went Away.

As adoptees, we simply cannot accept Amy Coney Barrett’s proposition (who is herself an adoptive parent) that relinquishment reduces “the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy.” It shifts the consequences, transforms them. To invoke the desires of hopeful adoptive parents, to say that forced birth-plus-relinquishment meets an unmet demand for the opportunity to parent, is to say that pregnant people, and the offspring they create, are to be pressed into a social experiment of incubating and transferring the raw materials for making families. Clearly, hopeful, affluent adoptive parents are a powerful political constituency.

Relinquishment is catastrophic. It is a failure to preserve the bond between a parent and their child.