adoption

It’s My Mother’s Birthday Soon


I refer to both my real mother and my adoptive mother as Mom. I use “real” and “adoptive” to differentiate when necessary for clarity, but most of the time, when I say, “Mom this or that”, I could be talking about either one of them. It drives my husband a bit crazy sometimes. But today, I am talking about my real mom because her birthday looms.

Because I never got the chance to meet her, all things to do with her are grounded in the secondhand history that substitutes, poorly, for having a relationship with her. I don’t know how she felt about her birthday although according to my cousin (an incredibly unreliable narrator), she loved the cake part of it. So each year when her birthday rolls around, I am left wondering if I should mark the day. What would she have done? What would she have liked? Would she even care?

My brother, who she raised, has made a habit of decorating her grave for Christmas. He tidies it and puts up a wreath. He allowed me to participate one year. I sent him a couple of ornaments to put on the wreath, but it made him uncomfortable though he was too polite to say so. He has his rituals where mom is concerned, and I intruded on that particular one, so I haven’t asked to share that activity since.

I tried cake a couple of times. Bought a cake one year. Made a cake another year. I like cake. No idea if she’d have liked my choices. It felt weird. Like putting urns on a mantle piece or coffee table kind of weird, so I haven’t done that again either.

The truth is I am not sure what to do with my mom. Either mom, but that’s a blog for another day.

Last year, for my own birthday, which is very close to mom’s, I got myself a ring with her birthstone, mine, and my daughter’s. It’s beautiful. It doesn’t make her birthday anything more than a day to m,e but it made her a bit more tangible than she has ever been.

Mom is just not real real. That’s the issue.

She’s pictures and stories. She’s facts I have gathered on Ancestry. But she’s also gone. A literal ghost.

Maybe this year I should start writing that book about her and me, and the whole fucked up story of how we came to be separated. As it turned out, forever. It’s a story I’ve told a lot over the past 6 years, but I have never written it down.Not because it bothers me to tell it, but it’s mine, and once you’ve written something down, it runs the risk of becoming a thing of its own. A narrative that others can use.

November is adoption month in the United States, and I’ve seen some stomach churning adoptee stories being sold as heartwarming, which is just about the last thing I would want for her or for myself.

Adoption,as it’s practised in the U.S. is human trafficking, dressing itself up with language that is better left to rescue pets because it’s not as offensive when one is talking about homeless cats and dogs.

Our story, mom’s and mine, is not a Hallmark movie. Maybe that’s why her birthday is so hard to define?

She’d be 80 years old. She’d probably have cake.I don’t know that we’d be sharing that cake, and I guess that’s the issue.

Infertility and Adopted Children


Every time I meet someone in my natural family for the first time, I learn something new. New information about my family specifically or generally, or something about myself sudden comes into focus. It makes me angry because it shines a harsh light on the lies I was told growing up adopted. I was not supposed to question or miss what I had lost when I was taken from my mother. None of the things she could give me where considered consequential in any way, and I have come to discover as the years roll by that nothing could be further from the truth.

The basic lie of adopted families is that they are no different at all from families of origin. Taking someone else’s child to raise as your own is the same thing as giving birth to a child. It’s not a win-win. It’s not harmless solution for solving the infertility issues of one couple or the single parenthood issues of the mother. Harm is done, and I would argue just as much to the infertile couple as to the birth mother who is being asked to abandon her child for some nebulous greater good.

Why do I say that infertile couples are harmed by adoption?

First, adoption allowed them to pretend they aren’t infertile. At least publicly. It doesn’t erase the damage that infertility as wrought on them personally or on their relationship. In fact, it might make both those things worse as it gives them an excuse to not deal with the issues.

I know my adoptive parents did not deal with the damage done to their relationship because my adoptive mother couldn’t have children. He blamed her. Blamed her mother. Was quite angry for the majority of my life about being denied a biological child. He thought we didn’t notice, but he wasn’t subtle about his disappointment. Every time we didn’t live up to his expectations, it was there, an elephant lumbering about the room, trampling us children.

Second, adopted families aren’t viewed as “the same” by societies in general. I have lost count of the number of people who praised my adoptive parents for “taking those children in” as though we’d been left on doorsteps. Adopted children are less than. Adopted families are “better than nothing”. That’s the harsh truth.

Finally, it never gives the couple proper space to mourn and heal from their infertility. Everything they went through trying to get pregnant. Treatments. Miscarriages. An adopted baby is a band-aid for a gaping wound. It’s not the job of a child, suffering their own separation trauma, to fix the adults who’ve acquired them like one would rescue a kitten or puppy.

I don’t bother to discuss this with my adopted mother anymore. She is too deep in her own feelings to see mine. She’s too old to really have the in depth conversations we needed to have decades ago in any case. It’s unfortunate but reality can’t be amended to suit my needs at this point.

I do not support non-familial placement of infants and children. Reunification is best. Keeping children with extended biological family is next best. There should be a concerted effort by the government to make sure all efforts are made and that includes financial support if necessary.

What can be done for infertile couples? The obvious financial support for assisted reproductive health measures for one. Mental health support for those who cannot because parents if medical intervention fails. Finally, society supporting the idea that having children is something not everyone does. The absence of children is not a personal failure and should never be sold as such by anyone or any institution.

Celebrating a Birth Mom’s Birthday


For almost all my life, I didn’t know who my real mother was. I didn’t know what she looked like. What her hobbies and passions were. If we shared any common likes, dislikes, quirks. And I didn’t know when her birthday was.

Her birthday is coming up at the end of the month. My half-brother makes a xmas wreath to hang on her gravestone. Very Christmas Carol if you ask me. This year, I asked him if I could contribute decorations for it.

Generally, Bro’s wreaths are pretty standard wreaths. Very colour-coordinated and indistinguishable from a wreath you might see on a door in your neighbourhood.

I went to Michael’s and found a wooden heart, which I wrote a personal message to her on, and I found a packaged of cute animal themed ornaments at IKEA, which I choose for two reasons. Cute animals. But also very durable plastic that should be able to stand up to most anything an Iowa winter might hurl at them.

I mailed them to Bro and when they arrived, I asked him if they were okay for the wreath.

“We’ll get creative,” he replied.

I told my youngest daughter later that had Bro and I grown up together, he would have been the one to painstakingly plan something and I would have been the one to come along after and blow it up with “creativity”.

But cemetery decor aside, I don’t really know what else to do for her birthday. I don’t really like the idea of birthday cakes for the dead. However, she loved cake and having a cake would be a fitting observance.

I want to flood my FB with pictures of her because I will get the most response there but my adoptive mom will be hurt by this. She will put on a brave face publicly but she will cry to my sister and brother about in private and they will tell me, which is the point.

I hate that I have to temper my feelings to spare Mom’s feelings. Had she not lied to me about knowing who my real mom was, I’d have been able to meet her before she died. Got some semblance of closure.

As the death of Twitter looms, I have started a Tumblr account I could use but it would be somewhat like this blog. Just putting words and thoughts out into a void to echo until it fades away.

Maybe Instagram?

I really don’t know. There are no handbooks on best practices for adoptees and reunionification.

I wonder what it was like for her on that only birthday we spent together. She was very pregnant. And alone except for me though I was probably not much consolation as I was just weeks from being born and whisked away for what turned out to be forever. It must have been horrible.

I am going to need to give this more thought. Get creative. As my Bro would say.