How does a person lose her mother in such a way that this mother can be found again? It’s not like she died, so what’s the deal? The answer is: Adoption. My birth mother got lost through adoption. All I knew about adoption as a young child, before I understood that I had been adopted, was that when women were unable to take care of their babies, they could give the babies to people who were older and financially established. Why else would someone be unable to care for her baby unless she was a teenager? That was the situation with my adoptive sister when she was 14.
In the hypothetical example, the hapless young mother would know before the baby is born that she must do something better for the child. While pregnant, the expectant mother, somehow, finds a representative who will pass her baby on to a willing couple after it’s born. The mother and the people who are going to take the baby never meet or know anything about each other besides the vague biographical information shared by the go-between. When the baby is born, the teenager says her tearful goodbyes after the birth and the baby is whisked away into a new life, cutting all ties with the past. The arrangements are all done in secret since her pregnancy was not a good thing for her, especially back in the day when “unwed mother” was an insult. Certainly the couple who can’t have their own children are not proud of their infertility.
Often in life we wish we could pretend our preferred reality is real. With adoption, society is complicit in perpetuating alternative reality.
Everyone pretends the adoption never happened and the prevailing belief is that the best course of action is to keep the myth alive. It helps that there is a literal breach between the family of origin and the adoptive family. No one is going to come along to present the truth.
By the way, that story was not my story. The story of the teenage mother is true for many but, It turns out there are very many stories. These stories are the subject of this blog. That teen mom scenario was what I imagined had happened to my mother when I was a child. The reality was far from anything I could have imagined.
In this blog, I will tell you how I found my mother through excerpts of my book, which will be available in series form in Amazon. Besides my life story told in chronological order, there’s much to be said about the myriad aspects of being an unwanted child. And I have a lot of insights from my life as an unwanted child for life. I bet you’d like you know how I navigated this world, including, but not limited to how I found my birth mother. did it. That’s what this blog will be about—what happened and how I felt about what happened.
Adoption Shockers, straight talk about adoption, q&a 