I have a great adoption story to tell, but I’d like to hear others’ first.
I’m mostly interested in stories from adoptees, but adopters are welcome to share.
Adoptees:
Are you looking for your biological parents? If so, why (health, curiosity, children, etc.)?
Did you find them? What was the outcome?
Was the reunion what you thought it would be?
How did your adoptive parents feel about it?
Adopters:
Was it an open adoption?
How would you feel if your child wanted to search for his/her biological parents later in life?
What do you see as some of the positives/negatives of raising an adopted child?
Feel free to add anything not included in the above list. Perhaps some folks may even have resources to share with those who are searching for their biological parents.
I would like to play. I don’t fall into the categories mentioned, but I can give you my perspective as the biological mother.
Short intro: I became pregnant when I was 13, giving birth when I was 14. I knew immediately (as in, walking home after we’d done the deed) that I was pregnant. I also knew that I would not be parenting the child. Reflecting, that made the process of adoption easier because I never permitted myself (or was not emotionally ready) to bond with the fetus. By the time I told my parents, it was “too late” for an abortion in my home state. The biological father offered to get married, but I knew I didn’t want to ruin his life. I took as much responsibility as I could at that point; it was I who insisted on no condom, after all. (Young ladies who may be reading this, please please please don’t think you’ll be “cooler” for being the one to turn down protection.) Adoption seemed to be the answer, and my mother was very supportive of my decision. She was intuitive (or selfish? ;)) enough to know that I would like an open adoption, even though I never actually voiced that preference. Her younger brother A and his ladyfriend were willing to meet me and discuss options. They adopted J as soon as he was born.
To half-ass address the questions in the best manner I can…
I don’t know if or when J will be willing to acknowledge me for what I am. He has known since he was 2 years that he was adopted. (He’s now 8 years old.) His parents pray with him and (I hear) thank “birth mommy” for allowing them to be a family. I have seen him when I visit their area, and I don’t know if he makes (or wants to make) the connection between us. If he ever wants to know who his biological father is, I will try to help him. I don’t know J well enough to speculate that far in the future.
Eventually, I suppose he will know who and what I am to him. I fear the day he asks me about it. I absolutely do not want to step on his parents’ toes, but I don’t want to worry about speaking with him openly about his life and mine. His parents seem touchy to me on that matter; when I’m around, they wait with bated breath for me to act out or say something. Sorry to disappoint you, guys, but I’m not 14 anymore. I can (and do) remain calm by acting distant, which may suck for J if he realizes. I’d rather see him occasionally, though, than try to woo his undying love, if you (the reader) are following.
So… yeah, this is getting kind of long; I’ll try to sum it up. As far as guilt and sadness go… I have regrets. I can’t imagine not having them. However, my regrets are pure selfishness. My family’s arrangement has been perfect for J and he’s the only person who matters, IMNSHO. I hope he can accept me at some point. If he doesn’t, that’s okay; I can get used to that idea. Time heals all, and all that crap. I hope it won’t come to that, but what else can I do? This being an adult stuff kinda sucks.
I don’t know from what angle you come, Large Marge, but I hope J feels about his story the way you seem to feel about yours. Kudos to you for being happy.
I am also a birth mom. I placed my baby for adoprtion when I was 17. It was not an open adoption.
I was recently reunited with my daughter, who is now an adult. She had been searching for me for a long time. Her adoptive father was supportive of her decision to find me, but her adoptive mother (her parents are divorced) was not. She does not have a great relationship with her adoptive mother. The reunion was great, but I am still confused about our relationship. She is definitely looking for a mother figure, but I am not exactly comfortable in that role. I don’t have any other children, and being a mother is a totally new thing for me.
This is all very emotional, and more than I usually share. I am still uncertain about our relationship, but I am so happy we found each other. Sometimes I feel more like her friend than her mother.
I’m sorry, I absolutely should have stated that mothers who had given their children up for adoption were included. For me, it is synonymous with my adoption - with being an adoptee - but perhaps that’s only because I have found mine and I don’t even have a story without my mother.
I admire your strength and maturity at that age. My gawd, what you must have been going through and what you will continue to go through in the waiting. But I expect a happy ending, mostly because you handled it so well.
It is such an unselfish thing you did, not only giving him up for adoption, but an open adoption within the family where you knew you would be seeing him often. I’m not sure I could have done that. I would have needed more separation, I think, or it would have hurt too much. J - eventually - will see this for himself. Right now it sounds like he’s influenced by his parents - as would be expected - and he probably can sense the tension from them on the subject. But the fact that they include you in their prayers of thanks is a truly wonderful thing.
My adoptive mother told me at 7 that I was adopted, and while I knew what that meant, I didn’t grasp the concept completely until I was about 13 or so. It wasn’t discussed in my house after that talk at 7, either. As I grew up, I had so many unanswered questions, mostly because my adoptive mother didn’t know the answers. J will at least be able to fill in some gaps in his life, because you are so near to it. That is important.
It is impossible to keep some of these short, so don’t bother. I’m interested in every last detail.
Congratulations on reuniting with your daughter!! Were you looking for her, too? These stories usually are very emotional, so thank you for sharing it. I think talking about it - especially in an Internet forum - is a good way to release some of the anxiety many involved in adoption feel, without bringing it into your day-to-day life, though for me, it was always there on some level. My birth mother had an enormous amount of guilt, though she was in a bit of denial about that, probably because it was too painful.
Your story reminds me a bit of my sister. L and I were both adopted from different families; she is two years younger than I am. Our adoptive parents divorced when I was 4, and my adoptive mother moved us to California, where we were raised. She did the best she could raising us in a teacher’s salary with little child support ($120 a month total) from Dad.
But my adoptive mother had “functional mental problems” as I’ve come to call them. She is undiagnosed because she won’t even acknowledge that there is a problem (it’s a long story for another thread). As a result of her condition, she is unable to connect with people emotionally, and consequently, it was hard on L and I. This upbringing caused me to become self-sufficient; it caused my sister to become angry and reclusive. She is 33 and still blames my adoptive mother for the problems in her life. To her I say: Get over it. At some point you have to take responsibility for your own life and decisions.
Because of these perceived “circumstances,” my sister became absolutely desperate to find her birth mother, thinking that would make it all OK, that it would somehow make her the person she knew she should have been. She wrote letters to organizations. She signed up on Internet message boards. She tried to get the hospital to release records. She hired a private investigator. She searched for FIVE YEARS. During this time, she moved from California to Vancouver, Wash.
The private investigator finally did find her biological mother, and guess where she was living? About 30 minutes from Vancouver, Wash.
So, she wrote to her. A nice, long letter. And then she waited for a response. A week went by, and nothing. A month, and still nothing. Three months passed and still, nothing. She knew she had the right address; in fact, I found out later she had sort of stalked this poor woman, parking near her home and spying on her house. She just wanted to know.
IMHO, my sister’s expectations of her birth mother were way, WAY too high. I think that in the little fairytale in her head, her mother would welcome her with open arms, apologize for any sadness she may have inadvertantly created in her life, and then invite her into her home and into her life to give her all the love and acceptance she felt she so rightly deserved.
Her mother finally wrote back. She said that she had remarried, and that her husband didn’t know she’d given up a child, and that she didn’t want to tell him. Couldn’t tell him. She said that she had four sons, and how could she possibly explain that to them? She said she wasn’t ready for this in her life, and that she was sorry, but that was how it had to be: a secret.
You can imagine my sister’s disappointment. But I think she created some of it for herself. How could anyone live up to the expectations she had?
I don’t mean to say that this is what your daughter has in mind, but it does sound as though she wants more from you than just knowing who you are.
Being her friend is the best thing you can do, and I think asking a biological mother to be more just isn’t fair. My bio-mom handed over that responsibility to my adoptive mother, absolving her of any parental obligation, so when I went looking for her, I did NOT expect anything other than a possible friendship. And I think that’s why it turned out so well for us.
Have you talked to your daughter frankly about how you feel about the whole “mom” thing?
Adoptee here. I found out when I was quite young-maybe 5 or 6. I was flipping through a date book my mom has always kept by the phone. It notes my birthday, then six week later it says they brought me home. I questioned her, she explained it to me.
Other than the usual “Your momma didn’t want you!” crap from peers, I was pretty okay with it until college. I applied and auditioned for the music program at the local university. The whole time I was preparing my mom was pretty silent, unusual for her. I was also getting used to the concept that I was the result of a one night stand, biomom didn’t want to deal with me, &c. I was vocal about my “issues”, but my mom just brushed them away, stating I was being melodramatic as usual. After I was rejected by the music program, my dad let it slip that mom didn’t really want me to attend that university. Why? According to mom, biodad was a music professor at that particular uni and biomom was his student. It’s entirely feasible that I auditioned in front of my biodad.
When I started college (elsewhere), I had a few people come up to me and call me “Melissa”. I’m not, nor ever have been a Melissa. I guess there was someone who looked almost identical to me that went to a southside high school. Half-sibling? Entirely possible.
I have made some halfhearted attempts at locating them. One of them was kind enough to bestow upon me an inherited disease, of which no real cure (PKD). The county I was adopted through will allow me access to my records due to the medical issue. I have gone to the uni and had yearbooks from 68-69 in my hand, but could not get up enough gumption to actually open them.
I love my parents dearly. I know they know I’m torn. I wouldn’t want a relationship, per se, with either parent. Being a mom myself, I can understand why my biomom did what she did (according to my mom, biomom was a highly accomplished classical musician and being a single mom in 1969, in Minnesota, was not condusive to attaining her goals). I would rather meet my biodad. Having been born at the end of the school year, he had to have known about me. Was he married? Do I have other siblings, as noted by college friends?
That’s my story. LilMiss wants me to seek my bioparents out. I’m of the opinion that all in all, I have the ideal family now.
Sounds like you are asking for a blessing on not looking for your biological parents at the moment. You really don’t have to open yourself up to this if you don’t want to. You might want to provide “LilMiss” with assistance at the right time with the understanding that you are to be left out of it – if that is your desire.
And you can always change your mind if you choose.
You don’t have to decide once and for all right now, do you?
BTW, please don’t assume that your biological mother (or father) didn’t want you. I don’t think I’ve ever known a woman who carried a child to term who was ever happy about parting with the baby. I hope you are not painting the situation with the darkest colors possible.
I really don’t discuss the whole “I’m adopted” thing with my daughter unless she brings it up. Sometimes when I say ‘mom and dad’ she asks me “Your real mom and dad?” My response is always “As far as I’m concerned I only have one “real” set of parents”. We’ve discussed what led to my biomom putting me up for adoption and that I really don’t have any problems with it. I have been VERY lucky to have the parents I have.
(Although it really does show how much of us is nature vs. nuture, but that’s another conversation)
I am an adoptee. I’ve known since birth that I was adopted. I was never “special” or “chosen”, just adopted. No big deal. I theorize that many children that have to find their bio-parents are those that weren’t told until later in life that they were adopted.
I’ve never had a strong desire to find my bio-parents. I am an only child brought up by two loving people that couldn’t have a child of their own. My parents are my parents and while they were alive, it seemed almost disrespectful to try to locate my bio-parents. My mom even offered to help me find them but I declined.
Since they’ve died, I’ve discovered a few pieces of the puzzle quite by accident. In their papers, I found a medical report of my mom’s (she had cancer when I was quite young) that referred to me as a “foster child”. I also found legal paperwork dated when I was about 6 months old to change my last name from XXXXX to my parent’s name. That document also identifies the name of my bio-parents.
I’ve not pursued that information any further.
Curiously, I recently met a woman that told me that there was another woman living about 3 hours from here that looks exactly like me, talks like me, and acts like me. The odd thing is that this woman was also adopted. A twin perhaps? A sibling? A coincidence?
I’ve offered to meet with this woman to compare notes and haven’t heard back yet. Never having siblings, it would be awesome to have a sister or brother out there.
If I were to ever meet my birth mother, the only thing I would like to tell her is, “Thank you.” There is nothing more courageous than a birth mother giving the privelege of raising that child to another couple. It doesn’t matter to me why she did it, but rather that she made the most unselfish decision a woman can ever make.
I’ve got two adopted children. Both of them are South Korean-born. When we were considering options, going overseas was a no-brainer. In the late 1980’s, there were several highly emotional court cases in which a birth mother had surrendered a child for adoption, then- years later- gone to court to reclaim her birth child.
This was not to be, for us. For a variety of reasons, we chose South Korea.
No money changes hands with the birth mother.
The program is heavily controlled by the government.
There are stringent controls in place in terms of who is deemed eligible.
Once that child leaves South Korean airspace, he/she cannot be taken back by a birth parent who changes their mind.
I’ve never had any struggles with this. Obviously the kids have always known they were adopted; they even each had a bedtime book we made up with photos of them before and after they came to us, and a baby-esque story of their adoption into our family. We bring them to a camp once a year that brings a few hundred Korean adoptees together for 4 or 5 days. It’s very healthy and important, IMHO. A sense of belonging that otherwise might be missing.
There have been some painful moments, but I do not think either would ever use in anger the much dreaded phrase, " You’re not my father ! ". My son came when he was 6 months old, he is turning 15 in a few months. My daughter came when she was 4 1/2 months old, she just turned 13 a few months ago. We’re both white, and we live in a fairly white town. ( sadly… ) Few asians, some folks of color.
We have asians in the family, their cousins are half-Chinese half-white. It helps. I have said to them many times, " you guys have each other, for things we will never relate to or undersand. Use that…use each other for the connection you share. "
Of course, pretty much the second I saw each of their placement photos ( months prior to arrival ) I began to imaging bonding with them. I’m a real baby person, my wife is not and never has been. I bonded immediately with both of em upon arrival. She did okay with the son, with the daughter she admits it took a while. No idea why. It was a matter of days not weeks at any rate.
I meet parents of kids who have adopted who say, " Oh, I never see them as Korean/Guatemalan/Chinese/Thai". Please. Stop being so P.C. You’re white, they’re some other brand of human. Embrace but don’t deny, that’s a big thing to me.
Besides, I know without a shadow of a doubt that my children are roughly ( and, this can be empirically measured ) almost 12,000 times more beautiful than any child my loins could have produced.
They’re good people inside and out, and to that I freely attribute the fact that nurture beats nature out every time.
Side note to Large Marge: I liked ya last week after that great thread. Now you’re a champeen in my book. Glad you’re around. Great thread idea, just great.
Cartooniverse, incredibly proud daddy of a coupla good kids.
I have no stories as of yet, but I really wanted to chime in—so I’ll use any flimsy excuse available to do so. My wife and I are planning to adopt deaf children, and I’ve already started doing my homework on the subject. If anybody wants information on this particular area of adoption, just say the word and I’ll point you in the right direction.
Wow! To have such information and not do anything with it - what will power! I’d be dying of curiosity! It would be very satisfying to know that the information is at your fingertips, though, should you ever decide you want to pursue it.
People used to do this to me all the time and it would make me nuts. I would think the same thing - that they might be siblings - and then I’d hound the poor stranger for information: Where did you see her? Do you know where she works? How old was she? Exactly when and where did you see her? Can you get me her phone number? I’m sure they thought I was a complete loon.
I couldn’t agree more. I spent a lot of time as a child wondering “why” and finally deciding that it wasn’t about the why; it was about doing the right thing, and that whatever those reasons were, if they were good enough for her, they were good enough for me. Really, it was a trust thing. I just trusted that it was as it should be. And, in hindsight, it was.
Thanks, Cartooniverse! And great story! I knew a woman who spent three years and $25,000 to adopt the love of her life: A beautiful South Korean baby girl. She was an unmarried reporter at the time, so this was no small feat, as you can imagine. She made a point to connect her daughter to her South Korean culture, too, but it’s not easy when you’re living in a small New England town. Her daughter was 3 when I knew her, and the two couldn’t have been happier.
Oh, and I have a story that may impinge on your nuture beats nature stance. Coming soon …
Adoptee here. Adopted at birth (or shortly thereafter). I have never sought to contact my biological parents. Several years ago, I understand there was some sort of freedom of information legislation that may have enabled my biological parents to attempt to contact me - in any case, I signed a disclosure veto to prevent the release of such information. Unless the laws change, my biological parents will never be able to contact me through government records. Similarly, I believe biological parents also had the option to sign a disclosure veto to the same effect.
Now to the interesting story - when I was adopted by my parents, they debated for quite some time before they decided upon my name. Some time after this, they obtained some information from my biological parents (medical history, etc.), as well as a brief and non-identifying letter, written by my birth mother, in which she referred to me by the name she chose before she made the decision to give me up for adoption.
I was born in 1966 to a young, unwed woman in the midwest. Things like open adoptions and being raised by a single parent weren’t exactly common back then, so I had the typical closed adoption. I always think of the parents that raised me as my “real” mother and father, but was always curious about my birth parents.
Many many years later (I was grown up and married) I decided to look for my birth parents. I gathered up all of the papers we had about the adoption, which was a handful of forms with a few key areas literally cut out with a pair of scissors. We contacted the lawyer who had done the adoption, but he claimed that all of the paperwork had been destroyed many years ago (not sure I believed him). To make a long story short, we did a lot of things, but the one that worked was we noticed a signature on one of the forms that didn’t match up to any name we knew. It wasn’t the most legible, but we took a somewhat educated guess to what the name was. We searched a 1966 reverse lookup directory from the city where I was born, and someone with that name did live in that town in a particular apartment for a few years. At that point we lost the trail.
With nothing else to do, we got a modern phone book and started calling everyone within a 60 mile radius of the hospital where I was born with that last name. As you can imagine, this led us on a few wild goose chases, but eventually we did manage to find my birth mother’s family.
Unfortunately, she had died many years earlier, and I never got to meet her.
I now have a good relationship with the other members of my birth family. I’ve been out to the midwest to visit them a couple of times, and we keep in touch with letters and e-mail.
My adopted mother has had some jealousy issues over it all, but mostly it’s gone pretty smoothly.
I have a daughter who is adopted from China. She is perfect in every way, and I feel blessed to have her.
I wanted to agree with Cartooniverse, she is Asian, not Caucasian. There are ways in which we will never have the same experiences. This has been somewhat of an ethical issue for me, the extent to which the love of a family and material security outweigh being removed from her own culture and turned into a minority. I worried about it while the adoption was in process, and I still worry now. I have her enrolled in a Chinese immersion program right now, and we have lots of friends in the Chinese community, and I’m hoping that this will give her some grounding when she needs it later on.
A local woman who is an adult adoptee from Korea has written a book called The Language of Blood. I haven’t read the book, but I have read and heard interviews with her, and she is very forthright about the parts of international adoption that most people don’t want to talk about. Yes, we love the pictures of cute kids finding families, but there is a profound loss there as well. To some degree, I wonder if her issues are similar to second-generation immigrants, not quite of either culture.
One of the things she is most vehement about is the way international adoption destroys families in order to create other families. In the case of adoption from China, this doesn’t bother me, because the destruction of the family came about through Chinese government policy, not anything I had a hand in. She also makes some valid points about the amount of money that does change hands, and the percentage of it that goes to the agencies. (She has a less valid point, IMHO, in asking why that money couldn’t be used to give support to the birthmothers in their home country, so that they can keep their children. Who would transfer those resources? Frankly, even in my most altruistic moments, I would not have simply sent thousands of dollars off to some unknown woman in a foreign country, although I did happily (more or less) spend thousands of dollars to adopt my angel.)
I do have qualms about having adopted sometimes. Because I am a white, middle-class American, I am able to go to a poor country and take one of their children to be my own. There are serious ethical and systemic issues here that I hope I’m being clear about. On the other hand, my Chinese friends tell me that no one would actually marry a girl from an orphanage, and that orphans would never go to university, and that once she was an adult and had to leave the orphanage (which I visited and liked a lot), she would be on her own, without the extended support system necessary to survive in China. She is brilliant, and talented, and deserves a chance to go as far as her abilities will take her. (As does every child, obviously, but not all of them get that chance.)
On a slightly different note, early in the adoption process the agency had a panel discussion and two birthmothers from open adoptions shared their stories with us. They both said that they really wanted to spend a lot of time with their children the first couple of years, and the adoptive parents were clearly edgy about it. When their children became teen-agers, the adoptive parents started wanting them to be more involved with the kids, but they had both moved on, married, had other children, careers, and weren’t as attached anymore. (But they did care, and loved the kids.) They also said that in open adoptions, the kid is almost always in the bridal party at the birthmother’s wedding, which I found interesting.
