Speaking for us again

You know..... I see articles like this and I go through such a range of emotions. I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to punch somebody, I want to laugh, I just smh. Once again an adopter is speaking for us. Once again an adopter thinks she knows what we think, what we feel and what she thinks we should do - such as "move on" from our grief.

First of all, I wish they would stop calling us "birthmothers". They are mothers, I am a mother. Period. She writes of a mother's experience after giving birth....

"They may feel a surge of connection to him, as well as pride, sadness, and grief."

May feel? Ya think? Yeah, maybe she'll be sad that she's losing her first born child. Maybe, just maybe, she'll feel connected to this little person she just grew in her womb. The child she shares cells with, a child who carries her DNA, a child she's nurtured and loved within her body for the last 9 months. It's utterly baffling to me how people can make such statements. 

"Adoptive parents who experienced the grief of infertility may use that experience to empathize with their baby’s birth mother. One mother told her child’s birth mother at the delivery, “I am sorry you are going through so much pain. I wish I could go through labor for you.”

I've talked about this before and some people may not like what I have to say but.... gonna say it anyway. When grieving infertility the grief is real, it hurts, I get that and I'm not trying to minimize it but it's grieving what could have been- what will not happen. It's grieving an imaginary child, the child that will never be. When a mother is grieving the loss of her baby to adoption she is grieving the loss of an actual child- a living, breathing human being. They are both grief, they are both real but they are completely different. I don't know what it feels like to feel the grief of the infertile and I won't pretend to. An adopter who is infertile has no idea the level of grief a mother deals with. She can't grasp what it is to carry a child and feel that child kicking and moving within. She can't grasp the sacred connection a mother has to her own flesh and blood. She can try to empathize but she will never know. I appreciate an effort to empathize but not when she still feels entitled to take the baby from his mother.

"I wish I could go through labor for you"?  She says she cares so much about the mother that she wishes she could go through the labor for her. BS! If she cared so much about the mother she would ask that mother what she could do for her to clear whatever obstacles are in the way of that mother taking care of her own baby! But of course that won't happen. That would interfere with her being able to take that child from the mother. She says things like this so she can show concern but still she thinks she's entitled to take the baby home and raise him as her own.

"Following a period of emotional chaos and grief, most birth mothers reach a level of acceptance in their lives. As your child’s birth mother becomes more at peace with her decision, she may gain renewed energy for her current life, and more clarity about her role as a birth parent and her relationship to you."

Reach a level of acceptance? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. How does she know what most mothers do? Mothers don't reach acceptance, they learn to hide the grief, they learn to hold in the tears and let them go when no one is watching, they learn to function so they can go to work everyday. In an open adoption they learn to cover up and keep silent so the adopters don't see it and decide she shouldn't have contact with her child anymore. She learns to be the good girl so she can, if she's lucky, stay in the adopters good graces because they hold all the power.

"While each contact may reawaken some of her feelings of loss, most birth mothers report that these contacts help them to move on from the sadness and be more productive in their lives."

The loss isn't reawakened, it's always awake. Every minute of every day for the rest of a mother's life. That doesn't mean a mother doesn't have a productive and fulfilling life, even a happy one. It just means that the loss is always with her. The lost child is not replaced with the birth of more children or a fabulous career or anything else the mother might do. There is no getting around that and reunion doesn't fix it. You don't just "move on" from the loss of a child. 

And why do they feel the need to tell us to move on? Did they just move on from the loss of their fertility? Did they say- "well it wasn't meant to be that I have children so maybe I should focus on volunteering or fostering children"? No. They jump through hoops, pay a lot of money to the industry, have business cards made that they can hand out to pregnant women who aren't wearing wedding rings, hire people to design slick full color brochures advertising themselves as better than mothers who are poor, in a bad situation or are just unsure of themselves, place ads on Craigslist and use crowd funding to get other people to help them buy a baby. 

Adopters, please stop. Stop telling us to move on. Stop telling other adopters how to help mothers leave their children.

Am I a hero?

This post got me thinking.... am I a hero?

What does a hero look like? Does it look like a woman who is pregnant, young and not at all sure about what comes next? Does it look like someone who surrendered to pressure because she didn't have the finances or the strength to back her up? Does it look like someone who surrendered to the pressure of family and church because those people believed that having a child outside of "wedlock" was morally wrong and the child is then illegitimate and doesn't deserve to be included in the family? Does it look like someone who didn't have anywhere else to turn? Does that make me a hero?

According to the woman who wrote that post, we- meaning the mothers who bore children and were unable to keep those children-, we are heroes. What's wrong with that picture?

Not having choices does not make anyone a hero. It makes them simply choiceless. It makes them people who are doing what they have to do to survive. It makes them people who have to carry on in the face of grief that they're expected to live with regardless of how other people view the situation or how horrendous that grief is. It makes them people who carry on even though they want to just curl up in a ball and die.

Like the woman who wrote that post, the woman who adopted my daughter thanked me one day for giving her the gift of my daughter. I replied with- "she wasn't a gift, I didn't give her willingly. I was forced" There was silence on the other end of the phone. The subject was quickly changed.

Adopters are saviors and first mothers are heroes. This is what the adoption industry would have us believe. This is what they bank on. This is what keeps the bottom line healthy.

A good read

I just read this book The Light Between Oceans by ML Stedman. It wasn't my intention to sit on my butt all day last Sunday and read but once I started I just couldn't stop. I started and finished this story in one sitting. It wasn't adoption themed but in a way it was. It was the adoption loss core of me that it touched. Through the story you see isolation, grief, joy, prejudice and what happens to a child caught in the middle of adults who are grieving, overwhelmed, needy and delusional.

*Spoiler alert*

A woman still grieving the recent stillbirth of her baby hears a cry. She finds an infant crying and left alone with what appears to be the body of the child's deceased father. They're in a small boat that washes ashore an isolated island where the woman is living with her lighthouse keeper husband. She convinces her husband that they don't have to report finding the dead man and infant. In her grief she tells herself the story that the child's mother surely must have drowned and God brought this child to her to raise. She decides she is meant to be this little girls mother through divine intervention. Where have we heard that before?

A few years later, back on the mainland a mother is still grieving the loss of her infant daughter and husband. The small boat is found but no bodies. Of course all assume that both are dead until she receives a note telling her that her baby is alive and well cared for. With new hope she fights to find her child and finally succeeds. By the time the mother is reunited with her daughter, the girl is 4 years old and of course doesn't understand what's happening. She has no memory of her mother and all she wants is to go back to the woman who found and kept her. The scenario brought to mind all the recent articles of parents fighting for the return of their children from people who were trying to adopt them, people who know the child is wanted by their mother and/or father but still hangs on to the child along with the delusion that the child is supposed to be theirs.

This is the story of 2 grieving women and the little girl caught between them. It's also the story of a man caught between his love for his wife and doing what he knows to be right - returning the child to her mother.

Dealing with it.

Double Portrait, Lucian Freud           

I love this post on Lost Daughters by Karen Pickell. She's talking about dealing with grief. My best friend said to me one day that me and my family cry because it's Tuesday. She comes from a family that doesn't show emotion. It was always forbidden for her which I find very sad. At the same time I come from a family of criers. I cry over many things - commercials on tv, books and movies, compliments, anger, you name it - I can cry about it.

I'm a step-parent adoptee along with being a mother who lost a child to adoption. I know about dealing with grief. I've been living with the grief of losing my daughter for the last 32 years. It was a grief that had to be hidden and swallowed on a daily basis. I had to pretend that I had 2 children instead of 3. I had to pretend that everything was just peachy with my family even though becoming pregnant while single was the ultimate perceived shame upon my family and my daughter's adoption was the result of that shame.

What Karen's post reminded me of were the times when I was a little girl and my parents would find me crying for what they thought was no reason. I heard these stories for years, stories about me as a little child, sitting in front of the tv just crying. They told me they would ask... "why are you crying?" The joke was when I would say... "I don't know". They thought that was funny. They thought it was funny that a small child of 4 or 5 years old who was sitting there crying her eyes out, didn't know why she was crying. I've often wondered if the crying had something to do with the loss of my father even though from the stories I heard, there wasn't much to lose. Who knows. I just can't imagine having one of my children crying like that and not being concerned about the cause. Apparently I was suffering from some sort of upset but couldn't verbalize it. Did I somehow know that my father didn't want anything to do with me, even though he was gone when I was a baby? Was that affecting me or was it just something happening in the house that day that bothered me. From what I understand it wasn't an isolated incident. I guess I cried a lot as a kid. What I want to know is... why.

I learned a lot about my adoption experience of grief by going through a completely different type of grief process. I was extraordinarily close to my grandmother. In her last decade she lived very close to me and I saw her nearly every day. Her last weeks were spent in a nearby nursing home and I would sit with her for hours. We talked about everything under the sun including the fact that she would be leaving us soon. We cried a lot, we held each other's hands, the grieving had begun. She grieved with me about her leaving. When she died I was sitting on one side of her bed holding her hand while my mother held her other hand. The rest of the family was gathered around the room. As she took her last breath I felt peace. Of course I cried through the following days of dealing with the funeral and all that entails but I also laughed. We all had many good stories to tell about our lives with her. Of course I still miss her but now I can look back and think of her with fondness and love.

Losing my daughter and losing my grandmother were both devastating to me but there was a difference. I was allowed to openly grieve one loss but not the other. Although the people in my family cry easily, my pregnancy and shame meant that there could be no grieving about adoption. How could I grieve for her if no one is supposed to have known about her? As far as the loss of my father, how could I grieve something that I was too young to recognize or understand? For that matter, how could I grieve something that no one else even considered to be a loss for me at all?

What I do know from these grief experiences is, whether it's hidden or unrecognized, grief has to come out at some point. It has to be dealt with eventually. In the loss of my grandmother, the grief was hard but eventually there was peace because the pain was allowed to happen. When it's allowed it's easier to move through it. In the loss of my daughter the grief would explode out of me every year around her birthday. I could only swallow so much during the course of the year before it would spill over and her birthday was the catalyst. I then thought that reuniting with her would end the pain but what I found was, in meeting her, there was another layer of grief to come to the surface - it was the realization of all that I missed in her childhood and the anger at what was done to both of us. When I saw the photos of her growing up it hit me like a ton of bricks.

Everyone's process is different and we all need to do these things in our own way. For me, going through one type of grief gave me a much better understanding of the other kind, the kind that had to be hidden. In thinking about how I handle life situations, it's good to realize that maybe it's the grief that has to be dealt with and it's not that I'm somehow defective.

What Remains

What Remains

48x36

Standing at the edge,

treading lightly,

casting what's left of myself.

Who I was is gone.

This is what remains.

Bought and sold,

before and after.

Thoughts move from light into shadow.

One event, one moment,

became 2 lifetimes changed.

Holding thoughts of her, 

protected in the small dark place,

time moves in and out of the light.

With her,

in the sun,

who would we have been?

A PAP is asking....

I just read a blog post that made me smile. That's something I needed too. I've been having a hard time with the whole spirit of Christmas thing this year. Just not feeling it. The last few months have been an emotional struggle for a variety of reasons. That's why I haven't been posting here much. It's also why I haven't been reading much about adoption. There's only so much heartbreak I can handle before I have to take a step back, take a breather and then jump in again. Anyway, last night I finally got lights on the Christmas tree and my son and granddaughter come over to help me decorate. What a great time I had showing a little 18 month old how to put ornaments on the branches. Watching her toddle back and forth between the box of ornaments and the tree while learning to say the name of each one was such a kick! Nothing like an adorable little girl to light up my spirit again.

So back to the post that made me smile..... A PAP was asking where the babies are.

"We have her name picked out. We are ready to go. Except for one thing..... there are no babies up for adoption with either agency. There are not even any pregnant women/girls considering adoption with either agency. HUH????"

I think that's the first time I've read something adoption related that made me want to go woo hoo!! There are no babies available? The supply dried up? Excellent! I can just hear the agencies now...the demand is there so why aren't they producing? We have families here ready to give us a lot of money! Families have taken second mortgages, held fund raisers, borrowed and begged from friends and family, paid for advertising, did the home studies, taken cute photos with their dogs and picket fences, filled out tons of paperwork and yet there's no product to buy.

Yesterday someone asked me - but what about the couples who can't have children and want them? My response to my friend was "that doesn't entitle them to someone else's baby". So, what about those couples? They should have no bearing whatsoever on the issue of newborn infant adoption. I know that may sound harsh and my friend probably thought I sounded harsh too but as another friend said - "If someone lost their leg in an accident that doesn't mean it's someone else's job to cut off their leg and give it to them." Yes, there is a lot of pain for these waiting couples. I understand that and I'm sure most of them are perfectly wonderful and loving people. But, their wants do drive the market and the agencies are there ready and willing to give these couples that sense of entitlement. The agency is anxious to hold their hand and feign concern all the while taking lots of money from their other hand.

"I had a long conversation with my adoption coordinator last week. She is just as stunned in the low number of adoptions as we are. While I hope that number is lowering for positive reasons, it's hard to say. When I asked her what she thinks may be a contributing factor to such few children being placed for adoption, she said the MTV show "16 & Pregnant" is definitely NOT helping by glamorizing teen parents."

Really? Does she really think that a TV show is causing the number of available babies to drop? I also hope it's dropping for positive reasons. Reasons like better education about birth control, more people seeing through the lies of the agencies, more education about the damage that separating a mother and child does to both mother and child, more families stepping up and helping their family members, more people fighting for family preservation.

"Our only real conviction is that we are to adopt a GIRL. My dreams have been about a girl. I want another girl. Our boys want a girl. My baby girl wants a girl. My husband just wants me to be happy. So we are unanimous on the "girl" part."

It's all about what they want. Their wants have blinded them to the tragedy that's at the heart of how adoption comes about. Their gain begins with a terrible loss for an entire family. Wishing for babies to be free for adoption means wishing for other people to grieve for a lifetime. The news that there are no babies available at 2 agencies is sad for this woman but encouraging to me. It's another little something to lift my spirits this holiday season.

Not a bit

This butterfly was a painting project I did for the city of Lakeland. They were doing a fundraising auction to build a children's playground and a bunch of us artists were fortunate enough to be chosen to contribute art. This particular project was special to me not only because it was to benefit children but because the city of Lakeland is where I was living when I was pregnant with my daughter lost to adoption. Near this park is where I had to sign the papers when she was 4 days old. When I was designing the pattern I was going to paint on the wings I decided to incorporate my daughter's initials into the design (thankfully this project came up after finding my daughter so I actually knew her initials). So, in this small way, Liz and I are always together in the town where I spent those months carrying her.

You see, mothers don't forget. Our sadness over losing our children doesn't turn into joy and warmth knowing that our babies are with other people who have more money or are married. I bring up the butterfly because our children, although not with us, are part of everything we do, everything we think, everything we feel. Last night I was looking through some websites and came across yet another rah, rah, happy adoption site. These sites always have questions supposedly asked by pregnant girls/women considering adoption (I doubt they're genuine questions considering how similar the questions are from site to site). I see this one all the time - "Will I feel sad forever?" The reply was...

"NO! There may always be a bit of sadness in your heart. But will be replaced with the joy, warmth, love, security and financial support your baby will have with the adoptive couple."

Oh, BULLSHIT! Seeing this nonsense just burns me. How dare someone, who has no idea what the hell they're talking about because they haven't lived in these shoes, give that kind of answer. These are the kinds of outright lies told to young, vulnerable pregnant girls in order to convince them to give up. After their baby is gone they're left to deal with the grief day in and day out for many, many years. Sadness will be replaced with joy? A mother without her child doesn't feel joy about the adoption no matter how long it's been. Sadness replaced with warmth and love? No and no. Love for who- the couple who took her baby and is raising her baby as if born to them? Love for the other woman who is being called mommy instead of the child's natural mother? Sadness replaced with security and financial support - well that just doesn't make sense. She might feel the security and financial support if she had been adopted by the couple along with her baby. I'm pretty sure what they meant to say was that the sadness would be replaced with love knowing the security and financial support their child will have. But here's the thing - there is no knowing. No one has a crystal ball. Those pretty brochures with the smiling, perfect looking PAP's could be false advertising just like the lies told above. There's just no way to know.

In the 22 years without my daughter I cried on a regular basis. There was an underlying depression that never left me and when her birth month rolled around every year I would be overcome with grief. Every day of my life I was searching. Every time I saw a child around her age I would wonder - could it be her? I worried that the people she ended up with could be abusing her (thankfully that wasn't the case but it does happen sometimes). I even wondered if she was still alive - could there have been an accident? maybe she was sick? You just don't know. That's not "a bit of sadness in your heart". That's living with constant uncertainty and depression. That's living with a piece of your heart far, far away and never knowing when or even if it will ever be returned to you.

Art, Adoption and Fear

Solstice Night

colored pencil

14x10

I know the winter solstice is the one we're close to but this piece represents a summer solstice night from years ago and I'm putting it here because it reminds me of the inner work we do as artists (it also reminds me of the warmer temps - I'm not liking the freezing weather we've had in FL lately). The painting was done from a photo I took in my friends yard in Taos NM during our last meeting of The Artist's Way group.

Artist's don't get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working. ~ Stephen DeStaebler

Artist's deal with insecurities all the time. First there is the fear of the blank canvas. There's the fear of putting our work out there, the fear of ridicule or rejection, the fear the gallery director isn't going to like the work, the fear the director won't even look at the work, the fear of spending resources on show entry fees and not getting into the show, the fear of not being able to sell the work, the fear of getting into shows and then not having the funds to deal with the framing, shipping and cartage fees required. Then, even after getting into a show and winning an award, there is the fear surrounding being able to produce that quality of work ever again.

Producing art, showing the work and working as an artist takes stamina, tenacity and facing fears. The basic thought behind all of this fear is "I'm not good enough". Producing art is very revealing. When we paint we put a piece of our soul on the paper or canvas. If you gave the same photo to 20 different artists and asked them to make a painting from that photo, you would have 20 different results. The subject might be the same but every artist's soul is different and the art reveals that.

For me living as an artist takes introspection, meditation and courage - a willingness to be seen. Maybe all these years of learning to be an artist has helped me in living as a natural mother from the closed adoption era. As mothers we were told we weren't good enough to raise our own children. The only reason being that we weren't married. The 2 children I did raise are proof enough that it wasn't true. Finding my worth in the art world/outside world coincided with finding my worth as a mother. I believe finding ways of dealing with fear in creativity also helped me in dealing with the grief that comes with adoption.

It's hard to face that grief. It's hard to live with it every day. It was also hard to start the search for my daughter. Some people were afraid for me. They were afraid that I would get hurt, either by what I found out or by not being able to find her at all. I was afraid too. Searching online in the reunion registries was a simple way to start so that's what I did. I spent years doing that with no success. Finally I got the courage to make the call to Catholic Charities. The pain of not knowing was far greater than the fear of what I might find. I had to know something.

A lot of life as an artist and as a natural mother is about facing fear. The latest hurdle for me was facing the fear of talking about adoption. It still comes down to overcoming the feeling of not being good enough but I'm the only one who creates that feeling so I can change it by thinking a different thought. Now putting the art out there doesn't seem nearly as difficult as it used to and talking about adoption is getting easier. Although the people who used to worry about me during the search phase are relieved, they're now worried about me talking about it. They worry that I might get sick again (last year I was dealing with the big "C" but I'm fine now) As a matter of fact, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the pain of decades of hidden grief was the cause of the illness to begin with. So.... no worries. Painting is fulfilling a need to create and being honest about adoption is fulfilling a need to be free. And, as facing the fears in the art world seems to have helped me in dealing with adoption, adoption has now found it's way into the art.

This painting is from a photo I took on a family trip to Indiana. I was walking along the lake, early in the morning and feeling very peaceful. I've had many moments like that over the years. I've had so much joy raising my children and my husband is amazing. We're soon celebrating our 29th anniversary. I have good friends and a full creative life. I've had a good life and I'm grateful. I'm also angry. There's been a lot of talk in the blog world about this issue so I guess I'm just adding my .02 when I say I've been pissed off for 30 years. Has that kept me from enjoying my life? No. I can put it in perspective. The anger is kind of like the grief. When you lose a child to adoption there is no getting over it. Recently there was a woman who said we as natural mothers need to "get over it and deal", "forgiving yourself is the starting point", "not all first moms want to keep their "problem". I'm sorry..... huh?! Children went from being illegitimate (a word I absolutely loath) to being a problem.

Human beings are neither illegitimate nor a problem. They are people deserving of love from the women who gave birth to them.

The women who lose their children to adoption are young, scared, vulnerable, lacking resources and not getting the info they need to make an informed decision. When they feel backed into a corner, they're not really making a choice. Instead they are getting bombarded with people telling them that they need to do this so they can finish school, go to college, it's in the best interest of the child, the baby needs 2 parents in the home, what will the neighbors think, you can't handle this...... yadda, yadda, yadda. So, you believe the BS because you're already feeling like you've shamed not only yourself but your entire family. Look at what you're doing to everyone else! This is how we were raised. We're good girls, we'll do whatever it takes to make it right so we give our children to other people to raise.

Enter the anger and grief. We're not supposed to talk about it, ever! We're supposed to pretend it never happened. So then what happens to that anger and grief? We swallow it and choke on it. It gets buried along with our self-esteem. Sometimes it's so bad we can't even breathe but can we tell anyone about it? Of course not. We're not allowed. So it festers and once a year it boils over on our child's birthday. Every year we see the month coming on the calendar. February, March... here it comes. It starts to weigh you down, you see the numbers change, the date gets closer and you get more depressed. Here it is, it's now April. As the date comes screaming toward you all you want to do is crawl into a corner and cry and cry and cry........ This goes on for literally decades. When you lose someone to death you have a funeral, you grieve and you have support from family and friends. On the other hand, when you deal with this kind of grief there's no end in sight. There's not only no support, hardly anyone knows about it. How are you supposed to just "get over it" when you have no idea if your child is alive or dead? How are you supposed to just get over the anger when your child is taken from you? You don't, you just learn to cope. You learn how to hide.

So now what. What happens decades down the road. Some mothers and their children are reunited and some are not. In my case I'm reunited with my daughter. Thank You!!!!! What a relief! I know what happened. Now 30 years later I'm here, we have a wonderful relationship. I feel like I've been let out of prison. So, for me, what's the next step? The next step is letting people know what happened. Now my job is to let people know that what happened is not right. Babies should not be taken from their mothers. The only reason to take a child from their mother is in the case of neglect or abuse. Finances shouldn't factor into it. Social class shouldn't factor into it. Whether a mother has graduated from college or not shouldn't factor into it. People shouldn't be traded for a degree. What happens now is I add my voice to the cacophony of other pissed off voices to let the world know that it's ok to be angry. I'm allowed damn it! It doesn't have to rule my life but if the rest of society has no idea that we're angry how is anything going to change for the better?

Anger doesn't have to rule my life. I have a good, happy life, but if anything is going to change people have to know the injustices that happened. If anything is going to change people have to know that the adoption industry is just that - a multi-billion dollar profit making industry that trades not in goods and services but in human lives.

I make my life what it is and I want other mothers to have the opportunity to create their lives with their children free from brainwashing, shame and the grief that comes from losing a child to adoption.

Peace,

Carlynne