So UM, what the hell have you been doing?

Wherein our interviewer asks UM a few questions…

Q:       So Um, tell us. What the hell have you been doing?

UM:   Clearly, not writing on this blog for one thing.

Q:       Why is that?

UM:   Good question. If you read my last posts, my Dad died . Actually, in the last year or so, my Dad, my uncle and two friends.

Q. Sorry to hear that. Is that the only reason?

UM. Well uh, I just felt tired. I just felt tired of the whole adoption thing. It seems to me sometimes that a competition is developing about who has been hurt the most by adoption. That makes me sad. You sometimes feel that there are so many forces at work your voice is like dropping a grain of sand in the ocean to try and stem the tide of misinformation. I think one of the saddest things about this is the fact that even though you may be part of the adoption triangle it is hard, maybe impossible, to walk in the other guy’s shoes. It makes me angry sometimes when adoptees start projecting stuff onto birth mothers.

I think maybe the deaths had something to do with it too. Too many people are burning daylight when they could have another person, who just happens to share their DNA and loves them, in their lives. Yet the thing that tore them apart in the first place continues to work its evil magic and keep them apart.

Q:        Don’t I remember you writing a post about getting tired?

UM:    Yes I did, the one about the geese flying in formation. About how the lead goose falls back to let someone else take the lead for a while. Maybe that’s what I’ve done. Not that I ever felt I was the lead. I am in awe sometimes of how often and how well other people write about adoption, birth moms and adoptees. How they keep fighting the fight. I am also in awe of the adoptive parents who get it and write about it. How wonderful it would be to be dealing with adoptive parents like them. There are some wonderful ones out here in the blogosphere.

Q:        Did you happen to catch “Find My Family” the other night?

UM:    Yes I did. I approached it with some trepidation but I was, for the most part, pleased with what I saw. I liked the name of the show for one thing. That’s pretty gutsy. I am sure the letters are pouring in to ABC saying how dare they call a birth family – family. In fact, I went on the ABC website just to see what people were saying. Most of the comments were pro from what I could see but there were a few – my child has a family or how dare you put this on TV and give my child ideas. Hmmmm. I saw the woman from the show on GMA this morning and I thought there was some reassuring back peddling going on. All that says to me is that even if the show isn’t perfect, those of us in favour of open records and raising awareness generally, not necessarily in that order, should write in and support it. I liked seeing a birth mother and father who accurately expressed what it feels like to have lost a child to adoption even though they went on to marry and have other kids. I liked what it showed about the adoptee and that the adoptive parents were welcoming. I thought meeting under the family tree was a little hokey but on the other hand they are re-enforcing the idea that this is your family. Not perfect but if ABC can withstand the pro-adoption backlash they are sure to get I think it will be a good thing. If it makes one adoptee not feel guilty for wanting to know – that is a great victory. If it makes one birth mother or birth father more convinced they have a right to know what happened to their child – that is wonderful. If it makes some adoptive parents accept that their child has two families – I’m all for that. Sure adoption reunions are complicated and don’t just involve running toward each other through a field of daisies – or up a tree to a hill. Sure they didn’t mention the fight for open records. And maybe doing all this in public isn’t ideal but I’d do it if I was hitting a brick wall and it was the only way to find my kid. It’s only the first show. I’m prepared to cut them a fair bit of slack.

Q:      Seems like you haven’t lost all your passion for the subject matter.

UM:   No I guess not. It’s hard to open the door just a little. Maybe that’s another reason.

Q:      Why don’t we wrap it up for now.

UM:   Can I just say one last thing?

Q:       Of Course.

UM:  Whenever I see a birth parent and a child hug each other for the first time I have the same reaction I do when I see a baby being born. Tears because it is so beautiful and wonderful. I will never ever forget the first time, my son, his father and I hugged each other.

Q:      Can we call to talk to you again?

UM : Absolutely. I appreciate you getting in touch with me.

Watch This Space

UM returns March 15th

Nightmare on the 14th Floor

I read that Mahatma Gandhi said – Those with the greatest awareness have the greatest nightmares.

I have been dealing, over the last three days, with my father’s very serious medical issues.

On Monday morning, he had a fall caused, we suspected at the time, by a blackout of sorts. My mother was reporting him to be unresponsive to her on occasion. They don’t always seek medical help because they fear the consequences. Loss of their independence. However, my father is on dialysis and when he goes for treatment they assess him and if they have concerns about his health they will call an ambulance and send him to emerg. His face was badly bruised from the fall and his blood pressure was very low. He was very frail and weak.

Having a negative assessment by the dialysis clinic has repercussions because in the town where they live there is no in hospital dialysis and so if he ends up in the hospital he must go to a city about an hour away. It is very hard on everyone.

On Monday, this was the scenario that played out. He was not in good shape, the dialysis clinic called an ambulance and he was sent to the emerg. Things did not go well there. It was serious. At one point he had no pulse and the doctors were talking about do not recusitate orders. And he had to travel to the city to have dialysis.

During this time, both my father and my mother spoke of my son which they never do. My father to ask if I ever heard from him. My mother to say she would be dividing some money she had saved in her will between her four grandchildren. That would mean she was including my son.

Being there in the hospital with my dad, I kept thinking back to when I had my son and how I was driven to the hospital by my mother and left to go through two and a half days of labour by myself. About how when I came home from the hospital I broke down in tears on my father’s shoulder and he did not respond in any way, did not put his arm around me. Nothing.

But that was a long time ago and I tried to put it out of my mind as I advocated for my father during his hospital stay.

It turned out that the problem may have been a mal-functioning pacemaker and so my father, after another evaluation and a re-jigged pacemaker, is now permitted to go back to the dialysis in the town where he lives. The crisis has passed.*

Tonight my husband and I returned to our condo overlooking the lake. Both of us were exhausted and I fell asleep on the couch watching tv.

While I was sleeping, I dreamt that my daughter was in an orphanage and I had gone to rescue her. When I came into the room where she was with rows and rows of babies, she saw me and her face lit up and filled with hope and I could tell she knew I had come to get her. She was little, maybe 9 months or a year old. I signalled to her not to show that she recognized me so no one would suspect I had come to rescue her.

As I looked around I started to see how sick all the other children in the orphanage were. It was a horrible place. I became very worried about her, feeling that I could rescue her but even if I did she may not be alright because conditions in the orphanage so terrible.

And then I woke up.

I don’t think the dream was really about my daughter, I think it was about my son. How even finding him cannot undo the harm that his adoption experience has done – to him.

My husband asked me if there was anything wrong and I told him that I had had a nightmare. When I told him the details of my dream, he had a great look of concern on his face.

He is pretty savvy about the impact of adoption but I could see, having been through the journey of this week with me, and having heard about my dream, he understood it all in a new way.

Peace

UM

*The crisis passed only briefly because they called back the next day and said he has to travel to the city again.

Thanks-Giving Item #5 Having my eyes opened about adoption

My grandmother used to say – It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow somebody some good.

I’m not sure why that saying came into my head. I think because I am writing about how, when you have a reunion, you just may find out some things that you really didn’t want to know about adoption. But, in the end, that is probably a good thing.

I think most birth mothers were hoping to find a happy, healthy, well-loved child who lived the life that they had been told their child would lead.

Someone who, with their family, respected and honoured the decision that the Mom had made. People who appreciated it.

Unfortunately, in lots of cases, that is not what happened. We had our eyes opened.

So why is it good to know these things?

It’s good because adoption was existing in a fairytale world. Some people are still trying to keep it that way.

But changing the course of a child’s life is not something that should be done based on gossamer threads of spun sugar mythology. It should be done with full knowledge of the potential consequences for everyone involved. Not just the joy that adoption will bring to adoptive parents.

I don’t want to spend too much time on this because it is not a particularly happy place to go but still – I am glad I went there. I am glad I came out of the adoption fog. I know what’s what.

I posted the little piece below when my blog was very new, about a week old, so some people may not have read it.

It’s all about how adoption reunion raises adoptive parents’ understanding of the issues of adoption. That is, of course, if they are willing to meet their children’s mothers and keep their minds open. And how that is sometimes unsettling for them.

Here’s the story about the study:

Raising Awareness of Adoption Practices

Many participants found themselves revisiting their “naive understanding of what adoption was and what being an adoptive family was going to be like” when they first adopted, as one adoptive father put it. As this participant suggested, many adoptive parents did not understand adoption as being anything other than a form of creating a family. Hence, at reunion, when faced with their fear of losing their child, their struggle with entitlement, and the reawakening of earlier losses, many adoptive parents experienced a sense of despair and confusion but also an emerging awareness that they were, in fact, part of something much bigger than they initially believed. That is, although reprocessing of certain adoption issues continued at a personal level, approximately two thirds of our sample also found themselves becoming more cognizant of the contextual factors surrounding adoption practice at the time of adoption and currently.

Some participants suggested that they were ill prepared, if at all, for the issues they faced as adoptive parents—namely, the issues that emerged as their children negotiated identity in late adolescence and participated in reunion. Robinson (2000), in her discussion of adoption and loss, stated that in more recent times, both birth and adoptive parents consider that they were “duped by a legislative system which guaranteed adoption would provide the answer to their problems but did not address the core psychological issues that adoption could not resolve and which it is now seen to have created” (p. 162).

Certainly, this subgroup of participants would concur with this position.

In addition, participants found themselves questioning the messages about adoptive parents and the nature of adoption. As one mother expressed,

“Suddenly I become a stealer of babies. I did not steal anyone’s baby. I do not want to be and I do not deserve to be put in a position where I have to justify my relationship with my daughter. I did nothing wrong but to be cursed with infertility. I am not a bad person, and yet I am made to feel that wanting a child and loving her makes me a criminal.”

In writing on adoption ethics, Jordan (1997) argued that social discourse on adoptive parenting and the sanctioning of one parent as true or real (i.e., the birth parent as the real, natural parent) creates a win or lose contest with significant emotional consequences for adoptees, their adoptive parents, and birth parents. As suggested by the mother in the previous quote, no one actually wins this contest. Rather, setting up either party as good or bad only maintains the pain.
Generally, however, the majority of participants found themselves becoming more aware of issues to do with relinquishment, the sociopolitical context in which it occurred, and the personal issues faced by birth parents. However, the effect of this burgeoning awareness and empathy was not always greater resolution or clarity. In fact, many participants reported greater confusion and dissonance in trying to make sense of their own responses to the reunion process. (Emphasis added)

One participant described feeling “split.” She explained that she had experienced a surge of fear and anxiety and strongly questioned her role, contribution, and worth as a mother. She had been forced to face issues she thought she had “finished with.” Simultaneously, she found herself feeling compassion and empathy for birth families and facing their needs with the same interest with which she faced her own.

From:

The Experience of Adoptive Parents in Adoption Reunion Relationships: A Qualitative Study
Gabrielle A. Petta, MPsych, and Lyndall G. Steed, MPsych, PhD Curtin University of Technology
American Journal of Orthopsychiatry Copyright 2005 by the Educational Publishing Foundation
2005, Vol. 75, No. 2, 230 –241

Thanks-Giving Item #4 My Daughter

This is a big reason to give thanks over there to the left. My daughter.

If I had never met my son, I would never have had my daughter. She was born about a year after I met him. If he had been unwilling to meet with me, I don’t think she would be here.

If you had met me back then, before I found him, you would have thought (and of course you wouldn’t have known about him probably) I was a person who didn’t like kids particularly. The thought of being pregnant sent me into a panic. To me, being pregnant was equal to complete loss of any control over my life.

Just a few fears left over from the first pregnancy – I don’t think I realized it then but I think that is what was happening.

Shortly after I met my son, I knew that I could have another baby and it would be OK. He lived with us shortly after she was born and, of course, to her he was just her big brother. Which was great on one hand but on the other hand, I knew someday I would have to tell her the truth, that I had not raised him.  I told her when she was about 5. She was very understanding and gave me a big hug and said she thought she was very lucky.

I feel very lucky to have her too. She’s grown up now, in her 3rd year of university. But in having her I did learn that I knew lots of things about being a mother, I knew them naturally. I was OK.

I will always feel I owe my daughter and the experience of being the kind of mother I never got to be with him – to my son.

Ironic but true.

Peace

UM