Who’s Your Daddy II

There are two parts to this post. The first is this item from the Family Preservation Blog. The second is a reaction to this news story that I read on a local newspaper’s website.

First, Part One from the Family Preservation Blog on Sunday, December 20, 2009

Ontario Disallowed Father’s Names

An issue of great concern for my colleagues at the Canadian Council of Natural Mothers (CCNM) is that when mothers relinquished, and gave the father’s name, wrote it in on the forms for the birth certificate – it was deleted, whited out, expunged.

Now that the records have been opened, adoptees are finding their mothers but not [their] fathers.

Karen Lynn of CCNM says they went to great extent with photo copying secions of the forms that were whited out so that the dotted line she KNOWS she wrot eon appears to be in tact!

Apparently, the law, up until 1986, forbade listing the father’s name on birth registries or adoption papers for children of unmarried mothers unless both mother and father demanded it. So only some 10% of those documents identify a father.

Part Two:

I originally read the report of this story on the on-line version of the local newspaper. Because it is on-line there is the opportunity to comment. The first comment tells adoptees not to worry about finding their fathers because children who are given up for adoption are rarely the products of long and loving relationships. (This person needs to watch the first episode of Find My Family.)

Excuse me?

All you mothers out there – How long had you been going out with your child’s father?

For me – it was 4 years when I got pregnant.

These old myths about us die a hard death?

And what makes me saddest of all is some people don’t even know how much they have been brainwashed into believing what people would like them to believe.

I’m serious, if you are a mom, weigh in. How long?

Peace

UM

Hello God, It’s Me UM

I have been turning to prayer lately. This is not like me.

I am more of the “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” school. And I am not big on organized religion. Did I ever do a post about how I believe the Catholic Church had a big influence on what happened to me and my son and has a lot to answer for? Remind me to do one some day.

I do, however, believe there is a power greater than we know, whether that is God or the universe, I am not sure. Part of the reason I feel this way is the number of things that happened when I was looking for my son. There were forces at work.

But I am not appealing to these forces, I am appealing to God. I do it whenever I have a quiet moment or when I’m waiting in a line or just before I fall asleep.

I would like God to help my son find peace.

And I am not defining peace as meaning he has a relationship with me.

I just want him to find personal peace. I think he needs it desperately and he cannot seem to achieve it.

I believe it is adoption, or maybe just the particular version of it to which he was subjected, that has robbed him of this peace.

He needs to believe in himself, he needs to love himself, he needs to be able to accept love from other people. Right now I don’t think he can do any of those things. Time is passing. He is not in his teens, or twenties or even thirties. I believe he would like to have a wife and a family. Nuclear and extended.

It worries and pains me. I want better for him – I want the best for him – whether it is with me or without me.

Wasn’t that the whole idea in the first place?

Peace

UM

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