Why Mothers Reject Reunion

Lorraine 

Besides the debatable differences on the grief scale for those involved in open or closed adoptions, there is a second issue: What happens later. And that requires looking at the impact of shame, humiliation, grief, and gossip—and the subsequent secrecy—that surrounded the mothers who relinquished their children decades ago. For months, the pregnant women, some of them high school teenagers, hid their growing bellies from the outside world. They were forced to drop out of school and go into seclusion, possibly with faraway relatives or in a maternity home—some even committed to psychiatric institutions—all to shelter their families from the ignominy of the unwed and unwanted pregnancy. Every day was a reminder of how disgraceful it was to get pregnant outside marriage. Knowing that they were going to relinquish their babies to adoption, birth itself was sad, harrowing in the present and haunting in the future. 

A great many of these teenagers received little or no emotional support from their families, and instead endured their scorn before and after the birth. For these teens and women, it was a hellish time. Then these young mothers, still aching for their babies with the “love hormone” oxytocin running rampant in their bodies, were told to “forget” the whole experience! Social workers said it. So did priests, nuns, ministers, rabbis, and doctors. Some women were told their babies died, while others were told they were supposed to think of their child as dead. The mantra women in closed adoptions heard was forget, forget, forget. They were supposed to move on with their lives and not grieve openly, the way one is allowed to grieve in any other catastrophic loss. Some dropped out of high school. Those in college often switched schools, having to integrate themselves into a world of coeds whose greatest problem was getting into the sorority of their choice. Like many others, I quit my job and moved to another town. 

I was fortunate in that my social worker did not tell me I would forget. She said I would never forget, but that in time, my awareness of loss would be easier to bear. There would be scar tissue, but the wound would heal somewhat. And in truth, it did. It took a long time, but life—and acceptance of my life—did get better. 

Perhaps writing has been a way of expiating my own sorrow and guilt, but since writing about my life is as natural as riding a bicycle, I don’t experience it that way. I do know those honest words from my social worker and adoption confidante, as I sat weeping in her office, have always been a lodestar on my life’s journey. She understood as well as anyone who has not gone through this herself. 

But others had the primacy of secrecy drilled into them too deep to dig themselves out. Many were left an absolute emotional mess, without a shoulder to cry on, and once they managed to squelch their pain and sorrow and get their lives back together, they had constructed a suit of emotional armor that left them unwilling ever to go there again. Opening themselves up once more to the pounding grief, embarrassment, and disgrace of that time in their lives became unthinkable. And so, they reject reunion. Even when their grown sons and daughters return, however discreetly, asking for information and hoping for connection.--Excerpt from Hole In My Heart: Love and Loss in the Fault Lines of Adoption