August 2, 2010 at 9:40 pm · Posted by Tara · Filed under Adoption Blogs, Birth/First parents
A new post by Jane Edwards on Birth Mother, First Mothers Forum talks about the legalities surrounding relinquishing a child to adoption, and the difficulties birth mothers face when trying to obtain legal representation to contest an adoption.
From the post
“When Leticia learned her daughter, Ashley, was pregnant, she went to her pastor for advice. He referred her to his wife who conveniently happened to run an adoption agency. Over the next several months, Leticia and Ashley met with the adoption social worker as well as a couple interested in adopting Ashley’s baby. But Ashley did not commit to placing her daughter. Leticia says they were looking for help, not adoption. Ashley gave birth June 16, via cesarean section. Five days later, Ashley signed an irrevocable surrender to the agency while still under the influence of drugs and the effects of the delivery. The next day, with her mother’s help, Ashley tried to revoke her consent. Too late under Oregon law!”
“Ashley’s case is only one of many cases throughout the country where a parent seeks to contest an adoption and confronts a legal system which demands money in order to achieve justice”
Jane describes a situation that, no doubt, has been repeated time and time again over the course of the many years formal adoptions have taken place. The law, and financial resources weigh heavy on the side of adoptive parents. There is a conversation happening on the blog that, at it’s core, is about the window of time, legally, mothers should have after giving birth before making the decision to place their child for adoption. Oregon law allows mothers to sign the papers immediately after giving birth. This is not nearly enough time. Alternately, laws in the UK ensure that mothers do not sign adoption papers until six weeks post-partum.
Too long? Too short? What are your thoughts?
June 2, 2010 at 10:05 am · Posted by Tara · Filed under Adoption Blogs, Adult Adoptee, Birth/First parents, Guest Blog, Kinship, Talking about Adoption, Transracial Adoption
From Guest Blogger Melissa Konomos visit her at Yoon’s Blur, and click here>> for more information on Adoption Mosaic Bloggers.
After reuniting with my biological parents last year, my husband asked me whether my need to conceive biological children had diminished at all.
(Just for clarity’s sake, we both want to have children, so he was not asking because he was hoping to escape the simultaneous joys and horrors of raising children. But rather he was asking a very valid question based on previous conversations, in which I had expressed a desire, almost a longing need, to conceive a biological child.)
Clearly, as an adoptee, I have never known what it is to share a biological connection with someone else. Earlier in our relationship, as my husband and I would discuss whether we wanted to conceive a child, time and time again, my answer was an emphatic, almost desperate, “Yes.”
There was never a doubt as to why I answered, Yes. Having a biological child seemed the only way that I could somehow know and connect with my biological mother and father. It seemed the only way that I might be able to gain insight into what my biological mother experienced as she carried me for nine months and subsequently relinquished me. It also seemed the only way that I would be able to understand what it means to share a biological connection with another human being.
But now, that I have met my biological mother and father, along with uncles, aunts, and cousins, and hence now have opportunity to build relationships with those who share my biology, it would seem plausible that my “need” to have biological children would diminish or at least change as a result.
As of now, surprisingly so, meeting my biological family has actually seemed to have the opposite effect of what would be predicted—it seems to have increased my desire to want biological children.
I can identify several contributing factors.
The first factor I’ll mention is simply that reunion does not “fix it.” There can be a well intentioned but false assumption that once an adoptee reunites with his or her biological family, it fixes everything—all the questions find answers, all the loss and pain find healing, and so forth.
This is not true for more reasons than I have space to elucidate here. But in short, reunion cannot magically redeem all the years, often decades, that have been lost. Although reunion has given me some answers, in many ways it has served to also give me more questions. Although reunion has brought some healing, it has also awakened old pain while stirring new pain. Although reunion has allowed me to meet my biological family, it cannot compensate for the 35 years that have been lost between us.
Even though I now have the hope of building a relationship with my biological mother, she and I will never share the moments when I took my first steps or spoke my first words. She and I will never know the thrill of when I first learned to ride a bike or when I won a soccer game. She and I will never know the tender moments when my first love broke my heart or conversely when my husband and I fell in love and eventually married.
She was not there and will never be able to be there for those crucial moments of my development growing from child to woman. She has missed the first 35 years of my life, and nothing we do can ever retrieve or restore all those moments of growing up that have been lost between us—except in some symbolic, metaphorical way—that is, through conceiving a biological child.
Hence, secondly, having a biological child, at least for me, lures me in as an opportunity for redemption for all of us. My Omma and I could share in the moments of raising my child, her grandchild. She could be there for her grandchild in the way that she could not be there for me, while I could give to my child what I never had—a relationship with a family that is both biological and relational. My Appa would also have, in a way, a second chance to do things differently.
A third reason that I can identify for wanting biological children even more so now that I have met my biological mother and father is that I fear losing them all over again. Some day, I know that they will die. So, I tell myself that if I have a biological child, the trauma of losing them a second time will perhaps be minimized if I can look at my biological child and see them in him or her. Without a child through whom I can maintain a biological connection to the parents that I lost 35 years ago and will lose again some day, I fear that the connection I now have will be lost and severed again, forever, when they die.
So, you see, at least for me, meeting my biological mother and father has not abated my desire to have biological children. Rather it has intensified and amplified it.
Now, of course, I share all this knowing that having a child for these reasons is a dangerous thing. I don’t want to bring a child into this world assigning him or her with the job of redeeming the lost hopes and dreams of his or her mother and grandparents. (Alanis Morissette wrote a very affecting song years ago about parents who do just this entitled, “Perfect.”) If I do ever have a biological child, I am going to have to be hyper aware of my own issues to ensure that I don’t project them onto my child—the aforementioned being only a few of the many issues.
I am simply sharing all of this in an attempt to explain, with sincerity and a somewhat uncomfortable honesty, what goes on in my mind and heart as an adoptee regarding the question that titles this post, “Did meeting my biological family diminish my desire to conceive biological children?”
I am not purporting that my answers to this question are right or wrong—they just are. As adoptees, we face complex psychological issues surrounding identity and relationships and just about everything else in life. The issue of biological children is no different.
I realize the emotional baggage I carry, and the potential that exists that I may strap that baggage onto my children. This is all the more reason for me to be aware of it and to make it apparent to others—not simply for my children’s sake, but for the sake of others who also occupy this vast and complex world of the adoption experience.
April 26, 2010 at 11:24 am · Posted by Livia · Filed under Adult Adoptee, Birth/First parents, Guest Blog, Search & Reunion, Talking about Adoption, Transracial Adoption
From Guest Blogger Melissa Konomos visit her at Yoon’s Blur, and click here>> for more information on Adoption Mosaic Bloggers.
I am a Korean-American adoptee who met my biological parents for the first time (last year in June of 2009) since my relinquishment in 1975. Since then, I have officially entered into what is often referred to as “post-reunion.”
Post reunion often receives less attention, I think, in part, because it is less glamorous and less emotionally climactic than the process of search and reunion. Hearing the story of how I searched for seven long years and the details of the first moments of coming face to face with my Omma and my Appa are much more enthralling and riveting. It is this phase of the adoption experience that brings simultaneous tears to our eyes and smiles to our mouths. But the actual reunion is only the beginning of a long, and often arduous and daunting, process. I find it unfortunate that post-reunion is so grossly neglected, because it can often be the stage in the process that can last the longest, can be the most fragile and complicated, and requires long-term support that is often lacking or underdeveloped.
Read the rest of this entry »
March 5, 2010 at 9:36 pm · Posted by Tara · Filed under Adoption Blogs, Adoption Language, Birth/First parents, Guest Blog
We recently wrapped up our newest, and soon to be released, Adoption Dialogue on adoption language and it has (once again) brought the issue of adoption language to the forefront of my mind. I am reminded of this blog post by adoptive parent and Adoption Mosaic Guest Blogger Dawn Friedman who blogs at This Woman’s Work. She wrote this post last fall and it has stuck with me. (Read the full original post here>>) For those of you who aren’t familiar with Dawn’s family, Dawn is Madison’s adoptive mother, Pennie is Madison’s birth mother.
“It sounds like a very gloomy conversation but it wasn’t. She is very matter of fact about it all. I was just thinking about how she (Madison) says “real real mama” and how that’s supposedly “negative adoption language.” I guess in the mouth of the wrong person it could be but hearing it from my daughter, well, I know what she means.
Read the rest of this entry »
February 8, 2010 at 4:11 pm · Posted by Tara · Filed under Birth/First parents, Guest Blog
From Guest Blogger Dawn Friedman visit her at www.thiswomanswork.com, and click here>> for more information on Adoption Mosaic Bloggers.
On Saturday we had a big celebration for my son’s bar mitzvah and most of our immediate family were there including our daughter’s birth mom, Pennie. We have a very open adoption with Pennie that has grown in the last 5 and half years to something we have integrated comfortably into the rest of our family life. Pennie is not a special event or a separate experience and for our daughter that has been nothing but good.
The night before the celebration, Madison had a hard time falling asleep. She was excited about the party but she was also worried about something. I left the room to get her a drink of water and when I came back, she was sitting up in bed sobbing.
Read the rest of this entry »
January 13, 2010 at 10:12 pm · Posted by Tara · Filed under Birth/First parents, Talking about Adoption
A friend of mine let me in on a conversation she had with her husband last week. It was initially in reference to international adoption and went something like this:
A: If we were to adopt would you be upset if the child didn’t call you “daddy.”
B: Well, yes, a bit. I would want them to call me “daddy.”
A: But what if we were to adopt, say, your niece?
B: Well in that case no, I wouldn’t expect them to call me “daddy”
A: Why not?
B: Because they already have a daddy.
Put so simply, it makes you realize how easily and how often birth/first parents are completely erased from the lives of the adoptive family, as if they don’t exist. But the fact is, all adoptive children already have a daddy. They already have a mommy too. Can you imagine how the face of adoption would change if we all kept this reality in the forefront of our consciousness rather than tucking it away out of sight out of mind? What an amazing thing it would be if we could celebrate each of our parents (or children’s parents) without value judgments or guilt, but with openness and love.
