Jennifer Lauck's "Found" reveals the painful truth of adoption

Jane

“This is your mother,’ my mother’s voice is weak and broken, a frail warbling. ‘I want you to know not a day has gone by that I haven’t thought about you.’” Thus begins 44-year-old Jennifer Caste Lauck’s reunion with her mother Catherine as recounted in her new memoir, Found.


As she hears Catherine’s voice, Lauck feels "a rise of love so pure and utterly familiar. It is the same feeling I have for my children, which began sprouting the moment I knew I was pregnant with them.…I know I have been waiting--for my true mother, for Catherine—in order to finally release this universal love in the other direction. Love has always been in my heart waiting for the right person to trip the code.”

  Found is beautifully written, a great addition to the adoption library. Louck uses the events of her life to make the case that mothers and children belong together. A seemingly obvious statement but one that threatens the institution of adoption as it is practiced in the U. S. today. Here's an excerpt:

"Had I known anything about myself, I would have known that my mother married my father when she was nineteen. If I had been given some sense of her path, I would have seen that I was doing exactly what she had done and perhaps would have chosen differently for myself. ...My first compass of being in this world had been an abandoned child whose mother did not hold her and later, did not search for her. Unloved. Yes, I had a strong sense that I was unloved and unlovable. 

"Who is closer to us than a mother but the lover? How hungry is the child who has not bonded with her mother? By nineteen, I was starving for human contact and love. I didn't care if the human contact was cruel or painful or confused. That is why I endured Jeff...."

Found begins with Lauck's birth in 1963 in Reno, Nevada, the daughter of 17-year-old Catherine and 18-year-old Bill. Because Catherine was unmarried at that time, Lauck was placed for adoption with Janet and Bud Lauck. They had a biological son, Bryan, two years older than Lauck. Janet (Lauck always refers to her by her first name) had failing health and believed that adopting a child would restore her health since God would not allow her to have a baby if she was going to die.  "I was like a handbag or a scarf. Any baby would have done. It wasn’t personal.”

Janet died when Lauck was seven. Bud remarried and died two years later. Lauck lived with her stepmother, Deb, for two years. Deb was “like every evil stepmother in every fairytale.” In her first book, Blackbird, Lauck recounts in detail abuse she suffered at the hands of her stepmother.*

Lauck moved into Bud's parents' home and then lived with Bud's sister and brother-in-law who adopted her. Her brother, Bryan, killed himself when she was 20. In the next two decades, Lauck attended college, married and divorced twice, had two children with her second husband, and moved to Portland, Oregon.  She studied Buddhism and married her third husband. During her study, she took as a guide Tara, the Buddha of compassionate action. “Tara was a powerhouse of compassion with a purpose." (After her reunion, she learned that her mother named her Tara after the plantation in Gone with the Wind.)

After the success of Blackbird which made the New York Times best seller list, Lauck was invited to speak at an adoption conference. She began reading about adoption and received counseling from Nancy Verrier, author of The Primal Wound, whom she credits for pressing her to “take that final step in the journey and to finally find my mother.”

Once Lauck found her mother, Catherine, she pursued (pursued is not too strong a word) a relationship. When her mother did not respond to a request for second meeting, Lauck simply bought a ticket to Reno and told Catherine she was coming.

Lauck embraced the similarities between herself and Catherine. They were both “bossy and confident and annoying.” She took the differences—Catherine admired Sarah Palin, for example--and Lauck did not--in stride.

Like her model Tara, the Buddha of compassion, Lauck was understanding of her mother: “My heart breaks for my mother and what she has endured. I have no right to judge her and when I find I am judging her, I make myself think again—I push my heart to open wider still. I look for the love that is my original connection to Catherine and I keep my focus there."

She concludes her memoir with the question all adoptees ask: What if I had been Tara Wright instead of Jennifer Lauck? She answers that she “will remain Jennifer Caste Lauck for this life. That is who I am and who I always was. But I suppose I am also Tara.…My Self, prior to meeting Catherine, was a patchwork quilt, a jagged mosaic of trial and error. I am now in a phase of refinement.”

Shefinishes an End Note criticizing adoption practices in the U. S.:

"My general feeling about adoption is that we are not thinking very well about this very important subject, nor are we applying common sense to the biological connection between mother and child....

"Adoption is big business. ...It is distressing to learn that the U. S. leads the world as the single largest adoption nation. It seems startling to me that Americans are so fast on the scene of international disasters, and we scoop up orphan children and have them adopted in American homes before body counts are added up....

"Helpful is keeping children within their own culture and empowering the people of those lands with resources, food, medicine, and water....

"Nor is it helpful, within our boundaries, to take a child from a mother due to her economic struggles, her age, or even her education. It is helpful to offer support, education, and solutions. We can fund wars and build bombs, but we cannot empower mothers to keep and care for their children?...

"I do believe women, especially the educated women of the West, have the power to heal this world.... To create generations of children nurtured by their mother's touch and care will make this world worth living in."
__________________________
*(According to an 2001 article in Portland's Willamette Week, Deb and her son, Lauck's step-brother, deny abuse occurred. Other facts are disputed as well. Any factual discrepancies, however, do not take away the truth of what Lauck writes about adoption.)