As a first mother it's better to speak up than suffer in silence

Jane and Lorraine. 1983

All right, I've been trying to avoid this all day...but what the hell? FMF is a personal letter in many respects to the world, and the friends and acquaintances I've made in the adoption community. Today is the fourth anniversary of my daughter's death and I have been trying to distract myself but it's not working too well.

What I do know is that she seemed determined to die by her own hand as she had tried to kill herself several times before, and that I could not have prevented her death. She was stopped before, years earlier in fact, but something that deep and resolved eventually wins out. Her life was troubled from the very beginning with adoption and epilepsy the double-whammy handed her. So I'm allowing myself to feel blue today--and I'm eating some dark chocolate too. Today, I feel bad. Tomorrow will be another day.

Over on Facebook a woman wrote that she is upset that her youngest brother is having his first child--out of wedlock--and no one in her family is upset. It is 19 years after she gave her son up. Now she is trying to be happy for her youngest brother, yet she finds
herself crying all the time: She wrote: "I just want to tell them all how I feel inside but I can't get the words out--not that it would matter, according to them my daughter never existed it. It is something that never happened."

Oh, don't a lot of us know that feeling? Of psychic loneliness and despair?

THE LIBERATION OF LEAVING THE BIRTH MOTHER CLOSET
Until I got out of the closet myself, I felt the same way about other births in my extended family and among friends. Everybody was married, and so there was not that comparison, but while I was happy for them, their joy brought into relief my own dark emotions about the daughter I had, but didn't have. And I couldn't say a word. I avoided baby showers, was undemonstrative when I heard baby news, turned away from labor scenes in movies...babies were not a subject that I could be involved in. After I came out and told my family about my daughter, it was a whole lot easier, largely because my mother was so accepting and sympathetic and understanding, not only of what happened, but the role I said I was going to play in adoption reform. 

Coming out of the closet--while hard at the moment of truth--was so much easier than being in. It's not unlike being gay and coming out; in some circles, however, it's a lot more shocking. So be it. The more of us who come out, the less shocking it will be, the quicker those noxious laws of the past overturned, the fewer adoptions there will be in the future.

Over at Facebook, I left a comment for the woman encouraging her to speak up--tell someone in her family, tell them all--how she feels. Because maybe the day will come that her child will come looking for her, and instead of finding her (because her name has changed with marriage), that person first will reach someone else in the family. And because she, the mother, has never spoken up about her secret grief, that brother or uncle or father will think that she does not want to be reminded, and tell the caller to go away. We hear about this happening enough to know that it does happen. Brothers and uncles say. Well, Mary (or Linda or Jeanne or Janice) has never spoken about it, so she must not want to be disturbed. In New York Mayor Bloomberg has actively lobbied against open records--sending a paid lobbyist to Albany to work against our bill--and since opening the sealed records will not affect the city budget, I can't figure out why he would do this--unless it were personal. Maybe he has a close relative who relinquished a a child, but she and the family have never spoken of him. 

IF ADOPTION WERE SO DAMN WONDERFUL...WE WOULDN'T BE IN THE CLOSET
We do need to let our families and close friends know the truth of our grief. We need to not keep this hidden. As long as we do, outsiders will think we are fine with having given up our children. When I told the wife of one of my husband's college roommates, she was shocked because she had never heard anyone talk about this before, and was rather amazed that it was the source of lifelong sorrow. Did other women feel like me, she wanted to know. This was a woman in her 60s. Of course she knew lots of people who had adopted, and some who were adopted, but she said, she'd never met another birth mother. That you know of, I quickly added. All she knew was that the sister of a college friend of hers had gotten into the same kind of "trouble," but she never heard another thing about it, or knew how the woman felt. 

If you are at any large Christmas parties this year, stop for a moment and look around the room. It's almost a given that there will be adoptive parents, or siblings of adoptive parents, or adoptees in the room with you, and most everyone knows about the adoption. But where do the adoptees come from? Sure, some from overseas, but not so many if the adoptee is over thirty. First mothers will almost certainly be there too, each in her own private closet. If adoption were so damn wonderful, this wouldn't be the case.--lorraine
-----------------------------
See also: Telling a Stranger What It's Like to be a Birth Mother
My Daughter's Suicide
Adoption: Then, and Now
Remembering My Daughter on the Anniversary of her Death