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.

Hmmmm, Cutting Through The Noise

What is so great about children being surrendered and raised without their identity ? Did I get your attention ?

I can’t imagine losing my mom – can you ? Both of my parents did.

You don’t have to take my word for it (just listen to enough adult adoptees and you will become a believer) – adoption is trauma. Bringing a child into a stable, loving home does NOT erase their trauma.

Why would you glorify abandonment ?

You know, you’re basically waiting for a woman and her baby to have the worst day of their lives so that you can have the best day of yours….

Adoptive parents literally act like the stork delivers these children.

One person’s intense joy is a result of another person’s desperate sorrow. I certainly saw the truth of this as I read my mom’s adoption file from the Tennessee Children’s Home Society.

Tell people who are not familiar with conventional adoption about the fake birth certificates your parents were given. That is one some people have trouble believing (yes, it is done all the time). Then tell them your parents’ REAL names were taken away from them and that they were both given a name that the adoptive couple preferred.

Imagine creating your family tree and having to list two names for each of your parents and then show their spouse with the adopted name so that someone might with difficulty sort it all out. Yes, my parents were not allowed to use the names they were born with. Are you incredulous yet ? Most people have no idea that adoptees are forced to live fake identities. My dad’s name was changed TWICE when his adoptive mother remarried. He was already 8 years old at that time.

If that baby had lost his mother to cancer, you would be mourning with him right now.

If adoption is so wonderful, which one of your children would you give up to someone else for a “better life” ? Note – it should be the child you love the most that you give up, since you would obviously want that child to have the best life. Crazy, huh ?

Ask an adoptee what it means to be adopted – adoption means you’re never going home. Let that sink in.

Most adoptees would get an abortion before they would give up their own child for adoption.

As the child of two adoptees, I try to be balanced (after all, I would not exist but for) and not be too harsh. Many people are well-intentioned but ill-informed about the realities surrounding adoption. I want my readers to walk away having learned something real, maybe opening up further conversation on the topic. Adoption is more complicated than you might imagine.

Many people believe that every adoptee was unwanted or they view the original mom as less than human because they can’t relate to someone who has given up a child. Both perceptions are quite likely UNTRUE.

Angry At Mom

It is such a taboo but it is surprisingly common that in attempting a reunion, an adoptee will find themselves angry at their first mother.

Having experienced the wounds of abandonment, rejection and being given up for adoption, seeing stories of women handing their kids over to strangers is understandably triggering. Many of these moms are so blinded by the narrative that they don’t see the long term repercussions of the decision they are making. Adoptees are shouting as loudly as possible and that is a good thing. More expectant mothers are not allowing themselves to be pressured into making a permanent decision about a temporary condition (lack of financial resources or familial support).

There are groups for expectant mothers contemplating surrendering their baby and the reality is 99% of the women in those groups will pounce and fill her head with nonsense about how wonderful adoption is. That is not a balanced perspective to make a decision from. One should always seek out the most diverse perspectives about the really important decisions in life.

The truth is – nobody gets a say in being born or choosing biological parents (unless you believe as I do in eternal life and that such choices are actually made before birth with full awareness of the likely, though not certain, outcome) nor do they have a voice in being given up for adoption. Voices filled with strong emotions always speak the loudest – be it the original parents, the adoptive parents or adoptees.

I have a very complicated story related to adoption. I recognize that my story is not everyone’s. And I welcome anyone else’s opinion on adoption that needs to express themselves in their own way and in their own time. We may agree to disagree about whatever but I will always seek to be respectful and considerate of each and every unique person and situation that comes my way.

Adoptees should not feel that they have to be grateful to anyone that is part of their adoption story. My sons are both donor conceived. We have never hidden that reality from them. They would not exist otherwise. I remember the oldest once said to us “Am I supposed to be grateful to her?” We answered honestly, No but we are.

Life is never perfect. Families are complicated. Issues vary and hopefully, love prevails. Sometimes love looks like removing one’s self from a relationship for one’s own well-being. That is a valid choice as well.

Slightly Off Topic

This may seem off topic but please bear with me. This morning I realized that my tolerance for injustice has diminished. I believe that learning about how my maternal grandmother was trapped and exploited has done that to me.

My grandmother’s only deficiency was poverty. She went to Porter-Leath orphanage for temporary care of my mother while she attempted to get on her feet financially and they accepted my mom under a temporary condition. My grandmother tried to reach her husband, my grandfather, who didn’t respond to the Juvenile Court’s notification – I believe – because he was out with the WPA trying to help Arkansas deal with a Super Flood of the Mississippi River that began the month my mom was born.

Georgia Tann had a repeat, paying customer in my adoptive grandmother. She had previously adopted a son from the Tennessee Children’s Home and returned to them seeking a little sister for the family before my mom had even been born. Miss Tann had a network of enablers, movers and shakers in the Memphis elite that helped her acquire product to sell. Forgive my harsh judgment.

So my poor grandmother was pressured with a surrender or I’ll have you declared unfit by my good friend, the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley. Even so, 4 days later my grandmother tried but failed to recover my mom. She never had any other children.

I have always paid my medical bills – even those I thought unfair – even if I made the creditor wait and sent them only the smallest amounts for the longest time. Having been uninsured for 30 years, I was grateful to finally qualify for Medicare. I thought might as well catch up the basics and so went to my local nurse practitioner for a pap smear.

Unknown to me, the coding recommended by the laboratory to the doctor’s office for women between the ages of 30 and 65 was to also do a hpv test on the same specimen. This was never discussed with me. Medicare paid $29.44 against a bill of $128.20 for the pap smear but refused to pay the $169.80 for the hpv test.

I have been fighting this bill for 8 months and find myself trapped and exploited by a greedy laboratory. I offered them $60 for the hpv test if they would write off the rest as they did for Medicare. I thought I was being more than reasonable.

They have refused my offer and so I will now refuse to give them even a penny. I no longer tolerate such exploitation. The doctor’s office should have advised me to wait a year for the pap smear and this would not have even occurred. I refuse to be a victim. I never gave my permission and I won’t give in now.

Thank you for reading if you made it this far. Do NOT allow LabCorp to do any tests for you. I won’t ever again allow them to do any tests for me and I will not use my local doctor’s office for my next Medicare approved pap smear in 3 years. They both lose. I am not worried about a small black mark on an otherwise excellent credit rating. I don’t intend to use credit anyway but I do have an Amazon Visa as long as I can pay in full with the first bill if I need that or just want to burnish my credit rating.

Leave Those Moms Alone

I don’t know these people and they are not the point. Among the reforms I have learned about in the private Facebook group for original parents, adoptees and adoptive parents that I belong to, and one of their missions, is to support expectant mothers. One of the reforms they advocate, and I agree with, is for the prospective adoptive parents NOT to be present in the delivery room during birth nor for the first few days after the birth. The goal is for the new mother to bond with her baby and perhaps change her mind about giving the baby up for adoption.

The problem is the coercive effect of the adoptive parents’ presence on the new mother. So it is today that I read the story of a hopeful adoptive mother and the problems that have occurred at the last minute in the new mother’s intention to give her baby up. This is a teenage unwed mother who at the tender age of 15 had previously expressed a desire to go back to her pre-pregnancy life and be educated to become a nurse. She also was not living with her parents, had been raped (perhaps by a family member) and did not believe her own mother was capable of helping her parent.

Flash forward to her difficult 3-day delivery and she informs the hopeful adoptive mother that she does NOT want her there because her mom (who opposes the adoption completely) is trying to help her through it and the new mother doesn’t want drama. She gave birth and due to the C-section, she is in the hospital for longer than expected.

Well, she begins to breastfeed the baby while in hospital and of course, breastfeeding does encourage the bonding of mother and child. The result is that three days before the surrender papers are to be signed, the new mother has decided to parent. The struggles of any new mother are temporary, placement is permanent, which is the message this Facebook group attempts to convey.

The result is a very mad hopeful adoptive mother who is blaming everyone from the social worker to the hospital to hormones and drugs and the immature age of the new mother and to the new grandmother as well for losing the “perfect baby-these don’t come by often” which echoes in my own mind like the words the Tennessee Children’s Home used to describe my mom to her adoptive parents.

Ever Heard Of Birth Control ?

I am a compassionate person and I don’t want to be cruel but I really have to question this story I read.

Hi, I am 30 weeks pregnant with my 7th baby. I plan on placing him for adoption and have found an amazing family for him. As I get closer to my due date I am starting to get mixed feelings. My other 6 children are all under 8, so idk if I could mentally handle another baby. I have severe depression and anxiety dating back to high school. I already am overwhelmed with the kids I DO have. My husband is supportive of either choice I make, but he lost his job last year and we have been living off of 900$ a month in cash assistance and 900$ in food stamps. All 8 of us live in a crappy 700 sqft 2 bedroom trailer so there’s no room for another baby ( my youngest is only 8 months old) . My brain knows that all these factors mean I can’t keep this baby, but my heart is tearing to pieces at the thought of having to say goodbye. I guess I just need some outside perspective.

No matter how challenging the circumstances this just seems irresponsible to me when one realizes how many ways there are to protect one’s self from having unwanted children.

One response was this (I agree with it too) –

I’d hate to see you make such a permanent, life-altering decision based off a temporary situation. I am a birth mom, and my perspective is that adoption should never be the answer. Anyone who is willing to help themselves to your child rather than helping your family as a whole does not deserve to be a “mother”.

Another realistic response to the actual situation was this –

Just keep in mind that your situation is temporary. Your husband will get another job. If you place for adoption this child will lose both of their parents and six siblings. If you feel your heart falling apart just know it will get worse. It doesn’t matter if these people are the most amazing people in the entire universe, all your baby wants is you. It is a loss you won’t recover from. I thought I couldn’t handle another child, turns out losing your child forever takes a whole hell of a worse toll.

Another one was –

Something I am learning, if I am not at peace with a decision, then it is not the right one for me. I have had to make some pretty tough decisions, however, had a peace when making them, as they were the right ones.

Yes, trust your intuition and follow your heart. Also know this – at some point you have really conceived and given birth to enough children for any lifetime. There are so many ways you can take control and prevent it from ever happening again.

Offensive Descriptions

The surrender of baby Moses

It’s a story as old as mankind but in these modern times, many of the common phrases of yesteryear are being relinquished. Some descriptions of a mother who surrenders her baby are now acknowledged as offensive.

I would have said Birth Mother before I became better educated by people even closer to the truths of adoption than I am. Now I will most often say Original Mother or Natural Mother.

Some have described their adopted children’s mother as the Belly Mommy. This could be equated to making the mother of those children nothing more than an incubator. People are often confused if you say other mom or first mom.

Of course, what an adoptee chooses to use to describe their biological parents should be entirely their choice. Adopted children should always be told that they were and allowed to ask questions about their biological roots.

The most important thing is to be transparent with your children about their unique circumstances and normalize those children regardless of how they originated. It is perfectly appropriate for your adopted child to know they grew in another woman’s body. Age appropriate language can be hard to define but naming that other woman as the child gets older is a responsible way to approach the situation.

The truth is – a mother’s role does not end at the birth of their baby, even if that baby is surrendered to adoption. It is a lifelong genetic/biological connection as the prevalence of adoptee reunions would indicate.

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.

Honoring My Grandmother

In 1916, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Lou Stark was born to James Coleman and Mabel Irene Stark on this date in Eads Tennessee. It is my understanding that her father was a difficult man and quite old when he began to have children. Lizzie was the oldest and her nieces and nephews called her Aunt Lou.

It seems that her siblings and my grandmother each escaped their family home as soon as they could. One can surmise that my grandmother chose the possible opportunities of the big city, Memphis, to her west. There she would meet an older man who had become both widowed and had lost one of his children not long before. Most likely he was attached to a big WPA project building a hospital in Memphis.

So they married but his children and the mother to whom he was devoted and who supported him by caring for one or more of his children caused his heart to remain in Arkansas. For reasons I will never be able to explain, he left her in Memphis four months pregnant. Whether it was considered an end or a temporary separation can never be known.

What I do know is that my grandmother was sent away to Virginia to give birth to my mom. Most likely, she was an embarrassment pregnant with no husband in sight in a very conservatively Christian community. I suspect she was supposed to leave my mom in Virginia but she could not.

I cannot believe she brought my mom back to Memphis with any intention of giving her up for adoption. Juvenile Court records do show that she reached out for my mom’s father over in Arkansas but he did not respond. In his defense, there began a Super Flood on the Mississippi River the month my mom was born. Refugees poured into Memphis from Arkansas who bore some of the worst destruction. My grandfather was out shoring up levees.

My grandmother found the going difficult in Memphis. The people who had been supportive of her previously were suffering from charity fatigue. In desperation, my grandmother sought temporary care for my mom in an amazing citadel of an orphanage with a storied history. The superintendent there betrayed her to Georgia Tann who was a master at separating children from their natural parents.

After being given a no win choice (surrender your child or be declared unfit – a threat with teeth in it because the Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley was good friends with Tann), my grandmother tried to get my mom back 4 days later. But Tann had a paying customer on her way from Arizona by train to pick my mom up and no way would the baby thief give my mom up.

Such a sad story. She never had another child . . .

Before and After

I’ve only just started reading the nonfiction sequel – Before and After – to Lisa Wingate’s bestselling fictional novel Before We Were Yours. Sadly, the true life stories of Georgia Tann’s victims are all too familiar to me and her methods clear in my family’s own circumstances. I may have more to say about the book when I finish reading it.

There actually was an adoption ring in Memphis in the decades from 1930 to 1950. The movers and shakers in Memphis were all to happy to make Georgia Tann the scapegoat and bury the evidence along with her – when she conveniently died of the complications of cancer. It was an opportune moment, just before criminal charges were going to be filed against her. And those charges would have only been profiting illegally from the placements and not the worst accusations against Tann.

Her legacy of wrongs emerged as her story came back to light in the early 1990s and eventually caused a law to open the sealed adoption records for the victims by the state of Tennessee. I have that law to thank for my mom’s adoption file. Sealed records remain a hindrance for adoptees in many states even today. I know, I’ve hit locked doors in California, Virginia and Arizona.

Thanks to Lisa Wingate’s fabulously popular telling of the Georgia Tann scandal in a compelling story, the whole story is being added to and told yet again. This brings some justice to the victims and their descendants. I am one of an unfortunate community of such persons. There are thousands of us.

In our family’s story – the adoption ring was composed of Georgia Robinson (the superintendent at Porter-Leath Orphanage who conveniently retired early just before the scandal report was released), Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley (who was forced to retire because of it) and of course, the Baby Thief herself, Georgia Tann. Miss Robinson seems to have escaped the scandal with her “good name” intact but it was she who betrayed my original grandmother. Porter-Leath took my mom in for TEMPORARY CARE. Miss Robinson alerted Georgia Tann to the presence of a “highly marketable” blond baby girl less than a year old.

Judge Camille Kelley was involved in my original grandmother’s life when she first returned to Memphis, after having given birth to my mom in Virginia. Since my grandmother’s widowed father and siblings still lived in rural Tennessee east of Memphis, I can only assume her father sent her away to have my mom after her husband seemed to desert them. I will never have the answer to the questions that weigh heavily on my heart about why that seemingly good man – my original grandfather – did that. Later, when my adoptive grandmother was on her way to collect her prize, Judge Kelley threatened my original grandfather with a subpoena if he didn’t sign the surrender papers.

There is no doubt in my mind that Georgia Tann exploited my desperate grandmother with a no win demand – surrender or be declared unfit (her only deficiency being a financial one). It is also clear that 4 days after signing the surrender papers, my grandmother tried to recover my mom – but Georgia Tann had a paying customer and no way was she going to let my mom go out of her control.