Fake-Walkin’ the Dog

When I found my son, he had been thrown out by his adoptive parents and they had gone to Europe.

I discovered where he lived because, for a very short time, he had a telephone. One day , for some reason, I cut through the telephone company’s building in the city where I live. There was a bank of phone books on the wall. Since I was searching for him, I decided to stop and take a look. Why not?

Among the phone books was a slim, interim telephone book for the city where he lived. His name was in it and his address. His name never appeared in the large regular telephone book, before or after. I checked. Finding that book was extreme good luck. Or the hand of God. Or something.

I knew from my research where his adoptive parents lived. I knew their part of the city well because their house was half a block from my grandmother’s house. The address in the little phone book wasn’t the same one. This other address was, you might say, in a poorer part of town.

I wrote him a letter.

Well that’s not exactly true. I drove to the city with my dog in tow, parked down the street from the house, fake-walked my dog and waited until I saw him come out. Then I followed him to school and took his picture courtesy of my husband’s telephoto lens.* Then I felt it wasn’t fair. I knew who he was but he didn’t know who I was so then….

I wrote him a letter.

He later told me that when he called his adoptive father and left a message that I had contacted him, his adoptive father didn’t call him back for three days.

The first time I talked to him on the phone, the first time I spoke the simple words with a history behind them as large as the universe, “How are you?” he said, I had some trouble but I am alright now. He had fallen in with a band of thieving juveniles and had gotten into trouble with the law. At one point he was living in a group home. It was located in a large co-operative apartment building that had been built in the late sixties as kind of a hippie experiment.

You know who else used to live in that building?

Me.

It was the location of my first apartment after graduation from university. I moved out because the hippie experiment was nice in theory but not too good for practical things like building maintenance. But I digress.

I find this happens a lot with adoptees and birth parents. Their lives seem to interconnect. Pure coincidence? I doubt it.

I believe that there are bonds between a mother and child that cannot be cut.

If you are still looking or waiting to be acknowledged, don’t give up.

Peace

UM

* Somewhat disconcerting I know but desperate times call for desperate measures. I’d fake-walk that dog again in a minute if I had to.

Betty Friedan Made Me Give Up My Baby

I saw Kate Winslet on TV the other day talking about the film, Revolutionary Road. She said that in preparing for her role she read a lot of early feminist writing including The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan. This got me googling Betty which led to a reference to an article that appeared in Redbook in the early 60’s.  This article talked about the unhappiness of the American housewife.  Apparently when it appeared, the response from women who echoed the sentiments expressed in the article was overwhelming.

Many of us have often wondered how our mothers could have encouraged/forced their daughters to give up their children for adoption.  Maybe they were experiencing this unhappiness tapped by the Redbook article.  Maybe they saw us as their hope.  They wanted us to be different.  They wanted us to be the women who would escape their fate.

Maybe when we got pregnant they saw us as betraying that hope and starting down the same  path that led to their unhappiness.

Just an idea – Haven’t you wondered how your mother who knew the joy of holding a baby in her arms could have for one second entertained the idea of you losing your child and her grandchild  forever.

I’m just saying…and wondering.

Peace

UM

I had a dream too Susan….

I am so glad to hear the news about Susan Boyle. After breaking first day sales records with her CD now she has been offered a TV special. I like all this because it turns all the demographic theorists on their heads. Can they still make money predicting who will buy what? Who will look at what? What kind of person will become a star?

Susan Boyle has proved them all wrong. Susan has guts. She must have believed in herself.

And that, of course, got me thinking about guess what – adoption. Or more particularly adoptees and birth parents.

People told us for many years how we were supposed to think and act. But we, like Susan Boyle, said – you aren’t going to tell us who we are. We have a dream and that dream is that we have a right to be and know who we are and who our children are.

There was no Britains Got Talent for us to go on but there was the internet and boy did we hit it. Saying wait a minute, we don’t care what you think about us, we deserve to be heard.

And I don’t know about the rest of you but I think our voices are beautiful. As beautiful as Susan’s. And maybe as surprising to some people.

I can’t get the link to Susan’s triumph to work but do yourself a favour – go on YouTube, listen, watch and get yourself uplifted.

Yep – we had a dream. No small coincidence a song from Les Miserables.

Peace

UM

Anger is just hurt disguised…

From the Family Preservation Blog

Excerpt from Adoption Reunion: Ecstasy or Agony? © Evelyn Robinson, 2009

Re-grief therapy and adoption

The process of re-grief therapy involves reworking, at a later time, a loss which had not been satisfactorily resolved. It has two goals; to understand why mourning was not completed in the past (operating on an intellectual level) and to help those affected to experience their grieving emotions in the present (operating on an emotional level). During the course of re-grief therapy people’s ‘frozen emotions are stimulated and reawakened’. As with regular grief therapy, the outcome of re-grief therapy is an increase in self-esteem and a decrease in guilt, as well as an increase in positive feelings about the lost person (Raphael, 1983, pp385-6).
I have chosen to apply re-grief therapy to reworking an adoption loss. In the case of adoption loss, I believe that, in order to understand the reasons why the mourning was not completed, it is important to understand first of all how and why the loss occurred. An informed exploration of the circumstances leading to the separation often results in the griever having more positive feelings about their adoption experience.

Exploring these issues can be instrumental in bringing the pain and grief to the surface and it can then be experienced. Pain is not necessarily a negative outcome and preventing people from experiencing pain is not always in their best interests. Pain is not always avoidable and it is sometimes necessary in order to produce something new. Childbirth, for example, is rarely accomplished without pain.

When people can understand the basis of their pain, they are in a better position to manage it. Patients would not feel confidence in a doctor, for example, who wrote a prescription for pain relief medication rather than first of all seeking the cause of the pain. Pain is a message that there is an area that needs attention. Experiencing the pain created by adoption separation can, in fact, be a way of creating a renewed sense of self.

Anger is a common response to a loss and frequently occurs with regard to adoption loss. Many people are angry that an adoption took place, but this does not necessarily mean that they are angry with any particular person. Re-grief therapy may cause suppressed anger to come to the surface. Anger can be destructive if it results in vindictiveness and cruel accusations. Anger can, however, be a productive and helpful emotion when it is understood and managed. It may be appropriate to talk to those involved in the adoption about one’s anger so that there is openness and honesty in those relationships. Telling someone about your anger is very different from expressing your anger towards that person.

Because adoption separation is a profound experience and because the emotions attached to it have often been buried for many years, re-grief therapy can itself be an emotionally traumatic process. It is wise therefore, to prepare oneself for such an undertaking and to remember that no matter how difficult it may seem, this process can lead to a personal recovery from the trauma of adoption separation. It takes courage to begin this process but the rewards can be great.

Lost Boys

I was out for a walk this morning and decided to go through the city’s wealthiest neighbourhood. I saw a very sad sight. There were two police cars there and a third was arriving on the scene. A well dressed woman was standing at the end of the driveway but there didn’t appear to have been a traffic accident or anything. And then I noticed something else. The police had a young boy – maybe 16 or 17 – handcuffed with his hands behind his back.

I will never forget the look on that kid’s face. It wasn’t fear, it was pain. His face looked like tragedy of the comedy/tragedy masks. He was trying very hard not to cry.

I wanted to go over but with now six policemen there I didn’t think there was any point.

The kid looked so incredulous and in so much pain that I wondered if the woman was his mother and she was throwing him out of the house. He was also well dressed and there was that look of disbelief. I moved along because I didn’t want to appear to be a voyeur but I thought about it a lot as I walked back home. My son’s adoptive parents threw him out of the house when he was about that age. In fact, he was still in that state when I found him. That’s probably why this scene had such an impact on me.

It also made me think of something else that happened this week. I was at an award ceremony and one of the writers who was receiving an award made it clear in his acceptance speech that he was a success in spite of, not because of, his father. Now this guy was getting an award for his body of work so he was no kid. Perhaps in his early or mid-fifties. And yet he still felt compelled to give the finger to the old man in a mighty public way. The wounds of childhood and adolescence run deep.

How important it is to tell our children that we believe in them.

I’ll be thinking about him for a while – that boy in the handcuffs at the end of a laneway in one of Canada’s wealthiest neighbourhoods.

I hope he is OK.

Peace

UM