Friday, January 22, 2010
Recently I was having a discussion with fellow adoptees on adoptee rights and specifically, our right to our original birth certificates. Currently, only FIVE states allow an adult adoptee unrestricted access to an OBC. Eight more will allow the adoptee to request and obtain records, unless one of the birth parents has denied releasing the information through a formal affidavit. Four will allow access only if consent is on file from the birthparents and seven allow access when eligibility to receive the information is established by a State adoption agency. This means twenty-six; TWENTY-SIX do not allow it PERIOD! This is ridiculous! During our conversation, I had mentioned that I had not requested my own OBC even though I was born in one of the five unrestricted states. When asked why, I replied that I already knew what was on it so why did I need it? Then one of them said something that has stuck in my head in the days since....she told me "because you can." These three simple words are what separate me from some of my friends. Three words that up until a year ago separated me from almost everyone I knew with a couple of exceptions. Because I can; up until a year ago the only thing that I could get was an amended copy that held my adoptive parents names in place of my birthparents. Half of this country has withheld OBC's from the people who have every right to them...the person whose birth it represents. In my case, it's like I did not exist prior to my adoption in 1971. Although the amended birth certificate does list my birthdate as XX/XX/1968, Debra WOODWARD did not exist legally prior to my adoption in 1971 and likewise, Debra STEVENS ceased to exist after, and yet both people are the same person. I was granted the right to know who I am. How perverse is that? To be more accurate, how perverse is it that millions more do not have that right?
Monday, January 18, 2010
I have had a difficult time wrapping my mind around my birth mother's mindset. I have been told that she looked at giving us up as "getting rid of us" much as one would get rid of a cold, and with about as much emotion. As a mother myself, I cannot fathom carrying a child for nine months, handing he or she over to strangers and not having any emotional problem with it. My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage at 16 weeks, I was 19 and unmarried and no longer in contact with the father. I grieved the loss of that child as I would have grieved the loss of any child. When I became pregnant with my eldest daughter, it was suggested to me to give her up. I could not even think of it. I don't know if it was due to the feelings I had that this would be my first blood relative that I would know (I had met Wanda by this point but had yet to prove she was in fact my sister) or if it had to do with my feelings both tapped and untapped of being adopted myself. With her first cry I was lost in her and continue to be to this day. I had two more lost pregnancies between her and her brother each equally devastating as the first. My grief compounded with each loss. With each loss, the idea of willingly giving a child away seemed more and more absurd to me. This is not to say that some first mothers are as selfish as my own was. Some have very good reasons, and they grieve as much as any woman would who loses a child. For them I feel sorry, for some are as much victims of the adoption process as their relinquished children are. I see my birth father as a victim. He had no say in whether I stayed or went. My birth mother informed him after my birth that she had a boy and she got rid of it. Maybe she told him I was a boy to throw him off searching for me, we may never know.
Thoughts
So…. I am thinking of writing about my personal experiences as an adoptee. Almost anything in print you read about adoptees and the search for their roots usually ends in happy reunions with at least one birth parent. The stories tend to have a saccharin overload that leaves me with that age old bitter taste in my mouth. Not all stories are easy, not all are resolved and certainly not all have happy endings.
Lately, I have been thinking A LOT about this. Maybe it’s because of the new interest through certain TV shows that glamorize reunions, maybe it’s the contact with some "toxic" friends, or maybe perchance the words in my mind and heart have finally reached the boiling over point where I feel I MUST share them lest they destroy me.
Not all adoptees are screwed up messes, at least not outwardly. It's not as though we wear a sign that says "Hey World! I was adopted!” Yet, I bet if you interviewed many adoptees, you would find some similar feelings and experiences that may be unique to the adoptee. There are things about my personality that I could never explain about myself until I sat down and tried to correlate to being adopted. I am a bit of a perfectionist, I am for the most part an introvert, and I don't like to cause waves. I crave acceptance yet can brush aside others indifference like a pesky mosquito. Relationships have been at best rocky. Could this be the result of being cast aside as an infant, of being looked at by "shopping" potential parents to see if I match their decor (I was actually not taken by one couple because I had "big ears" and another because I had one blue eye and one green), or is it just who I was meant to be to begin with. We are in many ways like the “Land of Misfit Toys”, although we are more like Charlie in the Box than the train with square wheels. The way we feel don’t fit in is not as apparent on the surface….Charlie outwardly looked like any Jack-in-the-box until you found out he was named Charlie; a label that distinguished him as different much as the label of “adoptee” separates us from everyone else. Outwardly, in appearance we are the same as everyone, our tough outer shell insulating us from threats to our psyche real or imagined while inside we are a fragile skeleton of a whole with pieces missing that we search for.
Even when we are placed in a positive, nurturing and loving home, there still is a sense of being out of place. My parents never showed any difference in how they treated my two sisters and me and yet deep down, I KNEW I was different.
It wasn’t just the fact that I was blonde with light eyes when everyone else was dark haired with brown or hazel eyes. It wasn’t something you see or even sense from the outside and yet I knew I was different.
It wasn't until I was found by my sister, Laurie, and ultimately reunited with five of my six siblings, that I realized that these feeling had been there all along. The reality struck when I found my birth father. In the beginning he was seemingly thrilled...then almost a year later he cut off communication. The abandonment feelings were so intense, so painful, and so raw.
I was lucky in the fact that I was prepared for my birth mother's rejection. Not that it made it any easier but when I finally found out that she was in fact my birth mother I didn’t have to go through the rejection....I just left it where it was. Maybe my need to be accepted by others comes from the first rejection I faced before I even took my first breath. I know for a fact that she never held me, and I can only assume she didn't even look at me. I don't even consider her my mother, birth or otherwise. Is that cold on my part? Some people take issue with me over the fact that I have no feelings good or bad toward her. I look at her as merely the vessel that carried me here...a rental unit of sorts. I take great offense when I speak of my mother and people ask, "Your REAL mother or your ADOPTIVE one?” For me, I only have one mother and only one father.....they are the ones who took me in at 4 days old and ended up keeping me for life. I do, however do not have the same rationale towards my siblings.....I have 8 siblings. I do not in my mind's eye make a distinction based on how long I have known them. I only make a distinction for others who otherwise get confused. They say your birth order determines a lot about who you are. Well then I must be terribly confused! In my adoptive family, I am the baby...and was raised as such. I got spoiled, got away with things my sisters never would have and at the same time had to deal l with mistakes they made. In my birth family, I am smack dab in the middle, 3 older siblings and 3 younger on my birth mothers side. And with my birth father I am an only child. I carry traits of all the above. I am both a leader and a follower or I can simply blend in and disappear.
I never felt "adopted" at least not in the way most would think. My adoptive Mom and I are very much alike and growing up I was THE poster child for Daddy's Little Girl. Of course, I had the grandiose fantasies that my birth mother was someone rich and or famous and that she would find me and spoil me. Never once did I fantasize about my birthfather, EVER. When I was 22, I decided I needed to know who I was and what did I face medically in my future. I had no desire to know who my birth mother was, I had no need to...I already had a wonderful Mother. I went to the library and grabbed as many books on how to perform a search. This was in the days prior to nearly everyone having a computer in their home and internet access. I was living with a friend as a live in sitter in Lewiston, Maine. I came home from the library that day knowing I had a daunting task at hand. I sat at the kitchen table with a notebook in hand and all these books around me. I was only armed with two real bits of information, my last name which I had discovered on a piece of paperwork and my place of birth as listed on my “abstract of live birth”. I set to work. About fifteen minutes into my note taking there was a knock at the door, it was a friend of my friend’s older son. He had stopped by to see if he was there. He was not there so, this friend asked me what I was doing. I told him of how I was adopted and that I was trying to figure out how to conduct a search to locate my birth mother so I could get medical information. He asked me what I already knew. I told him that I was born in Rumford, and that my last name before I was adopted was Stevens. It was so little to go on. He gave me an odd look and then said something that ultimately changed my life although I would not be able to prove it for another sixteen years. He told me that his girlfriend and I looked very much alike and that her last name was also Stevens. Now the skeptic in me jumped right up, there are several columns in the phone book for that area with the name Stevens. I was only fifteen minutes into my search on how to conduct a search; certainly this was too good to be true. He told me he would have her come over with some pictures of herself and her sisters, he encouraged me to at least talk to her, her mother had given up at least two or three children to adoption. It was a good lead albeit a remote possibility. About an hour later Wanda came to the door with photo albums in hand. We both laughed over the thought that her boyfriend thought we were sisters, how absurd! We were living one street apart and only a couple of houses down from one another. We both were tall, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and yes, I did a similarity but was it due to us being related or the wishful thinking I held? As we talked and went through photos she told me what she knew about her mother and the children she had. The elder one was raised as her aunt by her grandparents. She knew that her mother had also had at least two or three other children, one a son, who as the story went had died in a swimming pool accident at the age of two. Then there was the youngest daughter, she not only knew nothing of her oldest sister’s true identity but knew nothing of the rest of the children either. The pieces were slowly fitting in to place, she showed me a picture of the eldest sister, Michelle, and my heart stopped. We looked more alike than Wanda and I did. Could they really be my sisters? Could I have found my birth mother this fast? Then she dropped the bombshell, her mother had stated before that if any of the children she gave up ever came back she would want nothing to do with them. Proving that we were sisters just got a whole lot more complicated. We continued to hang out together even going to Rumford one day to go through old newspapers to see if there was anything that might point us in the right direction. On the way there she had asked if I minded stopping at a small store where her mother worked so she could drop something off to her. I told her, “Sure." As we came up to the store, I recognized it as a store that my Mom, my Mom’s friend and I would stop at when we went to visit my Mom’s friend’s husband at the nursing home up the road. I cringed. There was a woman there who I had encountered on several occasions who I found to be just plain rude and highly unlikable. Surely this could not be her mother, possibly my birth mother, fate could not hand me such a cruel blow. As we walked into the store Wanda walked straight up to this woman who I was praying was not the one she was going to see. I had met my birthmother years before without even knowing it. We never did let on why we were there or who I potentially was and deep down, today, I am thankful for that for at that time the rejection would have stopped me cold from pursuing any further information on my family. We continued on to Rumford, never finding any information that would prove or disprove that we were indeed sisters. For the next few months we would joke that we were sisters and after I moved out of state I carried the image of her in my heart and the names of her sisters as well. On more than one occasion, I contemplated contacting my “potential” birth mother backing down each time. I even went as far as talking to a search company about how much it would cost to hire them to do the leg work for me, they would even initiate contact and if she did not want any they would at the very least try to get medical history for me. At the time, I could not afford to hire anyone so I left it where it was at.
Over the years, I toyed several times with the prospect of searching out this woman who I suspected was my birth mother. Knowing full well that if the woman I had met so many years earlier was in fact my birth mother it would all be a waste of time. Finances kept me hiring someone who could ultimately prove if she was or was not my mother. During that time I was becoming more familiar with the internet and learning how to search different databases. I had located what I thought was her physical address and phone number as I knew what town she had been living. Little did I know that I had all the information I needed, I just lacked the nerve to reach and make that initial contact. I knew from what I learned many years earlier that she had no desire to have any of the children she had relinquished to come back and find her.
Lately, I have been thinking A LOT about this. Maybe it’s because of the new interest through certain TV shows that glamorize reunions, maybe it’s the contact with some "toxic" friends, or maybe perchance the words in my mind and heart have finally reached the boiling over point where I feel I MUST share them lest they destroy me.
Not all adoptees are screwed up messes, at least not outwardly. It's not as though we wear a sign that says "Hey World! I was adopted!” Yet, I bet if you interviewed many adoptees, you would find some similar feelings and experiences that may be unique to the adoptee. There are things about my personality that I could never explain about myself until I sat down and tried to correlate to being adopted. I am a bit of a perfectionist, I am for the most part an introvert, and I don't like to cause waves. I crave acceptance yet can brush aside others indifference like a pesky mosquito. Relationships have been at best rocky. Could this be the result of being cast aside as an infant, of being looked at by "shopping" potential parents to see if I match their decor (I was actually not taken by one couple because I had "big ears" and another because I had one blue eye and one green), or is it just who I was meant to be to begin with. We are in many ways like the “Land of Misfit Toys”, although we are more like Charlie in the Box than the train with square wheels. The way we feel don’t fit in is not as apparent on the surface….Charlie outwardly looked like any Jack-in-the-box until you found out he was named Charlie; a label that distinguished him as different much as the label of “adoptee” separates us from everyone else. Outwardly, in appearance we are the same as everyone, our tough outer shell insulating us from threats to our psyche real or imagined while inside we are a fragile skeleton of a whole with pieces missing that we search for.
Even when we are placed in a positive, nurturing and loving home, there still is a sense of being out of place. My parents never showed any difference in how they treated my two sisters and me and yet deep down, I KNEW I was different.
It wasn’t just the fact that I was blonde with light eyes when everyone else was dark haired with brown or hazel eyes. It wasn’t something you see or even sense from the outside and yet I knew I was different.
It wasn't until I was found by my sister, Laurie, and ultimately reunited with five of my six siblings, that I realized that these feeling had been there all along. The reality struck when I found my birth father. In the beginning he was seemingly thrilled...then almost a year later he cut off communication. The abandonment feelings were so intense, so painful, and so raw.
I was lucky in the fact that I was prepared for my birth mother's rejection. Not that it made it any easier but when I finally found out that she was in fact my birth mother I didn’t have to go through the rejection....I just left it where it was. Maybe my need to be accepted by others comes from the first rejection I faced before I even took my first breath. I know for a fact that she never held me, and I can only assume she didn't even look at me. I don't even consider her my mother, birth or otherwise. Is that cold on my part? Some people take issue with me over the fact that I have no feelings good or bad toward her. I look at her as merely the vessel that carried me here...a rental unit of sorts. I take great offense when I speak of my mother and people ask, "Your REAL mother or your ADOPTIVE one?” For me, I only have one mother and only one father.....they are the ones who took me in at 4 days old and ended up keeping me for life. I do, however do not have the same rationale towards my siblings.....I have 8 siblings. I do not in my mind's eye make a distinction based on how long I have known them. I only make a distinction for others who otherwise get confused. They say your birth order determines a lot about who you are. Well then I must be terribly confused! In my adoptive family, I am the baby...and was raised as such. I got spoiled, got away with things my sisters never would have and at the same time had to deal l with mistakes they made. In my birth family, I am smack dab in the middle, 3 older siblings and 3 younger on my birth mothers side. And with my birth father I am an only child. I carry traits of all the above. I am both a leader and a follower or I can simply blend in and disappear.
I never felt "adopted" at least not in the way most would think. My adoptive Mom and I are very much alike and growing up I was THE poster child for Daddy's Little Girl. Of course, I had the grandiose fantasies that my birth mother was someone rich and or famous and that she would find me and spoil me. Never once did I fantasize about my birthfather, EVER. When I was 22, I decided I needed to know who I was and what did I face medically in my future. I had no desire to know who my birth mother was, I had no need to...I already had a wonderful Mother. I went to the library and grabbed as many books on how to perform a search. This was in the days prior to nearly everyone having a computer in their home and internet access. I was living with a friend as a live in sitter in Lewiston, Maine. I came home from the library that day knowing I had a daunting task at hand. I sat at the kitchen table with a notebook in hand and all these books around me. I was only armed with two real bits of information, my last name which I had discovered on a piece of paperwork and my place of birth as listed on my “abstract of live birth”. I set to work. About fifteen minutes into my note taking there was a knock at the door, it was a friend of my friend’s older son. He had stopped by to see if he was there. He was not there so, this friend asked me what I was doing. I told him of how I was adopted and that I was trying to figure out how to conduct a search to locate my birth mother so I could get medical information. He asked me what I already knew. I told him that I was born in Rumford, and that my last name before I was adopted was Stevens. It was so little to go on. He gave me an odd look and then said something that ultimately changed my life although I would not be able to prove it for another sixteen years. He told me that his girlfriend and I looked very much alike and that her last name was also Stevens. Now the skeptic in me jumped right up, there are several columns in the phone book for that area with the name Stevens. I was only fifteen minutes into my search on how to conduct a search; certainly this was too good to be true. He told me he would have her come over with some pictures of herself and her sisters, he encouraged me to at least talk to her, her mother had given up at least two or three children to adoption. It was a good lead albeit a remote possibility. About an hour later Wanda came to the door with photo albums in hand. We both laughed over the thought that her boyfriend thought we were sisters, how absurd! We were living one street apart and only a couple of houses down from one another. We both were tall, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and yes, I did a similarity but was it due to us being related or the wishful thinking I held? As we talked and went through photos she told me what she knew about her mother and the children she had. The elder one was raised as her aunt by her grandparents. She knew that her mother had also had at least two or three other children, one a son, who as the story went had died in a swimming pool accident at the age of two. Then there was the youngest daughter, she not only knew nothing of her oldest sister’s true identity but knew nothing of the rest of the children either. The pieces were slowly fitting in to place, she showed me a picture of the eldest sister, Michelle, and my heart stopped. We looked more alike than Wanda and I did. Could they really be my sisters? Could I have found my birth mother this fast? Then she dropped the bombshell, her mother had stated before that if any of the children she gave up ever came back she would want nothing to do with them. Proving that we were sisters just got a whole lot more complicated. We continued to hang out together even going to Rumford one day to go through old newspapers to see if there was anything that might point us in the right direction. On the way there she had asked if I minded stopping at a small store where her mother worked so she could drop something off to her. I told her, “Sure." As we came up to the store, I recognized it as a store that my Mom, my Mom’s friend and I would stop at when we went to visit my Mom’s friend’s husband at the nursing home up the road. I cringed. There was a woman there who I had encountered on several occasions who I found to be just plain rude and highly unlikable. Surely this could not be her mother, possibly my birth mother, fate could not hand me such a cruel blow. As we walked into the store Wanda walked straight up to this woman who I was praying was not the one she was going to see. I had met my birthmother years before without even knowing it. We never did let on why we were there or who I potentially was and deep down, today, I am thankful for that for at that time the rejection would have stopped me cold from pursuing any further information on my family. We continued on to Rumford, never finding any information that would prove or disprove that we were indeed sisters. For the next few months we would joke that we were sisters and after I moved out of state I carried the image of her in my heart and the names of her sisters as well. On more than one occasion, I contemplated contacting my “potential” birth mother backing down each time. I even went as far as talking to a search company about how much it would cost to hire them to do the leg work for me, they would even initiate contact and if she did not want any they would at the very least try to get medical history for me. At the time, I could not afford to hire anyone so I left it where it was at.
Over the years, I toyed several times with the prospect of searching out this woman who I suspected was my birth mother. Knowing full well that if the woman I had met so many years earlier was in fact my birth mother it would all be a waste of time. Finances kept me hiring someone who could ultimately prove if she was or was not my mother. During that time I was becoming more familiar with the internet and learning how to search different databases. I had located what I thought was her physical address and phone number as I knew what town she had been living. Little did I know that I had all the information I needed, I just lacked the nerve to reach and make that initial contact. I knew from what I learned many years earlier that she had no desire to have any of the children she had relinquished to come back and find her.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)