What Memoirs Of Adopted Daughters Tell Mothers

By Jane Elizabeth Edwards

Ten years ago, in November, 1997, I received the call I had been hoping for -- and dreading -- since that dark day 31 years earlier when I left the hospital in San Francisco without my newborn daughter. She wanted to know me! We began emailing daily.

I had not told my family about her except for a brief conversation with my husband before we were married. I considered continuing my secret -- meeting her, answering her questions, and ending the relationship. But the more we corresponded, the more I knew I could not do that. I needed her to be a visible part of my life, not a secret kept hidden away. We arranged to meet in January. I told my children about her shortly before we met.

Our meeting went well, I thought, but afterwards she began to pull away. I was devastated. What had I done wrong?

I poured over the memoirs of women who had been adopted -- Betty Jean Lifton, Amy Dean, Jean Strauss, A. M. Homes, Zara Phillips, Sarah Saffian, and Katie Hern.  I hoped for happy endings – the daughters returned to their original mothers and left that other family, which in my ignorance I considered to be a faux family.

The memoirs gave me insights into why daughters distance themselves or refuse a relationship with their original mothers. I’ve written this paper to share these insights with other mothers who are riding the reunion roller coaster.

Fantasy Mother
Although the adoptees’ backgrounds and life experiences were vastly different, their thoughts and feelings were remarkably similar. Before reunion, the daughters imagined a loving natural mother whose only mistake in the words of Annie was “giving up me.”

Amy Dean’s mother Ruth was 18 when Dean was born, the result of rape. As a young child, Dean was placed in a foster home because of her adoptive mother’s alcoholism. After her adoptive father re-married, Dean went to live with him and his new wife. She never accepted her step-mother. She wrote about her mother:

“I’ve always dreamed of having—
...a kindly woman with a sweet, smiling face who gently washes away the dirt from my scraped knees and elbows and who chases away my tears;
...a tireless woman who provides me with soft, clean clothing that smells a little like her and a little like the fresh outdoors;
...a caring woman who does many things with me, who talks with me and shows an interest in my life;
...a nurturing woman who makes the house smell as scrumptious as a home-baked cookie and who never lets me know what hunger feels like;
...an angelic woman who makes me feel safe as she takes me in her arms, places my head gently upon her soft, full bosom and rocks me to sleep each night.”

Zara Phillips, raised in a London suburb, had a tumultuous adolescence, abusing drugs and alcohol:

“I fantasized a lot about my birthmother. I looked for her constantly on the streets. ...
“I spent much of my time daydreaming and never really feeling connected with anyone. But secretly I was always waiting for the day that my birthmother would show up on my doorstep, apologizing and telling me there had been a terrible mistake.”

Searching
Four of the daughters searched for their mothers: Betty Jean Lifton, Amy Dean, Jean Strauss, and Zara Phillips. Two were found by their mothers: Sarah Saffian and A. M. Homes. Katie Hern and her mother connected through a mutual consent registry.

Regardless of whether they searched or were sought, the daughters had the same needs. Jean Strauss, adopted by a warm, nurturing couple and raised in rural California, explained her quest:

“Why did I feel I had to search? If I was so comfortable with my parents and my childhood, why would I pursue such a quest? The reality for me was that I was never looking for parents. I was looking for answers. There was an empty chamber in my mind full of question marks. My curiosity changed as I grew older, until I no longer just wanted to know about my origins, I had to and needed to find answers.”

Upon learning that her mother was searching for her, A. M. Homes, a writer raised in New York, said she wanted “information: where she grew up, how educated she is, what she does for a living, what the family medical history is, and what the circumstances of my adoption were.”

Universal Regret
Like me, all the mothers regretted losing their daughters.

Betty Jean Lifton’s mother, Rae:
“’When you were two, you had to have a mastoid operation. They told me you would die if you did not get a family of your own. They encouraged me to let you go for adoption if I really loved you. I was afraid you would die or I would never have done it.’”

Amy Dean’s mother, Ruth:
“’Amy, even though I was raped – and that is a painful memory to me, even after all these years, ... you weren’t a painful memory to me. I never wanted to give you up. But I had to.’”

Jean Strauss’s mother, Lenore (Lee):
“’You know, you did the right thing when you gave me up.’

“Her answer burst my hallucination. ‘I’ll never believe that. I should never have let you go. I wish I had taken you and run. I looked for you in every one of my children.’”

A. M. Homes’ mother, Helene:
“’As I left the hospital with the lady who was picking up the little girl, I can still see myself in the taxi and her asking me to give her the baby. I did not want to give her the child, however I did realize, I did not have the wherewithal to take care of her myself. Yes, I have always loved this little girl and been tortured every December of my life from the day she was born that I did not have her with me.’”

Zara Phillips’ mother, Pat:
“’It’s always been my deepest regret that I could not keep you, but I was a very immature seventeen-year-old, and without the support of my parents I would never have managed.

“’I adore my children but there’s always been something missing in my life. No child can replace another.’”

Sarah Saffian’s mother, Hannah:
“’My heart breaks at the thought of all we missed out on – that I didn’t get to raise you, to hold you..., to watch you grow, that I was unable to take on the incredible responsibility of having a child in 1969. ...  I am so sorry about so many things, but I have never been sorry that I had you.’”

Katie Hern’s mother, Ellen:
“’Your birth was joyous to me.....

“’I coped, as I had from the beginning, by convincing myself that you were going to be raised by the two loving parents of my fantasy. That you would want for nothing ... It made it bearable, just barely.’”

Reactions
The mothers were overwhelmed when they met their daughters. They became the vulnerable young women who surrendered their first born child. Their grief, kept within for decades, exploded. They became supplicants, seeking forgiveness, trying to appease their child, hoping their daughter would not leave them. The mothers’ feelings -- and mine -- were romantic, sentimental.

The daughters were unprepared for their mothers’ responses. Dean wrote: “I’ve been so worried about how you [her mother] might reject me if/when I find you. But I’ve never even considered how I’d feel if you welcomed me with open arms”  My daughter too believed that “I had gotten on with my life” and rarely, if ever, thought of her.

Anxiety and Guilt, Not Joy
The mothers were not the women the daughters imagined -- the  “goddess – the queen of queens, the C.E.O., the C.F.O., and the C.O.O. Movie-star beautiful, extraordinarily competent, she can take care of anyone and anything”  as Homes described her fantasy mother.

Homes was vicious in describing her mother, Helene. She “wants everything all at once. ... Her lack of sophistication leaves me unsure whether she’s of limited intelligence or simply shockingly naïve.”

Everything about Helene was wrong: Her hair, her clothing, (“She looks like someone from another decade – a woman who believes in glamour, who listens to Burt Bacharach and Dinah Shore....”); the restaurant she picked for their first meeting, (the Oyster Bar at the Plaza Hotel); the drink and food she ordered (Harveys Bristol Cream; lobster); her table manners.   Helene sent Homes a birthday card which Homes described as “a putrid pale-pink with roses, the color of femininity, of a box of sanitary napkins.”

Several mothers -- Lifton’s, Dean’s, and Phillips’ -- refused to provide information about their fathers which exacerbated their conflicts.

Not surprisingly, the daughters disavowed similarities between themselves and their mothers. “I am horrified at the way I see myself in her.” (Homes)  “I refuse to acknowledge any similarity between us.” (Strauss)

Only Katie Hern, whose Catholic adoptive parents could not accept her homosexuality wrote positively about her mother, Ellen. ”...It’s especially great to replace those distorted visions with well-balanced and funny you. It’s a massive relief to dispel those lurking anxieties.”  Unlike the other adoptees and their mothers, Hern and Ellen committed themselves from the outset to work on establishing a positive relationship.

Betrayal of the Adoptive Family
My daughter’s adoptive mother discouraged her search: “You’ll just open old wounds.” Upon learning my daughter continued our relationship after our initial meeting, she was hurt and enraged. While my daughter insisted that she “was her own person” and would stay in contact with me regardless of her adoptive mother’s wishes, I am sure her adoptive mother’s opposition affected our relationship.

Lifton, the pioneer in searching, never told her adoptive mother of her reunion: “By destroying her myth I would destroy what was most meaningful in her life.”

Strauss remained loyal to her adoptive parents even though they were dead. “I retrieve Mom’s wedding ring from my jewelry box, and slip it on my ring finger beside my own wedding ring. It will tell everyone: I am married to her. No one will ever replace my mother in my life.”

Phillips waited years before telling her adoptive family about her reunion. She did not invite her mother to her wedding: “Part of me wished that my birth family could have been there too, but it would have been too hard for my parents....”

Hern felt “like a traitor to my parents, to my adoptive mom in particular.  “I’ve made several trips [from San Francisco where she lived] to Chelmsford [Massachusetts where her adoptive parents and birthmother lived] without even telling my parents I was in the state. I am having a clandestine affair with my birthfamily.”

What Do They Want?
“I am not your long-lost daughter. I have a father, mother, brother and sister, … they are my family. I don’t need another one”   wrote Saffian to her parents. My daughter also told me that she “did not want a new mother.” She just needed to “know.”

Now that she knew, was our relationship over? Was I an encyclopedia to be returned to the library shelf after filling in the facts? Did she want to hear from me only if I developed breast cancer or some other condition that might be passed from mother to daughter?”

Struggling with Lee’s demands, Strauss sought counseling. At her psychologist’s suggestion, she focused on her goals for her reunion.

“What did I want to have happen? ...What would Lee have to do for me to be comfortable with her? It was so simple. She would have to acknowledge that Betty was my mom. That was it! If she could do that and mean it, then that would mean she accepted me and my adoptive family and the reality of who I am.”  

Who Might I Have Been?
Adoptees are “the changeling, the imposter, the double.”  In reunion, the daughters confronted not only where they came from but who they might have been; knowledge that was terrifying.

Strauss: “Since the third grade, I have believed if I could just meet my birth family, everything would become clear. But on this first day with my original family, I am more confused than ever. Who am I? Am I supposed to be someone different?”

Hern:

“Along with the feeling that I was being disloyal to my [adoptive] parents by contacting you [her mother] was the feeling that Katie Hern, the person I’d spent twenty-six years becoming, was suddenly in jeopardy. ...

“The feeling was most triggered by learning my original name. The name represented for me a whole other life I almost led, and a whole other person I might have become, a possibility that terrified me.”

Homes dismissed her mother. “The more Helene and I talk, the happier I am that she gave me up. I can’t imagine having grown up with her. I would not have survived.”  Paradoxically, Homes also wants Helene “to see how well I turned out, to be proud of me.”

Two Families
My daughter, like other children in closed adoptions, was brought up to believe that the adoption decree obliterated her first family. Adoption law trumped natural law. Hern wrote:

“The goal in Catholic Charities’s closed-adoption system was to replace one set of parents with another and erase all traces of the first set. And for me, it worked. Complete erasure. I don’t think I really understood that I had another set of parents [until the reunion]. There was no way to conceptualize two sets—two mothers, two fathers. It was an either/or thing.”  

Homes was forced to confront the reality that she had two mothers when Helene came to a public signing for Homes’ recently-published book:

“’You’re not behaving,’ I say. The store is packed with people who don’t know what ghost has risen up....

“In the distance, another shadow emerges. My [adoptive] mother and a friend of hers are coming toward me. I imagine the two mothers meeting, colliding. This is something that can’t happen. It is entirely against the rules. No one person can have two mothers in the same room at the same time.”

Strauss struggled to come to terms with having two mothers.

“Denial was a strong emotion I experienced in the early stages of my reunion: denial of the profound relationship that in reality does exist. I spent over three decades ignoring my birthmother’s role in my life. To acknowledge it was as threatening as anything I’ve ever faced. The concept of having two mothers seemed as sacrilegious to me as there being two Gods. To alter my belief system felt like denouncing everything I hold dear.”  

Although my daughter attended family reunions and met siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, it became clear we were a lesser family. This year I received an announcement of – but not an invitation to -- her daughter’s high school graduation.

Relationship with The Adoptive Family
Reuniting with their mothers improved the daughters’ relationship with their adoptive families.”[F]inding my birth family has made me feel more a part of my adoptive family than ever before” wrote Phillips. ... “Our relationship today is better than it has ever been.”  Dean tells her adoptive father: “’Finding Ruth has made me more appreciative of what I have, not what I have not.’”

Strangers in Their Own Family
While the adoptees considered their adoptive family as their primary family, they were pained at being outsiders in their natural family. Hern wrote to Ellen:

“Until maybe four months ago, I believed my own story: ‘I’m adopted. Big deal. It’s not like an after school special or anything.’ But that story was actually a fallout shelter I had sealed myself into. It protected me from what I couldn’t acknowledge: that my mother gave me away. Even now that’s a sentence I can barely bring myself to write.”  “Back in San Francisco, as my feelings started surfacing, one of the first to arise was grief that I am a stranger to the people I now consider family.”  .

At the first family reunion my daughter attended, she was aloof, seemingly more interested in tourist attractions than in her blood relatives. I think now that she may have been masking her discomfort at being an outsider.

Lifton’s mother refused to meet her openly out of fear that others would find out about the child she had borne as an unmarried teenager.

“I was not as devastated that my mother could not acknowledge me openly as I had been after our two meetings years before. ...

“After all, I was the one who was always telling others that we do not belong to one another in this life by legality or blood, but rather by a bond of the heart, by mutual caring and compassion, by ‘elective affinities,’ by a spiritual tie that was formed somewhere out in the stars in a time we no longer remember.

“Yes, I could console myself in innumerable ways, but it was just that: a consolation prize.”

Integrating their Mothers into their Lives
Strauss, Hern, and Saffian eventually acknowledged the importance of their mothers, and in doing so, integrated them into their lives. The turning point for Strauss was helping Lee who had also been adopted find her mother, Mary.

“This reunion is so different than mine with Lee. It doesn’t seem sacrilegious to have another grandmother. It feels perfect and natural. Yet my comfort with Mary demands that I examine anew the arms-length relationship I have with the woman who gave birth to me, the other mother I have never fully embraced. My grandmother forces me to see how I have held my adoptive family in one hand, like a ball of blue clay, and my birth family in another, like a ball of red, interpreting them as unrelated parts of myself. But they are not separate. They are the same. They belong together. Grandma reshapes my view of my family. She helps me make purple.”

Hern wrote to Ellen:

“One of the things that has become clear to me ... is how I dealt with being adopted growing up. Until about a year ago, I denied that being adopted was in any way significant. ...

 “On the rare occasions when I ... [thought about my other set of parents], the phrase was ‘biological parents’: impersonal, scientific, mechanical. And I would become furious when people would use emotional words like ‘roots’ or ‘original,’ ‘family’ or ‘mother’ to describe the ‘biological’ side. I hated the significance these words gave to what I was so intent on shutting out.”

“[After visiting with her birthfamily], I’ve let myself acknowledge my connection to you and the rest of the family, let myself think of you as my mother and Gus and Jack as my brothers.”

Saffian:

“Thus the odyssey is an all-encompassing continuum, reunion a form of re-adoption – of “Thus the odyssey is an all-encompassing continuum, reunion a form of re-adoption – of that original child, family, self, which had previously existed in shadow.

...I was finally coming to terms with an idea clear to many – that we are not born entirely formed, like so much clay waiting to be molded by our environments into people with identities....

Who we are, in the larger sense – our likes and our dislikes, what makes us sad and what brings us joy, how we relate to others and how we reflect in moments alone, how we exist both in the world and in our heads and hearts – can be partially inherited, as well....

In transit on the road between the Leyders and the Saffians, I thought that perhaps just as one can have many children, one can, in varying degrees, also have many parents, many families – and even many selves, or discrete but complementary parts that make up the whole.”

Phillips took tentative steps towards developing a mature relationship with her mother.  Sadly, for Homes, Dean and Lifton, it was too late. Homes’ and Lifton’s mothers died  and Dean’s mother refused to have anything to do with her after Dean pushed her away.

Twenty years after Twice Born was published, Lifton wrote:

“I came to understand how the necessity to live that double life, so as not to hurt my adoptive parents, had the effect of cutting off honest communication with them. How my internalized guilt and fear of betrayal of those parents, who were also victims of the system, so overwhelmed me after my awakening and search for Rae, that I fell back into the Great Sleep for over a decade. And, most incredible, I realized that it was I who had cut Rae off after our initial meetings, not she who had rejected me. The trauma of losing me again, after I had failed to contact her for so long, was the reason for her retreat to a place where she could not be hurt once more. Mother and daughter, lost and found, could not hold on to each other in a natural way.”

Lessons for Mothers
As I have experienced this wondrous event called “reunion” I have become convinced that although natural families are cast and adoptive families welded, the bonds are equally strong.

There have been times when I have been angry. I had opened my life and my heart to my daughter, disrupted the lives of my other children (who unlike my surrendered daughter had no other family to turn to), and was cast aside. “I’m glad I was adopted,” my daughter often said. “You made the right decision.” These words crushed me. Did she really believe that any woman selected by an adoption agency would have been a better mother than I?

I have come to accept that my daughter has two families. I cannot change our relationship but I can change the way I think about it. I have taken control. I no longer fantasize that the adoptive family will disappear from my daughter’s life, nor do I fear that my daughter will disappear from my life. As certainty about the relationship has taken hold, the longing and sadness has dissipated. I’m focused on the “here and now” rather than the “why and what if.”

In the summer pf 2007, my daughter and her youngest child visited me. Her middle two children came for a visit several weeks later. In a few months, I may be seeing her oldest child at her college. Just like a regular family. But I accept that my daughter has another family. I cannot meet her adoptive mother who has passed away. I may meet her adoptive father; it is up to him.

Mothers newly in reunion or whose daughters have refused to have any relationship, even after many years often examine themselves endlessly. “Should I have said this instead of that?” “Should I send her a birthday present, a card, or perhaps nothing?“ I assure these mothers that they are always a part of their daughter’s life although their daughter may pull away or cut off contact altogether. They should not blame themselves. It is likely not their fault. Their daughter is coping with intense emotional conflicts: pain from being rejected at birth; guilt from betraying her adoptive parents; confusion from having two families; anxiety about who she would have been.

What can mothers do? I put this question to Delores Teller, past president of the American Adoption Congress. Teller is a Portland psychotherapist and clinical social worker who surrendered a son in 1968. She gave this advice:

• “Seek professional help through support groups and individual therapy.
• Understand your daughter has reunited with you to meet her needs, not to hear about your pain.
• Reclaim your parental role in small but significant ways by stating your preferences and not approaching the relationship with ‘your hat in your hand.’ -You may get rejected but it establishes with your daughter that you care and are there to stay.
• Remember that you are both reclaiming lost parts of yourselves and an old relationship but that you can’t do the work for each other. Give it the time and respect that it needs to be restored.
• Don’t pressure your daughter to assume the role of daughter or to accept you as her mother or her children’s grandmother.
• Exercise choice in other areas of your life when you feel you lack control in this one; it will help you be more patient.
• Increase your self care: massage, good sleep --  yoga, exercise, vitamins, eating well -- to boost your body health.
• Channel your anger/frustration into action to make changes for other women who are considering adoption or who have surrendered a child so you can move from victim to warrior.
• Be the person you are, the competent, caring, attractive woman your daughter respects.”
  

Copyright 2007 Jane Elizabeth Edwards