A Different Universe

Coming to terms with the loss of one’s natural mother within an adoptee’s awareness will not be complete in a lifetime.

This is what I believe is true.

On the surface, an adoptee placed within a decent family may not show any signs of deep though subconscious trauma but I believe this is always embedded deeply within.

From all I have unexpectedly learned, after discovering who my original grandparents were and something about their lives at the time each of my parents’ adoptions occurred, I now know the wound of separation is always there. It is unavoidable. It is the natural truth of the matter.

Often adoptees behave in ways while they are growing up that confuse the adoptive family and their closest friends. Some of this confusing behavior even occurs during their adulthood. I have seen it with my own parents.

The truth about adoption is that the wounds are not visible in the way a physical accident would leave obvious impacts. They are psychological, emotional and mental. You can’t see them by looking at an adoptee.

All the love that an adoptive parent is able to give will never touch this pain that will always be deep inside the adoptee – caused by having been given up by the one person most of us believe we will always be able to depend upon. It really isn’t possible to simply exchange one mother for another and life then goes on as though no disruption ever happened.

Being adopted is similar to being put into a forever box of different than, not the same as, all of the non-adopted people around you.

It is a good thing that adoptees are finally trying to understand the pain of relinquishment and speaking honestly and out loud about their suffering.

There isn’t really a solution to the situation but it is the beginning of awareness and that may yet bring about reforms to the practice of adoption that will spare at least some children in the future from suffering similarly.

Why do people adopt babies ? It comes from a deep desire to protect and love a being that is capable of loving you back. It is useless to expect from an adoptee what a parent expects when they give birth to a child naturally and then raise that same child.

Adoption is an entirely different universe. That is a story that may not be capable of delivering the happy ending you as an adoptive parent had hoped for. This is the reality. Time to accept the truth of it.

Infertility Grief

Regarding choosing adoption after giving up on conceiving a child, it appears that all the screening in the world isn’t going to heal infertility grief. It isn’t going to magically turn a stranger’s child into the one you couldn’t have. It can’t predict how well you can actually love an adopted kid, even though you *really, really* think you can. It’s not going to account for a genetic mismatch between adoptee and adopter. Most importantly it doesn’t turn the adoptee into a robot, capable of bonding to any old genetic stranger at will. That’s the one thing I find never, ever gets talked about.

My husband and I tried and failed and did consider whether adoption was the way to go. At that time I knew nothing about the wounds associated with adoption. Yet, we felt we would rather begin from scratch than take on the unknowns of a pre-exiting child. So we turned to assisted reproduction.

I will always believe that this was a better choice than adoption. I already had a child that was genetically related to me and grandchildren too. My husband wanted that for his own self and I was sympathetic and understanding to his own need to become a father – even if he really waited way too long.

The advent of inexpensive DNA testing has brought it’s own unique reality to deal with but I am okay with it. My sons seem to be okay with it. They simply would not exist otherwise. Any other children that my husband might have conceived would not be these children. I believe in dealing with realities.

Turning to assisted reproduction meant these children were implanted and grew within my womb. The bonding of mother and child begins in the womb. These children nursed at my own breast for just over a year each. No one can be more their mother than I am.

I do see our donor and her own genetic children mirrored in my sons and we do not withhold access to that family though our sons seem disinterested in pursuing it at this time. Since we are older parents, someday they may reach out to establish a new genetic connection, just as I have in discovering my own.

I remember encountering my own infertility grief when I fully realized the natural method simply was not going to happen for us. I regretted my husband had married such an old woman. Even so, we have a good marriage and it would not have made good sense to simply throw that away to allow him to become a father. He is a good one because he waited until he was actually ready to commit himself to parenting.

Love Isn’t Always On Time

Since I believe reality is never wrong, I know that my parents conception, birth, adoption, marriage, parenting was all just as it was meant to be. No one escapes this Life without wounds and some are more wounded than others but we were not promised a rose garden when we agreed to spend some time incarnated upon this planet.

So the romantic relationships and/or marriages that conceived my parents were not wrong. I do believe my grandparents all loved one another. The Great Depression and a lack of social safety nets certainly played it’s role in separating my grandparents and in separating their children from them.

In learning about my true, genetic roots, one of my joys has been to discover that every one of my grandparents eventually found a lasting love with someone else. Every one of them remarried and stayed married until death.

So in a bizarre paradoxical way, I accept that all the sadness and grief were somehow necessary for me to be conceived. It was also necessary for the souls of my grandparents to learn and grow into better people who could find love and stay married after their early failures.

Love. It is what we are here to do.

Only For The Extreme Cases

In some ways, Judge Ernestine S. Gray with her child-friendly courtroom, reminds me of Juvenile Court Judge Camille Kelley of Memphis in the Georgia Tann days but whereas, Judge Kelley became corrupted, I have an intuition that is not going to happen with Judge Gray. She gives each child who appears before her a bear and a book. She believes it makes what can be the worst day of their lives just a little easier.

This soft touch belies the power that Gray wields as one of just four Louisiana judges who control the entire child protection docket in their jurisdiction. And she has used that authority to upend the status quo and reduce Orleans Parish’s foster care numbers to levels unmatched anywhere in the country.

Between 2011 and 2017, the number of children in foster care here fell by 89 percent compared with an 8 percent increase nationally. New Orleans children who do enter the system don’t stay long. Seventy percent are discharged within a month; nationally, it’s only 5 percent.

Gray has effectively all but eliminated foster care except in extreme situations, quickly returning children flagged by social workers to their families or other relatives.

“We shouldn’t be taking kids away from their parents because they don’t have food or a refrigerator,” she said in explaining her philosophy. “I grew up in a poor family in South Carolina, and we didn’t have a lot. But what I had was people who cared about me.”

Removing a child is extremely traumatic, and the best outcome is to make sure kids go home to their families where they deserve to be as quickly as possible, or not enter the system at all.

Few who know anything about the foster care system would disagree that it is severely broken nationwide due to decades of mismanagement and inadequate funding. Instead of protecting children, it often traumatizes them further. They have poorer outcomes in education, employment, housing and early pregnancy, studies show. By 17, more than half will have been arrested, jailed or convicted.

The Family First Prevention Services Act is the biggest overhaul of foster care in a generation. The law redirects money from paying for state custody to providing services designed to keep families intact, such as mental health care, substance abuse treatment and parenting skills training.

Judge Gray stresses that “The greatest threat of harm, for most of the children who appear before her, is being unnecessarily removed from their families.”

“Foster care is put up as this thing that is going to save kids, but kids die in foster care, kids get sick in foster care,” she said. “So we ought to be trying to figure out how to use that as little as possible. People have a right to raise their children.”

This Is Us

First, a disclaimer. We don’t watch commercial TV in my home and I’ve never watched this show. What I do know is that it attracts the attention of a lot of adoptees and former foster care adults. Clearly, from the image above there is also an issue of transracial adoption.

For anyone somehow connected to adoption or child welfare, such viewers are likely to watch this show through a different lens. There are pebbles of accuracy surrounding adoption, foster care and birth parent reunions in the series as it unfolds from week to week. It is well not to forget that this is still a dramatic television show, which is never able to give anyone a fully realistic picture of what it’s like to be adopted or reunited with your birth father. But it’s definitely been judged one of the closest mainstream shows to attempt this issues.

The show’s writers are judged to have done their research and consulted with adult adoptees with the hope of accurately portraying not only aspects of transracial adoption, but also search and reunion, identity and trauma.

The truth is that each adoptee has a unique perception, opinion and view of their adoption experience — and that those very perceptions, opinions and views may change on a yearly, daily and at times hourly basis! But overall, the “feeling” of adoption as portrayed in mainstream culture is usually one of goodness, happiness and “rainbows and unicorns.”

In “This is Us,” we are introduced to a different side — the trauma and loss side — of adoption and foster care. We feel the push/pull of how an adoptee struggles with their feelings toward their birth parents. The writers painfully convey the angst that Randall feels when he discovers his adoptive mother knew from the time he was an infant who his biological father was — yet kept it a secret.

We see young Randall in a grocery store asking random adults to curl their tongues because he has learned this trait is hereditary and wonders if any of them — because they are Black — might be related to him. As he battles with forming his identity, he also carries a little notebook where he documents his encounters with people of color. In current time, we see Randall deal with panic attacks and his need for perfection and control. He is paralyzed by his own fears and the unknown.

As an adult, Randall and his wife, Beth, decide to become foster parents. They begin fostering an older girl and the writers introduce trauma triggers of abuse as well as the child’s deep connection with her mother. We sense Randall’s internal battle between wanting to protect his foster daughter while at the same time empathizing with her mother and the struggles she has experienced.

This show is recommended for adoptive and foster parents, especially those parenting children of color. This show would be appropriate for teenagers to watch, but it does have adult storylines and content.

A Strange Club

I finished reading Before and After yesterday. I don’t think Lisa Wingate expected to open this door when she wrote her bestselling fictional novel based upon the horrors of Georgia Tann’s methods of operating an adoption agency – separating children from their original families purely for profit.

However, as she embarked on book tours across the country, the sheer number of real lives impacted by Georgia Tann made themselves evident. I believe the reunion in Memphis that the new book is based upon was an effort on Wingate’s part to repay the living victims, many of whom are descendants of those directly impacted, for a good story that made her even more successful than she was before (she had written quite a few books before this phenomenal story).

In the Afterward chapter of Before and After, a story about Georgia Tann adoptees and their remarkable reunion in Memphis –

“We need to be given peace and

freed of the misery that comes

from not knowing,

and allowed to live with the truth

before we pass from this world.”

~ Letter from a TCHS adoptee

to her unknown birth family

The reunion proved that people are interested in hearing what the adoptees and their descendants have to say, that strangers care about this long-ago miscarriage of justice.

Countless families have a connection to the horror of Tann and those movers and shakers of Memphis who let her operate until 1950. This is a story that doesn’t have an ending. It never will. For thousands of families, tens of thousands of lives, it will always be a part of their history.

There’s fear of the unknown. My adoptee father had that and he wasn’t a Tann baby. The Salvation Army separated him from his unwed, poverty stricken mother.

Many, if not most, adoptees hunger for their personal information – their medical history in particular.

Being a Tann victim is like being a member of a strange club. Those who’s lives are somehow a part of the the Tennessee Children’s Home Society story. There is a shared experience with all of those who’s lives have been impacted by this.

For many of us (myself included) there is a feeling of kinship when we find our long ago “lost” family members. Not all reunions go happy but mine have.

What I took away from reading this book is that there is a universal aspect to the experience of most adoptees. Though the Georgia Tann/TCHS story was a particularly bad scandal, the effects on the Tann adoptees is so very similar to the wounds and trauma that every adoptee experiences (even the ones who aren’t aware it is there – that is my own opinion about it but from exposure to a diversity of adoptees, I don’t believe I’m far wrong).

Before We Were Yours (the fictional account) is a fast and engaging read. Before and After is a bit more tedious but the real story of real impacts on real people. I recommend both books.

To Raise Up A Child

It burgeons like a night mushroom beneath a protective cover of fallen leaves that look sickly and forlorn. The leaves are the symptoms that protect and in some strange way nourish the spores of the hidden genius that it may arise at the right time, possessed of its own unique and unadulterated powers.
~ Jean Houston, A Mythic Life

I think that those people cut off from their own, whether adoptee or foster child and their original parents, are in the early stage of changing the myth. The unicorns and rainbows story of how wonderful it is to be plopped into a stranger’s world. We are seeing that it is an outmoded perception and it needs to change or go away. These individuals now speak up loudly to help those unaware to see what is going on.

Life is complex. The child (and even the matured individual) who has been impacted may be scarred by a trauma, those who haven’t been subjected to it may struggle to understand.

Finding a way to make sense of it all is something I have been doing for a couple of years now. A good starting place for my own self has been to accept and acknowledge the sad and tragic circumstances that are part of the thread of continuity which makes me who I am.

For those adoptive parents and foster care givers, it is critical to see, not only the trauma and the wounds and certainly to address those, but also to seek to see the core self that is at the deepest level of the soul, before those impacts arrived. What are the natural talents and capacities, yes gifts, this child has to give to the world ? Nurture those !! Even as you attempt to heal the wounds that will always be within the personality.

Second Chance

One of the saddest situations in adoptionland is a child that was adopted and the adoptive family seeks to be rid of that child and it does happen.

In one case, an adopted child had been through four failed adoptions. This child had been renamed each time and didn’t even know their real name.

Or a child adopted internationally when they were 2 years old now up for re-adoption at the age of 8-1/2. The advertisement for this child is full of glowing attributes – why then is the need to be rid of the child ? It is beyond sad that people adopt without understanding the trauma and wounds that come from separating the child from their original family.

Between 1 and 5 percent of U.S. adoptions get legally dissolved each year. Some children are put up for “second-chance adoptions.” Second-chance adoptions are children who were already adopted and whose adoptive family no longer wishes to parent them.

Accurate statistics are not available for how commonplace second adoptions are, due to a wide variety of factors that include the closed nature of some adoptions, changed names on Social Security cards and birth certificates, and other paperwork issues.

Legally speaking, adopted children are recognized as no different from biological children. And for this reason, parents who opt to put a child up for re-adoption are doing nothing more legally complicated than any parent who puts a child up for adoption in the first place.

Children who end up in need of adoption a second time have lives that are deeply disrupted and end up with lifelong doubts about their worth. Most adoptees, even when their first adoption does not end up dissolved, suffer from similar issues.

Adoption is a complicated situation that is fraught with problems. That is why many adoptees are now speaking out against the process and looking for better alternatives for cases where a child’s welfare requires a more stable situation.

Adoption-Competent Therapy

Given an awareness that separation of a child from the mother inflicts deep, often unconscious, wounds – what is a method to achieve some kind of healing regarding an event that won’t change ?

I find it interesting that my mom, an adoptee, believed she had been stolen til the day she died. There was some basis in her belief, as she did know that she was a Georgia Tann baby and that many of the children that Tann placed were not legitimately available for adoption.

I also believe that it may have been a very deep seated memory at a pre-verbal time in her infant life from having just seen her mom (she had been placed in an orphanage ONLY for temporary care while her mom tried to get on her feet) and then given to a complete stranger who took her by train from Memphis TN to Nogales AZ. One can see how without words to explain her experience, the feeling of having been STOLEN dominated her belief about the “inappropriate” (my mom’s word for it to the state of TN when she tried to get her adoption file released to her) way she had been separated from a mother who never intended to give her up. Such a sad story.

For today’s adoptees that wish to find some relief from their own wounds there is the possibility of therapeutic intervention. If choosing to go that route, it is important to locate a practitioner competent in adoption related trauma.

All adopted children — of all ages — are at risk for changes in their brain’s chemistry and structure. These alterations don’t just go away with time and, if not effectively treated, can become increasingly problematic as a child grows older.

An adopted child knows they are different and some of their behaviors are not acceptable. This can shatter any self-esteem they may be trying to hang on to. Deep down in this child’s very core is a deep black pit of shame and grief.

Adoptees are over-represented nationally in the mental/behavioral health field. That means that the percentage of adoptees seeking mental/behavioral health services is much higher than the percentage in the general population. If you are going to seek therapy, educate yourself on what makes a therapist adoption competent. You don’t want to go down the general diagnosis pathway that leads to a medication intervention and never acknowledges the core problem.

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.