Thursday, September 04, 2008

Nightmares, Sound and Fury


I still keep hearing the words of the adopter who was in my water aerobics class when she commented on reunion between the (her) adopted person and the natural mother. She described it as "her worst nightmare."

When my daughter told the woman who adopted her that she had found me, she said, "We were told this would be impossible." We went on to find out that she and her husband, who were cronys with some southern politicos, did all in their power to make sure that it wouldn't happen. They illegally sealed my records of my daughter's birth and surrender. When I inquired of the SC DSS about non-identifying records on my daughter, I was told there were no such records. Yet, a couple of years later, when non-id was made legally available, my daughter got the works and found me, quickly. I was the one who was barred from obtaining any information.

Women who adopt seem to know that we are not lined up like eager applicants, just dying to surrender our children. Deep inside, they realize it was an act of surrender and desperation and not the noble sacrifice myth they try to keep going. They know we would give our right arms to have those children with us again. The fact that there might be more than mere curiosity on the part of the adoptee frightens them and the love we still hold for our children scares the spit out of them. It's a fact that they either try to keep the adoptee from searching or try to run the reunion or, as in the case of one particular adopter, covers her face whenever they drop one mother's son off to visit.

Another adopter disrupted her over-21-aged adoptee's reunion with her mother by calling the police and reporting the mother for KIDNAPPING. If these examples don't show that adoption with the "as if born to" mind-set, done to give a home/couple a baby rather than an infant a home is a broken and skewed institution, there are many more such stories that can be told. These women who feel that they are entitled to a child, don't really know the full ramifications of raising a child they did not bear. There is a bond that they can twist and mangle but they can't break it.

You hear them exclaim, "I was the one who sat up with him/her when they were sick, changed the diapers, drove them to soccer, etc., etc., ad nauseum. I, and many other mothers of adoption loss, would have been overjoyed to wipe those bottoms and stay up until midnight helping put together a science project that is due the next day. If caring for a child makes one a mother, then there are a lot of nannies and baby nurses out there that can claim motherhood.

I get comment after comment, from adopters, mostly, who extol the "beauty" of adoption because they don't want to see the painful underbelly of this "institution." I also get descriptions of slatternly crackwhores from whom these saintly people rescued a child. Funny...out of all the natural mothers I know, and they number in the thousands, now, I don't know of any who were involved in drug abuse or other dangerous behavior at the time they became pregnant with their lost child. There are a few who self-medicated after the fact in order to deal with the pain. I can't blame them. My drug of choice was excess food.

Ladies Who Have Adopted or Who Want To Adopt, please understand something. You are going to do what you want to BUT we are not going to endorse it. It's almost, in your protests to us, that you are asking for our blessing. That is not going to happen. Coercion, either overt or subtle, social attitudes that condemn a single and/or poor pregnant women and laws to insure that these mothers won't have a leg to stand on when they realize they were conned, is not Kosher and never will be. There is no way to justify the majority of adoptions, especially infant adoptions. If that is the only way you can aspire to motherhood, don't you think it might be time to re-think things?

The reunion between the adoptee and the mother may be YOUR worse nightmare. But please remember, we have already lived OUR worst nightmare. We lost our children for no good reason and we were not even allowed to mourn. The pain IS nightmarish.

So, with hope for mothers and their children to reconnect and with only realistic thinking on my part, let me say that I wish for all your nightmares to come true.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

W"o"W!!!! This rocks!!! This says it all. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!!

Anonymous said...

Yes, I always love the whiney comments about how the adopters stayed up with our children, changed diapers, etc., etc., etc. Guess what, the adopters had my full name, my son's father's name, and my mother's full name, they could have found me easily any damn time they pleased to ask if I'd like to come take care of my son. I had nothing on them except what general fields of work they were employed in.

When he turned 21 they had no problem finding me, but they have had a big problem in figuring out that our reunion is NONE of their business. They've manipulated it from the start and they need to fucking butt out. And no, I'm not grateful to them.

I hope I am their worst nightmare.

Great post!
C

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Yup, and i still remember hearing from M about the kidnapping charge they tried to file against me. The cops (Coquitlam RCMP) laughed in their faces, but that did not deter them. They truly want to see me dead. And these are two professionals with masters degrees -- one being a college prof and the other a highschool vice-principal!

M was 22 yrs old. Is 5 inches taller than me, does martial arts, and can wrestle me to the ground. How on earth could i possibly "kidnap" M?? WHY on earth would I WANT to?? I wanted my child to be free to love both families, but they laid down the law that ANY contact with natural family was AGAINST their rules!

I think that reuniting with an adult child is seen as "kidnapping" by many adopters. These ones just had the balls to try to get the cops to do something about it.

Robin said...

That makes three mothers I know, personally, who have had that happen with their reunion. The one I cited happened in SC. It makes you wonder about the sense of "ownership" these people have.

Robin said...

To the person who observed that I had never been to Canada...well, yes I have been to Canada, I have good friends from Canada, sister EMS mothers from Canada and know that the government there has its pro-adoption factors and that there is a real fight, province by province, for open records. While our problems are not identical, especially in the area of the Religious Right, they are similar in form. 'Nuff said?

maybe said...

Kidnapping???? Are these people batsh#t crazy?

Robin said...

I think adopting does something to people. Maybe. I know one woman who was about the nicest person you could want to know. I was a bridesmaid in her wedding and I cared about her, deeply.

But when 8 years of marriage went by and no babies and she started adoption procedures, she was totally changed. She was obsessed, would bitch whenever a young, unmarried woman would keep her baby and act like this kid was taking HER baby away from HER.

When she finally managed to snare a Healthy, White Infant, she paraded that poor kid around like she was showing off a fashion accessory. The poor kid never got to taste candy or ice cream unless he was at the adopter's mothers home. She was a nut!! And she was another one of those who summarily closed what was supposed to be an open adoption.

Anonymous said...

""Ladies Who Have Adopted or Who Want To Adopt, please understand something. You are going to do what you want to BUT we are not going to endorse it. It's almost, in your protests to us, that you are asking for our blessing. ""

Dear Adopter Women..

You would have us surrendering mothers give you all our Blessings in the adoption of our newborns? WHY? Why would you think it would be acceptable to 'most' any surrendering mother to celebrate the surrender of her newborn, so that stranger women and men could raise our children? I am not fathoming this on any level. Your worst nightmare is not only the reunion of the mother and her now adult child..your FIRST nightmare, I imagine, is that a mother will change her mind and not opt for adoption for her baby, or for you Senior Adopters, that somehow, someway, the Mystery Mother would come back and steal her child in the night. If any adoptor woman considers a mother changing her mind to keep and parent her own child, to be one of her worst nightmares...what on earth do you think a mother who has been forced/coerced to sign away her parental rights to her newborn must be? Just a simple dream, that one wakes up from and feels just fine and dandy? Think again...adopter women...simply ain't so. You can try to cut, slice and dice your viewpoints on adoption, where you are clearly the 'winner', but the bottom-line facts remain. Many adopters came to be in our babies lives, because we Senior Surrendering Mothers, simply were NOT ALLOWED to keep our children, simply because we were young and unmarried. Many of us not being allowed to see our newborns, others not told the sex of their baby and still others told their babies died in childbirth. After all you must certainly know today, in how you Senior Adopters came to be in our babies lives, you still want to argue/debate your entitlement to our children? You still want to challenge our on-going nightmarish experiences, you want to measure whose nightmare was more frightening? Many of you adopters have and do say..you cannot imagine someone taking your adopted child from you...then My God! do you not think, do you not even begin to understand the pain of losing your firstborn, born of one's own body? Are you all that blinded by your adoption entitlement, that you cannot see the truth and the deception in adoption and the gross maltreatment of natural mothers from the Era of Mass Surrenders? If you can't or refuse to...then I feel terribly sorry for the children you adopted and raised. For they would have been raised by a mercenary, cold-hearted, discompassionate adopter woman who felt she was entitled to the natural mother's child, no matter how terribly the mother was treated or under what extreme measures the baby was taken from it's own mother. Seems many humans have more compassion for kittens and puppies and their 'mamas', then we do for real, live human babies and their very real, live human mothers.

Chris-SMAAC