Letting Go

Alright, I told you I’d be back to write a little update. Things have not changed with my “reunion” but I have done some growing up. I have learned so much from my wonderful adopted freinds and I am forever grateful to them. I am no longer the hurting 15 year old wanting, yearning and wishing to have my baby back. This does not mean that I have “healed” from the trauma induced by adoption but that I can finally put my trauma to the side to live again. I have greived for my lost baby and need to now see if there is anything that can come of two adults knowing each other. I have realized that what was lost will never be recovered. I am an adult and so is she. I cannot reparent her and I will never recoup the lost time that is glaringly obvious between us. I guess you can say that I have “let go”. This doesn’t mean that I don’t want her in my life and that I don’t love her. I always will want and love her but I no longer obsess over needing her to be in my life. I can’t control what another adult does and in reality, life does get busy. She is newly married and is making her own life as a young adult and truly it must be hard to find time in her life for the freinds and family she knows.

I am focusing on my own story and the injustices done to myself and other mothers like me. This is my story and I do not need to be scared that she’ll see it and be angry that I told the truth. I have come to the realization that I cannot hide what happened. I need to stand by my sisters and speak out with them and fully join the fight for justice. I cannot control her reactions if she were to find out the truth, it is not for me to worry about. So, I have even allowed a reporter to use my name in an article. I had severe anxiety but once I read the published piece, I was fine. I felt free actually. So while I have been “away” from my blog, I have been regrowing up and learning the lessons that I needed in order to move forward with my life. This has been a very long road but I am happy I have gotten where I am. I think we need to greive the loss of our child both when we lose them and when we find them. Then we need to let go and allow things to move where they will without force or grovelling. It is hard to push the desparation aside but once you can get by it, it feels better.

Fast-Track to Sainthood-Adoption

I have been pondering my ex-mil and the things she did to get me to surrender my daughter a lot lately. I often wonder how she can live with herself knowing the lies, deception and the scope of irreparable pain she has caused. I marvel at how she can call herself a Christian. Most of this has been brought on by a post in an adoption group I read where the poster stated that she was the grandmother of a child who was surrendered for adoption. She talked about how proud she was of this fact and this really got me thinking about where a person considers this to be moral. It is obvious that she had some part to play in the surrender of her grandchild.

As I have been pondering this, it did come to light that most adopters, agencies, etc all consider adoption to be “saving” the child and that somehow it makes them into a martyr and more of a  “Christian” that they took this child into their home and raised it as their own. There are so many problems with this way of thinking.

The first problem that I find with this, is that no one wants to recognise that adoption is purely and utterly covetous and greedy. Adopters (infant adopters) do not take in the older children who are in need of a safe home. Instead, they want to pretend they gave birth by robbing a mother of her infant, nowadays they also pump chemicals into their body so they can shove their strange boob into this poor baby’s mouth too. YES, I did mean strange boob, this is not the baby’s natural mother whose milk and nipples are designed specifically for this child. Their WANT of a child to be theirs supercedes any moral judgement to get what they want.

The next problem is that even in this day and age, an “unwed” mother is considered a detriment to society and must be a whore/slut, addict, too young and is definitely not considered a “fit” mother. Therefore the deserving “married” couple should rescue this child from such an unsavory life. WHOA, what? MOST expectant mothers targeted for the adoption industry have never been charged with ANY crime, much less drug/child abuse. This leads me to the conclusion that this must be a conviction in the “church” world. In order to save the young mother from hell fire she must atone for her crime of adultery. So truly the adopters must be doing her a favor by inflicting her righteous punishment…right? Sorry people but NO. You are now a conspirator of the crime of kidnapping/child trafficking. Remember that JESUS said to help the widow and the fatherless? He never said help YOURSELF to them.

Anyways, I will regress back to my ex-mil. I think she offered up my daughter for sale to achieve sainthood. I believe she must think that separating me from my first-born daughter was the way that she would look good in the eyes of her church and atone for her son’s wayward ways. She punished the evil slut, who got pregnant, in a righteous manner and has now achieved her place as a saint for saving us all from hell. I think most of them believe this. They don’t realize that they CONDEMNED us all to a life of hell by their actions to obtain that special recognition for themselves that they COVETED (remember that pesky tenth commandment? NOT suggestion, COMMANDMENT) from other churchians, their earthly sainthood. We were the sacrificial lambs they led to the slaughter.

The Current Interviews

There are going to be two links to listen to the interveiw on CBC’S The Current with Sharon Pederson relaying her story of how she was targeted as a single mother to obtain her baby for adoption. She was so brave to tell her story which also tells the story of many mother who lost thier babies to adoption.

http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=2135736746

 

There was a follow up on The Current to this interveiw. It can also be heard here:

http://www.cbc.ca/video/news/audioplayer.html?clipid=2139968681

The Silence

Since my last post I have been still sitting in the deafening silence of no reply or any contact of my daughter. The silence has been good for me. I have come to some realizations through the silence.

I have realized that my pain of surrender is not my daughters pain. She has no knowledge of and does not have a personal need to know of my pain. She is also not the “cure” for my pain. I think in me placing so much emphasis on wanting her to know, or ask, I have negated her own struggles and pain. My own pain is mine to deal with and try to come to peace with on my own, yet her pain is MY responsibility to deal with if she allows me to help her through.

I have come to grips with, or think I have, of realizing that I do not “fit” into her life. Adoption is unnatural and obscures the natural lines of placement within a persons life. I cannot be her “friend” because our history and genetics has not allowed that type of placement. I cannot be placed in her life as “mother” because someone else filled my place for so long. This leaves us in a completely precarious predicament of not having anywhere where I “fit”. I do actually feel within my soul that she would like to find a place where I can “fit” but it is confusing and frustrating and is easier to just not deal with the predicament of trying to sort it all out.

Her wedding is coming up soon. I have not sent an email of anything for a while now. I have chosen to not complicate things right now as I am sure she is very busy with a full schedule right now. I struggle with trying to know if I should voice any of the realizations to her at this time since I know it is a very emotionally charged time for her.

She has not removed me from her Facebook account which tells me that she is just putting me on hold. I need to learn to focus on her, as she is today and what her needs and wants are today instead of what my own needs to try to quell my pain and fears are. It is tough to know what to do and if I should do anything at all. I am fortunate that she was so gracious as to allow me a glimpse into her life. Not every mother gets to know if the child they lost even grew up.

This journey has taken me so many places and not all of them good. I will still fight for every mother who is wronged and every adoptee that has ever lost their family, but this is not my daughters fight as she did not live what I have lived.

Peace

I am working on finding peace. I don’t believe that there is healing in adoption loss. Peace, however, has possibilities. I have been weaning myself off of the monthly emails to my lost daughter as it seems to be almost an irritant to respond to me. I have gotten tired of the one way relationship (if you can call it that) that we seem to have. I email her, then check a million times in hopes of a response. The response sometimes comes and sometimes doesn’t. Hope is a terrible thing to have, it creates anxiety as you wait for something to transform your relationship from what it is into something that is should have always been. I think I have finally given up hope and am trying to find acceptance and some sort of peace. I have been here all along waiting and trying for over 3 years with little in return. I think that this pattern is destructive to me and I am doing my best to try to let go. I have been very busy with a new acreage that we are developing which helps immensely with keeping my mind occupied instead of the constant waiting and hoping. She has not been rude to me but I can tell that it is too much like work for her to just have a plain, normal conversation. I have given up the dream of seeing her face to face and have taken a break from most of my adoption support sites.

One day soon I am looking forward to the possibility of peace.

Fathers Day

Father’s day is coming this weekend. I do not get the same sense of despair as I do with mother’s day but it fills me with another sadness. My daughters father was never given the choice for adoption either. He was present when she was born and throughout the pregnancy, but his mother had already made “plans” for our daughter. I know that he suffered and still does. Although I get angry that he refuses to release the secrets that are held surrounding her adoption, I know that he loved her then and loves her now. I regret not talking to him as much as I regret not speaking to anyone about my pregnancy and the impending birth. I wonder at times that had I not shut down emotionally, would I have been able to save us from this unnatural act. This is part of the guilt that comes with adoption and I know this. I also carry guilt over the pain that he endures/endured over not being able to parent his first daughter. Society places the burden of “decision” on the mother and excludes the father entirely when it is his right to parent as much as the mothers right. In doing so, I think that maybe he was silenced which is what may have ultimately allowed this thing, adoption, to be done to us. I regret not allowing him to grieve also. That one gets me. I was so wrapped up in my own grief that I forgot that he was grieving also. I didn’t acknowledge it until last year, a couple of years or so into my electronic reunion. By then, it was too late for me to tell him I’m sorry. I had already asked him for the truth behind our daughters adoption and he cut off all contact. I am sorry though, although I could not have stopped the adoption which was never my choice nor did it ever cross my mind as a “plan”, I could have been there for him as he suffered silently.

In realizing my own story, I have to acknowledge the multitude of men who were never given a choice to parent their child. Yes, they were not traumatized and brow beaten nor drugged or held against their will, but many did not consent either. Some were never even told that there was a baby. Maybe that saved them the hurt of never knowing their child though. Being forever a legal stranger to their own offspring. Some of these men willingly walked away. The problem being is that the child has the right to know their father even if they were legally severed by adoption.

I think of my own father as this day quickly arrives. How he abandoned me when I needed him to protect me most. I celebrate and honor him still. He has made devastating mistakes but he is and forever will be my father. I know that he regrets how he helped to destroy me. If we only had a time machine.

So for Father’s Day, I would like us to all remember the fathers who are separated unwillingly or unknowingly with their children. They may never reveal their pain but I am certain that they feel it.

Fathers Day by vampporcupine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Awakening

The truth hurts, so the saying goes. I walked out of the fog the summer of 2010, and into the truth. The saying is right, it hurts. I guess my mind wanted to protect itself and it took this long before it assumed I could handle it. I am now plagued by my memories as they haunt me whether asleep or awake.

My story begins multiple times. It has many events that seem to be the reason I am where I am now. I walk a living death daily. I write this to expose the secret and with it the silent suffering of many women. My story is not the exception and is not the worst. I have been struggling writing this, I have written my story only once before but am editing it to post here. For whatever reason, in writing about my personal story, I feel like my chest is being crushed and I can hardly breathe. Here I am again attempting to do it.

I was 14 when I found out I was pregnant. The daughter of an upper middle class family who scandalously had divorced a couple years earlier. I had been living with my father who was not too pleased to find out I was pregnant. The family reputation might get muddied even further than it was already. My father would threaten to kidnap me and bring me across the border to force me to abort my daughter. I started locking my bedroom door at night. The next threat was to send me to a maternity home. In hindsight I may have had a chance to keep my daughter if I had gone there. I turned 15 that summer.

I guess I don’t need to put too much background info in the writing of my personal story. It all ends up in the same place. Here, in hell. Ultimately, my father kicked me out and my boyfriends parents took me in. They kept asking for me to make a decision and had also informed me that as soon as “the baby” was born that I would need to find somewhere else to live as they had decided to move back to another province. My boyfriend was sleeping with another girl the whole time I lived there. He got her pregnant too. She had an abortion. Needless to say, being 15 with a cheating boyfriend, his parents kicking me out after the birth and not being able to go home to my father’s house had directed me to only one possibility, which I never even uttered. I had also contacted social services while I lived there and they had told me that due to my age, they would not provide financial support to me. I have found out since being an adult that it was illegal for them to do so.

I guess my boyfriends mother felt it her responsibility to make a decision for me. She arrived home from work one day and announced she had made an appointment with an adoption agency. It was night-time and she drove. I believe it was out-of-town. I never spoke a word the whole time I was there. I was shut down. I collapsed inside myself. The worker spoke with my boyfriends mother and then before we left, she told me to pick a family out of the three she had presented to me. I hadn’t even read any of it. I pointed at one and just wanted to get out of there. She had given me a bunch of pamphlets with adoption propaganda like, “if you love your baby…”crap. I remember being fed this shit from everyone around me.

Some of the following things I am about to recall in writing, I didn’t remember until last summer. This is what is called coming out of the fog. It hit me like a ton of bricks and most of my memory from that time came rushing back to me with one tiny little discovery. The tiny discovery that the one thing that I thought I had control over, was a lie also.

My boyfriends mother took me to and from all of my appointments including a lawyer for the adoption. I have no idea where she got this woman but I was just being shuffled along. I had never even agreed to adoption. I was silent for about 4 months. Regardless, after one doctors appointment, I was sent in to the hospital for an emergency induction. I called my mother in Vancouver, but got my sister instead. My sister told my mother to get on a plane immediately. This is one of those fateful moments. Had she not pushed her to do so, my mother may have been present and I may have never lost my daughter. This was October **th, a Monday.

Thursday, October **th, I finally went into labor. My mother, boyfriend and his mother were all present. My daughter was born and I was bleeding to death. I did get to hold her before I passed out. I have wished almost every day since that they didn’t stop the bleeding. It was more cruel for them to let me live after what they did.

October **st, I was so weakened from the loss of blood and unable to even sit up. I spent the day in bed at the hospital while they decided if I should have a blood transfusion. I never left my room.

On October **nd, I was able to function. I asked to see my daughter. I was stretching my neck out as we approached the nursery. The nurse pushing my wheel chair told me that babies for adoption do not get put into the nursery. That we would be going to a different floor. I spent every waking moment down there with her. I loved her and still do. I love her no differently than if I had raised her myself.

I have no idea who called the lawyer. I imagine it was my boyfriends mother. The phone calls from this lawyer kept coming. She kept harrassing me to sign the papers. I kept putting her off. I wasn’t feeling right the whole time I was there (medically speaking). I felt off in addition to not wanting to sign away my daughter.

One night, the lawyer called and told me that I would not be released from the hospital unless I signed. I felt trapped. The hospital sent in a social-wrecker to see me. She asked some questions and then left. The lawyer called right after and put the pressure on harder.  I told her that I had to meet these people. She set it up that they would come and meet me at the hospital. They told me what wonderful christian people they were and what a wonderful life they could give my daughter. I had already been beat down with the “it would be selfish to keep her” mantra. They promised that I could send and receive pictures and letters throughout her life. I thought that since I had no choice (I was being held hostage in the hospital) that maybe at least I could still be a small part of her life and see her grow. So I signed. True to thier word, they allowed me to leave the hospital as soon as I had signed. I collapsed outside the doors from my grief.

My daughters adopters did not live up to thier promises. They cut off contact with me after she turned one. They had what they wanted. I found out 19 years later that they continued to send pictures and letters to my ex-mother-in-law (I married her father later) until she was 2 or 3. My ex-mother-in-law never shared this with me. I found out from my ex-husband after I had found our daughter.

It has been 3 years since I found my daughter. There was no special reunion moment of her running into my arms. We barely have contact and it has been via email only, I have not seen nor held her since she was 4 days old. She isn’t interested in meeting me face to face at this time.

Last year, she met my ex-mother-in-law face to face. Since then she has been fairly cold toward me. Actually she stopped contact for 8 months. I felt as if I was drowning when she met my ex-mil. It was as though I was missing information/memories and emailed my ex-mil to ask if she remembered the name of the adoption agency she took me to. I was hoping that the paperwork from them would fill in the holes. She emailed back and demanded to know why I would want that information. That is when I knew that something was up.

I had joined an online support group for mothers in reunion. I told them what was happening and they suggested that I call the post adoption registry in my province since records are open. I found out that I had the information in the adoption order that was sent to me two years earlier. The man on the other end told me that if I couldn’t locate it in the documents, to call him back once my file was in front of me and he would help me. I was a bit embarrassed as I had these papers for so long but never read them. I had only wanted to find her so I read what her name had been changed to. I went home from work that evening and pulled out all my papers and read them. I was shaking as I read through all the lies that was written in those papers, but, I remembered that some of the women in my support group had mentioned that thier files were filled with lies too. I wasn’t able to find the name of the agency.

The next morning, I took the papers to work with me so that I could call as soon as I had a moment. I played a bit of phone tag with the man and finally got through. He must have pulled my file while we were trying to reach each other. He stopped me as I tried to explain that I could not find the name of the agency and he told me that he had looked and that there was NO agency involved. This adoption had been facilitated by a doctor and lawyer only. That was the moment. The little closet that hid all the secrets that they had done to get my signature burst open in that very moment. I was screaming over the phone and word vomitted EVERYTHING I remember that they did. I told him how they held me hostage in the hospital and lied to me about who would parent my daughter.

I have found out more since. I requested my hospital records. They had drugged me with sodium amytal while I was there. This makes a patient compliant and easily coerced which explains why I felt “off” while in the hospital. I found out from my mother that the lawyer had called her screaming at her wondering why I wasn’t signing the papers. This lawyer was supposed to be working on my behalf. I also found out that she is the one who told hospital staff to hide my daughter in the hospital. This lawyer demanded to know why I was seeing my own daughter. I have only one conclusion in all of this. My ex-mil was involved from the start and had colluded with my doctor for the purchase of my daughter. My eyes are wide open now and the pain is never ceasing. The memories are still coming back a year later. I dream of her and I relive moments when I close my eyes.

This is my story of my awakening.

Awakening by vampporcupine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at canadianbanishedmother.wordpress.com.

Woman, sold as as black market baby, reunites with mom

Woman, sold as as black market baby, reunites with mom.

Stay Tuned

I have been trying very hard for about a month to finish editing my personal story of adoption loss for this blog. I know that in doing so it has the ability to help others like me and to also help adoptees who may not understand what it is truly like for a young mother who has lost her child to adoption.

Unfortunately, my personal story is one of the hardest things for me to get through. I will finish it, however, and post as soon as it is done. This along with a crazy busy workplace and the purchase of a new acreage have made writing very difficult.

Stay tuned…I will eventually be able to get it out of my head and onto my blog.

As Good as it Gets

Acceptance in adoption is difficult at best. If a woman truly neither loved nor wanted her child, I guess for her it would be easy to walk away and never look back, never recall her child, never long to know him or her. Unfortunately, that scenario accounts for about 1% of all adoption situations. As Mother’s Day is fast approaching, I have been thrust into my depression of knowing another year will go by without being acknowledged by my oldest daughter on this day. This Mother’s Day will account for 22 of which I will not be acknowledge by society, family nor friends of being HER mother. I am desperate for relief of this unending hell that has consumed me in silence for so long. My silence is still there as no one wants to hear about the horrors of adoption nor my longing and unending love for her. I must be silent as it causes arguments in my personal life if I speak out. I suffer alone even though I have connected with my sisters who have also endure the same loss.

I found my daughter on Facebook. I found her 3 years ago. Actually, April 22, 2008 is when we became Facebook friends. I had found her a month prior. She was less than pleased to be found, to say the least. I had the fantasy of a wonderful reunion where she wanted to know me and we could become the best of friends. We would go shopping together and movies and dinners. I guess I was the only one which had those hopes. I don’t know what she had ever really wanted. We emailed each other frequently for the first 6 months as she had lots of questions regarding medical stuff, etc. Things slowed down to a comfortable once or twice a month and it seemed we had a nice friendship developing. Then she met with her natural paternal grandparents last summer. Her and I have never met face to face nor even had a telephone conversation. After she met with them she went silent for about 8 months. She finally began to respond sporadically to me via email but no real conversations. In February of this year she finally asked the BIG question which was if I regretted “giving her up”. I responded telling her that I had no choice and that I didn’t “give her up” and that there were things done to me to ensure that we were separated. She has never asked anything about it again. I don’t think she is interested in knowing the truth.

I have been emotionally down this week as the dreaded “M” day gets closer. I looked for some relief and found a book. It’s called Adoption Healing by Joe Soll. He has a book for mothers and one for adoptees. I am halfway through it and it has been shockingly dead on in the true accounts of adoption. Unfortunately it also talks about reunion and how most abruptly end without notice and for unknown reasons. Very few reunions create lasting relationships leaving the one who desires it in extreme emotional pain. Reunion sucks for the most part. I am at the whim of what she wants to know or when she wants to talk. All I want is to be near her and become close to her. I guess a one line email once every one or two months is about as good as it gets. I should count myself lucky that she is courteous enough to respond at whim. I thought once she knew I was forced to surrender her that she would be warmer, more welcoming. I thought wrong.

As Good as it Gets by vampporcupine is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at canadianbanishedmother.wordpress.com.
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