It’s About Pregnancy

In the fight against abortion, it is often very easily overlooked the kinds of demands any pregnancy places upon a woman. They are not minor. It takes almost a full year out of any woman’s life to gestate another human being. It changes a woman’s body, a woman’s daily life and if the pregnancy goes to term and she delivers the baby – her entire life will no longer be the same. It is not an equal situation regarding the man who made being pregnant possible in the first place.

So, one fact overlooked in the choice to have an abortion is a woman who is unwilling to commit such an extended period of time to gestating yet one more human being – and if being honest, thoughtful people realize that this planet is already overpopulated. There is no longer any need for human beings to be fruitful and multiply.

I know that not wanting to commit myself to 9 months of pregnancy was part (but not the only reason) that I once chose to have an abortion. However, I would be quick to add, every time I have had the circumstances to support me and the willingness to go through the extended period of time to gestate a child, I have loved every minute of it.

Adoption advocates seem only to care about the production of children that can be taken from mothers who are unable to make the longer commitment to raising a child. Adoption carries with it definite wounds to the original mother and to the child she surrenders to adoption. While there is a time and place (orphaned or abused children) for adoption, banning abortions is not for the support of infertile couples wanting to have a larger volume of babies to chose from. It is about controlling the lives of uppity women – plain and simple – by jerking around the emotions of people who love their own children.

Whose Perspective ?

She wonders – “Who explained adoption to my peers ?”

Her adoptive parents always told her she was chosen and special.

Yet her peers thought of her as something that someone bad had discarded.

What had their parents taught them about adoption ?

It could have been not their parents but messages about adoption
and pregnancy in the world surrounding them all.

Really great adoptive parents are NOT all an adoptee needs.

A great deal of the grief an adoptee experiences is the result of
the societal shame associated with being adopted.

It is painful to be seen as unwanted, almost aborted, and needing
to be grateful just because one has been adopted.

~ from The Declassified Adoptee

I know my mom’s adoptive parents felt likewise. They were over the moon happy with their two children – thought them brilliant and attractive. They were selected by gender and “supposed” traits (though Georgia Tann played them on that one).

Later in life, my mom had a tense relationship with her mother. She never felt as though she lived up to her mother’s expectations regarding her life and it was probably actually true. My mom got pregnant out of wedlock, therefore, she was never the debutante my grandmother probably hoped for.

Societies perspectives on women and chastity and who’s responsible (hint, it’s never the men who impregnate them) all add up to an adoptee’s whose origin story is founded in rape or incest being automatically impure. What did that baby ever do to deserve such a judgement ?

Other Ways To Rob A Mother

With my sister in 2014

While I have a lot of sadness for my maternal grandmother’s separation from her child, I also have a lot of sadness for my sister’s lot as a mother. Interestingly, when I first saw the photo of my grandmother I thought of my sister and coincidentally, she carries my grandmother’s name of Lou.

My sister has given birth to two children and was not able to raise either of them but had more time with her first born son. When she became afraid her husband was going to hurt her, she left him and sued for a divorce. Her child was mixed race, partly Mexican in the predominantly Mexican town of El Paso TX. His Mexican grandparents fought her for custody. The court was afraid he would lose contact with his culture – as though it only came from that part.

When I first pulled together the details of our family’s history into a long saga, I included an exchange with my nephew that highlighted the damage that had been done to him by his paternal grandmother who raised him. I won’t argue the fact that they could afford to support him much more easily than my sister. What I can’t forgive them for is how that woman poisoned him against half of his family. And he is a very wounded person – married three times and not that long ago suffered some kind of breakdown.

I knew I was risking his anger by sharing that heartfelt private exchange with him in a very limited edition of 10 copies distributed to family members only but I simply felt it was too important to an overall understanding of our family dynamics not to include it. And he has since disowned our whole side of the family over it – though my sister isn’t angry with me over it – she says it was headed that way because she knew he didn’t want her in his life. So sad. I do regret the loss of his feelings towards me.

My sister also lost her daughter. Our adoptee mom convinced her to give up the baby shortly after birth. And similarly to my nephew’s situation, the adoptive family probably could afford to support her better than my sister who waitressed her entire life, mostly at Denny’s.

My sister has had opportunities to spend time with all 3 of her grandchildren and in today’s world where we are all so scattered out over this country, I don’t really have all that much more in person time than my sister does, nor did I have much longer to raise my daughter as she ended up being raised by her father and step-mother. Her removal from my life was voluntary but not intended. He refused to pay child support and I was financially desperate.

Breaking The Cycle

Both of my parents were adoptees, so it is no wonder really that the pattern of giving up children to adoption continued in the lives of my sisters and I. Both sisters gave up children to adoption. While I did not and while one of my sisters experienced a horrific outcome through the courts that I will always believe was biased, two more children were not raised by us because of circumstances, including financial hardship, beyond our control. I even understand now that it was a minor miracle that I wasn’t given up for adoption when my teenage mother conceived me out of wedlock.

Happily, I have optimism that our children, who are raising their own children successfully, are breaking the cycle that has fragmented my childhood family both on the parental side and through our own children.

I believe that the general perspective is shifting now, though not yet entirely ending mothers losing their children to adoption, to encourage more mothers not to chose that deeply painful loss that too many mothers have suffered and too many children have been damaged by.

There will always be some need for surrogate parenting but it may be time to allow adoptees not to become a false identity but to be supported in order to grow up as whole and integrated selves with their original identities and family trees known and intact.

Preventable Separations

Within the community of adopted persons, there seems to be a consensus that separations of children from their original mothers could be prevented with the right encouragement and financial support. A group I belong to actively seeks to encourage single mothers to at least make the attempt before giving in to surrendering their children for adoption.

A valid question is whether, in being separated from the mother, the child is deprived of something that society cannot replace – even with the best care it can provide. I have been convinced that this separation results in a wound in the child, and also in the mother, that never entirely heals, even if it has been unconsciously buried within that person.

This most important consideration may outweigh all others in my own opinion. To avoid causing the wound to begin with, seems to my mind, to be more important than convenient “solutions” to a perceived lack of parenting skills or inadequate financial support.

It is a growing belief that separation might be prevented – if we as a society cared enough to do that. Separating mothers from their children for profit-driven reasons is not in the best interests of the child, nor of the mother.

A Better Way ?

Will the business of buying and selling human beings
continue to be an option for those who cannot conceive children ?
~ The Baby Scoop Era

I really don’t expect it to end anytime soon. Having learned all that I have learned over the last year plus, I do not think that adoption is generally a good way to go. There are wounds inflicted on mother, child and even the adoptive parents.

Thankfully, medical science has progressed to the point that many couples who were previously unable to conceive are able to now with assistance. Single women who’ve been unable to find a partner to parent with them can still have children and raise them well.

Medical assistance comes in many forms and sometimes involves more than two people in the genetics and biology of a child. This is the real world we live in today.

With assisted reproduction techniques, babies grow inside their mother and have all of the advantages of natural conception. Therefore, there are no wounds, just a more complicated genetics.

With inexpensive DNA testing, those people who do chose to conceive a child in this manner would do well not to hide it from the child who comes into existence in this manner. Discovering such a reality unexpectedly can wound almost as much as separating a child from its mother can.

Losing A Mom

The Dead Mother painting by Edvard Munch

I was talking to a woman in our county seat day before yesterday. She’s is an older woman and she seems to be of a very like mind to myself politically, which puts both of us in the minority here in the county where I live. So, she enjoys having someone who speaks her language to talk to. We really don’t communicate with one another that often but as I was leaving it came out that she had lost her mother at the age of 9.

I was almost finished reading a book by a woman, Mary Sue Rabe, that I met at Jean Houston’s home in August of 2016. Her book is titled “Stand There and Look Pretty Darlin’: Don’t You Worry Your Pretty Little Head ’bout Nothin'”. An important segment in her book was about losing her mother at age 9.

Back in my original grandmother’s childhoods in the early 1900s, mothers dying seems to have been a rather common phenomena – at least it happened to both of my grandmothers (one at age 3 mos and one at age 11). Also, my husband’s great-grandmother died after giving birth to her third child. That child was turned over to an unrelated couple to raise. His great-grandfather could barely manage the two older children he was left with in widowhood, one of whom was my husband’s grandfather.

Just after my older son was born, my mother-in-law made it her mission in life to get a memorial stone for Edith Morgan Yemm (my husband’s great-grandmother). Her husband was an impoverished coal miner when she died and so she was put into a pauper’s grave without a marker in the cemetery across from the church. He moved to another state after she died.

Not long ago, I read a book Motherless Daughters by Hope Edelman. The impact of losing one’s mother during childhood upon a daughter is profound.

Cutting Ties

Ours is not a happy story. I didn’t fully realize that until I began to finally learn about who my original grandparents were.

I had described the situation though and I had intuitive senses about it before I began to read what others had written about it as well.

I put together everything I knew into book form – a limited edition only meant for direct family and not even all of it.

Knowing it wasn’t a happy story before I sent it off to its recipients, even so I was willing to risk the fallout that might blow back at me. And it has. Sadly.

What I regret most was that it appears it will impact several others who had nothing to do with my decision to come fully to face all of the less than happy truths about our family circumstances.

Yet with a heavy heart and deep sadness, I also know it isn’t something that only happened last night. It has been always at the edge and always unhappy. The wounds are deep, complicated and hurting.

I wish it wasn’t that way. I suppose that many families do have less than happy stories. I have cut off my youngest sister for the time being because she has traumatized me. My husband and his brother who were once very close are not now. It happens. That doesn’t mean I rejoice in it.

Family Dysfunction

I remember a long private Facebook chat with my nephew as I became aware of wounds that he was suffering from and trying to help him with the truth I knew at the time. I had not yet learned so much that I have learned in only the last year but I understood that somehow the family I was born into was broken.

This didn’t mean I had a bad childhood or that my parents didn’t love us or that they divorced. None of that is true of my own circumstances.

I believed stories about my parents’ origins that weren’t true. And now, armed with the true stories, I have yet learned about the wounds that happen when any child is separated from its mother – as both of my parents were – then adopted by strangers and forced to live false identities.

There were other elements too – my grandmothers grew up without their mothers who had died. All three of us – me and my two sisters – in one way or another lost custody of our own children – the same as our grandmothers (and by inference the fathers had lost their children too).

I am still trying to write this sad, romantic and true story in the best possible way. It is also a growth and healing process for me. I understand so much, so much better now. Eventually, it may come to pass that you are able to read my story too.

There Is No Way To Get Around The Pain

Adoption has been seen as the best solution to 3 problems –

[1] a biological mother who cannot, will not,

or is discouraged from taking care of her child

[2] the child who is relinquished

[3] the infertile couple who want a child

Regardless of the quality of the adoptive relationship – adopted children experience themselves as unwanted, they are unable to trust the adoptive relationship as being permanent and they often demonstrate emotional disturbances and behavioral problems.

Some people cannot understand why the substitution of parents makes a difference – if – the adoptive parents provide a warm, caring, and loving atmosphere in which a child should be able to grow and develop.

The above paragraphs are notes that I made while reading The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child by Nancy Newton Verrier.

I was directly questioned at a writer’s conference, as I shared the family origins story I was discovering, about why is it a problem if the adoptive home is good. This is the reality – separating a mother and child from one another simply has consequences that are unavoidable. The book mentioned above goes to great pains to explain why and it has made a believer out of me.

I remember a long chat with my nephew when he poured his heart out to me – “it bothers me more that we were all kind of disposable and I hate the idea of kids being disposable to adults. I would do whatever it takes for my son. Why was I not worth that? I know it doesn’t always work out that way and life isn’t always easy but I love my son more than air and no one loved me the same. That is what kills me. That makes me angry. People are NOT disposable.”

It wasn’t true of course. This child was loved very much. However, this is the kind of pain that haunts a child separated from their natural mother, even as an adult. And it has effects on their relationships throughout their lives. Therapy and counseling can help but even so, there is no way to get around the pain – sadly.