What Is Wrong With This Picture ?

There was a time in my sons younger days when I worried that their behavior was going to result in unintended consequences. Sometimes well-meaning people insert themselves in ignorance into other people’s lives. Fortunately, we weathered those years without the worst happening to us. That is not always the case for some families.

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler writes –

“The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”

This is definitely a reason for concern as our government has been trending authoritarian.

In a YouTube titled “Legally Kidnapped: The Case Against Child Protective Services” the narrator says – “They don’t want you to know what is going on because if you did you’d rebel, you’d fight back.”

There is an agency that has ripped families apart for decades. In 2014, when that video was made there were 400,000 children in out-of-home care. That is a staggering number. It is true that 20% of Child Protective Services removals are for physical/sexual abuse.

With the ongoing legalization of marijuana in many states in this country, it may shock you to know that a vast percentage of child removals have been for the use by their parents of this substance.

The sad truth is that foster children are 6 times more likely to die of medical neglect, physical abuse and/or sexual abuse while in CPS care than a child suffering in poverty is.

You can learn more at https://stopcpslegallykidnappingchildren.org/

The Emptiness And Inadequacy Of Not Being Enough

I feel very sad this morning. Many women who give up children for adoption did so because in whatever way they did not feel like they were enough. Strong enough, wise enough, financially sound enough. It doesn’t help that often this is a true and honest assessment of one’s condition.

I left my first husband due to issues of addiction. He honestly tried very hard, more than once, in a variety of ways to change his behavior so that his addiction was not a part of his life nor our life as a family. I tried to stick it out. Because our family’s financial resources were being poured into satisfying his addiction, I eventually believed my daughter and I would be better off if we separated from him.

I tried to handle the divorce in an enlightened way for our 3 year old daughter. Telling her that her father still loved her and I still loved her but that we would not live together as a family any more. Financially, I wasn’t able to pull it off. I wasn’t able to financially support us. I went to my mom for tiny bits of money to get by. I took on roommates to share the cost of providing shelter. None of it worked.

In desperation, I left my daughter with her paternal grandmother, who because I had to go back to work when she was only a few months old, had always cared for her. I didn’t know if I could drive a truck but I knew the money was good and if I could do it for a little while and save it up, then I could recover her and we might make it.

Often, life does not work out as we plan. Her father remarried and he took physical custody of our daughter. Her step-mother had a daughter and together my ex-husband had another daughter with this wife. My daughter had a family and I know the issues of addiction continued to weigh heavily on this family. I don’t have easy answers.

I had a reconciliation of sorts with my ex-husband not that long ago. No recriminations. Only an acknowledgment of how lucky we both are that our daughter is in our lives. She is an amazing person. In spite of all the challenges, somehow we did something right along the way and both of us would say, mostly the work of becoming amazing deserves 100% credit by our daughter.

What Is It About Babies?

The reason there is a business related to adoption is that couples are willing to wait a long time and pay a lot of money to adopt an infant. It is the blank slate idea that Georgia Tann (the baby scandal thief) was fond of utilizing to obtain customers.

After 10 years of marriage, my husband decided he actually wanted to become a father after all. Before that, he was glad that there was no pressure from me because I had been there and done that (I gave birth to a daughter in a previous marriage at age 19). Therefore, when he announced to me over Margaritas at a Mexican restaurant that he had been thinking, I think my mouth dropped open in amazement.

At first, we considered adoption. We weren’t actually thinking about infants. My husband’s uncle had adopted an older boy. We considered the problems that had resulted from that choice. We wanted a child without someone else’s baggage. Ours was not an uncommon perspective. At the time, I really knew nothing about adoption beyond the fact that both of my parents were adoptees.

Ultimately, we did find a way to conceive our two sons that required a lot of medical assistance and thankfully, in our case, it worked. Half of all women who try to conceive in the manner we did – fail. Because my husband waited until he was truly ready and did not have fatherhood forced upon him without intention, he is a wonderful father.

There are lots of older children in foster care who would benefit from a more conventional kind of home situation. Many never receive that and age out of the system without any resources to be independent and self-reliant. There is no profit in taking any older child into one’s home and the attendant complications can be daunting.

The only request adoptees make of hoping to adopt couples is that they first understand the impacts of their own infertility and what it is they seek to do, in taking another woman’s child and raising it as their own. I’ve previously discussed some of the common reforms suggested. [1] Not changing the child’s name or birthdate. [2] Making possible their awareness of and eventual reunion with the people who conceived them as well as any other siblings that exist. Those two are some primary ones.

Becoming Whole Again

Much of what I write here came as an unexpected side effect of discovering who my original grandparents were. Both of my parents were adoptees and both of them died without knowing what I know now.

The journey began because my cousin informed me she had received her father’s adoption file from the state of Tennessee. This came as a huge surprise to me. Back in the early 1990s, my mom tried and failed to get her own. I had hoped, since she had died, it might become available to me but that is not how sealed records work generally – and I have bumped up against them in 3 states – Virginia, Arizona and California.

What made Tennessee different was the Georgia Tann scandal. There would have been criminal charges lodged against her if she had not died before that could happen. The movers and shakers of Memphis political life were all too happy to let the wrong-doing die with Miss Tann.

The story had such potency, that it erupted on the public’s imagination in the early 1990s on 60 Minutes and Oprah. A movie was made by Hallmark featuring Mary Tyler Moore as a convincing Georgia Tann. Reunions of adoptees with their original parents started being seen on television and my mom wanted that for herself. It was not to be. No one told her that less than 10 years after her own efforts were denied, it would have been possible.

It was surprising to me how the dominoes began falling so easily, so that in less than one year, I knew who all 4 of my original grandparents were and made contact with some surviving descendants. Only a few years ago, I would never have predicted such a result.

It didn’t end there however. From that new wholeness, I also began to understand deeply the impacts of separating young children or infants from their mothers and original families, how this causes a deep traumatic wound in the adoptee and how even the most well-meaning of adoptive parents (my adoptive grandparents were totally that and good people in general) can not make up for what has happened to the victims of the process.

And from all that, has come this blog. No doubt I still have more to say as soon as tomorrow.

A Permanent Loss

Conflicted feelings when I first learned I was pregnant

I gave birth to my baby and once the infant was born,

I became that child’s mother.

A mere signature on a surrender paper and

the adoption that followed can never undo that.

I had a baby and I gave that baby away
but I am a mother.

~ A Hole in my Heart by Lorraine Dusky

It is a very sad story and worth reading.

A lifetime of regrets, of unintended consequences that are channeled in an activism, so that others do not have to go through the same experience.

I have learned so much about the impacts of adoption on ALL parties to it. Not one of the triad escapes some effect. Not the adoptee who never had a say in what happened to them. Not the original parents who will never be able to know their child in the intimate way most parents do. Not the adoptive couple who may receive more than they originally bargained for – wounds they can’t see nor understand because they are foreign to any concept of parenting they may have entered in with.