Birthmother

A Poem titled "New Year's Eve" by Carl Dennis

2011-12-31T11:50:00.000-08:00

NEW YEAR’S EVE

However busy you are, you should still reserve
One evening a year for thinking about your double,
The man who took the curve on Conway Road
Too fast, given the icy patches that night,
But no faster than you did; the man whose car
When it slid through the shoulder
Happened to strike a girl walking alone
From a neighbor’s party to her parents’ farm,
While your car struck nothing more notable
Than a snowbank.

One evening for recalling how soon you transformed
Your accident into a comic tale
Told first at a body shop, for comparing
That hour of pleasure with his hour of pain
At the house of the stricken parents, and his many
Long afternoons at the Lutheran graveyard.

If nobody blames you for assuming your luck
Has something to do with your character,
Don’t blame him for assuming that his misfortune
Is somehow deserved, that justice would be undone
If his extra grief was balanced later
By a portion of extra joy.

Lucky you, whose personal faith has widened
To include an angel assigned to protect you
From the usual outcome of heedless moments.
But this evening consider the angel he lives with,
The stern enforcer who drives the sinners
Out of the Garden with a flaming sword
And locks the gate.

********************************************************

If birthmothers had angels, it seems to me they would be, more often than not, of the stern enforcer variety.

Wishing everyone "a portion of extra joy" in 2012.

Christmas 1990

2011-12-25T07:41:00.000-08:00

Not long before Christmas I wrote a letter to my son detailing who I was and how I’d come to give him up for adoption. I enclosed a faded color snapshot of his biological father and me dressed in our pastel evening finery at our senior prom. I tried to imagine what my son would think when he saw those two innocent smiles. Would he realize that he was in the photo too? Christmas was just a couple of weeks away, so I wrapped the letter around the photo and put the packet in a red envelope, hoping to pass it off as a Christmas card. If he doesn’t write me back in a couple of weeks, I thought, I’ll call him.

The mail fell in heaps through the slot in our front door during the week before Christmas. I’d hear our dog bark, and I’d race to the entry hall to contemplate the holiday envelopes strewn on the rug. Examining each hand-addressed envelope, I hoped for a return address from Arizona, but there was nothing. At the meetings I’d heard adoptees say that reuniting with a birthparent could make the adoptive parents feel abandoned or threatened. I told myself my son was just taking it slow out of consideration for his family, but even ten days later there was no response.

When I first received information about my son, I learned some basic details. I knew that he lived at home with his parents, that he had a sister, that he worked as an information operator for the phone company. The searcher had given me my son's phone number and had pointed out that the line was separate from his parents’ line. As I began working up the nerve to call him, I wanted to find out if my son shared his phone line with his sister. One afternoon shortly after New Year’s, while my daughters were napping, I sat on my bedroom floor with the telephone in my lap. Since I had his sister’s name, I would call information to get her number and see if it was the same as his. I dialed information for Mesa, Arizona with my pencil at the ready. “Hello, this is Cory. May I help you?” said the operator. I gasped and slammed down the phone and lay on the cool oak floor of my bedroom. Was it possible that I had just spoken to my son?

Wishing everyone a...

2011-12-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

.... relaxing holiday season surrounded by friends and family. May you bask in the glow of love wherever you are.

Christmas Eve, 1969

2011-12-23T19:05:00.000-08:00

Like the gifts stacked in our living room, disguised beneath ribbons and wrapping paper, my secret remains hidden.

In the kitchen our table nearly sags with plenty. A ham decorated with pineapple rings and maraschino cherries, an array of side dishes, baskets of rolls, towers of bread, a three-tiered tray layered with homemade cookies, fudge, and divinity. I want to stuff myself with all of it.

My father is tipsy when he arrives. He considers it his duty to spread Yuletide cheer among his employees before sending them home to enjoy the holiday. Now he's handing out drinks to our guests-- scalding Tom and Jerrys served with a ladle from a polka-dotted bowl, highballs in tall narrow glasses. Ice cubes tinkle like sleigh bells; steam rises from cups like breath made visible. We stuff ourselves, get giddy on sugar, and then find our places in the living room. Gifts are handed out. One by one at first, and then the whole operation snowballs into Christmas-y chaos until there’s a pile of wrapping paper as tall as my little brothers.

This is my last Christmas before I go off to college. My parents give me a portable sewing machine so compact it looks like a toy, a Webster’s collegiate dictionary, and a thesaurus. Santa surprises me with a popcorn popper, a new bathrobe, and new pajamas so I can look presentable in dormitory hallways. None of us has any idea what college life will be like, but we assume these are the things I will need.

College. Will I really give my baby to strangers and go off to start a new life? Or should I imagine myself married, posing in front of next year's tree with a baby cuddled in my arms?

After we’ve done the dishes my boyfriend comes over, and we present each other with cassette tape recorders and packages of tapes. Our colleges will be three hundred miles apart, and he has the idea it will be more interesting to send each other tapes instead of letters. I toy with the idea of recording a tape for him that tells him I’m pregnant.

(I never work up the nerve.)

At midnight we attend Mass. The late night and the ham and the candy have made me queasy. Morning sickness can attack anytime if I eat the wrong thing or smell something strong. I still have a dose or two of the green medicine, but I’m saving it for school. The good thing is that I’ve lost several pounds, and my Christmas dress, a double-breasted navy knit with gold buttons, looks great. The bad thing is that when the incense rises and swirls toward me, I think I’m going to faint. Luckily, we’re seated off one of the side aisles near an exit, and occasionally an icy gust sends fresh air through the crack between the heavy double doors and saves me.

During Mass I pray to the Virgin Mary. I pray to God. I pray to Saint Catherine. I took Catherine as my confirmation name because it’s my mother’s middle name and because I like Catherine’s story. She was a virgin and a martyr, and when she was put to death milk flowed from her veins instead of blood.

Free Kindle Book: Saying Goodbye

2011-12-16T10:00:00.000-08:00

This weekend, in a special promotion, you can get a free Kindle edition of Saying Goodbye, a collection of true stories about how we say goodbye to the people, places & things in our lives with grace, dignity & good humor. http://amzn.to/tcU8PP

My essay about saying goodbye to my newborn son, "Holding Him Softly," is in it.

Here are a few snippets of reviews about the collection: (and if you like the book, you might consider reviewing it on Amazon.)

Tender perspectives helping readers with their own goodbyes. If you have ever had to deal with loss, read this book. It will make you feel better. -- Christina Johns, Midwest Book Review, Oct. 18, 2010

The stories are about love, really, not sadness. Despite all the sadness and grief that come with saying goodbye, there is love and joy and comedy on the Other Side. -- Gretchen Little, Squidoo.com Lens, Oct. 29, 2010

This book gets to the heart of what I teach in my class on death and dying - that life is filled with loss of all kinds and we can learn from each one and ultimately experience life more fully. The stories in this book do a wonderful job of showing that out of loss there are new beginnings. I recommend it for any teacher of death and dying classes. I also recommend it for anyone who is struggling with a loss - no matter what kind. -- Professor Jann Adams, Department of Psychology, College of Idaho, Aug. 25, 2011

Life is full of goodbyes. Some are painful, but some are downright humorous. Saying Goodbye is an anthology of short (true) stories about people saying goodbye to a variety of people, places and things. The authors vary as much as their subjects, and this collection does a nice job of showcasing how different people have so many different experiences with saying farewell. -- Book Nook Club, Nov. 5, 2010

This is a great book. There are many anthologies out there, lots with great short stories, but Saying Goodbye is about much more. It's about memories. There are heartfelt memories, humourous memories, some extremely personal memories. Some really made me smile. Others brought tears to my eyes. -- UK author Melanie Sherratt, High Heels and Book Deals, Nov. 22, 2010

2011-11-09T16:06:00.000-08:00

"Grandma, did you want to give my daddy away when he was a little baby?" I'm sweeping the floor in preparation for my eight-year-old granddaughter's birthday party when she asks her question. In a couple of hours the house will be overflowing with pizza and kids and presents, but right now, an emptiness seizes me in the pit of my stomach.
"No," I say. "I didn't. It was sad to give him up."
"Why did you do it then?"
"It's what girls had to do in those days if they had a baby too young."
"How old were you?"
"I was sixteen when I got pregnant with him."
"That's so old. That's a good age to be a mommy." She's sitting at the table with a glass of milk and a cracker, her eyes wide as she watches me. I must seem ancient to her.
"Not really, I say." And then I explain about high school and college, and how a baby should probably have a grown-up mother.
"Bompa and Grammy said that the first time they saw Daddy they knew he was the baby for them!"
"I bet they did," I said. "Your daddy was a really beautiful baby."

A couple hours later we're all singing Happy Birthday together--Bompa, Grammy, and me--along with a the other guests. I'm wearing a black fringed shawl as a gypsy skirt, a scarf wrapped around my hair, borrowed bangles, and silver hoop earrings. It's a costume birthday party. There are pirates, a witch, an old man, a couple of versions of bat girl, cat woman, and a knight. I think of the first time I met my son's adoptive parents twenty years earlier. I stood in my hotel room that evening changing into and out of every article of clothing I'd brought on the trip. A costume party might have assuaged some of that nervousness. I'd probably have chosen to be a saint or a nun. Maybe the first woman president or a high-powered executive to disguise the bewildered and shamed teen-age girl that lived inside me in those days, not far at all from the surface.

After the cake has been devoured, the games played, the princess unwraps her presents. She sits on her chair next to her mom, dutifully reading her birthday cards, one minute in the reality of party thank yous, the next in whatever fantasyland her new toy conveys her to.

At the end of the evening my son's adoptive father comes up to me to say good-bye. "I'll bet you haven't had a hug yet today," he says.
"Not from a tall person," I say. He laughs. My son's mother and I hug, too.

In my perfect fantasy world, I would have kept my son. But in the post-reunion reality that I live in, I can't imagine things being any better.

Two Articles to Read

2011-11-01T11:16:00.000-07:00

I have a piece in the November issue of the American Adoption Congress publication, The Beacon. It's an interview with a 19-year-old adoptee. Gabrielle's Story is quite different from the way my son and I experienced adoption in 1970.

There's another story I highly recommend. It's written by a young woman I've know since she was a baby. Pema Levy is now an assistant editor at The American Prospect. Her most recent piece, Moment of Conception, conjures a future that neither adoptees like Gabrielle nor birth mothers like me like to contemplate.

November is National Adoption Awareness Month, and it is not a celebratory time for most birth mothers. We're very aware of adoption, and our stories are often bound up with an un-ending grief. Imagine a future time when all abortion is outlawed, the ranks of birth mothers increase ten-fold, and clouds of sadness and shame once again hang over our land. In that future and terrible time, it's likely that any openness that has pried its way into the world of adoption will also disappear. In that world Gabrielle will not get her wish.

Dear Facebook, I will not be relinquishing any more children

2011-10-14T16:22:00.000-07:00

While Facebook may be letting you know that the fall boots at Zappos have arrived, or that the GOP is cutting funding for NPR, Facebook has placed an ad on my sidebar from an attractive 30-something couple who want to adopt. It's one thing to have a cushy little inner tube of middle-aged weight and be constantly barraged by "the three foods that kill belly fat," but it's quite another to be a birthmother and find prospective adoptive parents hovering in your side-bar.

Get a clue Facebook. I'm now past childbearing age. While you may know that I have relinquished a child, Mother Nature has insured that I cannot make the same mistake twice. You know my birthday, Facebook, but I guess you don't know much about biology. You also don't know much about me.

And Facebook? Just to be clear, I think it would be a bad idea to advertise coffins to people who've recently lost a loved one.

photo credit: adweek.com

Women Deceived in Surrogacy Scam

2011-08-16T16:44:00.000-07:00

THE ARTICLE on the front page of the Sunday Los Angeles Times left me stunned. Women lawyers operating a baby-selling ring. The surrogates were required to give birth in California. Apparently California is "one of the only" states where the adoptive parents can be listed on the baby's birth certificate without actually going through an adoption. In other words, the adoption is completely secret. The biological un-relatedness of baby and parents kept below the radar. These adoptees won't have the option of petitioning some court for their original birth certificates. They won't even know that they're adopted unless their parents choose to tell them.
The scheme was initiated in 2008. One of the ringleaders admitted that "she had carried and delivered at least half a dozen babies for the business." Since "parents" paid $100,000 to $150,000 to call one of these infants their own, the big-boss-baby-carrier made herself a tidy sum on her own efforts alone. These women should go to prison. But maybe there's some way for them to use their legal acumen and pay their debts to society for this outrage while under modified house arrest.
Battered women's shelters, orphanages, the guardian ad litem program, and other causes could use their services. Their assets ought to be seized and given to the Open Records movements.

Photo credit: WebMD

A Brief Review of Steve Yockey's play "Heavier Than..." and Other Not-So-Random Thoughts

2011-08-05T18:24:00.000-07:00

"Is playwright Steve Yockey adopted?" I typed the words in to Google and clicked.

I saw "Heavier Than..." last Sunday at Boston Court, an excellent theater company in Pasadena that focuses on new works. Yockey's ingenious play turns the ancient Greek myth about the minotaur upside down. Like in John Gardner's "Grendel" and Barry Unsworth's "The Songs of Kings," ancient heros are booted out of the limelight, and the story is told from an opposite point of view. In the case of "Heavier Than..." it's Asterius, the monstrous minotaur in the labyrinth, who is finally given his say. Asterius is the love child of a snow-white bull (sent by the god Poseidon to King Minos of Crete) and King Minos's queen, Pasiphae. The queen kept her boy close until he became unruly and incurred the wrath of his step father. After Minos consulted the Oracle at Delphi, Asterius was cast into the labyrinth that Minos had built solely for the purpose of confining his wife's monstrous boy.

But in Yockey's excellently acted and produced play the relinquished boy is not a monster at all. True, he's killed dozens of warriors sent into the labyrinth according to local custom year after year, but now on the eve of his thirtieth birthday, he wants what he has craved all these years--a visit from his mother. He had a dream about her and he thinks the dream portends a visit. But the Three Fates, who also inhabit the labyrinth as his guardians, insist that the queen, though she loves him very much, will not appear. The best they can do is invoke their special powers which allow them to conjure scenes of life outside the labyrinth for Asterius as if they were movies, and so they show him his mother--and his half-sister. Asterius watches raptly as Pasiphae laments her youthful past to her daughter. She misses her boy. She had to relinquish him. She had no choice.

But the Fates don't control everything, it seems. Asterius's only friend Icarus, who is able to fly into the labyrinth on his massive homemade wings, tells Asterius what he knows about the queen, and it doesn't match up with the version the Fates have revealed. When the Fates show Asterius the truth, he learns that his mother and his half-sister Ariadne have plotted against him in order to save the young warrior Theseus from certain death in the labyrinth because Ariadne has fallen in love with him.

The duality of the good mother/ bad mother is fertile ground for literature, but I've rarely experienced it as heartbreakingly as I did in "Heavier Than..." where the mother in question has relinquished a child. Because I've written a full-length memoir about giving up my own son, I am always sensitive to the question of what really happened. Did I really have to give him up? Did I really? I wonder too, how subsequent children ever completely trust the mother that gave away a sibling. Do they trust me? Really?

I'm a pretty happy person these days. I've made my peace with most of my demons. But I think it's good to ask the questions. Not to be too comfortable with one's own story. There's always another point of view.

Rights for Rhode Island Adoptees

2011-08-01T15:00:00.000-07:00

It's enough to make me want to move to New England. Along with Maine and New Hampshire, Rhode Island has restored the rights of adoptees, allowing them access to their original birth certificates. Rights advocates battled for twenty years in Rhode Island, and it could be that Connecticut will be the next state to win its battle for adoptee rights.
So now there are seven states where adoptees have access to their original birth certificates. Maybe soon there will be eight.

My son's original birth certificate resides in the state of Iowa.
Dear Iowa, please look east and pay attention.

Oh, and isn't it neat--the Rhode Island state flag? It says "Hope."

My Family Tree Will Amaze You

2011-07-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

Caveat re this post: Blogger and iPad are not a happily blended family. They are the Hatfields and the McCoys. I cannot get my links to post. Worse news: I will be in this deadzone of wirelesses for 2 more weeks. I will update this post upon my return to civilization.

There have been two articles in the New York Times recently that I found interesting, given my perspective as a birthmother. The first, which opens with the example of a pair of sisters, one who served as an egg donor for the other's pregnancy, explores the question of the the child's multifaceted placement on the family tree. Biologically, she is the daughter of her aunt. In the conventional familial sense, she is the daughter of the mother (the "aunt's" sister) who is raising her as her own. This complexity is nothing new to a birthmother.

I gave up my son when I was seventeen, but I never stopped thinking of him as my son. While few people in my life knew of his existence until two decades after his birth, and I never spoke of him during those bleak pre-reunion decades, in my own internal monologue the only word I had to describe him was, "son." Now, at a point in our personal history, when we will soon be reunited for as long as we were apart, I still refer to him simply as, "my son" though I fully acknowledge that I am not the only woman who claims him as such. There is no word in the English language that means, "son who I gave to adoptive parents,later re-united with, and now have a happy relationship with." It's probably just as well since the nuances of every birthmother's story are different. Some might make a case for the term, "birthson," but it seems awkward to me--a dichotomy perhaps since I am not loathe to employ the much debated term, "birthmother." To me the difference lies in the fact that my son has two mothers--the mother who raised him and me, while all along, there has been only one of him.

It's my hope that highly visible articles about these differently formed families make birthparent reunions more acceptable and less often construed as the skeleton in the closet, but in order to accomplish that we need teachers more adventurous and open-minded than the one quoted in the article. If we are not ready to have conversations about egg and sperm donors, about birthmothers and birth fathers, I believe we are doing a disservice to the child. Want the child, but not his or her genetic history? It seems dishonest to me. Why not open our arms to all of it?

I've written about my own complicated blended family here: I am happy to explain it to anyone who has an hour and a whiteboard and several colored markers. I grew up loving all my siblings, and none of them seemed any less lovable to me. When I was a little kid, I was confused about us a bit, but once I got it, I loved my family even more.

As for that second New York Times article, check back. It deserves a blog post all it's own.

I Don't Need a Gatekeeper

2011-05-26T16:08:00.000-07:00

I joined American Adoption Congress recently after their call to action asking for Birthparents to sign the list in support of open records for adoptees. I'm not much of a joiner. I don't especially like meetings. I don't have the business skill-set to be a good organization volunteer.But I liked the idea of this list of Birthparents willing to write their names on a list to say, yes, I believe adoptees have the same rights as other adults, and no, I'm not hung up on confidentiality. Studies and surveys have shown that many Birthparents do not feel the need for a gatekeeper.
I was pleasantly surprised when their newsletter,"Decree" appeared in my mailbox. Essays and poetry with multitude of perspectives. I recommend it.

Finding Kevin Parker's Birthmother Who Gave Birth at Parkview Hospital in Riverside in 1977

2011-05-11T07:28:00.000-07:00

I recently met someone who is an adopted mom. She and her son are searching for his birthmother. She's asked me to re-post what she has posted on Facebook:

I believe my son has a right to know who his birth mother is. He was born in 1977 at Parkview Hospital in Riverside. His birth mother named him Kevin, and she used Parker as a last name on the birth certificate. She would be in her early 50's now. She once lived in Southern California, and we were told she joined the army not long after his birth. If you know anyone who fits this profile, please contact me.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Finding-Kevin-Parkers-Birth-Mother/208443199189095

This Mom's Mother's Day

2011-05-07T20:15:00.000-07:00

Tobias Wolfe, author of This Boy's Life, has this to say about his mother:
"In her life she didn't get anything right, except one thing, and that was love. After reading This Boy's Life she said: ' I'm glad you didn't tidy me up and turn me into someone I wasn't. That would have meant that I hadn't been of any use to you as a mother.' "

Giving birth to my son at seventeen and giving him up, I have to admit I didn't get much right. But I loved him. That story is not a tidy one. Hallmark doesn't have a card big enough, wide enough, or ragged enough to cover all that.

Do Your Part for Open Records

2011-04-23T19:29:00.000-07:00

As as pregnant seventeen-year-old, I wondered exactly what was meant by sealed records. Just a humble envelope? An envelope with the state seal? --done in sealing wax, perhaps? A locked file cabinet? I still don't know.
But I do know this, birthparents can help the Adoptee Access Movement in their struggle to obtain original birth certificates for adult adoptees. You can sign this form: Birthparents for Access .
Because "birthmother confidentiality" is often trotted out as an argument opposing open records, it really can help the cause to sign in favor of unsealing those records.

Another Essay Published/Future Earth Magazine

2011-03-21T11:44:00.000-07:00

This came out a little bit ago. It's not that I didn't notice and forgot to jump for joy, it's just that the dastardly Mr. Ex--- http://hisbigfatindianwedding.blogspot.com/ has been more than a little distracting of late.
I kinda know one of the editors of this lit mag and he is a very cool dude. There are some awesome artists represented in this issue, too.
Check it out. Click on THIS LINK here and then look for the link to FEM 4 "Celebrations." I'm in there somewhere. It's a piece called "Cutting Down Trees."
Thanks for reading.

Under the Same Moon

2011-03-20T07:54:00.000-07:00

Last night I went looking for the moon. I wanted to see it rising over the red tile roofs of my condo complex--benign brightness and beauty, a silver river of light pouring out of the darkness. Instead there was a dirty blanket of sky, one corner torn and scrap of light showing through. 1983, the news reports said, was the last time the moon came so close in its orbit. In 1983 I'd already been in Los Angeles nearly a decade.

I had no children in 1983. Although my son was thirteen years old and somewhere under that moon, I didn't know where. I didn't know his name. Maybe he was in a park playing basketball, or going into a movie theater to see Star Wars for the the twentieth time. Motherhood was my secret then. A part of me covered over and not allowed into the light. I wouldn't be having any more children, I thought.

In the year of this "super" moon, the light resides in my children. All three of them. It seems something of a miracle that both of my daughters, now grown women, are asleep in my house tonight. And just four nights ago I stood in my son's backyard with him and his wife and children as we took turns peering through a telescope at the moon.

photo credit: art.com

"A rose by any other name..."

2011-02-26T12:13:00.000-08:00

I've posted about language before--Here and Here. I understand that words can upset people. Some words are mean to obfuscate or insult or demean.

I got pregnant when I was 16. I kept my secret and I kept it well. Six weeks before my son was born, my mom took a guess at what was going on with me. She told my dad. Then my parents insisted that I tell my boyfriend. My sisters and brothers were kept in the dark. My boyfriend's parents had no idea. I was hidden in a foster home in the Iowa countryside for eight weeks. Then I came home. A couple of weeks later I left for college.

I told the man I married about my son. I didn't tell my friends.

After each of my daughters was born, I slipped into an abyss of grief. Then I met a young woman who told me she was a birthmother. Until that moment, I believed myself to be an unwed mother. I loved the word, "birthmother." Shortly thereafter my new friend took me to a Concerned United Birthparents meeting. Here is what CUB has to say about language:
The terms "birthmother" or "birthparent" were coined by CUB founders, including Lee Campbell, who wrote an article in a 2005 issue of the CUB Communicator describing its origin. It is a term that honors the connection between parent and child, and has never been intended as a degrading or perjorative term.
We are Concerned United Birthparents. We welcome those with adoption experiences to share with, inform and support each other. Whatever terminology you wish to use will be respected here. We ask that you do the same for others, and exercise tolerance when others do not use the words you like.
The #1 search query that leads people to CUB is "birth parents." That's what people are typing into the search engines.
From time to time, arguments will occur on the list over the terms "birthmother" or "birthparent." Others may suggest the use of "first mother" "natural mother" or just plain "mother" with no prefix whatsoever. We respect the use of the terminology you feel comfortable with, and do not impose any particular terminology on anyone. At the same time, we request you extend the same respect and courtesy to anyone who does not use the terminology you prefer.

This is my sentiment as well, and the protocol I will follow on this blog. I moderate my comments, and while I enthusiastically welcome comments that evenhandedly make a case for one word or another, I will not post comments that demean the vocabulary of others. Let us use the words we chose to use, but let's not allow our words to divide us.

I said it

2011-02-10T15:21:00.000-08:00

The statistics:

"According to Dr. Ruth McRoy at the UT School of Social Work, there are approximately 5,000,000 US births each year. Of that, approximately 118,000 are adoptions (roughly 2.36% new adoptees each year). Anywhere in the US, a minimum of 2.3% of the population are women who are also birthmothers who have placed children for adoption. Then you also have 2.3% of the population who are birth fathers, and 4.7% of the population who are adoptive parents. Total that up and you have about 11% of the population who are triad members. That does not count aunts, uncles and grandparents to adoptive families and birth families.

Whenever you are in a room of strangers you can figure that one out every ten is a triad member."
from www.reocities.com

The Evan B. Donaldson study from 1997 claims that one in five Americans is or knows someone close to them who is a member of the triad.

The 767 I flew on today had around 300 passengers. I sat next to an adoptee. How often, I wonder, do two members of the triad who are total strangers end up sitting next to one another? She was a charming 40-something on her way to visit her terminally ill 82-yr-old mother. Born to a 15-year-old, she was adopted by a woman who'd already had eleven kids.
I told her my story. "Well, you did the noble thing," the woman said. "I would not have wanted to be raised by my 15-year-old birthmother." I might have smiled and nodded or even said thank you when someone said this to me years ago.
"I don't buy that line of thinking anymore," I said today. "I think society needs to work harder at keeping mothers and babies together." She was a little taken aback, and nervously fingered the psychology textbook she'd propped on her tray table. We talked a bit longer about separating mother and child and the hole that separation leaves in both lives. She's working on her Masters in clinical psychology. Maybe just maybe what she knows about herself, what she knows about mothering her 4-year-old son, what we talked about today will affect how she counsels triad members in her future practice as a psychologist.

"Just Kids" by Patti Smith

2011-01-26T19:44:00.000-08:00

I've recently finished reading the memoir, "Just Kids" by Patti Smith. "Just Kids" is a relationship memoir recounting Smith's more than two-decade long love affair/friendship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe. The book is a moving exploration of the interplay between artist and muse--roles that were both filled by Smith and Mapplethorpe alike as they found their way to their respective versions of art.
I've never been a huge devoteé of Smith. I knew who she was, liked her music well enough the times I crossed paths with it. I read the book because I'm addicted to memoir and because I saw Smith read and sing at a local bookstore when her book first came out. I figured a poet and a songwriter would be a vivid writer--and she is.
I was stunned to learn, just a few pages into the book, that Smith gave up a child when she was 19. Sent away to a foster family because of judgmental neighbors, she gave birth to her child as nurses ridiculed her for her immoral behavior. A bit later in the book Smith writes, "Though I never questioned my decision to give my child up for adoption, I learned that to give life and walk away was not so easy. I became for a time moody and despondent. I cried so much that Robert affectionately called me Soakie." That's pretty much the last we hear of Smith's experience as a birthmother. Granted, relinquishing a baby is not the story this book sets out to tell, but I'd say Patti Smith just might have another memoir to write.
And while I liked the book a lot, that lost baby was, for me, a profound song left unsung. And it made everything else in the book ring ever so slightly less true.

Tangled/Untangled

2010-12-19T10:30:00.000-08:00

I couldn't remember the name of the movie I wanted us to see. "Is it Untangled?" I asked. "Tangled," my daughters, said. We all went. Daughters and I, the son and his wife and kids.

I remembered the fairy-tale read by my mother at bedtime, the incantation echoing in the dark long after she'd kissed me good-night. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair that I may climb the golden stair. Back then it was the blond hair that filled my dreams. Something I would never have.

"What did you think of the movie?" my son asked when we were back in his kitchen getting ready for our own fairy-tale activity of building a gingerbread house. "To me, it was a movie about adoption," I said.
"A lot of fairy tales are about that," he said.

Our adoption story has untangled itself. A fairy tale ending. The life we live is as sweet as this.

Another Piece Published

2010-12-11T07:58:00.000-08:00

I love the look of this Lit Mag.

http://ramshacklereview.blogspot.com/2010/10/black-dirt-by-denise-emanuel-clemen-i.html

A perfect fit, I think, for this piece of mine which is the first two pages of my memoir.

I have a completed manuscript and I'm looking for a publisher.

Cold and Sharp as Razors

2010-12-05T15:54:00.000-08:00

I'm not surprised anymore when someone surfaces above the murky waters of adoption. Ever since I came out of the closet as a birthmother almost twenty years ago there's been a parade of conversations where it's been revealed that someone I know has also given up a child for adoption--or is an adoptee. There's sometimes a deep and instant connection when we share our stories. And sometimes pain. I'm at a loss when an adoptee tells me he/she has searched for a birthparent, and the parent has refused contact. Usually it's the birthmother. It's the shame, I want to tell the adoptee. And the fear of revisiting the grief.

Losing a child through adoption is its own brand of grief. The death of a child, while the profoundest of tragedies, is beyond a mother's volition. Giving up a child for adoption is a choice--albeit a "Sophie's Choice" sort of choice. No doubt the death of a child continues to haunt and hurt, but unless the mother was directly responsible, the knowledge that the child is now beyond harm is perhaps some sort of balm.

I could have kept my son. That's a truth. A truth without emollient. The rough fact that I would not have had my daughters if I had kept my son is a Judas kiss. My lips feel cold and sharp as razors when I think of it.

Birthmothers in Literature

2010-11-11T16:56:00.000-08:00

I've been fascinated by birthmothers in literature ever since my mother read me Rumplestiltskin. Although the miller's daughter escaped relinquishing her son in the end, the possibility of separating mother and child was the part of the tale I found most frightening. It was a close call for the miller's daughter and her son.

It was the summer between high school and college that I read Sophocles's Oedipus Rex--the same summer that I gave up my firstborn son. All of Oedipus's troubles began because his mother gave him away, I thought. What will happen to my boy? As a theater student, I found more adoption stories in Shakespeare--A Winter's Tale, Pericles, and Cybeline-- and in the novels of Charles Dickens.

Currently I'm reading Nicole Krauss's new novel, Great House. It's a complex story with several threads. The character of Lotte is somewhat of a mystery with a tragic past. Her husband does not know how tragic, exactly.
"She struggled with her sadness, but tried to conceal it, to divide it into smaller and smaller parts and scatter these in places she thought no one would find them. But often I did--with time I learned where to look--and tried to fit them together. It pained me that she felt she couldn't come to me with it, but I knew it would hurt her more to know that I'd uncovered what she hadn't intended me to find. In some fundamental way I think she objected to being known."

Later in the marriage, Lotte develops dementia (she's about seventy-five by then,) and one day escapes from the nurse who is supposed to be tending her at home. Lotte goes into the courthouse, finds a magistrate, and tells her that she'd like to report a crime.
""What is the crime?" she asked.
"I gave up my child," Lotte announced."

Another Essay Published

2010-10-11T10:54:00.000-07:00

Today is the release date for the anthology Saying Goodbye. I have an essay in it called "Holding Him Softly"--it's about handing my son over to the adoption agency when I was 17 and he was was just a few days old.

The book is a satisfying mix of essays that are sad and funny. It would be a great gift for someone who is moving, retiring, graduating, grieving--saying goodbye to people, places, or things.

http://goodbyebook.com/

A Birthmother's Perspective

2010-09-27T17:50:00.000-07:00

On Saturday night I saw the movie, Never Let Me Go. Adapted from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel of the same name, the film opens in an alternative version of the 1970s and then jumps ahead to the 1990s. In this revised recent past great advances have been made in medical science, and people live to be well over one hundred. The initial setting is an idyllic but mysterious boarding school in the English countryside, and in a shocking and moving scene, it's revealed to some of the children that they exist simply to be living donors of vital organs and other body parts. They will begin their mission when they are young adults, donating three times or more--if they survive the surgeries, before they succumb to premature death. The children have been cloned, "modeled" the movie calls it. They have no parents and will never know life outside of the institutions that house them.

Children exploited for the purposes of adults who need something they don't have, I thought. Children who don't have a say in their own fate. Children wondering about the person they were "modeled on."

In one particularly moving scene the 20-something protagonist pages through a stack of skin magazines looking for the woman she is modeled on after she's accompanied a friend on a mission into town to view a woman working in an office who might be her friend's model. Don't you know they don't model us on people like that? the friend cries. If we want to find the person we are modeled on, we have to look in the gutter. Winos, prostitutes, addicts--the dregs of society. Those are the people who are used for models.

An adoptee's worst fears, I thought.

The movie does not disclose what happens to the modelers--whether they are destroyed in the cloning process or not. They are societies' throwaways.

Like birthmothers, I thought.

There's a serpentine bureaucracy threaded with myths and lies that yields no viable information.
Like adoption and closed records, I thought.

The movie was excellent and thought-provoking in many ways.
Of course, I brought my own experience to it and saw it from a point of view that the author and the filmmaker most likely did not intend. But I highly recommend it.

The Birth (an excerpt from Beneath the Water, the book I am working on)

2010-08-13T22:40:00.000-07:00

“Prep room” someone says. A hospital gown. A hard table. No one explains anything. The razor scrapes across my pubic bone. I am embarrassed. Humiliated. Then more. An enema with an effect so immediate I barely make it to the toilet. The nurse stands outside the curtained doorway. “Aren’t you finished yet?” she asks.

“No,” I say. The cramping might be from the baby. Or maybe not. A hot stream fires into the toilet. Why have they done this to me? Why won’t this woman—this nurse—or whoever she is step back from the curtain? Finally, legs shaking, I emerge.

White room. A bed. The TV murmurring.

I am alone.

I want my mother. I want Sarah. I want my boyfriend. I want him to bring me a bouquet of long-stemmed roses so red that they are almost black. Like my father brought my mother when I was born. She pressed them in my baby book. Which I won’t have.

Don’t need a baby book.

Don’t bring roses.

Just come.

Still morning. Still alone. Nurses come in and lift the sheet. Spread my legs. Talk to each other but not to me—as if I am only my lower half. No eyes. No mouth. No heart. Their hands are inside me. Probing. I am mortified. Sick with pain.

TV prattles. Clock ticks. Contractions compress my body like a vise turning tighter. Tighter. Still morning.

Sarah appears in my doorway. Someone is watching the kids. “I can’t do this,” I tell her. Teeter toward the toilet. Vomit.

“We all feel that way,” she says, and gives me a roll of Lifesavers from her purse. “They can’t give you anything to eat or drink, but these will help you.” Milk white vase of artificial violets on my nightstand. Then gone.

Time tips into afternoon. More nurses. More hurt. Speaking in centimeters. Then words. “Doctor O. has a dinner party to go to at 7:30,” one says to the other. Injection. Something long and plastic torn from a cellophane wrapper. Pushed inside me. A rush of wetness between my legs--warm and urgent. Floodwaters spilling over a riverbank. River of pain.

Gurney.

Hallway.

Delivery room. Masked men. Masked women. An animal howling. “No sounds,” the older man says. “I don’t want to hear any sounds from you.” Light whiter than white. I am blind. Arms strapped. Body splitting in two. Body splitting into a miracle.

4:10 p.m.

Baby out. Baby crying. Baby whisked away. Baby. “A boy,” the younger man says. “Your first?”

“She’s an unwed mother,” the older man says. Silence.

Stitches. Down there. I am ruined. Disfigured, I think. Maimed. Burning freezing shaking. My hair a lump of knots so thick I must turn my head to get comfortable.

Wheeled out the door. Hallway has a shiny floor. Eyes closing.

Land of 10,000 Billboards

2010-08-04T19:09:00.000-07:00

The billboards are as plentiful as birch trees in Minnesota.
"Face it. I had Eyes, Ears, and even my Tongue 28 days from Conception."
"God knew my soul before I was born."
"Adoption can be a Life-Saver."
The ads feature photographs of adorable babies and are impossible to miss even if you're powering down the highway at 70 miles per hour. These billboards are the work Prolife Across America, a Christian organization that makes the claim that it has been "saving babies for 20 years."

I'm not going to say much about abortion here. Hilary Clinton is the politician that makes the most sense to me with her "safe, legal, and rare" philosophy. I'm a girl who got pregnant in 1969 while attending Catholic school in a town so Catholic public school wasn't even an option. Abortion was not on my list of considerations. And now all these years later, I have to say, I'm relieved it wasn't--for me.

It's the mention of adoption on these prolife billboards that I'm concerned with.
"2 Million Couples wait to adopt."
"God made me! Mom and Dad Adopted me!"
"If you're not ready to be a Daddy, let someone who is."
I feel a little crazy at these slogans which promote adoption as the sole alternative to abortion. I find it curious that mothers do not merit a mention equivalent to the "If you're not ready to be a Daddy" campaign--in fact there's no mention of the mothers (not even in the archives of past campaigns) at all.

It seems like shame's role in the pregnancy/abortion/adoption drama should have played out by now. But I don't think it has.

I'm not a pro-lifer, but if I were and my mission was saving babies and I believed that God had entrusted me with that work, my campaign would go like this:

"If you're not ready to be a Mommy, let us help you get ready. Parenting classes and cash subsidies available!"

"Thinking of abortion or adoption? They both hurt. Let us help you keep your baby."

"Prochoice means More Choices. Keep your baby. Daycare and parenting classes available."

Of course I'd have another component to the ad campaign too:

"Sex. Everybody does it. Be safe. Be sane. Be satisfied."

"Take control of your Birth Control.

Or how about this? "DEATH TO SHAME. It makes babies and then kills them."

And of course I wonder about the financial relationships between the anti-abortion and adoption forces. If the prolifers and adoption agencies are in the conjugal bed, a plague of shame on both their houses.

Another Voice Raised

2010-07-24T19:11:00.000-07:00

A friend sent me this the other day.

http://www.hereandnow.org/2010/07/rundown-719/#5

Scroll down to:

Singer’s Search For Birth Mother Inspires New Album

The music is beautiful and haunting.
The interview is sad.

Read and Watch

2010-07-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

There's an excellent post by Claudia Corrigan D'Arcy on her blog http://www.musingsofthelame.com/
She's put up video of an interview with one of the co-authors of the book The Adoption Triangle. Annette Baran passed away on July 11th.
I found Baran to be honest, articulate, well-versed in historic adoption practices, and full of insight.
I read The Adoption Triangle ages ago as I began to search for my son, and found it to be a helpful book as I took my first steps on the road to reunion.

Thank you, Claudia.
Thank you, Annette. Rest in Peace.

Through the Rabbit Hole

2010-07-11T22:58:00.000-07:00

I've been lurking around over at Birth Mother, First Mother Forum. Their blog has 117 followers (I'm one of them) and I have been clicking on each little picture wondering who all of these women are and what their stories are. If there is a link on the profile, I click on it and read a bit of their blog, and then I look at their followers and I click on those little pictures and see if they have blogs and who their followers are and then......

Are you following me--I mean this journey through a cyberspace rabbit hole where there are birthmothers around every turn?

One thing I've noticed is this: Many of the followers and the followers of the followers, etc. do not have blogs of their own, so I don't know for sure if they are are birthmothers or not, but I bet they are. Or adoptees. There are quite a few adoptees who follow Birth Mother First, First Mother Forum, too.

There are so many of us. So many birthmothers. So many adoptees.
And now I'm hooked. Every day, I'm going to click on a couple more pictures.

Traditions

2010-07-06T21:52:00.000-07:00

Ritual and rhythm in the life of a family are good things. The same vacation spot every spring. The Christmas candles on the mantle. The turkey centerpiece. It's harder to establish traditions in a family separated by adoption even after there's been a solid reunion. There's a lot on the calendar already if you're a 21-year-old adoptee. Ditto if you're a birthmother with other children and a husband and in-laws and a big extended family. And as everyone gets older more complications (albeit mostly happy ones) spread through our calendars like kudzu. Nineteen years post reunion my son has his own family. My other children are grown with mates of their own. Three years ago my husband left me for another woman, and what was left of our shifting sense of family rhythm was thrown completely out of sync.
This 4th of July (cue the big sunburst-like golden fireworks) my son and his family came to spend the holiday with me for the 2nd year in a row. The same park, the same blankets in the same spot.
It made me insanely happy.

"Without a Map"

2010-05-21T14:25:00.000-07:00

If you are a birthmother and have not read Meredith Hall's memoir "Without a Map" I highly recommend it.

http://www.meredithhall.org/

Secret Baby

2010-05-01T21:02:00.000-07:00

I chuckled a little to myself when I read THIS.
If Ms. Bullock had concealed a pregnancy under her Oscar gown--now that would have been remarkable.
There are countless birthmothers out there whose survival depended on a well-kept secret. I was one of them.
It was easy to keep my secret under wraps, aided by the fashions of 1970. Pantyhose had replaced stockings and garter belts, but the women in my family were still uncertain how to keep our hose from sagging. We sometimes wore the new stretchier panty girdles over our panty hose. These girdles were not the old-fashioned types that made one’s body appear to have been coated in cement—they were more relaxed, but still provided support. As for dresses, there was the empire waist, wildly printed tent dresses, the A-line and the casual look of men’s shirts worn un-tucked over jeans or shorts. An old dress shirt of my grandfather’s surfaced at my house, and I wore it constantly. In addition to these fashion statements, I wore a school uniform for eight hours a day. A frumpy pleated skirt and a large blazer concealed a lot of things, which is the intention of a Catholic school uniform in the first place.
No one suspected. Not at the prom at the beginning of May. Not at graduation at the end of May. Six weeks before my son was born, I went away with a tale concocted to explain my disappearance.
A month later, I returned bereft--and concealed that too. Like so many of us did.

The Miriam Project

2010-05-01T08:19:00.000-07:00

The ruckus over Artyom has mostly settled, but I can't stop thinking about foreign adoption.
I met a woman once--a writer. I was deeply involved in working on my birthmother memoir, and she was writing a book about the the adoption of her two children from Guatemala. We treated each other delicately when we spoke. I assumed her children were orphans.
Then came the conversation when she told me that she wanted me to know how much she appreciated birthmothers in general. "I've gone back to Guatemala to see my children's birthmother," she said. Then I think she told me that she gave her some money and that the birthmother was very poor and had other children. I couldn't quite organize anything articulate to say. I mumbled something. I'm not sure what.

I know someone else who has a child from a foreign adoption. I like him very, very much. He's honest and brave. He's sweet and smart and has had way more than his share of hurt in this life. I think he told me his child's father is still alive. I'm almost positive that's what he said, but there's something that happens to my brain during conversations like this. I can't think or hear or begin to hope to say anything smart.

Here is how I wish foreign adoptions would work in the case where the child has a birth parent who is still alive: I would call this sort of adoption The Miriam Project.
The adoptive parents would adopt the parent(s) and the child. And/or sponsor some major life-changing event in the birthparent's life. Like education, or job training, or provide an upgrade in healthcare and living conditions so that the birthparent could take the child back after a year or two of intervention in whatever sad thing has pushed the parent to the inevitable-seeming breaking point where parting with one's child seems the only answer. I imagine the American family adopting a foreign child. Like many households, both the wife and the husband work. They need child care; they need the general support and love that all families need to survive. The birthparent(s) could be part of that support network and be supported as well. Blended families are the norm now. Why not blend in a birthparent or two? Like Miriam taking care of her baby brother.

Of course there are the true orphans. But how do we know if there are really no family members who want them. Remember Haiti?

That's Me in the Corner with The Dunce Hat Again

2010-03-19T23:06:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted for ages, and maybe that's because I've been trying to get comfortable in this hat again. I think it was 24 hours or so after my previous post that the news story broke about the kidnapping of the Haitian children under the guise of adoption. Since then there have been other unsavory stories in the news about foreign adoptions.
I want to believe that there are children (orphans) who need adopting and decent people who will love them.
I want to believe that because I am a birthmother.
Unfortunately, in many, many cases the adopters are unscrupulous and the children are victims.
For years I've had this scenario in my head that adoption should include the birthmother (and father) if at all possible. Why not foster a teen-ager and a baby? But maybe that's another dunce idea--that I won't write about.
Meanwhile, while on the subject of bad adoption news, I was struck by this article in the L.A. Times a few days ago. http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/latimes/access/1982653831.html?FMT=ABS&FMTS=ABS:FT&date=Mar+15%2C+2010&author=Marilyn+Elias&pub=Los+Angeles+Times&edition=&startpage=E.1&desc=Ripple+effect+of+sadness%3B+When+a+parent+hurts%2C+the+children+can+suffer+--+now+and+in+the+future.+But+depression%27s+toll+can+be+eased. The article isn't about adoption per se--it's about parents who suffer from depression and the effect that has on their children. "Evidence is mounting that growing up with a depressed parent increases a child's risk for mental health problems, cognitive difficulties and troubled social relationships." Another ripple in the adoption pond, I thought as I read on. The sadness that is the legacy of giving up a child goes on to effect subsequent children. Which could go on to effect the children's children. And so on. Big ripples in a deep, deep pond.

Haiti

2010-01-20T21:44:00.000-08:00

Orphans. I'm not a weeper, but the Rachel Madow show was more than I could take tonight. Haitian orphans on a plane headed to the U.S. Adoptive families probably in their futures.
I hope they will find love.
I hope there's no one left behind in Haiti longing for them, looking for them.
If I were just a little bit younger, maybe I would try to adopt a Hatian orphan.

Milestones

2009-12-30T14:41:00.000-08:00

In a few days, I will receive a Master's Degree in Creative Writing. It's a big milestone for me and I happen to like celebrating milestones very much.
I wasn't there when my son got his first tooth, went off to kindergarten, finished grade school or graduated from high school. I missed the first 21 years of his life. All of it.
But here's the thing about reunion--important things continue to happen and we've been there for each other.
Each year that goes by, that list will grow longer.

A Secret Not for Keeping or About Me & My Book

2009-12-09T15:57:00.000-08:00

I've written a memoir about getting pregnant at 16 in my tiny Catholic town and giving my son up for adoption--and then later finding him after delivering $2000.00 in a manilla envelope to someone I barely knew--and how this brought happiness worth so much more than that to me and my daughters.
I got a very fine agent on my first try back in the summer of 2006, and she shopped the book around to the top publishing houses and while the rejections were very complimentary, they were still rejections.
The summer of 2007 my second family was broken apart when my husband left me to marry a size zero 34-year-old with expensive taste in shoes (another memoir eventually.) I started grad school that winter and for the past two years have been busy writing my thesis (yet another book) and running around the country on writing fellowships. BUT NOW the thesis is finished, and I'm back to work polishing my birthmother memoir and readying the requisite book proposal that I will send to small publishers on my own to see if they are interested. So I have a favor to ask, dear readers. If you stop by this blog occasionally or even if you have newly stumbled onto it, would you consider being a follower? It would help me in my publishing efforts if I could say that I have a blog with a zillion followers. Publishers like these little comforts because publishing is a tough business. Books are hard to sell unless the person writing them has been cheated on by a presidential candidate, or has been a presidential candidate, or has the secret to happiness or permanent weight loss or enlightenment. I can't claim any of that, but follow me anyhow, would you? And if you know anyone who has relinquished a child for adoption, is adopted, has adopted a child, maybe send them a link to my blog.
Thank you & much love.

We Are Everywhere

2009-12-08T21:26:00.000-08:00

"No!" the poet said. I'd caught her by surprise and her eyes were filling with tears. We were at my friend Barbara's annual Book Brunch, and the poet and I had just introduced ourselves to one another and were standing in the hallway. "What's your book about?" she asked me. So I told her.
"It's the story of getting pregnant at 16, giving my son up for adoption, and then reconnecting with him just before he turned 21."
"I gave up a daughter," the poet said. "In New York." Then she went on to tell me she searched and searched and finally gave up. That she eventually forgave herself for not finding her daughter.
I'm not surprised anymore when I meet another birthmother in this fashion.
I'm just beginning to wonder how many of us there are. How many of us have searched and found--and how many are still looking. And how many have given up. I would like to see us standing shoulder to shoulder in one place, willing to be counted.

In The Shadow of the Twin Spires

2009-11-09T16:59:00.000-08:00

I worried about going to hell pretty frequently during my 8 years of Catholic grade school. Girls were warned constantly against impure thoughts, words and deeds. It was hard to measure up against the martyred virginal saints who valued their purity more than their lives.

When I got pregnant my senior year of high school, I felt marked forever as a sinner.

Nowadays, in my home town, things are different. Young unmarried women don't have to keep their pregnancies secret and give away their babies. And guess what? The church is still standing. It hasn't been struck by a bolt of lightening or slid into the river.

What I'd once thought of as a narrow-minded main street seems broader now and prettier. Almost fairy-tale lovely--a place where families can live happily ever after.

It's an over-simplified view. I know that. But still, it's a different world than the one I grew up in.

Adoptees Need Their Medical Histories

2009-11-08T16:46:00.000-08:00

My son once told me that being adopted was like being in the Witness Protection Program--but without access to family medical history. With all the debate about healthcare swirling around us, I find myself thinking about healthcare and adoption. I most definitely want reasonably priced healthcare for all Americans. BUT adoptees need more than that--which is to say they need what those of us familiar with our biological families have. Our medical histories.
I know what my grandparents died of...and my father. I know that my mother has high blood pressure and that quite a few people in my family have circulatory issues (Maybe from smoking.) I know that despite the fact that most of us are as pale as the underbelly of an eyeless sea-creature, no one has contracted skin cancer. And that while we can eat pretty much anything, I know we've got one member with severe wheat allergies and issues with dairy. Another is allergic to dessert pollens and olive trees. Curvature of the spine is a big issue. Maybe hip degeneration. Imagine not knowing those things about yourself. And when adoptive parents hold that baby in their arms, don't THEY want to know? My maternal grandmother was allergic to penicillin and Novocain. One of my three children has that penicillin allergy and it can be life threatening. How can parents rest easily without knowing? For many, many adoptees, the information is available. Unsealing adoption records would make it accessible.

Dreamer Rescues Baby from Bridge

2009-11-01T13:59:00.000-08:00

Last night, I had this dream.

I was walking in a beautiful city. Cobblestone streets, a stone bridge. There were people carrying packages and bustling here and there. I was alone. Just as I stepped onto the bridge I saw the woman with the two little boys. She was hurrying with one boy, about four years old, by the hand--and a baby boy in her arms. The woman was petite and with shoulder length black hair and the boys had black hair too. They were Asian. Maybe Japanese. The woman had an untidy bundle under one arm and when she got to the middle of the bridge she unfurled it. The partially inflated kiddy pool landed in the water and she turned and held the baby over it. I was beside her by then and I flung my arms around them. “Can I have him?” I asked the woman.

“Take him,” she said. “Here.” Her chest was heaving and her eyes were bright with tears. She handed the baby to me as the pool floated under the bridge and made its way downstream. Then she ran, pulling the older boy behind her. The other people who’d been passing by stopped for a moment, but once I had the baby in my arms, they went on their way, looking backwards just for a moment as I stood on the bridge holding the boy. The baby himself seemed unfazed by the drama. His dark eyes looked right into mine and his hands clutched my shirt. I patted his back. His striped cotton shirt felt soft and clean. Well, I have a baby, I thought. The light was draining from the day and the streetlights began to flicker on. I walked across the bridge in the same direction the mother had gone. I listened for sirens, watched for police officers that might approach me. I was prepared to explain what had happened. It was obvious the boy wasn’t mine. I was white and sliver-haired, far too old for a baby that age. The boy was Asian with spiky black hair that stood up straight from the crown of his head. But the police never arrived.

The baby was easy to carry. He was maybe ten months or a year old but not heavy, not squirmy. I carried him into a fancy boutique and set him down for a moment on a satiny pink bench. I straightened my jacket, adjusted my purse and picked the boy up again. He looked worried now—as if he might cry. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’ll take care of you. I’m your new mommy.” He nodded and clutched my shirt tighter. I knew then I didn’t want to call the authorities. The boy had lost his mother and if I called the police and reported what had happened, he’d lose me too.

My own past real-life history didn’t enter in to the dream. I wasn’t a woman who had walked away from her own little boy. I was a heroine who’d rescued a baby who had nearly been thrown from a bridge. We stepped out into the fresh night air and I phoned my daughter. “I found a little boy,” I told her. “Can you go out and buy a box of diapers?”

“What size?” she asked.

“I think he’s about a year old,” I said, “but he’s small. Just make a guess,” I said. She grumbled a little. “I found him,” I repeated. I don’t know how old he is.”

“Right on,” she said.

The anxiety flooded in after I stuffed my phone back into my purse. I was taking home a baby that didn’t belong to me. What would the guy I was dating say? He was Asian, too, and I hoped that might make him like the idea of the baby a little more. But we frequently sighed with relief at the fact that we’d both made it through parenthood and that our kids were grown. I often spent the night at his place and we liked being alone. Now there was a baby. Poor baby whose mother had nearly murdered him. And what about the baby’s brother? What would happen to him? What had I been thinking? Why hadn’t I offered to take the older boy, too? I tried to reconstruct the moments after I’d lifted the baby from the mother’s arms. Had I seen which way she’d turned after she’d crossed the bridge? Maybe I should walk around the neighborhood and ask everyone I saw if they knew where the Asian woman with two little boys lived. “What’s your name?” I asked the boy as we stood in the atmospheric lighting of the boutique with music playing in the background.

“Anthony,” he said with perfect diction.

“Anthony what?”

“Anthony.”

“Okay,” I said. “How old are you?”

“Six months,” he said.

I laughed. The boy was obviously much older than that. With such perfect speech, he was probably even older than I’d first thought. “You’re not six months old,” I told him, laughing.

“Yes, I am,” he said.

I heard the voices in the hallway then. I pulled the pillow off my head and fumbled for my Blackberry. It was seven-thirty and I was confused. It took me a minute to realize I was waking up in my nephew’s bed. He’d been exiled to the couch and my brother and my mother’s voices were wafting down the hallway from the dining room or the kitchen.

I hadn’t rescued a baby, after all.

I was still just the woman who had given one away.

Holding Cory

2009-10-31T11:15:00.000-07:00

I got another essay published last week. And to make it even sweeter, my friend Elizabeth Aquino has a piece in the same issue.
http://www.themomegg.com/themomegg/Current_Issue.html
Elizabeth's piece is titled, Thoughts on a Picture of Sophie in a Silver Frame. She's a wonderful writer with a fabulous blog--http://www.elizabethaquino.blogspot.com/
My piece is called Holding Cory.

Adoption and Universal Healthcare

2009-10-24T17:21:00.000-07:00

I spent a month in France recently and had a few discussions with French acquaintances about the health care debate currently raging in the U.S. It got me thinking.

What if a woman who was considering relinquishing a child for adoption could rest assured that her child would have cradle to the grave health coverage?

It seems that in this day and age when shame and sin play a lesser role in the decision making process of many birthmothers, it might be healthcare--or the prospect of raising a child without it--that pushes one toward adoption.

And if we had universal healthcare, covering a birthmom's maternity expenses could no longer be part of the currency of adoption.

And let's go a step further into the world of socialist governments. Education would be free--including the university. There's goes the argument for giving up your child to provide him or her better opportunities.

A playing field that level could change a lot of things. Not everything for everyone, of course. But for many, I'd guess.

Transition

2009-10-12T23:55:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me that ever since I relinquished my son for adoption I have been, in one manner or another, trying to re-make my life into something new.

When my husband left me a couple of years ago, I was forced to re-double those efforts and began to really pursue writing--working on an MFA and trying for fellowships and sending work out to places that mostly send rejection letters on little strips of paper (not even a whole sheet) and the messages are pretty terse and to the point. Getting something published is not quite as futile as getting hold of an original birth certificate, but it's close.

But what I am thankful for in this morass of rejection (in addition to the love of friends and family, of course) are those little glimmers that encourage. This morning as I prepare to leave a wonderful writer's residency in France and am feeling like I didn't get enough accomplished and maybe the wonderful organization that sent me here will eventually figure out I'm a loser if I don't get a book out into the world very soon, blah, blah...this was in my email in-box from Literary Mama, a wonderful online magazine

Creative Nonfiction
I'd Rather Die by Ice Than by Fire
by Denise Emanuel Clemen

The world is a terrible place. Boyfriends going off to war, babies and mothers split apart, couples unable to have their own babies, and me hustled off to the countryside to keep the shame of my predicament from ruining my family, while I worry that I'll go to hell anyway even if my secret stays kept.

The essay came out several months ago and now apparently Literary Mama has used it in their subscriber email as a featured piece from their archives. So if you haven't read it, here it is.

http://www.literarymama.com/creativenonfiction/archives/002363.html

Adoptive Parents Read This: You Might Be at the Top of the Triangle

2009-10-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

When I think about how the past 18 years of reunion have gone with my son and the hows and whys of all of it, I can't help but think about his parents (his adoptive parents.) Especially his mother. She had lost a child herself, and I think because of this experience, was able to understand what I had lost. In our correspondence through letters and in person, in all these years she has never once been negative toward me, any aspect of the reunion process, or post-reunion life. The last two years, we've been at the same Thanksgiving table.

If there are any adoptive parents who stumble onto this blog, I encourage you to imagine yourself sitting at the top of the triangle. Imagine your arms and hands stretching downward. See the strength in connecting all of us.

Why I'm an Idiot--But There's Really No Excuse

2009-10-02T08:04:00.000-07:00

A few posts ago, I wrote about reunion vis a vis the California Adoption Bill (Assembly Bill 372.) Yay, I thought, more birthparents and adoptees will be reunited. I think I got an email from some nefarious person or organization touting what a good idea this was and that only encouraged my naive stupidity. There was a clause in the bill (now in some lucky legislative limbo) that required birthparent consent, which is a huge impediment to open records. The bill was a trick. A ploy to get in the way of open records.

I'm in the middle of a divorce, writing the thesis for my MFA, trying to rise out of the ashes once again and my brain is somewhat broken.

The Ties That Bind

2009-09-26T03:14:00.000-07:00

It's strange how a common experience can bind us to another human being. Even someone very different. Ex Manson follower Susan Atkins died on Thursday. http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/09/25/california.manson.atkins/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn

It was this quote from the story that made me feel connected to a self-confessed convicted killer.

Atkins gave birth to a son while living at Spahn Ranch, an old movie set, with other members of the Manson family. While she was on death row, she wrote, he was legally taken from her because no one in her family was willing to raise him.

"His name and identity have been changed and sealed, so I have no idea where he is or how he is doing," she wrote. "I have since been told his name was changed to Paul, and whether or not that is true I like it. ... My continuing separation from my son, even after all these years, remains an incredibly poignant and enduring loss."

Happy Birthday

2009-07-15T23:02:00.000-07:00

Today is my son's birthday--or so he's been told. It wasn't uncommon in 1970 for adoption agencies to tamper with details like birth dates. Sometimes, when the amended birth certificates were generated, changes were made and searches were thereby hampered. But I hesitate to make these accusations because it could be that in my effort to put my son's birth behind me and begin anew, I may have confused his due date with his date of birth. Giving birth to my son was a secret event known only to my parents and my boyfriend and when I emerged from hiding, I was supposed to forget and move on.

I've heard that this confusion is not unusual among birthmothers. Dates might be forgotten, but never our babies.

Buy a Chinese Baby

2009-07-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

This blog has been languishing much like the effort to unseal adoption records in many U.S. States. Writing has kept me traveling since my last post, and many of the places I've traveled through and spent time in have variations of the adoption laws I've commented on. It was depressing to belabor the point. So far in 2009, I've spent time in Vermont, New York, Maryland, Minnesota, Iowa (where my son was adopted) Nebraska & Oregon. Only Oregon has open records. I've driven through Nevada (where gambling & prostitution are legal 24 hours a day) Utah & Colorado. It's a big country and the prospects of birth parents and children reuniting are sparser than opportunities for a gourmet meal along the interstate.

Meanwhile, what I had envisioned as my personal contribution to the struggle--my book about my experience of relinquishing and reconnecting with my son--has languished too, as I put more and more effort into finishing my MFA. However, an article in the BBC news this morning got me going. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8130900.stm

The writer in me hatched a dastardly plot: Adopt (buy) a Chinese baby and then give her back to her parents. Of course, one would have to know who the parents are.

California Bill

2009-02-11T16:31:00.000-08:00

I like to think about the people who could reunite as a result.

http://www.calopen.org/

Published!

2009-02-08T15:27:00.000-08:00

I really haven't written much about my book (yet to be published) on this blog. Other things & ideas have taken precedence. But now I have birthmother piece that's just come out.

http://www.literarymama.com/creativenonfiction/archives/002363.html

It's a distillation from a few different chapters and tells a story that will be familiar to birthmothers of a certain era.

Literary Mama is a wonderful online magazine---worth reading regularly.

Adoption Laws in the Desert

2009-01-27T19:12:00.000-08:00

Here in Arizona--

access to adoption records

Obtaining Non-Identifying Information:Non-identifying information (Remember non-identifying is the operative word in this sentence) is available to adoptive parents or a child's guardian, adopted adults age 18 or older, an adopted adult's spouse, birthparents, birth siblings, and-if an adopted adult is deceased-his or her adult children (age 18 or older).

Note the ad. If you google anything about adoption, there is often a link you can click on to give a baby away. I find it especially pernicious, that girl or woman googling 'birthmother' in an effort to find insight, support, a lifeline will almost always find the first listings on the Google search page to be primers for how to give up her baby.

More Pregnant? Click Here

Obtaining Identifying Information:

An adopted adult age 21 or older or a birth parent can provide a notarized statement granting consent or withholding consent to the release of information. If consent is given, then the information will be given to the requesting party.This is actually pretty straightforward. If both parties--adoptee and birthparent understand the system and provide the notarized statements, they should be able to find one another! Any party may try to obtain identifying information by petitioning the court for compelling need.

Using a Confidential Intermediary:

The following parties may use the services of a confidential intermediary:

birth siblings age 21 or older;
adoptive parents or legal guardians of adopted adults age 18 or older;
adopted adults age 21 or older;
the immediate, adult relatives (age 21 or older) of a deceased adopted adult;
birth parents; or
birth grandparents if birth parents are deceased.
Wow--that's a pretty inclusive list.

A confidential intermediary must obtain written consent from both parties before releasing information. Adoptive parents may file an affidavit that prohibits the confidential intermediary from contacting the adopted adult unless the adoptive parents remove the affidavit or the adopted adult files an affidavit stating that he or she knows he or she is adopted and wishes to make contact with the birth parents. Holy shit--no matter how old the adoptee is? Birth parents can file an affidavit prohibiting contact with birth siblings.

Contact:

Arizona Confidential Intermediary Program
Arizona Supreme Court
Attn: Torin Scott
1501 W. Washington
Phoenix AZ 85007
(602) 542-9586 or (602) 542-9580
cip@supreme.sp.state.az.us
http://www.supreme.state.az.us/cip/

Providing Information:

Supplemental information may be placed in the file by any of the following parties: birth parents, adopted adult, adoptive parents, or family of the adopted adult. This is cool--so for example, let's say you had some compelling reason against reunion (rare)--you could still add current medical information to the file.

Obtaining an Original Birth Certificate:

An adoptee must petition the court in which the adoption was finalized.

Contact:

The Arizona Supreme Court

Chance

2009-01-09T14:01:00.000-08:00

The world is full of adoptees and birthmothers, some reunited and many still unknown to one another. There are siblings out there, too. Some of whom dream of having a brother or a sister and don't know that they already have one. And maybe that person they're wishing for has the same brown eyes or the same dimple or a similar set of freckles or loves the same kind of chocolate or drives the same car. I've seen statistics that say there are somewhere between two million and six million birthmothers alive today in the U.S. Probably no one knows how many are reunited with their children. If you consider the siblings that have been separated by adoption, there are millions of people out there looking for each other.

Here's a story where two siblings found one another by chance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dZU5NgF1yw&feature=PlayList&p=63533F63B3AC45FE&index=0&playnext=1

I dreamed of finding my son by chance almost from the moment I let him go. And although, coincidence has salted a pretty healthy dash of "you must be kidding" to our story, I don't think we would have ever found one another if I hadn't searched for him. Searching for my son, due to the sealed records in the state of Iowa, was a frustrating and useless venture. But Chance was there all the same waiting in the form of a person who'd happened to hear of a person, who knew of a person who could help. I have no idea who that person was--if it was a man or a woman, an adoptee or a birthparent, maybe even an adoptive parent--but if I had to give the person a name, I'd call him/her Mr. or Ms. Chance.

Knowing vs. Not Knowing

2009-01-06T21:43:00.000-08:00

This was an interesting piece in the NY Times the other day.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/opinion/02ullman.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Here's my response (which did not get published.)

I try frequently to step into the shoes of an adopted person. I’ve been trying these shoes on for size ever since I was a pregnant sixteen-year-old in a small Catholic town in 1970, knowing that my only respectable recourse was to keep my pregnancy a secret and give my son up for adoption.Like Ellen Ullman’s records, my son’s adoption file was sealed, too. His original birth certificate, which bore the standard particulars of birth along with my name and his name listed only as “Baby Boy MacDonald” contained information that I was already well aware of. Yet, I was not allowed to have a copy.

My son, whom I reunited with when he was twenty-one, says that being adopted is like being in the witness protection program--but without the medical information. While Ullman is certainly entitled to tell herself any story she likes about her origins, I object to her passive glossing over of the disservice that sealed records inflicts on both adoptees and birth parents. Yes, it is true there are many ways to conceive and carry a child these days, but it seems a shame to let the intricacies of that conversation obscure the totalitarian approach state governments take toward adoption records. And I suspect that Ullman herself, having made the phone call regarding her adoption file, might someday like to fill out a form in her doctor’s office without drawing a slash through the medical history section and marking it “unknown.” Her essay betrays a longing for other things, too, and I sincerely wish the power to discover those things resided in her hands and not with the state of New York.

I’m willing to give not-knowing its due. I’m fine with not knowing whether or not my son’s five-year-old daughter whose baptismal picture looks just like my own will turn out to resemble me or share my talents when she’s a mature woman. But I could never be fine with not knowing she existed at all.

Adoption Laws in the Frozen North

2009-01-06T15:15:00.000-08:00

I'm in Minnesota. This may be redundant, but why stop now?

access to adoption records

Obtaining Non-Identifying Information:

Adoptive parents and adopted adults (age 19) may obtain non-identifying information. Nothing new here.

Obtaining Identifying Information:

Identifying information is provided on the original birth certificate, which is released according to the provisions below.

Obtaining an Original Birth Certificate:

An adopted adult can request a copy of the original birth certificate. At this time the Commissioner of Human Services will attempt to locate the birth parents to obtain consent to release the original birth certificate. If each birth parent is located and consents are given, the original birth certificate will be released.I'm noting the use of the plural here. On my son's birth certificate, I asked that the father be listed as "unknown" as a means of protecting my boyfriend. We never told his parents and it was my way of protecting him.If there is no reply or contact with the birth parents, for adopted adults adopted before August 1, 1977,so these people would be 32 years old now the adopted adult must petition the court for release of the original birth certificate. If the adoption was finalized on or after August 1, 1977, then the original birth certificate will be released to the adopted adult if the birth parents have not filed an access veto. Once again, when was the access veto filed and do they know how to rescind it if they want to?

And here's another aspect of adoption law:

Under Minnesota law, a woman who gives birth to a child has "parental rights" to the child. These include the right to have the child live with you, to raise the child, and to make decisions about the child's upbringing, including the right to decide to place the child for adoption.

If a birth mother wants to place the child for adoption, she signs a consent to adoption form. Once a birth mother signs a proper consent to an adoption, the law requires that the mother be given ten working days for her to change her mind. After the ten days are up, the consent may not be revoked by the mother unless the court finds that the mother's consent was obtained through fraud.

Ten days.

What You Get When You Google "Birthmother"

2008-12-27T16:11:00.001-08:00

I find the list troubling. Most of the links go to sites whose primary focus is adoption. The site called Birthmom Buds is especially unnerving. Founded by two birthmothers, they offer mentoring by birthmothers who have relinquished. If they are as unbiased as they say

("although you may be making an adoption plan, you are not actually a birthmom, until you sign relinquishment papers. Until then, you are simply an expectant mother preparing for her child's future! Our biggest piece of advice to you is to research both the options of parenting and adoption. You truly can not make an informed decision unless you have educated yourself on both options. Take this time to explore both of those options and then make a final decision!" )

maybe they should offer mentoring by women who decided not to relinquish. There are all kinds of subtle and not so subtle messages on this sight that point towards giving up the baby.

Birthmother.org is geared toward adoption, too and BirthmothersUnite has a vibe that is part religious and part Hallmark card, though to give them their due, they do seem to understand the drive for search and reunion.

AdoptionOpen purports to offer birthmother support, but they are also promoting adoption. BirthmotherResources was created by an adoption agency.

I'd like to see some real birthmother presence on the web. But I'm guessing all the possible domain names have been purchased by adoption agencies.

I'm going to work on creating a list of blogs.

Adoption Laws in the Heartland

2008-12-27T15:31:00.000-08:00

I travel. A lot. Right now I'm in Nebraska where I was hoping I'd find snowy walks in the woods under brittle skies, but everything is a shade of brown or gray and while I'm waiting for my grad school seminar to start, I'd rather be inside than outside so I'm googling again. Here's what I've got on accessing adoption records here in the heartland. Again, the comments in red are mine.

access to adoption records

Obtaining Non-Identifying Information:

Adoptive parents at the time of placement and adopted adults can receive medical information. This is pretty much the same situation as Hawaii. The medical information is gathered at the time of the birth/ placement. Who is updating the medical information that Nebraska authorities deem adult adoptees can receive? Let's say you're an adult adoptee of 25 or so and you want to start your own family and would like a heads up on possible genetic conditions. Twenty-five-year-old information won't present the entire picture. It probably won't even come close.

Obtaining Identifying Information: See below. Birth parents may file a consent or non-consent form with the State social services department regarding their information. And again, do birthparents know how to update that information? Is there an administrative fee? The adoption agency I used charged me $25.00 for the non-identifying information they gave me.

Obtaining an Original Birth Certificate:

As a preface, let me say that withholding original birth certificates from birthmothers is unnecessary since there is nothing on the birth certificate that they wouldn't already know. Refusal to let a woman have the certificate of birth for her child can be construed only as an act of intimidation.

Adults who were adopted on or after September 1, 1988, (so you have to be older in Nebraska than you do in Hawaii. This is all so random)can receive a copy of the original birth certificate, medical records on file, and information about agency assistance in searching, unless a birth parent has filed a non-consent form. Adults who were adopted before September 1, 1988, upon written request to the court, can receive identifying information and a copy of the original birth certificate if both birth parents have consented.

The Law

- Nebraska Revised Statute 43-113 et. seq.
An adopted person 25 years of age or older may request access to the names of relatives or the original birth certificate.

Upon receipt of such a request, the bureau shall look for consent and non-consent (veto) forms.

If a birth parent consent is on file, and there is no veto filed by the adoptive parents, The adoptive parents have veto power over a 25 yr. old? A 30 yr old? A 40 yr old?the bureau shall release identifying information to the adoptee.

If no birth parent consent is on file, and if no adoptive parent veto filed, the adoptee will be given the name and address of the court which issued the adoption decree, the name of the agency involved if any, and the fact that an agency may assist the adoptee in searching for relatives.

If the birth parent(s) is/are deceased, and there is no adoptive parent or birth parent veto on file, identifying information shall be released. Yup, that's right. If they're dead, the state will help you find your birthparents. The makings of a tragedy right there in the Nebraska adoption statutes.

If birth parent consent(s) has been filed, and there is no adoptive parent veto, the original birth certificate shall be given to the adoptee. Still...gotta have permission from your adoptive parents.

If there is no birth parent consent on file, and no adoptive parent veto, the adoptee may ask the agency to undertake a search to seek such consent. Costs shall be borne by the adoptee, irrespective of the outcome. How about a little more heartache?

Medical history information contained in agency files shall be provided to an adoptee upon request, with names and place of birth redacted.

I've been reunited with my son for 17 years. The sisters he might never have known under the restrictive adoption laws in the state of Iowa have had him in their lives as long as they can remember and we are all better for it.

Adoption Laws in Paradise

2008-12-22T10:53:00.000-08:00

I'm in Hawaii right now, sitting in my hotel bed, thinking and googling (which sometimes go very nicely together.)

Here's how it is if you are an adoptee in the state of Hawaii: The comments in red are mine.

access to adoption records

Obtaining Non-Identifying Information:

Adoptive parents and adopted adults may receive ethnic and medical history. Keep in mind that the medical history they are most likely referring to is the information they gathered from the birthparents at the time of the birth. A lot of medical stuff develops later in life.

Obtaining Identifying Information:
For adoptions finalized before January 1, 1991, so these adoptees would be 18 or older adopted adults or adoptive parents must petition the court for information. The court will send a notice to the last known address of the birth parents. If no response is received, the adopted adult can access his or her information.This is good news for the adoptee, I guess. But it leaves the birthmother out of the loop unless she hasn't moved since the adoption. For adoptions finalized after December 31, 1990, the adopted adult or adoptive parents can receive information if there is no affidavit on file requesting confidentiality. A young birthmother who is facing the shame of an unplanned pregnacny or who has kept her pregnancy a secret from key people in her life is likely, I think, to request an affidavit of confidentiality. My question: What happens a few years down the road when she's found she can't forget her baby, move on, etc. etc. Does she have information on how to undo the affidavit?

Using the Adoption Registry:

Adopted adults and birth parents may register.

Contact:

Family Court Registry
Court Management Services
777 Punchbowl Street
Honolulu, HI 96811

Obtaining an Original Birth Certificate:

An adoptee must petition the court in which the adoption was finalized.

There are situations I can imagine where the adoptee might not know this.

Nibble Nibble at My House

2008-12-20T14:32:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about the concept of family and the effort and grace it takes to keep love in tact. My first experience at creating my own family was an utter failure and it was 21 years until I saw my first-born child. There were 20 Christmases, 2o Thanksgivings and 20 birthdays before I knew my son's name or where he lived. Our reunion reverberated through his adoptive family and through my own new family with a husband and 2 little girls, yet somehow we made ourselves a new family without damaging the roofs that already sheltered us.

All of my children are adults now, and in the aftermath of my divorce from my daughters' father, I think about family life as bricks and stones that need regular shoring up to keep the walls from falling down. In our case, a lot of travel is required--this holiday involves travel across a desert and an ocean for my youngest child and myself and every mile is part of the path that leads us to the sweetness of hearth and home.

As I lay on the couch at my son's house with my oldest grandchild--just the two of us singing Christmas carols in the dark beside the lighted Christmas tree--I noticed how our voices blended together and thought, for just a moment in the midst of that joy, about the birthmothers who not only don't know their children, but whose grandchildren are also lost to them.

Sealed

2008-12-13T21:44:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about social progress vs. political progress. I saw the movie Milk the other night. A lot has changed for gays since the 70s. Nowadays, many gays & lesbians carry on with their lives without keeping secrets about their sexual orientation. There's a fair amount of social acceptance for them, but legislated equal rights is another story.

There are no overt social prejudices against adoptees (though I think birthmothers continue to be marked with a stigma)--yet most states have yet to pass legislation that will grant adoptees access to their birth records. The fact that those records remain sealed and off limits to adult adoptees is a political wrong.

Nominated

2008-12-13T21:06:00.000-08:00

My friend Elizabeth, http://elizabethaquino.blogspot.com/ recently got the Uber Amazing Blog award and has now nominated my blog. So now, I'm going to nominate some of my favorite blogs (besides Elizabeth's.) They are:

http://www.writingtime.typepad.com/

http://badladies.blogspot.com/

http://www.literarymama.com/interact/blog/

http://www.schuylersmonsterblog.com/

Now, these bloggers need to do the following:

1. Put the logo (award image) on your blog or in a post.
2. Nominate 5 (or 6) blogs that you feel are Uber Amazing.
3. Let them know that they have received the Uber Amazing Blog Award by commenting on their blog.
4. Link to the person who gave you the award (which would be me, of course).

Intentions

2008-12-12T13:10:00.000-08:00

There's been a legal case in the news this week--Robertson vs. Princeton. It's a issue of donor intent. The Robertson family has been battling for control over the Robertson Foundation which was created to prepare students for careers in government service through Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs. The family claims Princeton has misused the donation. The problem is that times have changed. The government now outsources this type of work and the Princeton program has turned into a business degree factory instead, as the family intended, a training ground for diplomats.

Donors never know what the future will hold.

NPR, in their reporting on this case, cited the example of a a donor who, in the 50's, left a sum of money for homes for unwed mothers. When was the last time you heard of one of those places? Social change has rendered that particular donor's wishes obsolete.

I thought I would end up in a home for unwed mothers, but because I kept my pregnancy a secret until 6 weeks before my son was born, I had to be hustled out of town to the most readily available place--a foster family who had a farm out in the countryside about 60 miles from my hometown.

I learned an interesting fact about the adoption agency that handled my son's adoption. It began in 1896 as a "home for wayward girls" (so described by the current director of the agency.) It seems that the mothers and children were housed there together. The "girls" were counseled and attended an industrial training school while the babies were eventually placed for adoption. I would love to know if the mothers were allowed to be with their babies or if they were kept apart. In 1970, when my son was born, babies were whisked away in the delivery room and the mothers were not allowed to see them.

More About Words

2008-12-07T21:08:00.000-08:00

I have a friend who is adopted and after she read what I had to say about the words birthmother and relinquish, it started her thinking about the language of adoption, too. She says "it's like a dance society does as it continually steps on toes."

She doesn't like the word "chosen." I hadn't thought about it before, but the images it calls to my mind are pet store window, shelf of dolls or maybe the roster of eligible men I occasionally peruse on my favorite internet dating site. It seems to me that adoptive parents choose to adopt, but they seldom choose the baby (or at least they didn't in the 50s, 60s and 70s. ) Telling a child she's been chosen has implications meant to candy coat the fact that she's been given up. I can see why parents would do that. I can see that a young child might like that story......for a while even though it's not accurate. But later on it's just one more thing that dances around the truth--and people get hurt.

Anything Can Bring It Back

2008-12-05T08:02:00.001-08:00

I got an email from my friend Elizabeth the other day. She'd found a blog from a woman whose brother was given up for adoption when he was a baby and is now helping her mom (their mom) search. This "birth sister's" writing went right to my gut and before I knew it, the feeling came back.

It's mostly centered in my gut, this feeling, and radiates out from there. It's like evil butterflies. Like life or death fear and it wouldn't be a painless or clean or peaceful death. I felt this way sitting on a picnic table in the park the day I met my very first birthmother (other than myself) and she told me she wanted to search for her lost daughter and asked me if I wanted t search for my son.

The butterflies radiate out from the center and the beating of their wings cause a quaking and it takes energy to keep from full-out shaking--I mean St. Vitus dance arms and legs akimbo flailing--and the effort makes feel like I could sleep for a week if I could just relax and make the feeling go away. But it won't.

I felt like this every time I told my story to friends and family. And then, even years later when I started to write about it, the feeling was there. Not that long ago, I told someone it had been only recently that I could re-visit the experience of having given up my son without experiencing that shaking.

But it can still come back.

A Word About Words

2008-11-28T14:07:00.000-08:00

I've been looking at other adoption/birthmother blogs and general adoption sites on the internet.

There is no consensus among birthmothers about what we want to be called. Some of us think the word "birthmother" is derogatory and implies being used as a breeder. The word birthmother is sometimes a hyphenate, sometimes a compound word. I like the word birthmother in its run-on one word fashion. There's something headlong about it that describes my personal experience--the I can't believe this is happening, but it is happening and there's no way I can stop it or change it. Birthmother seems appropriate for other reasons, too. I gave birth to my son. I'm his mother--even if he has an adoptive mother whom he thinks of as more-his-mother than me. The other terms out there include bio-mother or biological mother, first mother, exiled mother. I desire no squabble with any woman who has had a child and relinquished it for adoption--let her call herself by the name she prefers and let us not divide ourselves from one another.

The word "relinquish" interests me. It was the word used by my social worker in 1970 as I prepared to give up my son and it's in common parlance today as well. I use it, but I would like to break myself of the habit.

Relinquish according to Webster means to withdraw from, to retreat from, leave behind or give up--and here's the part that pisses me off. It "usually does not imply strong feeling but may suggest some regret, reluctance, or weakness." I wonder if adoption professionals got together and handpicked this word. I find it far more insulting than "birthmother" or any of its alternatives.

Here's the list of what I'm thankful for:

2008-11-26T20:15:00.000-08:00

The sight of my youngest child giving the youngest grandchild a "plane ride" by lifting him into the air on her feet while lying on the ground with her legs extended.

The sound of the blender in the kitchen and my son asking me, "salt or no salt?"

The ring of my my cell phone with the song "Wooden Ships on the Water"--this means the sailor daughter is calling, even though she can't join us in person.

So much happy noise that it's hard to have a conversation.

I'm thankful, too, to be at my son's house. The table here where all of us--adoptive parents, birthmother, children, grandchildren and siblings gather.

Every Story Happens in a Particular Place at a Particular Time

2008-11-23T20:34:00.000-08:00

This is how my book begins:

I come from black dirt.

I come from tee totaling Presbyterians, fallen Catholics, and a small town where nothing is taller than the church steeples.

I come from the river and all the muck that lies at the bottom of it. I come from snow-white cranes on water and the hidden places in the woods that shelter a mushroom so delectable it melts your taste buds like a hot skillet melts butter. I come from red-winged blackbirds, and the shock of a flash of scarlet as they flutter up from a ditch beside the road. I come from fields and bare feet watching out for thistles and cow shit. I come from people who mind their own business and yours, from whispers, party lines and pointing fingers.

I come from weather; hail of all sizes, lightning bolts big enough to rip the sky wide open, tornadoes that will turn your town into a pile of sticks, and summer heat that just might last forever. I come from the relief of a sigh made visible by the cold on a morning when a blizzard blots out the road and school is cancelled. I come from rain that entire counties pray for day and night. I come from corn, and more corn--fields you can hide in where the shiny leaves are sharp enough to slash your arms; corn on the cob on a butter-soaked paper plate at a barbeque; corn in the feed trough stuck to the shiny wet-black nose of a steer that’s next summer’s steak.

I come from pitchers of peonies on old oak tables, and a girlhood of hats and gloves. I come from children should be seen and not heard, and don’t do as I do, do as I say. I come from mind your manners, and you know that girl was asking for it. I come from the deer at the side of the road that bolts when your headlights blind him, and the next thing you know his antlers are embedded in your grill, and the rosary hanging from your rearview mirror won’t stop swaying.

I come from ice-slick bridges, backseats, and beer. I come from gravel roads, and highways coal-colored even under the full moon. I come from red barns and hay and sweat that equals money. I come from mom and pop businesses on a narrow-minded main street where you can see the church steps from the door of every tavern. I come from the specter of hell and the promise of eternal salvation. I come from litanies of saints and hog prices.

I come from the place where a mistake can follow you as close as your shadow and be forever spoken of in the same breath as your name.

The Best Advice I've Ever Read About Grief

2008-11-23T18:53:00.000-08:00

This comes from Anne Lamott's book, Traveling Mercies:

All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately. But what I've discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

Like many birthmothers, I gave birth to my baby in secret. Secret losses can only be grieved privately, without support, and that's more like denial than grieving. More like the desert than the necessary sea.

The Wall

2008-11-22T12:06:00.000-08:00

A poster similar to this hung on the wall of my social worker's office. Its message struck my 17-year-old self as profound. I understood it to mean that I should live in the present, forget about the past and the baby I couldn't keep. Go forward. These ideas were routinely espoused by adoption professionals in the 1970s. Birthmothers were assured we'd forget the babies we gave away. That the other children we'd have later would fill the emptiness. For me, it was the opposite that occurred.