Dusky weaves the personal with the political

Janet Mason Ellerby

Lorraine's new memoir brings together her story as well as the larger tale of adoption in the 20th mid-century and the imperative for change. This is the message of  Janet Ellerby's engaging review of Lorraine's new memoir,

Hole In My Heart, published this week in the CUB Communicator.--jane

“Until I had answers, I would be stuck in a mire of remorse and recrimination...I could not move forward into my next act, until I found her.” Thus writes Lorraine Dusky in her compelling new memoir, Hole In My Heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption. She continues: “For mothers like me, adoption has no closure as long as we do not know what happened to our children.”

At the heart of Dusky’s memoir lie the emotional and psychological wounds natural mothers must endure after capitulating to adoption, whether open or closed. But closed adoption, Dusky argues convincingly, is especially egregious. It is not only exploitive and cruel but ultimately legally and morally wrong.

With Dusky as informed guide, readers first traverse the “baby scoop” era, the 60s, when Dusky surrenders her newborn daughter and closed adoptions are by and large the only option for unwed mothers; then on to the 70s and 80s, as Dusky joins a cadre of adoption activists; and finally, to the near-present, as the struggle continues to open sealed birth certificates and put an end to recruiting vulnerable teens and poor mothers to provide babies that end up “being transferred [as]...cash transactions,” products of the billion-dollar adoption industry that still tries to sell adoption as a completely “good thing.”   

Dusky’s personal narrative is not extraordinary. It follows the canonical seduction plot and its punishing aftermath for female characters. It is a plot that has informed Western literature from Persephone, to Clarissa, to Hester, to Tess: the young naïf, seduced by the sexually experienced rake, must face grim, sometimes deadly penalties. Stories like Dusky’s continue to captivate readers as well as film and TV audiences who hungrily consume chronicles of passion, capitulation, and calamity. 

THE IMPORTANCE OF MEMOIR

But what makes Dusky’s so worthy of note is the historical and political context she provides.  By putting her extensive experience as a journalist to work, Dusky not only tells her own story of seduction, surrender, reunion, and loss, she also gives us a chronicle of adoption practices, both domestic and world-wide,  for the last sixty years. She expertly weaves the personal with the political and the result is not only one natural mother’s story of sorrow, frustration, and helplessness, but also the advent of an imperative social change. As the moral values that inform our culture evolve and the social penalties for unwed motherhood and illegitimacy diminish, Dusky’s memoir insightfully reflects these cultural shifts. But her memoir does more than simply mirror these shifts. With fierce perceptivity, Dusky demonstrates how the genre itself can do important cultural work as it challenges and subverts the prevailing moral standards that affect the lives of natural mothers and the children they surrender.

Jane and Lorraine, reunited, here in 1983

Dusky does find out what happened to the baby she relinquished. With remarkable facility, a mysteriously cloaked “searcher” finds her daughter, Jane, in Wisconsin. Jane and Dusky are reunited with the support of Jane’s accommodating adoptive parents, Ann and Gary. The reunion does, in a sense, allow Dusky to move forward, but it is far from the transformative revelation she anticipated: it does not yield the lost key that would unfasten the dead weight of remorse and recrimination that could finally allow her a sense of closure.  

'I MADE A MISTAKE'

Dusky gives us crucial insight into the assumptions made about such reunions, that they are the cure-all for the trauma of surrender and secrecy. Jane’s life is fraught with difficulty, and Dusky cannot help but think she is to blame, that she failed Jane, that the daughter she would have raised, “would have not had to endure so many trials.” However, all the laborious justifications for the adoption fall away as she realizes,” I made a mistake...A terrible mistake. I shouldn’t have done it.” These simple words were a revelation for me. Like Dusky, I too have tried and tried to account for the decision to surrender my newborn daughter to a closed adoption. How freeing to say, “I made a mistake, a mistake for which I will always be sorry.”

And it is a mistake that is hard to live with. Reunion can help; an ongoing relationship with an adult child can be ameliorative; open adoption might be more merciful than closed; but ultimately, these rectifications cannot erase our regret or right our wrongs. Rather, Dusky shows me why we must continue to tell these sad stories of defeat and loss to whomever will listen. She shows me why she arrives at the following far-reaching conclusion:  If a mother cannot raise her child, “the best solution...is for the child to be absorbed into the larger biological, natural family of aunts and uncles and cousins, with the child growing up always knowing who his mother is.” 

Dusky and I know there can be no unequivocal happy ending for mothers who surrender. The baby cannot be restored. The longing cannot be assuaged. Yet we can be heroic. We can, like Dusky, lead productive, resolute lives. We can join her in making sure that the dramatic economic and racial inequalities that continue to compromise adoption practices are exposed. Reading this book will help all of us to be better able to contest the unexamined and harmful assumptions involved when it comes to “choosing” adoption.  

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Janet Mason Ellerby is a natural mother herself and professor of English and Women and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. She is the author of Following the Tambourine Man: A Birthmother's Memoir. Her most recent book is Embroidering the Scarlet A: Unwed Mothers and Illegitimate Children in American Fiction and Film. I googled her and discovered she received her B.S. at the University of Oregon, in the state where I live. The many Oregon/adoption connections never cease to amaze me.  It's a small state, with only about 1.5 percent of the U.S. population.

TO ORDER either book please click on the links above or the jacket image. The more noise we make--no matter how we make it--the more our message will be heard, the sooner change will be happen, the fewer babies will lose their original mothers, the more mothers will not know our heart break.

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