LIFE DOES NOT BEGIN AT PLACEMENT. For too long parents and adopted children have talked about adoption as if the placement of children in the homes of adopted parents was the beginning of their lives. When the children grow and come to understand biology and reproduction, they begin to realize that they did exist somewhere else before placement. Teens need to know what happened in the lives of their birth mothers that made an adoption placement necessary.
My question, “What do you want to know about your birth parents?” brought a definite, quick answer. I wasn't expecting this reply, and it continued to come as a surprise.
“I want to know why I was given up. that's all.” Karen pressed her hands on the table and leaned toward me. “I just want to know why!” she said, emphasizing the question that so many teens had demanded of me. She was my twenty-second interview and it was the twenty-second time I'd heard, “I want to know why.” It seemed to me that there were thousands of possible answers to “What do you want to know about your birth parents?” Teens could have said, “I want to know whether they had any more children,” “I want to know whether they're healthy”—any number of things. But as I listened to Karen repeat for the twenty-second time, “Why was I given up for adoption?” I, the adoptive mother who had believed that love should be all that mattered, finally accepted that this question was of great importance.
Karen invited me into her large apartment in the suburbs of Vancouver. Her boyfriend and another friend were sitting on the living room rug listening to music; Karen and I walked into her kitchen and sat at the table to talk. Short and bright-eyed, Karen talked quickly, rushing through a conversation like an enthusiastic evangelist, as if there wasn't enough time to tell me everything. At twenty, she was the youngest of five children. The youngest three were adopted, but that didn't make it easier for her to accept her own adoption. When she learned at age twelve that she'd been adopted, Karen was very angry with her adoptive mother for not telling her when she was younger, and angry with her birth mother for abandoning her. She ran away, then returned. Her older sister had been sympathetic because she also had run away from home when she was younger. She told Karen that she had had the same feelings, but that adoption was something that didn't have to be negative. Although the sisters talked for a long time, Karen was still left with feelings of anger and “not being real.”
When she ran away at fifteen, Karen hitchhiked across Canada, returned in a year, then ran away again. Finally her dad told her that she would have to leave home. Since she had been living on her own, she felt closer to her parents and brothers and sisters. She told me that she understood how difficult she had been for everyone, with her demands and questions, during those teen years.
Karen still had a tremendous need to find her birth mother. She wouldn't feel like a real person, she told me, until she knew who she was at the start of her life, and where she began. When that was resolved, she planned to go to school to become a zoologist. But, until she settled her beginnings, she didn't feel as though she could plan any-thing.
This need to “settle who I am,” was strong for many of the teens I interviewed. It was as if they were riding a merry-go-round watching life drift past and unable to join it until they knew who they had been and where they belonged.
Responding sympathetically to Karen's need to know her past, I momentarily forgot that it was her reaction to this need that was paralyzing her. It wasn't the fact of her adoption that was stirring up her life, it was that she thought about adoption all the time. Because I truly liked and wanted to help her, I wanted to respond with positive assurance that she ought to know why she was given up for adoption, that in wanting to know her background she wasn't unreasonable or even unusual. Karen, who was such an interesting, stimulating person, overwhelmed me with her passion to be herself.
The need to know who their birth parents are doesn't seem to be related to how well teens get along with their adoptive parents or whether they rate them as good or inadequate as parents. Nor was this need related to age, sex, or position in the family. Only Ryan and Jo-anne did not think knowing why was of any great import.
Why a child was given up for adoption wasn't important to me until I started this project. Although grateful to the two birth mothers who had given sons to our family, I hadn't tried to put myself into their minds. I remembered what I had been told about why my sons had been placed for adoption and had a general idea of why they were given up. Wasn't that enough? As my sons grew up I learned that all I had been told about their background was not true, and that my sons needed to know the truth. The social worker's report was not enough for them.
What she had been told was not enough for Karen, either. “I think about it almost every day. When I get all the pieces together, I'll be satisfied. I look in the mirror and think, ‘she probably looks like me.' I even asked someone once, a friend of my girlfriend's mother, if she was my mother. I knew she'd put a child up for adoption years ago and she sort of looked like me. She said she wasn't and I felt so stupid. I never did that again.”
Karen, like many adopted teens, speculated on who her mother was. “I think my birth mother was Russian. She might have come over with a group of women that came from Russia to Alberta around that time. They all left again, so maybe she's back in Russia. I'll have to go through a lot to go over there and see her. If she's still living there it would be really hard to see her, but if she's still here, no problem.”
I paused at that. Was she seriously considering travelling to Russia to find out who had given birth to her? She was. It seemed a drastic plan to me, but an adopted woman who read this manuscript commented, “I don't think that this is all that drastic. I'd have done it too.” I still had a lot to learn.
Karen said, “Because I was born in Alberta all I have to do is write and they'll send me my mother's name. This doesn't mean I'll go find her. It just means I'm going to know her history and that'll help me to know things about me that I maybe need to know. I don't know if I'm the same as anybody else, but I really do feel lost. I sometimes feel that I don't know who I am. I don't know who I should be.
“Some friends say, ‘Oh, come on. I know what it's like.' But no. They don't know. They aren't adopted. Their parents didn't give them up. They didn't throw them out. It hurts, you know. I want to know why.”
Karen had a great need to know who her birth mother was, but I wondered if it was her intense personality that made the question seem so vital. But over and over as I continued to listen to teens' stories, they told me that information about their birth mothers was often vital to their emotional well-being.
Leslie was quite a different personality from Karen, yet she had the same need. A queen-sized waterbed dominated the living area of her studio apartment; pictures and ornaments made it crowded yet comfortable. Rock music drifted from the radio on the kitchen counter. In spite of the relaxed, homey atmosphere she had created, Leslie did not appear relaxed, but more as if she were competently ready for a difficult interview. She was a determined, organized woman with a clipped way of speaking that made me feel as though I'd better be businesslike.
Leslie had discovered her adoption order at age twelve while rifling through her mother's private papers. Her adoptive mother was upset at her discovery; she felt that Leslie might leave her and return to her original parents if she knew she had been adopted. Leslie couldn't understand this; their fear that she wouldn't love them if she knew she was adopted didn't make sense. She had no desire to leave the people she loved to go to strangers, and she didn't understand why that wasn't obvious to her parents. Unlike Karen, Leslie didn't view her past with an emotional pull, but rather as a source of information.
That was my impression. But Leslie was very self-contained, and I couldn't know as a result of one meeting the depths of her emotions. She told me that she didn't feel rejected by her adoptive parents; she felt some rejection by her original parents, but had absolutely no desire to trade homes. Her adoptive parents might never have told her she was adopted if she hadn't found out for herself, they were so fearful of her reaction. Why can't everyone deal with life on the basis of facts? Leslie thinks her parents' attitude at the time was wrong, but it was their decision. “Mom and Dad thought they were right. They did what they thought was best.”
Once Leslie knew she was adopted, she started asking questions and, when she was seventeen, began to look for her birth parents. She found her mother's name and got in touch with her sisters. Although she hasn't met her mother, she knows who and where she was. Her sisters told her that, of all the seven children, Leslie looks the most like her mother. That pleased Leslie.
“My mom had six children already and her husband wasn't my father, so she had to give me up because she didn't want him to know about me.” Although Leslie knew most of her family background and had pieced together what she thought was the real story, she still wanted to know, straight from her birth mother, why she had been placed for adoption. “My sister didn't tell me much about it, but apparently my mother got pregnant from her boyfriend and her husband came back. My mother couldn't tell her husband she was pregnant, so she gave me up for adoption. Her husband was so mean if he'd found out he'd have killed her.
“It was a small town and I guess some people knew about it.” If her mother had kept Leslie with her and left her husband, she would not have been able to support seven children. “And at that time they had to worry about neighbours. I still don't know who my father is. The only way I'd find out who my father is would be to go and meet my mother. . . . My sister told her that I'm all right. My sister was upset because she wasn't sure if I was going to upset my mother's life. Her husband would kill her even now. I know a lot about her and it doesn't really matter if I don't meet her. The only reason I would like to meet her is because I'd like to know who my father is … I still wonder why the people that had me before didn't want me.” She was refer-ring to her first adoptive placement. Leslie had been placed for adoption as an infant, given up again at six months of age, then placed for adoption with her present parents. “It gets really, really confusing. Especially if you don't have anyone to talk to.”
Psychologists tell us that babies bond with their parents and that a disruption in the bonding process causes emotional withdrawal. Leslie had suffered two bonding interruptions—the first with her birth mother and the second with her original adoption placement. In spite of that, Leslie appeared to have a firm and deep attachment to her adoptive parents—proving the resilience of some children.
So much of the passion that the teens showed on the topic of adoption concerned the reasons why they had been placed for adoption.
They understood that sometimes birth mothers were too young and had no money to support a child; grandparents hadn't been willing to help support a baby; birth fathers couldn't or wouldn't help. Sometimes a mother kept her baby for a few months or a year until life got too complicated, difficult, or stressful. Birth mothers had been ignored by their families, ignored by government aid programs, cut off from work and support, from friends, from parties and fun, and often they were poor. Teens who were sixteen or seventeen themselves often found it understandable why a young mother would give up a baby.
When the teens I interviewed didn't know why they had been placed for adoption, they guessed:
“Maybe she was too young.”
“Maybe she just didn't want a kid.”
“Maybe it was a one-night stand and I was a boo-boo.”
“I don't know. No one will tell me. I don't know why or even where I was for six months. No one knows why.”
“I guess they were too young, didn't have any money, and couldn't handle it.”
Some parents, and I'm ashamed to say I was one of them, avoid the issues by telling the child that they put in an order for her or him and some unidentified woman did the family a favour by carrying and delivering the child—a sort of baby catalogue ordering system. The implication is that their birth mother was never really the “mother.” I hadn't realized how unrealistic that was or that by calling my children's mother “the lady who had you” I was taking away her character, individuality, and personality. When I met my youngest son's birth mother and heard from her how difficult it had been to give up her baby, and how she had loved him, I was humbled and ashamed. She did not have this child for me. What an incredibly arrogant attitude I'd had. She had him for his own sake, and I can only be grateful.
Teens told me that they wanted a personal connection with a real past, not with a vague, dehumanized idea. It was hard for them to get an accurate image of a real person in a real situation who actually existed with the limited information they receive, such as, “Five foot six inches, blue eyes, fifteen years old, and fair.” Even those who had a clear idea and good records where the social worker explained why she thought they were placed for adoption wanted to hear it from their mother.
In some provinces and states, social workers may ask for a letter from the birth mother at the time of adoption explaining why she relinquished her child. Such a letter is supposed to be passed on to the adoptive parents. The information in the letter is then to be passed on to the child as he or she is growing up. Most teens I interviewed thought it would be great to have that kind of communication.
But there could be problems with this. The social worker may not receive a letter; if she does, she may not pass it on to the parents, or if the parents receive it, they may not pass the information on to the child. Wouldn't a name, address, and contact be better?
Almost any information would be welcome to some even if they didn't approve of the reason for placement. Many teens see their beginnings as rejection by their birth mother. There isn't any doubt that the act of giving up a baby for adoption can be seen as a great rejection, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the birth mother didn't want her baby. Giving up a baby and wanting that baby can exist together.
It is possible to want something desperately and know you cannot have it; to know it would not, in the long run, be wise. It's reasonable to think that giving up a child is hard. While I was a public health nurse, I met no one who was able to give up a child easily. Some cried for days. Some stoically left the hospital without tears, but that didn't mean their sorrow was any less deep. Part of the problem is that at childbirth your body and your heart are ready to nurture a child and you react badly to empty arms. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to empathize with how a birth mother would feel. It is not a clear case of rejection of the baby.
Mike saw adoption as rejection by his birth mother. He was fifteen years old, short, quiet, neatly dressed, and polite. He allowed me to interview him in the kitchen of his home as his sister bustled around getting ready for work, apologizing for being in the way. When the house was quiet and we had talked for a while, I asked Mike what he knew about his birth parents.
“Nothing. Mom and Dad don't know anything about them. I don't know anything.”
“What do you want to know about your biological parents?”
“It would be kind of neat to know why they put me up for adoption.” He paused. “And maybe, what ages they are. I don't think I want to meet them again. It'd be sort of scary. I might even know them already.”
“What difference would knowing about your biological parents make?”
“It might take my mind off some of the things I've thought about.” He looked at me seriously for a few moments and then leaned his head back against the wall. “Like, why did they put me up for adoption? Was I bad? Was it because of me?” I was startled, and then horrified, that he thought he was such a poor human being that his mother didn't want him.
“You think she thought you were bad?”
“Yeah. Sometimes I think that.”
Mike didn't seem to be upset by this self-denigrating idea, but I was. “You know, Mike,” I spoke very slowly, “it seems unlikely that a week-old baby did anything, could do anything to make its mother reject it.”
Mike shrugged. “I don't know. Not really.”
I tried again. “There is nothing you could have done that would make you bad. I mean a baby is just a baby. There's nothing you could have done that was wrong.”
He nodded. I think it was a kind of thanks for my efforts, recognition that I had tried to understand. Mike was matter-of-fact about it, but I was upset that he could even think he was responsible for being given up.
Underneath this belief may be the fear that if he had been abandoned once because of who he was, he could be abandoned again. Wasn't there some way our society could prevent kids from having this kind of damaging speculation? Perhaps that letter from the birth mother explaining her reasons for surrendering him might help kids like him. Mike still feels that in some special way, he made his mother hate him so much that he wasn't worth keeping. Maybe he was so angry at her that it helped to imagine her as a cruel woman who would do some-thing so rotten.
Understanding why a mother would give her child up for adoption became important to me. At this time I hadn't yet met my son's birth mother and I was struggling with issues around the desperation of birth mothers. I had talked to many mothers at the time of child-birth, but I wanted to know how a mother felt years later. I was privileged to get some interviews with birth mothers.
A dark, regal woman talked to me in her city home. She had responded to my ad in the paper for teen interviews and thought I should hear what it was like from her point of view.
“We were engaged,” she said of her partner, “but he gambled. I didn't think I could make enough money to support the baby and I didn't know whether what he and I had was going to last.”
They eventually did marry and now have a family. It seemed busy and happy—two little girls and a dog kept running back and forth through the kitchen. When her first child was eighteen she searched for him, found him, and contacted his adoptive mother. The two mothers arranged for the son to meet his birth mother. He visits her occasionally now.
“It's nice that I know him. I always wondered and worried about him. In fact, I got depressed every year around his birth date. Now I know that he has a loving family who brought him up very well. And I know also that I will never really feel like his mother. I gave that position away. You can't do anything about the time you gave away. I'm glad I've met him, though. I feel better about the decision I made nineteen years ago and I think I've lost my depression.” Their reunion reduced her guilt and allowed her to live with herself. Her son discovered where he fit in the pattern of his past.
When the discovery that you are adopted comes at the late age of twelve or thirteen, the rejection by the birth mother seems to be more difficult to handle. Karen learned of her adoption when she was twelve. Leslie also learned late and found it hard to understand. “I cried for a long time. Someone dumped me when I was a baby and I couldn't understand why.”
Many teens told me that their resentment is not directed primarily at their birth mother, but at their adoptive mother (not their father) for not being honest with them. They trusted their (adoptive) mother to care for them, and when she withheld important information, they felt betrayed. She was supposed to love them and treat them fairly, and she lied.
Most teens felt that their birth information was their right. They felt adoptive parents were not fair or honest when they kept information to themselves. And, as Leslie said, “So what's the big deal? It's my background, isn't it?” Government officials and adoptive parents are slowly beginning to agree with Leslie's statement, but many still try to deny that teens existed anywhere before they joined their adopted family.
Some teens who knew quite a lot about their biological parents were happy to tell me about it. They saw themselves as coming from one place, the place of the birth mother, and moving to another, the adoptive home. Those who didn't know saw the time before their birth as a mystery. Am I the child of a celebrity who was forced by her career to abandon me? Is the woman who works in Sears downtown who looks like me, my mother? Is that woman coming down the street? Was I born at all or did I just arrive? They don't seriously believe that they came from outer space, but the joking comments indicate that they are uncomfortable, a little afraid that somehow they are not “normal.” They wonder, worry, and imagine the best beginnings they could have—and the worst.
Leslie insisted that I understand. “Like you walk down the street and you see someone with brown eyes and brown hair, and you wonder, ‘Gee, I wonder if they could be related to me?' You could walk right up to your mother. There was one time . . . a girl in a drugstore walked up to me and said, ‘You know what? If you had your hair cut the same way as my sister you could be identical twins.' And that made me think—I wonder if I've got brothers and sisters. They could be right here under my nose and I'd never know it. ‘Wanting to know' is just a kind of a feeling. Like there's a piece of the puzzle missing. Whether it's good or bad, you feel you have to know. You're compelled to know.
“That [knowledge of her birth parents] is part of me. that's part of my life. Whether I was too young to remember or not. . . . I was born in that hospital from one woman and I was given to another. … “ Her voice drifted into silence. Then she said, “And I just want to know why.”
I thought about why we, society, haven't kept the information these teens need. There were reasons—attitudes, and the real and imagined desires of both the birth parents and adopted parents. I remember the lawyer asking me if I wanted to know the name of my oldest son's birth mother. Because I was young, insecure, self-protecting, it didn't occur to me at the time that my son might eventually want to know and, by then, the information had been lost. All of society concerned with adoption except the adopted baby, helped shape our attitudes and approach to adoption. Our understanding of the needs of adopted children and teens has been imperfect.