Sorry We're Closed

This is a must share post from Lorraine at First Mother Forum. She's talking about the situation with the adoption agency that closed and left thousands of mothers hanging with no information about their children. When I lost my daughter to adoption there was no option of open or semi-open adoption. If it was adoption, it was closed - that's all there was to it. You were severed from your child, sometimes for life. You go through your life not knowing if your child is alive or dead, healthy or sick, well cared for or abused. When I first heard about open adoption I thought, surely that must be much better for the mothers emotionally. Boy, was I wrong.

I don't know how anyone or any agency can claim that what they're doing is open adoption or even semi-open. I think semi-closed is probably more accurate. The openness only seems to be on one side. In so many cases the a-parents know the full name of the mother and where she is but the mother knows nothing about the a-parents. Only first names (if they're the real first names) are shared with the mother and she has no idea where they are. She also has no control over contact. They can talk about agreements in the "planning" stages but it doesn't mean a damn thing. How can anyone even pretend that a mother has any control over the situation when she has to depend on the agency to forward any correspondence to the a-family and has to wait to hear from the a-parents? Even if she has some contact info on the family she still has to wait for return calls, letters or texts. If they're failing to live up to their end of the bargain the mother has to be careful to not be too pushy for fear of pushing the a-parents away. There is always the risk of the a-parents closing the adoption and there's nothing she can do about it. Again, she has control how?

I read over and over again, the heartbreaking stories of mothers and fathers who sit and wait, who had open adoptions that closed. The wound of adoption is bad enough but then to feel the betrayal of everyone involved from the agency to the a-family after promises of contact have been made just means the wound gets ripped open over and over again with each picture that never arrives or letter that's never sent. With every "open" adoption that closes there's another mother who has lost her child all over again. Infant adoption shouldn't be happening the way it is anyway, but then to do that to the mother AND the child is just pure evil.

History Waiting

History Waiting

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It's universal. We make family trees, we talk to and honor our ancestors, we trace the people that came before us, it's important enough to make reality shows about it - Searching For..., Who Do You Think You Are. We have websites about researching our ancestry.

Why is it that in adoption the biological connection isn't considered very important but in the rest of society it's huge? The adoption industry wants people to think that it doesn't matter how the family is formed - a person's roots are meaningless, what matters is who is there to change diapers and play ball. Of course parenting well is important, but many times adoptees are expected to consider their history to be from their adopted family. Good parenting should also include being honest with our children about who they are. I grew up thinking I was half Cuban. I thought my history was in Santiago de Cuba and Cayey, Puerto Rico. I thought I was a combo of the two islands - Cubarican if you will. Well, turns out the Cuban side was the adopted side. That's not actually my history. I love my dad and I do have an interest in where he came from and what that means but it's not the biology of who I am.

The biology of who I am makes me wonder if I look like Aunt Shelley. Do I have any of Uncle Tommy in me? When I look at photos of my children I see the same chin on all 3 of them and I see it in 2 of my grandchildren. There's a thread of continuity there that's important. Maybe some of the features that I passed down to my daughter lost to adoption are the same features from the father and family I never knew. When my daughter's first son was born she was looking for the very first time, into the eyes of a person who was biologically related to her. That's huge because her roots had been cut off from her. And, when her first son was born I wasn't there. I had no idea I was becoming a grandmother for the first time. I now have 4 grandchildren, 3 of them live in another state but I have contact with them, they're part of my life. The youngest is almost 9 months old and lives nearby. When I look at her I wonder about the grandmother that was taken from me when I was a baby. How did she feel knowing she had a grandbaby out there that she couldn't see? When I look at my little granddaughter I can't imagine being cut off from her. What did it do to my grandmother to be cut off from me completely. Was her grieving similar to the way I grieved when I lost my daughter?

Some of these broken links were the result of family decisions and some were because of the adoption industry. It's not ok for people in a money-making industry to make decisions about who we connect with and who we don't. Closed adoption is not ok. Closing an open adoption is not ok. It's not ok that I found out about my own adoption when I was 26 yrs old. It's not ok that my daughter had to wait 22 years to find out her own history.

There are still a lot of histories waiting.