Figuring Out Our Story

Shannon Gibney

Today’s blog is courtesy of LINK>an essay at Today.com. Shannon Gibney is the author of The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be. Her book is described as A Speculative Memoir of Transracial Adoption. It was published by Dutton just last month, January 2023. Her book details her search and reunion with her birth families, as well as the ongoing ripple effects of adoption intergenerationally. She notes – “For adoptees, figuring out our story requires work — scouring fragments of documents, stories and phone conversations. And sometimes, we still come up short.” As the child of two adoptees that basically had to do the same thing – I can relate and so, I share.

Shannon is a mixed-Black woman who was adopted by a white family. This is commonly referred to as trans-racial adoption. She writes, “In a culture that deeply values personal and family histories that appear to be seamless — at least on the surface — those of us who have little or nothing to go on can feel alienated and alone. Which is why so many adoptees search.” Certainly, for my mom and for my own self, we quickly became aware of the priority of genetic relationship in working with the DNA matching sites – 23 and Me and with Ancestry.

Shannon compares her own search to the more difficult efforts of international adoptees from countries outside of the US. Therefore, she says – As a domestic, mixed-Black transracial adoptee, my search for my birth family and my beginnings was far easier to navigate, although I didn’t know it at the time I began searching. I could say as much myself. My own search turned out to be surprisingly easy and relatively quick (within a year I knew who all 4 of my original grandparents were, something of their stories and had connected with living genetic relatives that I had not known about before).

Her birth mother had given the adoption agency permission to share her identity with Shannon, if she should ever reach out and ask for it. She goes on to describe what happened next – Thus began a long, complicated, on-again and off-again relationship with my birth mother, which ended with her death from a rare cancer in 2014. While initially getting to know her, she told me that she had had a very brief relationship with my birth father and couldn’t give me any real information about him beyond his name. She also warned me that he was “dangerous,” that she didn’t trust him, and that they “were both lost souls” at the time they got together. And, as it turned out, I did not have any biological siblings.

A therapist who specializes in adoption issues helped her to track down information about her birth father, though sad – In 1981, he had died from injuries he had sustained from a high speed police chase in Palo Alto, California. She was 6 years old at the time. She notes his family – “held the blackness that set me a country apart from both my white adoptive and biological families. This was a kind of racial and cultural damage I hadn’t anticipated.”

Yet, also a happy outcome – I eventually tracked down my paternal grandfather, and was even able to talk to him some years before his death. Likewise, conversations and meetings with my biological aunt and uncle on my father’s side have filled in many gaps in my story, and have given me the great gift of a fuller picture of my father. I may have never met him, but I can surmise so many things about him from the little information I do have.

Similarly to Shannon, I have had to accept – Adoptees will never have fully fleshed out stories of our origins, but we do have the conviction that we deserve far more truths than we ever receive, and we have a dogged determination to seek them out. All of this can make us feel frustrated. And yet, I too have discovered “talking to other adoptees we realize that we are actually not alone in our struggles, and that there are strategies and communities we can build to help mitigate the difficulty and disappointment. We also have imaginations that we can use to explore the people and possibilities that brought us into existence and with whom we co-create our identities.”

Typical Adoptee Struggles

Today’s story – As much as I love the holidays coming up I usually struggle through them. This year seems to be hitting me harder than usual. I always knew I didn’t belong in the family that adopted me and I was blessed to be able to start my own little family but still I struggle. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that my divorce number 2 will be finalized right after Christmas or that my adoptive mom was diagnosed with dementia and gets mad any time my adoption is brought up or my adoptive dad disowned me for my birthday this year or that I will never get answers about who I am because my biological dad is unknown and biological mom passed away about 5 years ago. I just feel so lost this year. I feel like I’m failing as a mom to a very awesome 13 year old. I know I’m not because I see how strong she is, but I still feel lost. I know my adoption caused a lot of trauma and I have worked really hard to overcome a good portion of it.

An adoptee asks her – have you by chance tried something like 23 and me? When I did it helped me and brought me so much joy because I got to see where my ancestry is! Maybe you’d find some close relatives on there? I just had to reply – 23 and Me really helped in my case. They are all dead – my adoptee parents (yeah both) who died knowing next to nothing about their origins, the adoptive parents and the birth parents all dead. However, a cousin with the same grandmother (my dad’s first mom) did 23 and Me and not only could she tell me about my grandmother but that led me to another cousin in Mexico who had all of my grandmother’s many photos (including a bread crumb hint about his father).

Someone also suggested Ancestry DNA and I have done that too and it does help with people who never knew you existed to prove that you actually are family. Like her, I have found I have an overwhelmingly HUGE biological-tree and it happened suddenly. Only a few years ago, I only had some names for my first grandparents that didn’t reveal much.

Another adoptee had a sympathetic response – is very understandable and appropriate considering you currently navigating a divorce, a parent with dementia and being disowned by the other. Any one of those things is a lot for a person to handle individually, but you have a stack of upsets. It’s ok to feel lost for a while as long as you don’t forget things can and will get better. I say this as a person who also had a stack of life in their hands for a 4 year period (my mom passed, we moved my dad, who then had a major health crisis, and I also had discovery and reunion and estrangement with parts of my biological family in there as well). It got better. It continues to do so. One day at a time. Be kind to yourself. Don’t forget to slow down and breathe sometimes. You’ll make it through.

Finally another adoptee acknowledges that the layers of loss are surreal for most to understand. She is parenting 2 daughters and not with either of their fathers. Seeing her 11 yr old’s abandonment/ trust issues pulls up her own feelings at that age. She finds that she is reparenting herself while she parents her daughter. Finally able to understand emotions she’s never been able to sort out before.

Hope Meadows

I stumbled upon mention of this reading something else. It was just a little “also” paragraph at the end but I was intrigued and had to go looking into it.

On a quiet street in Rantoul sits a small neighborhood of 15 nondescript duplex houses, part of a larger subdivision built decades ago to house the families of pilots and workers at the now-closed Chanute Air Force Base. Although it’s impossible to tell just by looking, something remarkable is happening here: adopted kids from troubled backgrounds are finding acceptance and support in the arms of neighbors old enough to be their grandparents. That’s by design at Hope Meadows, a community bringing together several generations of people from all walks of life for one purpose: building a safe and stable environment for adopted children.

Started in 1994 by Brenda Eheart, a researcher at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hope Meadows is a neighborhood of adopted children, their families and senior citizen volunteers, all working together to form a community of support and interdependence. What was started as a permanent destination for adopted children has also become a place where adoptive parents find support as they deal with often troubled kids, and where seniors can find continued purpose as they age. Hope is the first iteration of a social services model known as ICI – intergenerational community as intervention – and it is on the verge of spreading nationwide.

Families seeking to adopt move to Hope Meadows and are paired with children in need of a permanent home. Each family lives for free in one of the 15 six-bedroom homes converted from pairs of duplex apartments, and one parent is employed by Hope Meadows as a “family manager,” earning a stipend and health insurance coverage for the family. Meanwhile, senior residents at Hope volunteer for six hours each week and receive reduced rent on an apartment in the neighborhood. There is on-site counseling available for adopted children, and the whole neighborhood regularly participates in group activities that build intergenerational relationships. The secret of the program’s success is that the relationships are allowed to form naturally, which helps provide meaningful interaction and a sort of informal therapy for all involved.

The children adopted at Hope often come from situations of sexual abuse, neglect or overwhelmed parents, Calhoun says, and they often have issues with trust and abandonment. At Hope, those children find a permanent place to unpack their bags, literally and figuratively. With the seniors and staff involved, the families have constant support. The seniors have raised their own kids and can give hindsight about what might work in whatever situation. The support makes a lot of difference in the closeness at Hope Meadows because everyone is looking at what’s good for the children.

Hope used to accept foster kids but now the program focuses solely on adoption. Hope Meadows found that the bonds that were broken when those foster children eventually left were too hard on everyone involved. It was like they were losing not only the attachment to the foster parents, but an attachment to the entire community. Childhood is all about forming attachments. That’s how we evolve, and if that’s disrupted when you’re young, it makes it harder to do it again and again. It’s harder to trust and believe that this is really going to be your new family, your new home.

The community’s senior volunteers benefit from the program as well, and not just in the form of reduced rent. Seniors at Hope generally feel a sense of continued purpose because of the impact they can have on young lives, and the relationships they build provide meaningful interaction. As seniors grow older, they can rely on community members to look after them. Seniors are an integral part of Hope’s success because they provide wisdom and support for other community members.

The program is intergenerational, interracial, inter-whatever. Many of the adopted children are African-American and most other residents are white. Everybody gets to know everybody else as an individual, and when you know someone as an individual, it’s harder to put them into a category. This is it’s intentional. The majority of children in foster care are African American.

The Executive Director at Hope Meadows is Elaine Gehrmann. She is a former Unitarian minister and public defense attorney. Gehrmann says she wanted to be a part of Hope because it “deals with the whole person and their whole situation. Being a lawyer, clearly I helped some people, but I could only help them with their legal problems,” Gehrmann says. “A legal problem may be the least of your problems, and may be a manifestation of a larger problem. This place provides a lot of the things that communities used to provide that they don’t anymore.”

This blog was excerpted from a longer article. You can read the complete Illinois Times story here – This Is The Village It Takes.

A Common Enough Story

I’m having a really hard time with my feelings. I am in a reunion with my son who was given up for adoption. Here is a recap of my story.

I was 15 years old when I had him. My parents forced me to give him up for adoption, after a visit to an abortion clinic told us it was too late. My parents pulled me out of school. I was basically hidden away until I gave birth to him.

I was so happy when I was pregnant with him but I had nowhere else to go. I was terrified of making my parents angry. So, I cried and cried after leaving the hospital without him. All these years and I continued to think about him every day, but never about his adopted parents. I had to grieve for him at such a young age. I was never in therapy, was never asked how I was feeling about it all. I was just expected to act like it never happened (how is that even possible?). I was always searching for him. Then the miracle, he found me in May.

We have spoken every single day since reconnecting. I struggle with my own emotions when he talks about his adoptive mom. Of course, it is natural that he does and probably natural that it is hard for me to hear it. On his own initiative, he started referring to her in our conversations as his “parent”. I never asked him to do that. I did admit to him that this was something I personally had to work through and that I would never want him to be uncomfortable talking about anything with me.

Truth is, it’s not getting easier. It’s getting harder. Today he asked my opinion about something. After I told him my answer, he came back with, “well my parent….”. Honestly, it broke me. It isn’t unexpected that her view might be the opposite of mine. And, honestly, it wasn’t even in anything important. I am ashamed because I feel like I’m completely upset over nothing really. I now realize that these incidences make me feel those feelings I felt when I surrendered him – like I have been discarded.

It probably isn’t surprising that he views me as a friend. He doesn’t seem like an emotional person. At the age of 23, he still lives at home, has never really had a job, his adoptive parents coddle him (in my opinion) because they pay for everything, and he isn’t going to school.

I want to handle myself in these situations better. It really is so hard for me to control my emotions. I don’t want to make this sad story only about myself. And I really don’t want to project my feelings towards his adoptive parents onto him. I feel like I need help. I don’t want to hurt him or his feelings. I need to know how to accept the fact that just being in his life now is really a blessing. Whatever that is going to be like.

How can I respond or communicate better with my son?

I thought this advice was from experience and practical –

I am an adoptee and an original mom (meaning she gave up a child for adoption). He’s been raised. That’s over. Stop trying to compete with his adoptive parents and simply be his friend. In time that friendship may grow into a true mother /son relationship. Give it time. Adoptees often have trust issues, abandonment issues, identity issues, etc. so please don’t add to anything he is already struggling with. Work through your issues as an original mom separately – not through your relationship with him. (I don’t even want to touch upon my own issues because it’s still terrifying for me too). I do understand.

Just Don’t

Some honest advice from someone who has been where you may be now . . . .

Just need to get this off my chest. Any expectant moms reading this that are considering adoption, please do not do it, not even an open adoption. My daughter has spent this past two weeks with us and she was so happy. She went home to her adoptive parents today and asked to spend another two weeks with us. Well adoptive mother just sent me a message that they spoke to a social worker and that their attorney will contact us this week, so I guess they are getting a restraining order. My hands are tied as legally I can’t do anything because of a piece of paper I signed 13 years ago. So please never consider adoption as the better choice for your baby because it will torture you the rest of your life and your child’s life as well.

And this child won’t have more rights in adolescence. Adoptees do not have the same rights that non-adopted people have. For some reason, the courts care more about making the adoptive parents happy with their purchase than they do about the best interests of the child.

Someone asks this woman – They sent her to you for two weeks and now won’t let her come back ? Why is she involving an attorney ?

So, some more of this sad story – my daughter threatened to hurt herself, if she can’t be with us – so they sent her to spend two weeks with us. Picked her up today. Now because she wants to stay longer with us, they want to get restraining order. I have evidence of some physical abuse that she has suffered being with them.

Expectant moms – you do NOT want this to happen to your precious child !!

Some good legal perspective with which I agree – They may find that they can’t get a restraining or protection order over this, depending on the jurisdiction. Simply because your child wants to spend time with you doesn’t rise to the level of an order against you in many places. Also, if they try to get a protection or restraining order against you, you have the right to defend yourself and be involved in the court case.

On the other hand – People get restraining orders all the time for frivolous reasons. Courts pass them out like candy on Halloween. You don’t even need to have any evidence. Orders of protection are used more often to harass and control people than they are for actually protecting people.

Another woman added more cautions for expectant moms – Anyone who wants to terminate your legal rights to your own child does NOT have your child’s best interests in mind. Nor is that ever in your best interests. Someone who truly wanted to help a child, would’ve stepped in as a mentor, God parent, adoptive aunt/uncle figure. Don’t trust anyone with your children. Once you do, there is NOTHING you can do to protect your child from that person.

And for adoptive parents who may be dealing with a situation like this – consider what stopping visitation does to your adopted child. That is guaranteed to cause resentment against you and heap more trauma on them. Consider your next steps very thoughtfully.