Natural and Adoptive Families: Let's Gather Together

Jane

This holiday season families will gather together, give thanks for having each other, and wish each other well for the New Year.  Except many families separated by adoption.

As a culture, we’ve made great progress in traversing divisions of race, class, religion, and geography. Surely, we can cross the adoption boundary, knock down that artificial barrier created by a judge’s signature on a piece of paper, celebrated with a baptism or cemented in a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple.  Let’s bring our families together, natural and adopted, conceptually, if not physically.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. For many mothers, and I count myself among them, revealing that we had a child and placed her for adoption, is the most difficult thing we’ve had to do. Even in an age where we can’t check out at the super-market without reading tabloid accounts of infidelity and love children, the fear of exposure grips many mothers as tightly today as it did over 150 years ago when Lady Dedlock spoke these words to her daughter Esther in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

‘"This is the earthly punishment I have brought upon myself. I bear it, and I hide it. … I must keep this secret, if by any means it can be kept, not wholly for myself. I have a husband, wretched and dishonouring creature that I am! …

‘"My child, my child!"’ [Lady Dedlock] said. ‘"For the last time! These kisses for the last time! These arms upon my neck for the last time! We shall meet no more. To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long. Such is my reward and doom. If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered, think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask! Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable! And then forgive her if you can, and cry to heaven to forgive her, which it never can!"’

We at FMF are critical of these mothers, ignoring or oblivious to their children’s pain when they reject them for a second time. Secrets, though, are a two-way street. For ever birth mother cowing in the closet, there’s an adoptee refusing to let her own out.

Betty Jean Lifton, the revered author of three books about the adoption experience, wrote of the pernicious effects of secrecy in adoption. Although her relationship with her birth mother whom she found after a long search spanned many years, her birth mother always kept Lifton a secret, never allowing her to meet her half-brother. Lifton never told her adoptive mother of her reunion: “By destroying her myth [that she was Lifton's only mother], I would destroy what was most meaningful in her life,” she wrote in Twice Born, her memoir about her search for her birth family.

Singer and adoptee rights advocate Zara Phillips waited several years before telling her adoptive family about her reunion with her birth mother. She did not invite her birth mother to her wedding. Phillips explained in Chasing Away the Shadows: “Part of me wished that my birth family could have been there too, but it would have been too hard for my parents.”

Adoptee Katie Hern likened her relationship with her birth family to an illicit relationship. She wrote that she felt “like a traitor to my parents, to my adoptive mom in particular.

“I’ve made several trips [from San Francisco where she lived] to Chelmsford [Massachusetts where her adoptive parents and birthmother lived] without even telling my parents I was in the state. I am having a clandestine affair with my birthfamily.” (Reunion: A Year in Letters Between A Birthmother and the Daughter She Couldn’t Keep.)

Other adoptees, while acknowledging a relationship with their birth mothers, refuse to bring their two families together. Initially, I did not want to meet Rebecca’s adoptive parents, the French’s. I considered adoptive and birth families natural enemies. Rebecca's adoptive parents were rivals; I fancied myself in a holy struggle for Rebecca’s soul. I wanted her to return to where she belonged, to her real family, and forget those pretenders. Of course I soon dropped these illusions and accepted that I would have to share her, but I still resented these faux parents.

After I met birth parents and adoptees at conferences of the American Adoption Congress, I realized that it was possible for birth and adoptive families, not only to meet, but to have a positive relationship.  Fellow blogger Lorraine stayed with her daughter Jane's adoptive family numerous times when visiting her daughter, or picking up her granddaughter for a summer visit. They also they visited Lorraine and her husband twice, once staying for the weekend when Jane was not with them. Their relationship might have had some strains, Lorraine said, but communication was always the best option for the two mothers. Another birth mother told me that she always stayed at her daughter’s adoptive mother’s house when visiting. Not only was it convenient but she enjoyed the woman’s company.  Other first mothers have left comments here about staying with the adoptive parents. An adoptee told me that her adoptive mother and birth mother became good friends; they even ganged up on her when she considered leaving college, convincing her to finish.

And so I offered to meet Rebecca’s adoptive parents, thinking she would be relieved, that it would reduce the tension that must exist. Her response surprised me. “They do not want to meet you.”  Over the years, I offered again to meet them and each time the answer was the same: She later wrote that the thought of us getting together was “weird.” Both the French's have passed away so I shall never meet them. I do believe, though, that if I had met them, we may have understood Rebecca a little better and perhaps appreciated each other, not only as contributors to her Rebecca's qualities, but as individuals.

I did eventually meet Rebecca's sister by adoption, Susan. It wasn’t weird at all. We spent about a day together along with a friend of Susan’s and Rebecca’s daughter, my granddaughter. Susan and I talked amicably about politics, a common interest, albeit she is a Utah Republican and I, an Oregon Democrat. We visited Portland’s Saturday market (that place is weird) and lunched at a Portland landmark, Dan & Louis Oyster Bar.

Lifton came to regret that her two families remained apart. In the dedication in her last book, Journey of the Adopted Self, she wrote:

To the memory of

my adoptive mother

Hilda

and my birth mother

Rae

who might have known 

and even liked each other

in another life

and another adoption system.

As we celebrate love and reconciliation, whether it be at Christmas or the feast day of another faith, let families separated by adoption and families created by adoption come together. We have nothing to lose but our pains. 

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"A first/birth mother remembers 'coming out' to her husband-to-be"

"Telling My family about my first child--and then going public"

"A Letter to (Birth) Mothers Who Reject Reunion"