Gotcha Day

It is hard to believe but it is true, some families actually celebrate the legal finalizing of a child’s great loss as something like a birthday or holiday. Gotha Day is actually a real thing. I suppose it truly is a happy moment for them. But it seems to mistake what is happy for them when it is also a very sad day for others.

This official transfer of a child is a loss for the birth parents as well as their child. It is likely the natural mom and maybe the natural dad as well have never cried harder than they ever did that day they signed those papers giving another couple the legal right to call their child someone else’s own child. It is bittersweet. Nothing more and nothing less.

Now that I know about the wounds of adoption, it is even harder for me to accept that my adoptee mom actually had the nerve to encourage my sister to give up her daughter for adoption. Unbelievable but true and that is the reality.

Our own parents (both adoptees) were not willing to risk financial responsibility and so made it literally impossible for my sister to care for her daughter/their granddaughter as she would surely have done had she had adequate support. My sister even tried to get government assistance but was told that our parents wealth made her ineligible because she was living in their home due to her pregnancy. Another unbelievable but true fact.

Gotcha day is what some adoptive parents call the day the birth parents signed their rights away and often that is the day that the adoption agency and the adoptive parents stopped talking to the natural parents. They all got what they came for – except someone else had to lose to make that possible.

The adoptive parents now have possession and control.

The Eternal Mother

~ artist, Mark Missman

More than Mother’s Day, the holiday season celebrates the hope of humanity in two symbolic persons – a mother and her baby. A quiet calm image of nurturing and the infinite possibilities represented in any single person.

In discovering who my original grandparents were (both of my parents were adoptees), I never expected to learn so much about the impacts of adoption or the deep often unconscious wounds that are left behind when we separate a child from their natural mother.

For nine months, the fetus nestles in the cozy warmth of it’s mother’s womb. As close to her as her very breath, hearing her heartbeat, feeling her emotions and sharing the culinary tastes she prefers. It is now known that the baby is not fully developed at the time of its birth.

For at least the next year, that bond between mother and infant will be a core and deep sense of security, of love, of responsiveness and gentle care that will have a profound effect on that child’s well-being throughout their life.

We owe every single mother the support and encouragement to raise the child conceived within her womb and help her create the next best yet to be human being as we continue to evolve into better and better, more caring always, kinder human beings.

May we all know someday that it is so.

Mothers Suffer

I have said this before but it bears saying this again. Giving up one’s child to adoption is not a walk away and all is well process. Most natural mothers who’s child has been removed from them – whether by choice or coercion – will spend the remainder of their lives regretting the loss.

We are so deeply attached at a genetic and spiritual level to those persons who gave us the gift of life, that there is no true sundering of that bond. To pretend otherwise, diminishes the pain and suffering that both natural parents and adoptees will carry with them their entire lives. The relationships that should have been but never will be cannot be recovered down the road. One can only begin where they find themselves if a reunion occurs and develop whatever relationships they can going forward.

For an adoptee, it can be said that the woman who raises them is their mom. The woman who created them, is the one who made their life possible. It is possible and indeed the reality for many people, that there are two true mothers in their life.

Even so, it is not true – that in giving up her child, it was like she took out the trash and never gave it a second thought. As though that were even possible for any mom to feel that way. I do not believe it. Many women who surrendered a child were very young when they did that. They felt they had no choice in the matter.

Today, there are adoptee groups reaching out to unwed pregnant mothers to encourage them to go slow, before giving up their child, and seek a way to work through the circumstances without causing a separation. I’m on their side in this perspective.

Reproductive Justice

I believe in this concept – the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.

The truth is – most women do not want to give up the children they birth. Most women do not lose the children they have because they are wantonly abusive. If the support, encouragement and financial resources were there – most children would be raised by the people who gave birth to them.

Access to reproductive health is affected by many other factors – race, religion or sexual orientation. Also the financial, immigration or disability status as well as environmental conditions.

I have heard that families waiting in the squalor of make-shift refugee camps on the Mexican border, sleeping on the ground in flimsy tents meant for weekend camping in mild weather, are sending their children ALONE across the border in the hope of their being granted asylum. In most cases, the parents could see no other way to get their children the medical help they need or safety from being preyed upon by gangs.

In the United States, every new wave of immigrants (from the Chinese to the Irish and Italians) has faced hatred and difficulty before being accepted as yet another kind of American. We would do well to remember that always has it been that the resident population has feared the impacts of the arriving masses.

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.

Just Don’t

But you will. You believe you won’t make all the mistakes the others have made. You believe you know a better way.

Don’t be one of THOSE adoptive parents or hopeful adoptive parents who think they know better and their kid won’t be like those angry adoptees, the thousands upon thousands that have struggled with adoption. You don’t even KNOW what to teach them as an adoptive parent.

You do not raise adopted children like you raise biological children and that has nothing to do with love.

An adoptee said to his adoptive mother, “It doesn’t matter how loving and good your parents are and it doesn’t matter that you have a wonderful home….at times it isn’t enough and I am still very unhappy!” When you hear this from your adopted child, it will break your heart. Adopted kids are going to have pain and there isn’t anything an adoptive parent can do to erase it. Understanding that this is the reality is very painful!

You can’t erase the sadness lurking where you can’t reach it.

It would be better if you didn’t adopt but if you already have, the path forward is complicated.

So, if you already did it, then create a home where your adopted children know they can feel however they need to feel and that they know you’ll be there to listen, love, and support them through it.

Whatever your adopted child feels is the reality, don’t dismiss it. Your feelings are yours to deal with.

The trauma of adoption doesn’t stop existing because you want it to. If you think you can love that trauma away, as an adoptive parent you still have a lot to learn.

Love is not enough, good intentions are not enough. No amount of love or honesty can resolve the deep challenges an adoptee faces from being isolated from their biological identity.

In Defense Of

I do believe in all the reforms I have previously written about – retaining identity and family history information, not changing names or birth dates and not listing adoptive parents as the original parent. Beyond that is a consideration for guardianship rather than permanent adoption.

All that said, from direct experience, adoptive parents have been a part of my own family’s life in positive ways. First of all – my grandparents by adopting each of my parents. On each side, they were a positive influence on my life and the lives of my siblings as well as on my parent’s lives. They were good people who meant well. What we now know about the wounds suffered by adoptees was not known at the time they took possession of my parents.

My mom’s adoptive parents modeled financial security for us and affirmed the value of advanced education. My dad’s adoptive parents modeled faith and uncompromising personal values for us. My dad’s adoptive parents may even have been responsible for keeping my parents together by getting married and preventing me from being given up when my teenage mother found herself pregnant. I am grateful for that much.

Each of my sisters gave up a baby to adoption and these two children are fine adults. In one case, my niece is showing us what a good and consistent mother she can be. Even though she has been reunited with my family, she has remained steadfast in her appreciation for the people who raised her.

My nephew could not be a higher quality person. His adoptive mother has gone the extra mile to answer the identity questions that evolved as he matured. It appears that even my sister either didn’t know who his actual father was or chose to name the person who had the financial resources to help her make what has proven to be a quality choice as a substitute mother. Given my sister’s very evident mental illness, it is for the best that she didn’t try to raise him.

All that to say, while I remain firmly of the opinion that there are better ways to provide for the welfare of children than adoption, it is not that the adoptive parents in my own family’s life were to blame. It was naive ignorance and the intention to do good – which all of them have.

Not Bad, Not Good, It’s Life

Even though I have learned so much about the process of adoption – how it affects an adoptee, how it affects the original parents and how it affects those adoptive parents who try to fill a void, it is the truth of my own family, the one I was born into and I would not exist if the adoptions had not happened.

One of the success stories in my own family is my nephew. When I met him and his adoptive mother, she admitted to me that for a long time, she felt that she should not have been in the picture. When she learned about my nephew’s mother, about her struggles in life with mental illness, this gave his adoptive mother a lot of peace about their situation.

She has been a champion for my nephew. She has been with him every step of the way as he sought to discover his origins. She has supported him in his desires and has even gone the extra mile, smoothing the way for him.

Yesterday was his birthday. I sent him greetings by way of her email. She replied to me last night with the good news that he has met his birth father and has discovered he has two half-siblings, a boy and a girl, who are only a little bit younger than him. All of them have welcomed his arrival in their lives.

His birth father is not who my sister named on the birth certificate. The kindest explanation is that she didn’t actually know who fathered her son. My nephew’s adoptive mother actually paid a private investigator who triangulates DNA to discover the true identity of my nephew’s father.

Beyond being probably the best adoptive mother I’ve known in my lifetime, within her nurturing, my nephew has become an amazing young man. He is the Assistant Emergency Management Coordinator in the town in which he lives. He is now a Lieutenant in the Fire Department and holds down a job at the local utility. I am very proud of the high quality person he has turned out to be.

Saying The Right Thing

Who knew ?

Everything about adoption is complex and uniquely individual. For over 60 years, I had no idea.

I gave birth to two sons – one at age 47 and one at age 50. I don’t let the misperceptions that I am my son’s grandmother bother me too much. Afterall, I am a grandmother, just not these boys grandmother. I have two grandchildren, a boy and a girl.

Draw a circle. This is the center ring. In it, put the name of the person at the center of the current trauma. Now draw a larger circle around the first one. In that ring put the name of the person next closest to the trauma. Repeat the process as many times as you need to. In each larger ring put the next closest people. Parents and children before more distant relatives. Intimate friends in smaller rings, less intimate friends in larger ones.

Here are the rules. The person in the center ring can say anything she wants to anyone, anywhere. She can rant and complain and whine and moan and curse the heavens and say, “Life is unfair” and “Why me?” That’s the one payoff for being in the center ring. This is the way we give an adoptee voice without judgement or push-back.

Everyone else can say those things too, but only to people in larger rings.

When you are talking to a person in a ring smaller than yours, someone closer to the center of the crisis, the goal is to help. Listening is often more helpful than talking.

If you’re going to open your mouth, ask yourself if what you are about to say is likely to provide comfort and support. If it isn’t, don’t say it. Don’t, for example, give advice. People who are suffering from trauma don’t need advice. They need comfort and support. So say, “I’m sorry.” or “This must really be hard for you.” or “I am ready to hear you without interruption.” Don’t say, “I know someone who was adopted and they are very happy they were.” or “You should be grateful to your adoptive parents.” And don’t say, “Your original mother must have been a monster.”

If you want to scream or cry or complain, if you want to tell someone how shocked you are or how icky you feel, or whine about how it reminds you of all the terrible things that have happened to someone you know lately, that’s fine. It’s a perfectly normal response. Just do it to someone in a bigger ring.

God Isn’t Breaking Up Families

I am a person of faith in a Divine Order to the Universe. I do believe everything happens for a reason. Even so, that does not absolve us from an evolution into doing “better”.

There are adoptive parents who reassure themselves that God has broken up a family in order for them to have one, when they are unable to do so naturally. Nothing could be further from the truth.

However, there are situations where children are left adrift from the people who caused their birth.

Adoption is intended to provide a healthy and stable environment when contrasted with the foster care system. The idea is to place children so that they can be loved unconditionally and have a family of their own. That last thought is problematic. One needs to define “family”.

Family is defined as a group of people who are closely related to one another (by blood, marriage or adoption); kin; for example, a set of parents and their children; an immediate family. Adoption is therefore one of the avenues for “creating” a family. Even so, an adoptive family is not equivalent to a natural family. This is a reality.

Adoptive parents are never going to be equivalent to natural parents. This is simply a fact and one that anyone contemplating adoption needs to consider. Babies are not the blank slates they have been considered to be throughout decades. They are born with factors inherited from their natural parents already in place and effects from having been in their mother’s womb.

Society needs to do better on a lot of fronts. Family preservation and support for a struggling family is one of those fronts.