Not Real

This is complicated. It is weird growing up knowing your grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins are not really related to you. That is what it is like when BOTH of your parents were adopted. Adoptees experience adoption as individually as any two people experience reality.

My mom had to stop creating the family trees on Ancestry because she said to me, it just isn’t real. She somewhat hollowly said she was glad she was adopted but I knew from long years as her confidant that wasn’t totally true. She was glad that as a Georgia Tann baby she didn’t end up in worse circumstances. She ended up in a wealthy home with privileges.

So much so, that when she conceived me with a boy that came from very humble beginnings, her parents really felt disappointed that she had married below her class. My adoptive grandparents never shared family holidays until I was well into maturity and then I only remember one occasion when the 3 of them were all present for one Thanksgiving (my mom’s adoptive father having died long before that time).

While my adoptive grandparents certainly played their roles for real and had an enormous impact on all of our lives, now that I know the truth of who my parent’s original parents were, that is who I think of when I think about my grandparents, even though I had no in life real experiences with them.

At my age, it is not uncommon for one’s parents to have died and if that is so, one’s grandparents have also died. It’s not that I think those adoptive aunts, uncles and cousins are not really “good” people – they are.

Yet, now that I have cousins and one aunt who are genetically related to me, I’m all about slowly without a lot of force, experiencing their lives and all that unfolds in any human life as a way that I can become better acquainted. To build familial relationships with people that share some of my genetic DNA during whatever time we have left in this world.

The Sin Of Being Poor

Georgia Tann felt disdain toward poor, white, single mothers directly related to their class difference. She divided people into two types –

Poor people, including single “cow” mothers, were BAD.
Wealthy people “of a higher type” were GOOD.

Georgia believed that poor people were incapable of proper parenting. Their children needed to be rescued. Tann could “save” them. She did it by seizing them and placing
them for adoption.

It would appear that was her perspective regarding my maternal grandmother and the cause of my mom’s adoption. My mom was not unwanted and her parents were married. It was the Great Depression and there was a superflood affecting Memphis at the time my mom was born. Her father, WPA, was out shoring up levees in Arkansas and couldn’t be reached quickly enough to save my mom from the inevitable. Her mother never got over losing my mom.

In a 1935 article in the Memphis Press-Scimitar, Georgia Tann described the first time she placed children for adoption. She was only 15 years old. She had found two children in the corner of her father’s courtroom.

Rather than send them over to the Mississippi Children’s Home Society, she convinced a respectable Mississippi couple to adopt the 5 yr old boy and 3 yr old girl. In the newspaper article, Georgia didn’t reveal the process by which she separated the children from their birth parents.

Yet, her description of the family was indicative of her attitude –

“The father was a man of intelligence but of a mean disposition, who was always getting into trouble. The mother was an ‘ordinary’ woman, from a poor family.” That was certainly true of both of my maternal grandparents. Their only sin was poverty.

The children placed for adoption were sweet and attractive in appearance. The girl eventually received a degree in music. Thanks to the financial resources of my mom’s adoptive parents, she also eventually received a degree in music from the University of Texas at El Paso and that began the profession she practiced for the remainder of her life, right up until her death.

The boy in Georgia Tann’s story received a law degree and practiced his profession as a lawyer. My mom’s “brother” was also a Georgia Tann adoptee. He didn’t become a lawyer but still leads the life he has chosen with financial support from his inheritance.

These early placements by Tann, including both my mom and her brother, were given opportunities of wealth and all of them made the most of it. Some of her later efforts produced some horrific outcomes. My mom and her brother were very lucky regarding the adoptive parents they received. In no way would I say that the wounds of separation from their original mothers were not deep within each of them.

A Good Life

Even though I have learned so much about the impacts and issues associated with adoption since I learned the truth related to each of my parents’ adoptions (both of my parents were), I also understand that they did have a good life.

Did my mom yearn for a reunion with her original mother ? Absolutely.

Did my dad seem to accept his adoption ? Maybe that was because a baby stealing and selling scandal wasn’t part of it – the Salvation Army was.

My mom’s adoptive parents were well to do (a banker and a socialite) and she definitely had the kinds of advantages that Georgia Tann claimed she was seeking with all of her placements of children born into poverty and bought by wealthy infertile couples. Thanks to my adoptive grandmother, my mom got a college degree in music composition of which she was justifiably proud, having worked hard for that result.

My dad’s adoptive parents were entrepreneurial and humble. They had a small acreage (only half an acre) out at the edges of El Paso Texas where as children we wandered the irrigation ditches and picked cotton for fun out in the fields. Little did I know at the time that it was in my genes for my mom’s original parents were sharecroppers and cotton pickers.

I know in my gut even if I don’t have any real proof that it was my dad’s adoptive parents that kept me in the family so that after my parents’ deaths, I could make us whole again, by discovering the roots we came from.

I too had a “good” life.