What did this first mother do wrong now? Cont.

Lorraine

Continuing the story of my daughter's strange and hurtful behavior, when we had been close and she suddenly pulled back and wasn't talking to me, answering the phone, or emailing. I was dead meat to her.

April, same year, 2003. At American Adoption Congress’s 25^th anniversary convention in Atlanta, I am one of the keynote speakers. The AAC is comprised of adoptees and both first parents and adoptive parents, and stands for openness in adoption, including taking down the sealed-records statutes. I talk about the early days of this movement, and how far we still have to go. I do not gloss over the rabid opposition we faced then, and still do.


Tact in the service of reform is often ineffective; it can obscure the depth of one’s passion and muddle the message. Taken to its extreme, it confuses the opposition. While tact may let you continue talking to the opposition, talk may be all you get. Just as there was no way for abolitionists to speak to slave holders without raising their hackles—and fury—so it often is about adoption. My talk is basically a history of the adoption reform movement--I have been involved since the early days, and this is what I know. I mention that no matter how you slice it, no matter how many adoptive parents say they are in favor of open records, scratch the legislators who remain the staunchest opponents and you find that they are closely connected with adopting. They frequently turn out to be adoptive parents themselves or have close relatives who are. I've seen this in state after state--and in Washington, DC.

Adoptees and first mothers I know sit up front and nod in agreement. I assume my talk is being well-received. 

Well.

As a group, the adoptive parents in the audience are less than pleased, and let me know during the question period after. But I’m not aware of any real displeasure—their comments were more along the lines of: We’re not like that. Okay, you’re not, I respond. In the hall afterward some guy walks up and gives me a big effusive hug and a kiss on the check and moves on. Who is that?, I ask of the others surrounding me. He’s Adam Pertman, director of the Donaldson Adoption Institute. Though some first mothers revile Adam because they think his writing repeats misconceptions about adoption in general and them in particular, we are on the same side.
  

Happier times, Jane opening her birthday presents, circa 1986

Yet hours later I hear that in many of who were present spent the better part of the day in other sessions smoothing their own ruffled feathers. They rarely, if ever, hear criticism directed at them as a group—and particularly not from an uppity birth mother. We are supposed to be tending our wounds, and the very idea that we might criticize them is offensive. As far as I can tell, adoptive parents are familiar with two reactions: sympathy, because they couldn’t have children of their own, and praise, for adopting someone else’s outcast. Who does this woman think she is?

A part of me at the conference feels like a fraud— I am a poster first mother for reform and reunion, and my own daughter isn't speaking to me? Yet my own baggage is actually immaterial: adoptees deserve to know who they were when they were born, and reform will not happen without a phalanx of first mothers announcing that we do not want to remain anonymous from our own children. Think how much bloodshed would have been saved if plantation owners understood that all men deserved to be free; it is the same with adoption and first mothers.

There will always be those fearful few who want to stay anonymous from their children, for any number of reasons—because they have never told their husbands, or their other children, because their religion has told them they belong to another family now and forever, because their own sense of shame is emotionally incapacitating—but the vast majority of us desperately want to know our children, no matter how secretive and pathetic we were at the time we relinquished them. In the path to unsealing the records, we are needed. We cannot stay in the closet. Our voices must be raised.

Still, why have I been relegated to her emotional trash heap?

Her birthday is two days after I get back. 

Adoptive father on the changing culture

This year for the first time I had sent no gift, no card. I thought about calling, but that seemed wrong. She’d been silent so long. I was so clearly dead to her. Maybe they already had Caller ID (we did not) and she would not pick up anyway. Or if she did answer, I’d get a cool response that announced: Oh, it’s you—why are you bothering me? You are nothing to me. Or I’d leave a message that went unanswered.

And you know what? I am fucking exhausted by this fractious and fragile  relationship, exhausted trying to figure out how to react, tired of getting beaten up by something I could not fix. I do not call.  

But I don’t get off lightly, I spend a part of the day deep in the blues. A first mother friend, Linda, who knows what I am going through, calls and I burst into tears. We email each other pretty much every day. Unless you are one of us, you would be surprised how often adoption passes by in the culture: on television dramas, in celebrity gossip, on your street and in your office. You want to escape, but can’t. A never ending supply of reminders of the biggest, and saddest, event of your life confront you daily, and to each other we could make note of them. We are alternately snide, ironic, infuriated or simply sad. We can be free with our feelings without being thought obsessive or loony. Linda’s daughter had cut her off too, even though her daughter is the one who had searched. The reunion had been ecstatic. So why was Linda cut off? Unknown. Or maybe it was because Linda had used the guest towels hanging on the rack when she visited, as her daughter had remarked unfavorably about that. She didn’t use the right towels. You think I’m kidding? I’m not.--lorraine

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[1] Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming America (New York: 2000). Pertman is the executive director of The Donaldson Institute, an adoption think-tank, and an active proponent of unsealing original birth records of adoptees. 

Previous Post in this series: First Mother to (reunited) daughter: What did I do wrong now?

RECOMMENDED READING

Adoption Nation: How the Adoption Revolution is Transforming Our Families -- and America 
"Adam Pertman explores the history and human impact of adoption, explodes the corrosive myths surrounding it, and tells compelling stories about its participants as they grapple with issues relating to race, identity, equality, discrimination, personal history, and connections with all their families. For the first edition of this groundbreaking examination of adoption and its impact on us all, Pertman won awards from many organizations, including the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists, the Dave Thomas Center for Adoption Law, the American Adoption Congress, the Century Foundation, Holt International, and the U.S. Congress. In this updated edition, Pertman reveals how changing attitudes and laws are transforming adoption—and thereby American society—in the twenty-first century."--Amazon. Maybe I have a thick skin, maybe because I am a writer too and recognize Adam is on our side, I did not find anything in the book offensive. We are all trying to do our best and Adam has been a tireless supporter of adoption reform, and as an adoptive parent, and an educator, he can have a great influence. 

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