The Unsung Heroes
/
Marble sculpture at the site of the Fantiscritti quarry in Carrara, Italy
"I am excited to share with everyone the happiness that a momentous event has just brought into my life. After 47 years, I have finally been reunited with my daughter. I now have a family."
This is the monthly Cares and Concerns portion of the Sunday morning service at our Unitarian Church, when congregants are invited to come up front and light a candle before using the mike to share significant events of their life. The woman who just spoke is in her late 70s, well-groomed, and radiant. I knew her as an active and friendly member of our congregation. I meet her now as one of the women whose unwanted children were adopted by people like me, the unsung heroes.
As she goes on, extolling the glories of her newly discovered motherhood, I think of my own two children. Born of such women 37 and 34 years ago, and born to my ex-husband and me through the services of adoption agencies at ages three weeks and six weeks respectively, their lives are racked with anger and pain because they were rejected twice by their biological mothers: once at birth, and again after they found each other later in life.
When she leaves the mike to return to her seat, I feel like shouting: "Time for a reality check!" But I keep quiet. I am not ready to expose my wounds in public, even if I am yearning to speak. I am not sure I could get the words out and retain my composure.
I think first of my son, the youngest, whom I haven't seen or heard of in over five years. I remember his easy childhood and difficult adolescence, his addiction to drugs and alcohol, and how he's managed to eke out a living at various minimum-wage jobs for many rough years.
I mostly remember his search for his birth mother at age 26. Although I supported it both financially and emotionally, it marked the beginning of the end for our relationship. Not because I felt threatened by his search or feared its success, but because it met with the failure I had dreaded. When he found her, she accepted him, yes, so long as no one knew who he was and what their relationship was. My heart broke from not being able to take his pain away.
Out of despair or confusion, he subsequently blamed me for everything that ever went wrong in his life, which he accused me of ruining. He has shut me out of his life, and has yet to blame anyone else, including himself, for any of the difficult times he has experienced.
Then a second woman in her mid 40s comes up to the mike after lighting her candle. She wants to share her joy at being recently reunited with her biological mother and how it has changed her life, after the tribulations of her difficult childhood and adolescence.
This time I think of my daughter, my oldest, who, at age 11, became obsessed with the thought of having been given up by her biological mother -- and has, consciously or not, remained so ever since --, then embarking on a lifelong struggle with a low self-image. These very stormy and painful years led to her father and I divorcing. Her "incorrigible" behavior resulted in various unsuccessful court-ordered stays in foster homes, pregnancies as early as in her mid-teens, later involvement in hopeless relationships with abusive men, and her repeated angry rejections over the years.
She was the first of my two children, at age 25, to conduct "the search." Unlike her brother, finding her biological mother brought us closer to each other. After she and my grandson moved across the country to live near her, I met her once, on my first visit to see them. I thanked her for being instrumental in the welcome rapprochement between “our” daughter and me.
She also was the first of my two children to ultimately experience a second rejection by the woman whose genes she carried: "I am glad to know you, it's great having you here, but make sure you don't tell anyone that you are my daughter. Nobody must know of our relationship. I'll tell everyone that we are distant cousins." I could do nothing but cry privately, helpless to relieve my daughter’s profound and renewed feeling of abandonment.
Eventually, their contacts ended, and my daughter proceeded to have another three children, whom she is raising alone on welfare. After several attempts over the years, to become closer, the relationship remains difficult and painful for both us, with history and wounds on both sides which still sometimes stand in the way.
When the second woman leaves the podium, I have taken all I can. From the beginning, I’ve always sat quietly -- like all the other adoptive parents -- while I read or heard the pleas of both birth mothers and adoptees, each haunted and tormented by past choices or rejections. I hurt and I empathized with them.
The media and the legal system have gone to impressive lengths to make the public aware of the emotional upheaval that biological parents and adoptees go through. For the past 20 years, the legislature has changed laws to make it easier for adoptees to find their biological parents. Organizations have sprouted everywhere to assist in the reunification process. The courts have exposed and ruled on the dilemmas of both sides. The media, of course, publicized them ad nauseam and made stars or heroes of both the biological parents and the adoptees, turning their experiences into soap operas.1
Although the adoption process is a three-factor equation, only two of those are ever brought to light and vindicated. Little ink is wasted on adoptive parents, the silent partners, the unsung heroes who make unknown children their own -- in most cases sight unseen --, full of selfless love and generosity, joyfully committing their energies and resources to a lifetime of loving and nurturing.
Feeling unprepared but compelled, I take my turn at the mike.
"I wasn't ready for this," I start, "but it's time to speak up on behalf of us, the adoptive parents. So much is done to tell the stories of adoptees and their biological parents, and so little to describe the lives of the people who are the real parents. Our experiences are seldom recounted. Our heartbreaks are well-guarded secrets. Little do you all know of the pain and grief which sometimes come their way due to their children’s struggles with anger, confusion, low self-esteem or frustration. There are three parties involved in an adoption, and we are the silent ones, the unsung heroes, who need to stand up and be counted!"
A standing ovation from the congregation marks the end of my impromptu speech, and I can hardly contain the tears which flow freely once I return to my seat.
I don't know that our society has gained anything by rescinding previous laws whose wise intent was to protect all three parties of the equation by preserving their respective anonymity and privacy. Those parties involved were spared much unnecessary upheaval and inner conflict when there was no recourse possible once the transaction was legally concluded.
What I do know is that I will never stop grieving for my children's and my broken hearts and all of our tormented lives.
1. This was written in the early 90’s, when such organizations and their stories were very popular and discussed in social gatherings.