The Wrong Use Of Religion

I’ve never heard a religious person say that God decided they wouldn’t have children.

God is supposed to be without flaws or mistakes in all ways right? But not being able to have children is God’s way of saying adoption, when you’ve exhausted all the other angles?

Religious people never accept that infertility was God’s way of saying – you won’t have children.

It was just Jesus saying – take someone else’s child, believe that child is the child I took and returned for you. Take that child because I gave you money instead.

God forbid any of these families might chose to help mom enough to keep her child. No God’s calling wasn’t – help this woman with a job, so she can keep her baby. God’s calling wasn’t – teach her something, so that she has a skill. God’s calling wasn’t to be the neighbors that help a person grow and do better like she wants.

God’s only calling was take her child. Help her with food, clothing and bills till baby is here. God’s calling was support her emotions in your favor during pregnancy and make her feel like she will be part of your family. God’s calling was to take a child from a mom at her worst, when she’s trying to do what’s best.

F**k that God, he’s a f**king monster. All this is just propaganda to continue the practice of adoption oppression.

The Reality

One can hope the process continues to improve, though it has a long way to go.

The surrender of children by unmarried mothers was accepted by state and federal governments, by adoption agencies, by society, and by the parents of unmarried mothers. Society BELIEVED that the rights of unmarried mothers had been fully enforced and protected.

In many cases, they were not.

Some might still like to believe that these mothers were offered “choices”. That they were offered “information”. That they were offered help and support.

Often they were not.

MANY were not offered the choice to parent their own child.

Many were only offered the option of surrender.

Those who make money from infant adoption did not want society to know the truth about coercion. It has been a multi-billion dollar industry profiting on the removal of babies from young, unprotected, unsupported, vulnerable, often minor, unmarried mothers.

Approval

I came across a perception recently that adoptive parents are always hungry for stories coming from adoptees. That what they are really seeking is approval that they are doing the right thing.

As adoptees are speaking up more in these modern times about how adoption has impacted their lives and affected their choices, the people who always had the privileged position in the adoption triad are now questioning their motives (or should be, if they aren’t).

What’s been done cannot be undone and the results are a fact of life. That is the case for all of the adoptees in my own inner family circle.

But caring people should be paying attention because prospective parents could still seek to help a life be more stable by looking to the foster care system and offering a permanent solution for the older youth incarcerated within it.

Society could find it in it’s compassionate heart to be supportive of young women who find themselves pregnant with inadequate resources to parent their child. We could find ways to help them rather than leave them at the mercy of a profit focused business model seeking to effectively sell their babies away from them.

Every person and every action affects the whole collective. It is said that the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can cause a tsunami of good around the world. Adoptees are fluttering their wings these days.

Why Go Looking ?

Someone once asked me, if the adoptive family was a good one, what’s the issue ?

People not affected by adoption often struggle to understand what would motivate an adoptee to go searching for their original family. If one knows where they came from, it can be hard to relate to not knowing.

An adoptee that grows up in a loving, supportive family, will be strong enough to search for who they came from. If their adoptive family was a very good one, they might even expect that they would not like what their search found once they arrive there.

Maybe it would help to understand that this kind of experience was never intended to replace the adoptive family the adoptee grew up in. Yet any adoptee will feel that they have a few “missing” pieces. It is only natural. And once a puzzle has been revealed, completing it makes sense.

A Sacred Duty

In discovering my original grandparents, I’ve learned to be a part of both the adoptive and original families. This may be disconcerting to some of my adoptive family, aunts, an uncle and some cousins but I don’t love them less. I recognize we share life experiences that I can never actually share with my original family relations no matter how much I learn about our history – and I have learned a lot.

Though I’m not an adoptee, I have experienced some degree of “reunion” and it has been much more than simply restoring a connection that was lost, it is about trying to become acquainted with “new” family members and nurturing relationships that will continue for me until the day I die.

There are reforms taking place within the practice of adoption today that haven’t stabilized but are allowing for more flexibility within the unique family system in which the adoptee is the center. Whether they opt for an open adoption or not – every adoptive parent needs to be aware that the possibility an adoptee will seek reunion fundamentally exists.

Closed adoption enforces a rigid boundary upon adoptees by automatically excluding the original family from the adoptive family’s boundaries. That was the case for my adoptee parents. Thankfully, that has not been the case for my niece and nephew (both given up for adoption by my two sisters). Not that theirs were open adoptions, they were not.

What changed is their adoptive parents accepted it as a sacred duty to assist these adopted children in discovering their original family members when they were ready to request that for themselves. Thanking all that is good.

Fair Responsibility

The way things are going, it seems like this idea would be fair, if at least this was the law of the land. My mom’s mother lost her when she was exploited by Georgia Tann, because my mom’s father did not take financial responsibility for her life. There is no other perspective I can see as valid. I think he was a good and kind man but why did he abandon them ? That is a question I will never have an answer for.

Though unwed, the married man who impregnated my paternal grandmother did not take any responsibility for his existence either. I don’t know that the man ever knew he was a father, though my grandmother was clear enough about it to give my dad his father’s middle name and keep a head shot photo of the man with his name and the word “boyfriend” next to a photo of her with my dad on her lap.

People who are pro-life are usually only pro-birth. They don’t consider either the prolonged gestation, during which a woman may not be able to work, nor the life-long commitment that having a child entails. Condemning a woman and her children to poverty is not being a supporter of life that has any good qualities beyond love (and of course, love is very important) but that it is okay for them to starve and not have shelter or clothing.

Regardless of the personal hell they will live through, that baby must be born. The new Jim Crow ?

No Substitute

Bonding is not easily achieved (except with the natural mother).
The bond with the mother instills in the child a sense of
well-being and wholeness and is necessary to the healthy
emotional development of the child.

There is just a knowing in the natural mother (due to preparation
during gestation) about what the baby needs.

It isn’t just a matter of knowing how to care for a baby, but what
this particular baby needs at this particular time.

~ The Primal Wound by Nancy Newton Verrier

Though it may not have been abundantly clear to the general population – over the last year or so I’ve become convinced that those who believe there is no real substitute for the natural mother in any child’s life are correct.

Yes, there are times when a mother is so wounded herself, the child’s well-being is also in danger and that child must be protected by removal.

However, it is also true that as a society we do not try hard enough to support – financially and physically/mentally/emotionally – a struggling mother. The simple solution to allow someone else more financially stable and married to parent another woman’s child is not actually the best for the child’s welfare.

We can do better than that – it only takes the will and the understanding – that how we support these vulnerable persons will pay off in a healthier population overall. There are many today working actively to educate and promote that alternative – keeping mothers and children together.

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 . . .

Motherhood – Post Adoption

An infertile couple unable to conceive are generally focused on their own needs. Some have a rescue complex. They hide their own issues behind a desire to save some poor child from a fate worse than death.

What is rarely talked about are the long-term mental and physical effects upon the original mother from surrendering her baby to others for adoption.

It would only be natural to expect a woman who has carried a baby in her womb for nine whole months to experience some short-term grief.

The reality is that there is often a long-term lasting impact. How long you ask – 4 years, 25 years, forever ? Just as every person is different, every mother who loses a child will have differing abilities to put the loss behind her and go on with her life. Never does she ever truly forget.

So, a relinquishing mother may go on, will certainly have some kind of life but she is generally forced to live a code of silence that carries with it a toxic aftermath of effects upon her physical and mental health continuing throughout her life.

Some mothers feel compelled to search for their child. These women may be prone to a lowered self-esteem, anxiety and may worry about the well-being of their child. These women may require more doctor visits and most will attribute their physical and mental problems over the years to the loss of their child to adoption.

Many of these women had parental pressure to surrender their child to adoption. Certainly, one of my sisters did. One of my grandmothers may have. The indications are there – she was married but separated from her husband for some unknown reason. She was sent away from Tennessee to Virginia to have that baby. I doubt she was supposed to bring my mother back to Tennessee with her but she did.

I would say that ALWAYS, these women had little or no emotional support during the pregnancy and after the relinquishment. There would have been few, more likely no, opportunities to talk about their feelings related to the surrender. There is overall a lack of social support for their depression.

In letters written by natural mothers post-adoption, there is an intensity of feeling and a need to describe the emotional pain they continue to carry within them.

Even when comfortable with their decision to relinquish, as my youngest sister definitely was, very proactive, very concerned about the outcome for her baby – I do not doubt that she still felt a loss, some pain and mourning (even if not consciously aware it was that) and based upon a letter she sent to her son during his teen years, she did have a continuing sense of caring for that long vanished child.

Many wounded mothers live then for decades with shame and a societally enforced silence over their “secret” children because no one really wants to hear about it after a short period of time. For the mother, there is no end to it except her eventual death.

After Losing Frances Irene

Frances Irene Moore at 6 months

I don’t really know what happened to my grandmother after she lost custody of my mom. I do know she was forced into the situation by economic conditions, by the general chaos that accompanied the end of a super flood at Memphis and by a conniving and exploitative Georgia Tann who needed the perfect baby sister for my adoptive grandmother’s little boy.

So I imagine how my grandmother coped –

Grief doesn’t vanish when we try to lock it up in a sealed drawer,
yet that is how I coped, I didn’t talk about the pain, 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, 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.

My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air.
It leaves no room for anyone else.

After 3 years, Lizzie’s husband, JC Moore divorced her with no contest from her. My guess is that she couldn’t face him again after losing their child. She did remarry but she didn’t ever have another child. He remarried too but he was past fathering more children by then.

At least neither of them died alone. Such a sad and romantic and tragic story.