Confronting the shame upon admitting I gave up a child

Lorraine

What was it like coming out of the closet when it was very lonely out there? In the late 1970s, only a small handful of women, spoke openly about this "shameful" deed we had done in the national media. What was shameful was not sleeping with someone we loved, the shame was that we had given up our babies. 

Adoptees sometimes cannot understand why their mothers are so traumatized that they cannot deal with the reunion, or the reality of their child, now grown, now an adult. For many of us, that deep sense of shame and humiliation that we felt when we gave up our children now comes back in full force, and we ourselves do not understand why the reunion is so deeply disturbing. To try to explain what it was like in the Seventies to come out publicly, I am post an excerpt from the memoir, Hole in My Heart, that I am working on (and hope to be finished with very soon). The year is
1979; I have just published Birthmark, my memoir about relinquishing my daughter, and am on a national publicity tour.

(Copyright, Lorraine Dusky 2013. May not be reprinted, copied, etc in any media with  permission)

A few days later [note: following an appearance on Good Morning America], in Detroit at my first out-of-town interview, a dozen long-stemmed red roses are handed to me as I leave the set. The card says they are from the young man I spoke to in Sag Harbor weeks earlier—who happened to be adopted. I am amazed that he remembered my name, researched my media tour, had found the TV station where I would be that morning. Our meeting had been a one-time casual conversation with his girlfriend over Rolling Rocks in a rowdy bar called the Black Buoy. I realize he wants to be sending those roses to his natural mother, not to me, but I will have to do in the meantime. I realize not only can I do this, I must do this. Let the naysayers be damned.

My mother in her twenties--a firebrand herself

Across the river from Detroit in Windsor a young, attractive interviewer spews out questions as if they were hot coals burning her insides while the camera rolls: Don't you feel you will be disrupting her life by coming back? What do you expect to get out of this? Do you “want her back?” What about the adoptive parents, do you think of them? They were there to take care of her, to change her diapers, to see that she has all that she needed, to take her to school, help with her homework, when you—YOU—were not! Did you ever think of that? Why did you write this book?

I can see her Barbie-doll face now, distorted with hate, wishing she could stomp me into oblivion. Is she an adoptive mother, or an adoptee filled with rage? Her fury was too passionate to be that of an uninvolved observer. As my mother lives in a Detroit suburb, she is with me that day and watches this unwind in disbelief. But she is unbowed. Finally fessing up about my daughter has closed whatever gap had come between us when I left home. She has been my stalwart supporter, always understanding from the first moment I told her. If I had told to her when I was pregnant, would there have been a different outcome? I have no idea. The shame of that earlier era was thick as a blinding fog, and as cold. Look at what is happening now, thirteen years later.                        

The cause of all the trouble!

I calmly tell the pretty blonde woman all the reassuring things I can think of to say, and she cuts me off a couple of times, too angry to hear. But fifteen minutes later, the next interviewer in the same studio, a woman with a radio show, tells me before she turns on the tape that she heard the other interview and is stunned. What a relief not to be stoned twice in a row. It is up and down like that, everywhere I go:  

“When people discover what Lorraine Dusky is about, they’re likely to cut and run,” the story began in New York City’s Daily News. “Because Lorraine Dusky is One of Those—a woman who had an illegitimate child, gave her away and now wants to find her.” That story ends up being sympathetic. A Newsday columnist writes that to some I represent a “fearful specter that threatens the integrity of their families.” 

In San Antonio a reviewer writes that I “vacillated between understanding [my] emotions and becoming angry with [my] preoccupation with something that happened 13 years ago.” Angry with “something that happened 13 years ago.” No, I am only wretched. Anger is for someone else. 

At a radio station in Texas, I run into someone I know from Manhattan in the lobby, and he is just as stunned as I am when the talk-show host comes out to greet me in a papier-mâché full face mask—the kind people wear at the masked balls in Venice. His point? He intends to stay anonymous to that woman who gave him up for adoption. Clearly I am disturbing some ancient, buried rage. The receptionist raises her eyebrows and shrugs. But in the end, he is not vicious, just curious about what I have to say. Yet he does not take off the mask. Larry King and Sally Jesse Raphael, both of whom had popular radio shows then, tell my publicist that they are adoptive parents, and therefore, not interested. Obviously. Do you even need to ask?

At one national afternoon talk show I am pitted against a fuming adoptive father. Later I learn that he, like many other men I would debate over the years, is not only an adoptive father, he an adoptive father and an attorney. Such articulate attack dogs, they are going to put me in my place, barely controlled wrath dripping like saliva, all mentally pounding the table in outrage. The way they talk about their children they sound like investments—lots of money does change hands in most adoption of infants—and no one is going to upset that deal. One need not doubt they love their children; they merely do not want to be confronted with whom the children came from. I look at them and wonder what they say, in word or by inference, to their children about the other mothers; it can’t be pretty.

But I expected this, right? These people do not speak for the children; they speak only for themselves. I look at them and wonder if I knew any of their children, if some are the ones who come secretly to ALMA to search and let out their feelings, or if any of their children had already found their natural mothers and never told their adoptive parents.

The depth of the fury surrounding this issue of a mother and child reunion was testament to the inviolate certainty and strength of the genetic bond. My detractors would not have been so profoundly enraged if they did not instinctively grasp its power. Natural mothers coming out of the closet evoked, at least then, all kinds of fears from adoptive parents—of losing one’s child to someone else, to a bond of blood and genes, to eyes and noses that look alike, to similar smiles and idiosyncratic tics despite everything they had done for their children, every poopy backside wiped, every tearful nightmare calmed, every orthodontics bill paid. No matter that without us, their children would not be, these people did not want to share. In any way. Or, it seemed, admit that the original mothers—those who had actually borne the children, supplied them, as it were—even existed. Had ever existed. Once been a part of their child’s life. Mattered to that child. They could not acknowledge that despite the break in the bond, blood had its own inimitable claim and connection.  You could denigrate it, you could downplay it, you could even swear at me, but still it was there, relentless as the pull of the tide. You couldn’t make it go away. It was. It is.

But one only has so much armor. These angry match ups always scratched at my sense of culpability and I never left one without being ripped raw, my heart going ka-boom, ka-boom, adrenaline on its appointed route. Yet believing you are part of a just cause does give you grit. Fighting for justice against a system that was at bottom unjust is a way of making some good out of losing my daughter. I know it in my heart, I hear it in my head, I feel it in my bones. Look, I would have done anything to not be that person who wrote that book—to not have lost a child to adoption—but that is who I am and I cannot play my life backwards. I am in this fight to give adopted people the right to their original identities, to give the mothers who want reunion a fair chance at having that, to restore what psychic health we natural mothers can salvage from knowing what happened to the children we gave life to. Without knowing what happened to our children, for many—some would say most—there is no real peace of mind. We walk around in the perpetual aftershock of trauma, while everybody says we need to “put this behind” us and “get on with our lives.”

In nearly every state, the laws that birth mothers were forced to agree to sealed not only the original birth certificate of the child, but also forced anonymity on us. When we signed away the termination of parental rights, we had no choice about that if we wanted to have our children be adopted into the security of a two-parent home, a scenario that had been drilled into us as the only possible correct way to raise a healthy and happy child. We "owed" it to our child to give her or him a "better life." But know this, birth certificates’ are not sealed with the legal termination of parental rights; they are only sealed upon adoption. The lie that we were promised “secrecy” was not, is not today, [1]part of the law.

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[1] In Ohio, mothers were given the option of signing a “do not release” original birth records or my name to the child after 1996. A bill that will restore full rights of identity to ALL individuals has not yet been passed by the full Senate, though it has passed in the House with only one No vote. Currently, the  Ohio legislature is on summer recess. Children of those mothers, who signed a "Do Not Release" form after 1996 will still be subject to that unless their mothers retract it. 

OTHER EXCERPTS
Does one adoption spawn another? Too often for comfort.
A Daughter's Guilt Comes to the Forefront
Gathering Memories with my "birth" daughter
Giving Up a Baby Is a Plan of Last Resort
NONE MAY BE REPRINTED OR QUOTED WITH PERMISSION

AMAZON GLITCH!  Though the first click to Amazon may tell you that the book is unavailable, that is not true. Put it in the Amazon search line, and you will  be taken to it.