Conversations with my daughter, Part 4

Jane and Lorraine, approximately 1990

 In 1986, my relinquished-and-reunited daughter Jane had a daughter and gave her up for adoption. The fact that she would end up, at twenty, another first/birth mother damned near killed me because I knew how emotionally I had been ripped apart when I surrendered her--and now she would have to go through the same grief of giving up a child. It also meant that my act of relinquishment had started a trail of adoption in my line, nearly the worst thing I could imagine--generations of women going through the hell of relinquishment. I was bereft. What would be worse? That my daughter was a serial killer.

The father of the as-yet-unborn child wanted to claim her and raise her with his mother, but Jane was opposed to that, no matter how much I pleaded his case. When she was adamant about not letting H. raise his child, I moved on to open adoption, something I had unwittingly proposed when I wrote in  Birthmark: 

"If it had to be that way, if there wasn't a man to marry her, if she couldn't support herself financially and emotionally, if she couldn't go the road alone, in other words, if the child had to be adopted, I would tell her to insist on meeting those parents. She is giving them her child, and she has every right in the world to meet the people who will raise her child, and yes, pass judgment and decide for herself if they are good enough. She can demand this no matter what the laws on the books say, no matter what she has been led to believe by people who have never given away a child. There is wisdom the heart knows beyond reason, where logic follows if we let it. And if the experts say you can't do it that way, I would say, too bad; I will find parents to adopt my child another way. I know it can be done."

Lisa before adoption, at one month

But open adoption of any sort in 1986 was rare, and I was a thousand plus miles away on Long Island while she was in Madison, Wisconsin, living with her adoptive parents. From what she said, they were disgusted with her, and the pregnancy. This occurred at a time there had been a break in our relationship and I did not know she was pregnant until I called her for her birthday, April 5th; she was at the hospital at the time, her father took the call. She phoned me that evening, and told me that she had had a child two days earlier, and she was giving it up for adoption. Period. There was no room for discussion, but when I heard the father wanted the child, I tried to convince her that was the best outcome, if she would not raise her herself. But my daughter could not be swayed.

She went to a Catholic agency. Open adoption, if it was ever an option there, was not mentioned to me because she wouldn't even hear of it. I realized I was jeopardizing my relationship with her by talking about it, and so had to stop. 

Despite all my feelings about the loss of adoption, because of my work in adoption reform, because I had been so very public about the grief a birth mother endures, I had been powerless to stop an adoption--even that of the daughter I myself had relinquished. Was everything I said falling on deaf ears? Was my personal involvement a sham, like that of a minister who rails against homosexuality only to be outed himself? What was I doing with my life? 

For many years afterward, I stayed away from all adoption issues. I rarely spoke out, wrote about it only when asked, went to meetings only when someone asked me to go with her. I turned to women's rights in general and wrote about women in business, and the often unequal treatment of women in the legal system.

Lisa Marie, 24, in 2010

As regular readers know, Jane died in 2007 of her own hand; two years later, I found that daughter of hers and we have a relationship today that is the light of my life. This shot was taken in the summer of 2010 when she visited us in Sag Harbor. She is a strong, independent woman with a full life. She is an aspiring writer living in Minneapolis. She seems to understand so much about all this.

The conversation below with Jane was taped in the late Nineties, after she had been married, had another child, and divorced, a year or two after the picture above was taken. We had talked about doing a book about adoption together, or that this conversation would be part of a memoir I wrote about our relationship that was now in its second decade, so it was taped. I am so happy I have her voice on tape talking about the issues that are so deep.The conversation continues:

Same visit, another night. She’s lying on the couch. I’m sitting at the end. She had been talking about being raised in an environment where it was a given that she would search for her birth mother one day, and while that gave her no answers, her mother’s appreciation of the inborn need to know made her feel accepted and understood. What hung in the air between us was the daughter that she chose to put in a closed adoption.

I wait, wondering if she is having the same thought. She did.

“Putting Lisa in a closed adoption, a part of that was selfish, but I was not emotionally ready to raise a child,” she reflects. “I was twenty years old, I was working at Burger King, I was not going to college, I was living at home, making $4.75 an hour, and I would never see this baby.

“Was that selfish? Yes. Did I give her a better opportunity? I hope so. I think so. I wasn't going to marry him.”

She adds that she was using birth control—the contraceptive sponge—at the time, but got pregnant anyway.

“You told me you were planning to kill yourself, and that’s why you didn’t use birth control,” I counter.

“Maybe I thought that if I shocked you enough you would—pardon me—shut up about open adoption. I was a twenty-year-old kid and if I said the most outrageous thing I could walk out of the room, and go downstairs and be moody. I’ve thought about suicide so many times, but there was no time during the pregnancy when that might have happened.”

The conversation drifts off to a time when she took a bottle of aspirins and had to have her stomach pumped. “I was clinically dead a couple of times.”

Because of her seizures? Because of the aspirins? And was all this at least partly because she had been adopted? There had been numerous suicide attempts, and sometimes I was just too exhausted by the dismal cycle of the events of my daughter’s life to probe deeper. This was one of them.--lorraine
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There is one more part to this conversation. For the earlier sections see:
My (relinquished) daughter talks about adoption; Frank talk about adoption with my relinquished daughter, Part 2; 
and Frank talk about adoption with my relinquished daughter, Part 3