Writing My Wrongs

Do not ASS-U-ME

“The harder you fight to hold on to specific assumptions, the more likely there's gold in letting go of them.” - John Seeley Brown

“Suz, your efforts are admirable but the reality is there will always be adoption. There will always be some stupid girl who fell for some idiot guy who fed her a line that he loved her and would take care of her when all he wanted to do was bang her for the night. That silly girl will end up pregnant and she will always be too young, too drug addicted, too poor, with no family to help or support available to her and as such she will have to give her child up for adoption.” my friend said.

Hmph. Okay. Yeah.

I agree and I disagree.

Let’s break this down a bit.

I agree there will always be a need for adoption. Parents die, become ill, abuse children and do other things that cause children to become homeless and lack a parent. Those children should certainly be cared for and loved by another. Call it guardianship, kinship adoption, whatever you wish. I would never suggest a child should not be cared for or left in an institution

I also believe there will be some women who don’t want their child. (I am not sure I would want to know those women but I have to believe they exist.). The children they bear  should also be cared for (but their records should not be closed and if they were named, they should not be renamed).

I further agree there will likely always be naïve young girls who want to be loved and believe that the way they obtain that perceived love is to put themselves at risk for pregnancy rather than refuse to have sex with a man.

I must now disagree.

Too young to mother? Who defines too young? My own mother had four children by the time she was 21. Was she too young?  I don’t think so. But I can say that she was very married. That helped. Also, I gotta say, in my experience, our bodies are MADE to have children when we are young.  I had a child at 17, one at 30 and one at 35. Guess what? The one I had a 17 was a breeze physically.  The other two?  Not so much.  Additionally, I am sure many women who wait till their late 30s and 40s (after they are “established”) and learn they can no longer conceive will tell you they should have had babies when they were younger.

Too drug addicted? Gross, sweeping, generalization continually used by the mainstream media and adoption industry to justify taking children from their mother’s breast. I lived in a home with nearly 30 women in 1986. Guess what? None were drug addicted. I have no memories of anyone doing lines or shooting heroine as I walked the floors of Gehring Hall. Don’t assume this. You make yourself look silly.  (Besides, no one wants to purchase babies that come from drug addicted mamas, remember?)

Too poor?  Hmm. Again, most of the mothers I lived with in 1986 came from white, middle class families. Oh sure, we had our share of minorities who were indeed on welfare as well. But poor is another gross generalization. And frankly, we have a lot of poor people in the United States. Should we take all their children away?  For me, yet another silly statement.  Poverty should not be a reason why your children is given away or taken from you.

No family to help her? Why would she have no family? She came from somewhere, right?  Doesn’t the father have family?  And still more gross assumptions.   

And if she truly doesn’t have a family, as in not one single person related to her or able to help her, there are and always should be social welfare programs available to her. She should be told of those BEFORE she is told of the gooey loveliness of surrendering her child.

Finally, I say again, judge a country by the way it treats its women and children. Clearly, many parts of the USofA see no value in the mother-child bond. We should be ashamed of ourselves.

1. I lost my child to adoption in 1986.
2. I was a white girl from a middle class conservative Catholic family.
3. I was President of Student Government, an honor student and a girl with “potential” (obviously not mothering potential).
4. I was not poor.
5. I was not drug addicted.
6. I was not without family.

How do I and the hundreds of other moms I know fit into your schema?

Please. Get your facts straight.  Don’t assume. Don’t believe what you have been told by the agencies you are adopting from. By the friends down the street or by the latest report out of the NCFA. 

The American Adoption Industry is not what you think it is. 

To put it a bit more succinctly, consider the words of my friend Bernadette Wright. PH.D, President of Origins-USA:

"... preventing unnecessary family separations, ending falsified birth certificates, basic human rights and protections for mothers, stopping coercive and exploitative adoption practices, justice for victims of illegal and coercive practices, and ending profiteering in adoption -- these are all mainstream, common-sense ideas, even if we are one of very few organizations advocating for them. These ideas are supported by the United Nations and are the law in most civilized societies. Motherhood is a traditional American value, and we support motherhood (it's forever).

"Our enemies -- the radical religious right extremists and anti-motherhood adoption agencies who want to further erode mothers' rights and make it even harder for families to stay together -- THEY should be considered the fringe groups, not us. It is a fringe, extreme, un-American, anti-family idea to say that we should allow profiteering baby brokers to trick, deceive, exploit, and coerce mothers and to sell their babies, just because the mother is single, young, or having temporary financial difficulties."

Define Support

"Isn't supporting an expectant mother who wants to surrender (ahem, abandon) her child to adoption still a means of supporting her?"

I admit I struggle with this.

I would want to know, need to know, WHY she wants to surrender her child. I am hard pressed to believe any woman truly WANTS to surrender her child. Most, that I know  (and I know hundreds) HAD to. Big difference between had and want or need and want.

If an expectant mother had money, housing, emotional support, guidance and all the other things women so often lack when it comes to an unplanned pregnancy and still wanted to surrender her child to a closed, domestic, infant adoption, would I support her? Assuming she has been told about primal wound, life long trauma of adoption separation on mother and child and still wants to sign away her child?

Um, I guess I would support her. But what does that mean? Does that mean telling her I think she is doing a good thing? That she is right to give away her child and force her child to a life of closed records, changed names and fractured identities?

I couldn't do that.

So, I guess I could not support her - not entirely.  Respect it, realize it was her decision, not mine? Yes. That I could do. Chances are I would just not discuss it with her. I would however stay in contact with her for it is highly probable down the road she is going to need a sister to support her when the reality of what she did to herself and her child smacks her hard in the face. Adoption sounds like such a win-win for all involved.  Often the parties touting this win-win are those that will benefit by it (either financial or by receiving the child or by absolving themself of shame) or those with NO knowledge of the pain of surrender.

When the individuals that "support" you stand to profit from your pain and that of your child, I suggest you think long and hard about their motives.

I am agnostic (surprise, surprise).  This means when it comes to religion I often have to part ways with friends on that topic. That doesn't mean I don't like them or don't talk to them, just that I know where they stand and they know where I stand. Dont try to convert me, save me or damn me and I will promise you the same in return.

If a friend were to be faced with an unplanned pregnancy, I would help them identify resources, housing, options, therapists to talk it through with. I would advocate kinship, open adoption and guardianship after all efforts towards family preservation had been exhausted. I would remind them that children always change your life, are always expensive and college can be attended at any time of your life.

Knowing what we know today about the damage of adoption to mother and child, I struggle to support anyone doing it. For me it would be telling them it is okay to abuse their child. For me, and only me, I believe domestic infant adoption - as it stands in the United States today - is a form of child abuse.

I cannot support that.

Furthermore, I choose not to believe that there are women in the world that feel nothing, nada, zilch, nunca, niema nietz for the children they birth.

The very idea of that frightens me deeply.

I dont like the idea of living in a world populated by women who can birth babies and not care.

That type of world is not one I want to live in.

The Sin of Women

"Why had no one told me that my body would become a battlefield, a sacrifice, a test? Why did I not know that birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers?" - The Red Tent

I don't understand women.

I really don't.

You would think being a female creature I would understand them.

But I don't.

I don't understand all women.

Maybe I am not supposed to.

If men feel more confused than I feel right now when they deal with women, I really feel for men. Poor creatures.

I am currently the casual observer to an unplanned pregnancy. I am "counseling" a family on options. (By counseling, I mean sharing my own story, books and resources). The expectant mother and her mother are calling me and writing me regularly. They are on opposite sides of the fence (but trying to meet in the middle).

The expectant mother in question wants to keep her child. Her own mother, like my own mother and many of our mothers, is encouraging her to surrender the child to adoption.

This makes me ill, angry and dumbfounded.

Let me say that as a women whose mother encouraged her to abandon her first born, I don't like this feeling. It is wrong. My expectation at that time of my life was that my mother would help me. She should have valued my feelings, my sanity, my soul and therefore valued my child. She valued what the neighbors thought, she valued what the church would say, she valued what my father thought. She did not value me or my feelings.

As my MOTHER, she would have shown me how to be a mother, helped me to be one.

I am not suggesting it was my mothers job to take care of my child - financially or other. I am suggesting that I felt if my mother valued me, she would have valued my child. I am suggesting that women, mothers, sisters, daughters should help fellow females, not hurt them.

Now, I have done enough reading and talking and soul searching to accept the fact that my own mother was a product of her upbringing, the church and the political climate (Sollingers and Fesslers books really helped in this regard.). Acknowledging this allowed me to get past the majority of my anger towards my mother and the apparent ease at which she was able to discard me and my daughter.

However, I still get angry when I see modern day mothers turning away from their daughters and their crisis pregnancies.

Women are supposed to stick together, aren't we? Aren't we the alleged lesser gender and therefore we need to band together? Shouldn't we all gather in the Red Tent and discuss the womanly ways?

Why oh why do we allow these crimes to continue to be acted out on the hearts and souls of our sisters and their children?

How does an infertile, adoptive mother who presumably felt the ache of a child she could not have, encourage her own daughter to give hers away?  Is she repaying some perceived debt?  A baby for a baby as a opposed to an eye for an eye? Does her daughter not feel like she does? Not matter like she did?

Why do women who cannot have their own child feel it is okay to take that of another - often at any cost? Why do women think their needs or desires trump those of another? Most importantly, why do some women feel it is more important to feed their own  hunger for a child than the child's hunger for his natural mamma?

Why do we do this to each other?

How can any one of us advocate open records and reform when we stand by and watch other women perpetuate the very crime that caused the need for reform?

It pains me.

With all the research available, with the legions of women and adopted adults voicing the horror of adoption, why do we continue to turn our daughters away?

I have recently offered, on two separate occasions, to two separate expectant mothers, to house them. I have organized a support drive for another single mom who recently lost her job. My ehbabes moms and adopted adults sent food, gifts, and gift cards.

We did NOT call the authorities on the unemployed mom, we did not tell the expectant mothers that they should surrender their children. We did not question their ability to be a good mother. It never occurred to us that these mothers were not worthy or capable of caring for their child. They simply need help, guidance, hope and a support. Don't we all at some time in our lives?

Sure, you can argue that I obtained my wisdom from my despair. You can argue that I do this only because of the loss of my daughter. But you cannot know that for sure. Just like there is no guarantee that a child is better off being raised by a wealthy, two parent family than with his own natural family. You simply cannot know.

Yet many pretend that they do.

And our daughters and their children pay the price of that ignorance.

Pop and Squat

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe. - Albert Einstein

A warm fall evening.   Happy hour at a local brewery. Fifty or so IT professionals gather to celebrate the career of a coworker that has accepted a position elsewhere.

I dislike these types of events. I may be able to express myself well in writing but face to face is often a different story. Social anxiety reigns supreme. I dislike chit chat and sucking up and pretending you like people you don’t. 

I sucked up, I pretended and I networked.

I had to. My division is imploding and the champion and executive sponsor of my work is leaving the company. I can kill or be killed. I can hunt or be hunted.

I put on my happy face and chatted. To my surprise I made a few good contacts who seemed quite impressed with me and asked me to forward my resume immediately.

The evening wore on and the crowd thinned. I was engaged in conversation with an architect and a business manager. Turns out the architect and I worked at another company together. We rehashed mutual friends and reasons for leaving that company. We ventured into personal matters and discussed our children and schooling and property taxes.

I learn he has college aged twins.

Adopted.

From Korea.

I look for an escape route. I am not in a mood to discuss adoption. 

I become silent.

Business manager inquires about adoption. Architect proceeds to explain they adopted from Korea as he and his wife did want the “bother” or “interference” of a domestic “birth” mother. Did not want to fear that they may try to take back the child.

Went on and on about infertility and how shameful it is that those “loser ignorant” teenage girls “pop and squat” out babies when decent couples like he and his wife cannot get pregnant. (He does add that within six months of adopting wife miraculously became pregnant.)

He says he kept their Korean names as their middle names. (He starts to get some points from me). I ask him if they are interested in meeting their natural families. He appears startled at my question.

“No. They have no interest. Why would they? We are their family. Their Korean roots don’t matter.”

I vomit a bit in my throat.

I excuse myself to the ladies room and I don’t return to the table.