DNA reveals a mother who rejected contact. Maybe.

Lorraine

Dear Lorraine:

"Through DNA I have a close 2nd cousin match and with help from a search angel, I found my first mother. I have a younger brother from her. My problem is she said no contact when the Children's Home Society in Florida found her back in 2007. At that point I learned that she had not disclosed my existence to her family, but now with the DNA tests results and my tree on ancestry I won't be a secret any more for long.

"Trying to figure out what to do next--should I try to contact her again through a direct letter to her, with a few pictures? We look a lot a like.


"Mainly I was looking for siblings and I have one a brother four years younger and quite a few cousins. I am open to having a cordial relationship with her if she is willing. What now? I have such mixed feelings."--Carol, 52, the married mother of a grown son.

First of all, everybody has a right to know where and who they came from, no matter who it may embarrass. You have no desire to hurt your mother's feelings, hope for a meeting with her, and would like some sort of relationship with her. But if not with her, what about your brother and cousins? You have a right to know the people who are related to you. They are your kin as well as your mothers. They are your blood relatives. They do not have to have a relationship with you, but you have a right to let them know of your existence. 

By moving forward--and leaving the information on the family tree where you found second cousins--your mother may have no choice but to acknowledge you. It is not your responsibility to stay hidden because that may be her preference. You have no obligation to not use DNA profiling to find blood relatives. You are a free agent in the world.

AGENCIES MAY LIE ABOUT CONTACT
I am assuming from your email that you received the "no contact" information about your mother from the agency. But since Florida is a closed-record state--and there is no information about agencies in Florida contacting birth parents at the behest of the adoptee--what you were told may be a convenient lie. When I wrote to my agency--then called Hillside Terrace--in Rochester, New York, requesting information about my daughter, I received three letters, all assuring me that she was fine and happy with her new family. That turned out to be malarkey. Beginning at about age five or six, she began having grand mal seizures and her doctor was trying to get more information about me from that very agency at the same time I was writing to them, desperate to offer my whereabouts and any help. "Fine and happy" are actually two words that were used in one of the letters.

Any information about your mother that came through the agency should be taken with a grain of salt. That may be the answer they give everyone, because who's going to survey the adoptees who contact them? Can't be done without the agency participation, and obviously they are not going to do that. Your mother may never have been contacted. She may want to know you. 

Carol's choice--and as a follow up email stated--was to write directly to her mother, using the sample letter and advice we have a link to on this page, and enclosing a few photos. 

DNA IS COMING TO A FAMILY NEAR YOU 

DNA is beginning to have a huge impact on search and reunion, and mothers who reject reunion need to be aware that many familial connections now are being made through the DNA. A mother may not have told her new family about her earlier child, but DNA may find her anyway. A mother or father does not have to submit one's own DNA for this to occur. Aunts, uncles, first and second cousins--any of their DNA and a little sleuthing may reveal the obvious candidate for one's father or mother, depending on which side the DNA trail leads.

It is human nature to want to know who one came from, what one's story is, and adoptees are not immune to the same natural curiosity as the rest of us. Many of them have just had that curiosity beaten out of them by custom, by awareness that their original birth records are sealed, and by guilt that doing so is disloyal to the parents they know and love. But that sense of forbidden may not stay with any one adoptee forever. One day, everything changes and someone decides to go forward. I've seen it happen many times--even from people who are compelled to write letters to publications or be interviewed as to why they don't want to search. Something gives, and everything changes and they move forward to a search.

Some birth/first mothers feel they have no right to search for their child, no matter how many years have passed. Instead they desperately wait to be found. So we have both sides of the equation--mother and child--feeling that they have no right to find the other--but still waiting to be found.

Birth mothers who deny the existence of their child lost to adoption may be in for a nasty revelation of their secret by others. The obvious solution is to stir up some courage, and tell the truth to their children--that you have a sister/brother out there. But human nature being what it is, a certain percentage of women will do nothing, live in fear of being discovered, and pray that their son or daughter doesn't find them. 

THE RIGHT TO KNOW THE INFORMATION OF BIRTH 
Yet I repeat, the information of birth is shared between mother and child; it is only because the child is too young to collect the information for later use that adoptees do not grow up with the knowledge of their birth and who their mother is. I often quote the words below because they ring so true--in fact, without realizing I'd be writing about this subject, I put them up in the sidebar the other day. In 1980, after numerous hearings around the country, the then U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare proposed a Model Adoption Act stating:

“There can be no legally protected interest in keeping one’s identity secret from one’s biological offspring; parents and child are considered co-owners of the information regarding the event of birth….The birth parents’ interest in reputation is not alone deserving of constitutional protection.”

Needless to say, the legislation did not pass, with an adoptive father in the Senate, John Tower of Texas, leading the way to removing this passage.*We wish both Carol her and her mother reunion and acceptance. If I am allowed to know the response, I will let readers know. Let us all send positive thoughts to these two women for the best outcome.--lorraine
__________________________
FROM FMF
Letter to Birth Mother or Sibling

TO READ
*The story of what happened to this good bill is told in some detail in Hole In My Heart: memoir and report from the fault lines of adoption. This is my story of loss, reunion, and loss again, told in the context of the history of adoption and its ramifications. It it both memoir and journalism.

Destiny's Second Chance (fiction)
by Kate Vale
From the author:

"This story is an homage to my mother, herself a foundling, back when that term was frequently ascribed to children first cared for in an orphanage and later adopted into a family. Her story and those of other women and men who claimed two sets of parents--one left behind, the other joined sometime after birth--refused to let me go. I wondered what it might be like to want to know one's birth parents, to feel pulled in different directions by the knowledge that one's birth parents were not the same family that raised her or him.

"The emotional ties that link these people often are misunderstood. How they might be reworked into acceptance and even love was something I chose to explore." 

PS: I'll be reading this soon myself.--ld 

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