Sealed records also seal a medical history

Lorraine 

We hear so many sad stories in adoption, and my last couple of posts have focused on broken--call them interrupted--reunions.  To write or not write. To phone or not. To stay receptive to a distant child or mother, but to stop actively hoping that the next time you open you email there will be one from the estranged party. 

Before I found my daughter Jane I had written three letters to Hillside Terrace, the innocuous name of the adoption agency in Rochester, New York, and received three letters back telling me she was all right. The last one said she was "happy in her family." How do they know that, I wondered. They are making this up, I was certain. In fact, my daughter had a rather violent form of epilepsy.


I wrote the first letter when she was five or six. It seemed so wrong to write--I knew the agency didn't want to hear from me--but I had a sense that my daughter needed me, and wrote anyway. Only the third time, a few years later, did I mention the birth control pills I took when I was pregnant, as DES was suddenly all over the news. DES was a drug that was supposed to prevent miscarriage. What it did, however, is screw up the reproductive organs of many girls whose mothers took it, and this all came out in the seventies. Now I wondered--what about those birth control pills? I'd been prescribed them after I was pregnant but before my pregnancy test was positive. What effect might they have had on my baby? 

After I met Jane and her parents, when Jane was fifteen, her adoptive mother told me Jane's doctor had written to Hillside Terrace around the same time I wrote my first letter. They were trying to find out more about my medical history. Jane's seizures began when she was five. Before that, nothing had been unusual. And certainly there was nothing in the information given them--as it contained no health history at all. Just that Jane was a healthy baby. If her doctor had reached me then, he certainly would have asked questions about my pregnancy and of course the birth control pills would have come out. Would it have affected her treatment? Unknown. But it might have. 

And coming into my daughter's life earlier, rather than later, surely would have been a good thing. By the time we met, her self-esteem was about as low as it could go; her adoptive mother wondered if I had ever been in a mental institution, or if there were mental problems in my family. All I could think was: my daughter might have been led to believe that I might be institutionalized. That her natural mother is defective. And that's why she, Jane, has seizures.

Later on, it meant a great deal to Jane to read the letters I had gotten back from the agency. They verified in her mind that, indeed, I had not forgotten her. Of course, no mother forgets, but sometimes hard evidence is good to hold in one's hand.--lorraine
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FROM FMF
Family ties broken by adoption, linked by synchronicity
Was I Destined to be a birth/first mother?
Letters Lead to an Alternative Universe Daughter

BOOKS
Synchronicity and Reunion: The Genetic Connection of Adoptees and Birthparents
"Do experiences of synchronicity between adoption-separated parents and children confirm a continuing bond or genetic affinity that transcends space and time? Carl Jung knew "synchronicity" to be a subjective experience with significant time and meaning for the participant, a clue to an underlying system of science and spirituality. Paul Kammerer used simple physical analogies for such coincidences and defined the "law of seriality" as a unifying principle at work in the universe, correlating by affinity. He believed this pull toward unity produces concurrent or serial events in space and time, bringing like and like together. After search and reunion, adoptees and birthparents begin to piece together the long years of separation and to seek their own explanations for uncanny coincidental behavior and meaningful information transfer that occurred when normal sensory contact was absent. This psychophilosophical exploration of the anecdotes of 70 reunited families will certainly stimulate subsequent investigation."--Amazon

The Declassified Adoptee Essays of an Adoption Activist 
In clear and plain language, Amanda Transue-Woolston provides a wealth of emotional intelligence answering the difficult questions that adoptees face from the moment they learn they were not born into a family, but adopted instead. Without unnecessary verbiage, Transue-Woolston gets to the heart of the matter of what it means to be adopted, and what needs to change in adoption today. First mothers reluctant to search, adoptive parents fearful of an adoptee's reunion, and adoptees anywhere on the journey will all find much to savor in this wise collection of essays from someone who is destined to be among the leaders of the next wave of adoption reformers.--lorraine

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