Before my adoption reunions, I knew nothing about bonding and attachment. I believed I had no grief, no abandonment and no attachment issues. By forty, as the veil of adoptee fog lifted, I quickly discovered attachment theory and soon learned the true meaning of “adoptee fog.” Along these lines, a poignant memory of a serious talk I had with my adoptive mother returns to me, driven by the questions that lived behind my “special story.”
“Please don’t be sad Mommy, but I figure I should be adopted by Dora. She is not old like you, she has freckles like me, and she can give me a brother. See, I will be right there!” I said, pointing through the slatted window panes across the side yard toward my future home. “You can watch me play with my brother!” I assured her. “All you have to do is let Dora be my new mommy.”
At five years old, I adored the young woman who lived next door to us. She had a baby boy. I spent time with her and imagined her being my mom and him being my brother. An only adopted child, I was fully aware (as best a 5 year old can be) what adoption meant and how it worked. I thought I should have the best mommy I could get. After all, didn’t my birth mother want me to have the best parents possible?
It seemed Dora offered a better life, one that came with homemade cookies and a sibling. Mommy had already explained that no, the people at the agency wouldn’t let her get me a brother or sister, because so many people in the world couldn’t make their own babies. Like a cookie, you could only take one.
Mommy kindly but firmly told me NO. My birth mother picked my mother and my father out especially for me, and that the mommy she chose for me would always be my only mommy. If I could rewrite it, my mother would have said, “You will always have just two mommies, the one who gave you life and me, the one who is here to teach you to live it and to give you all my love and all the love sent to you by your Birth Mommy.”
I conceded with an “I’m sorry, I guess you will have to be good enough” hug, and Mommy pulled me into her lap. I curled there into her, her white silky housedress soft against my skin, the tender stroke of her finger along my cheek, and she began to explain the complications of it all.
While it may have seemed like a tender embellishment saying my birth mother picked them both out “especially for me,” it only created a false truth in my little head. We cling to every detail about our birth story. So when I met my birth mother and learned she had no hand in picking my parents, I felt lied to. I had always imagined her in a little 50’s church dress perched in the lawyer’s office looking over files and pointing to my parents, “Yes, they are the ones to raise my baby!”
I turned to this fantasy for comfort, when this Mommy seemed less than perfect to me. This is where I should be. This is what my birthmother chose for me. Later learning my birthmother did not pick my parents, and actually worried they would perhaps not be good enough, exacerbated this pain. This I know now is a natural birth mother concern not to be taken personally, but it crushed me to learn that it had all been fantasy.
Common Pains
On Grey’s Anatomy, S18 E12 “The Makings of You”, Maggie finds a letter addressed to her from her birth mother. At first, she fears reading it and just holds it, wanting it to answer all her questions. Why did you give me up? Did you suspect I would be a great surgeon too? Why couldn’t you have made me, Meredith and Richard, a family?
After she opens it, she is crushed by the blows of words she saw coming. She is broken by the absence of the words she already knew would not be there. As usual, the writers do a better than average job of revealing the true turmoil within the adoptee psyche. The scene shows Maggie moving from elation, learning her mother chose her birth parents for her, to fury at the realization that her birth mother declined any form of open adoption.
Learning that her birth mother chose her parents elates her, but for most of us that scenario is a fantasy. If we ever learn the truth, it typically crushes us, rather than buoys us up. For the birth parent, it is also dangerous ground. Multiple possible choices exist: choosing the right parents or choosing the wrong parents for a closed adoption, choosing the right or wrong parents with open adoption, or not choosing at all. And since most adoptees long to know the birth parent had a hand in the choosing, for many adoptees, positive outcomes are few and far between. In reality, we know most birth mothers, especially those in the 50’s and 60’s, didn’t get to choose, but it still stabs at the primal wound.
I know my adoptive mother did her best in the face of the great pain of me judging her not good enough. And I am sure this likely pulled on her own feelings about infertility and failing my father and her parents to bring them a natural child. She told me once my critical grandfather barked, “You can’t even get knocked up right!”
Her sister’s death at 18 meant my adoptive mother’s procreation held the last chance for her parents to be biological grandparents, and the last chance for my father’s family name to pass on. So there I sat, a 5-year-old telling her she failed at being an adoptive mom too. How I wish I still had her here to apologize to, to explain it. Perhaps she was insightful enough to know it herself.
Looking back, I see it as a test. Me testing my adoptive mother to prove that SHE could not be replaced, and neither could I. That under no circumstances could she or I ever be replaced — a great test for security and seeking protection from the fear of being taken away again. Having gone back to this and processed it, it has helped heal something in my heart. Perhaps this will spark other stories/discussions or help some adoptive moms with an adopted child searching for reassurance.
