One Reunion, Hold the Meltdown, Please

Where's Margaritaville? Seriously. I get so exhausted with my life. Yet I'm glad I have it to live. It is just hard sometimes.
Especially when leaving the house. Taking the risks.

Today we went to my (first) Father's house after church for the second Sunday in a row. After 20 years of reunion thats the closest we've ever come to some inkling of a "tradition" being started. We all yearn for more contact, more real, unhurried, unstressful, closeness, but I'm still nervous.

Especially when my son has a melt down. And that can be often if I'm not on complete alert and guard to try and prevent it beforehand. He is getting so much better with social skills, less anxiety, and changing routines, but he still struggles alot. It is just SO hard to get through the melt downs. It feels like I have to continually walk on egg shells, trying so hard to keep him calm. If I let my guard down even enough to have a relaxed conversation with my Dad or brothers, or little niece or nephew, things can unravel so quickly that it can't be salvaged. That is what happened today.

We were sitting by the pool watching the kids play. My husband was in with them, and I was enjoying the few minutes of just sitting with my family and soaking in the moments of lost time, the feeling of home, familiarity, the bond. I went to the car for just a few minutes to get the camera, and by the time I got back something had happened that set us on a downhill course. My husband had tried to correct and discipline Andrew, threatening him with going home or some other consequence. Every time he tries to discipline Andrew this way it leads to a melt down, so obviously it isn't working. But he hasn't found the alternative either. I think we are both so exhausted it is hard to come up with new and successful parenting techniques or skills that WILL work. We feel like really bad parents sometimes, and it hurts to see others stare in disbelief as we try to work with our son in public. He deals with sensory issues ~ his voice is too loud and he has a hard time self-regulating. Get the picture?

Anyway, a few minutes later things had calmed down and he and his cousin were, by this time, sitting on a chair sharing some pizza when, of all things, his cheese slid right off and onto the concrete. Oh my gosh. Nothing could calm him at this point. Nothing. The only other pizza was in the house so we thought that was the last piece. He threw a huge screaming fit. "GET ME MORE PIZZA!" at the top of his lungs. Pushing, shoving, wild. Most of the time we can't even get him to eat pizza, but even he understood the significance of this special time we were having with our family, and he didn't want it to end, no matter what. But he couldn't handle the pressure either. It was horrible. Having to carry him to the car kicking and screaming (how many times now I can't even count). Apologizing for his behavior, because he tells everyone he doesn't like them, including us.

It is hard, because I know most people think he is just a spoiled brat. And sometimes I really beat myself up thinking I've allowed him to become just that. But I also know how much he tries. He works so hard to keep it together. It breaks my heart to see him so anxious and unable to receive comfort during times of saddness. Instead, he lashes out in anger and independence because of months and months of feeling alone in the NICU.

Even at 5 years old I've noticed that he realizes he is different and he doesn't like it. One time recently he even said (out of the blue) "I don't like myself." What a horrible thing for a Mother to hear. I think he knows these meltdowns cause us to have to cut normal things short...and it hurts him. He loves his Papa, his cousins, etc. Yet it has been so hard to build these relationships because of these issues.

I've had to take a few "cry breaks" even as I write this. Here comes another.

I can't even wrap my head around it...the pain of not wanting my son to struggle through childhood, family, and life. I so want him to be close to his family, the one I lost as a child, and he now has. They love us so much, but it is really hard for me to keep trying because it makes us all so uncomfortable. Lord, please help us. Help us get through this and still grow closer to them. We need them and love being with them. Help Andrew grow and develop and learn, and most of all to love himself.

Even the two hours we were there were precious. My youngest brother and I watched a few minutes of some car race in Turkey (???) and it was so neat hearing him tell me such interesting facts about his passion sport. And my Dad is amazing. I can finally feel the love he has for all of us. As we were sitting by the pool he looked over at my brothers and I and said, "What a happy Papa I am, with all my kids."

Yesterday was a good day, too. We took my Mom (adoptive) to the Bass Pro Shop to see the fish and just walk around in the cool store. She has to use a wheelchair now and it is hard being outside in the heat. It's hard to believe, but we actually got through the whole day without a meltdown...yeah! We walked around the pond, ate on the patio at Los Cabos (the margarita was YUMMY too) and enjoyed feeding the baby geese on the water below. What a great day. Yet, in my heart of hearts, I so wish today could have ended as well. I so yearn for those same moments with my (first) family.

Thank you, God, for the opportunities you are giving us for growth and reconnection. Please help them continue.

Brother & Birthday Blessings

© Photographer: Chepko | Agency: Dreamstime.com

I've known my half-brothers since first being reunited in 1990.
I so wish I had known HOW to grow close to them at that time, because it was then they were more open. The relationship was new and exciting, but I was shell-shocked and unprepared, and was scared they didn't really want to know me, even with the clues they gave otherwise.

It is now 20 years later and I am ready to be close, but they don't seem as interested now.
I still try, though, and my youngest brother had a birthday yesterday. We had just seen each other at a family gathering a few days earlier. In person we always seem to hit it off but just don't seem to go any farther with communication or closeness.

Anyway, he had mentioned something about how he wished his life could count for more at his age and even appeared a little discouraged. I took the opportunity to write a him a short email on his birthday about how he is an asset to everyone who knows him because of his sweet personality and character and how I am so glad to know him.
He emailed me right back (unusual) and said how much he appreciated that. He even called me "Sis"! Wow! What a beautiful gift he gave me on HIS birthday!

It reminded me of a few years ago when he had given me the sweetest card on my birthday ~ one for "Sister". My heart melted and still melts. I just so wish we could spend more time together and actually have those every day moments we lost as brother and sister. Lord, help me to keep taking the risks and reach out. Give us these moments of time and closeness.

This goes to show how in reunion we can never give up on building these connections, even through the years. I'm glad I kept trying, even though it was (is) such an emotional rollercoaster. There have been several times I've thought about just giving up.  

I am convinced that the emotions of reunion are so deep that it causes everyone involved to do the "two steps forward, one step back" dance their entire lives. Many reunions become casualties because of it. I'm so thankful for books and healing, because it wasn't until I faced my own disenfranchised grief and walked through it, that I could become a real person and actually accept myself.

I'm also profoundly thankful for knowing my beautiful families with all their (and my own) quirks, pain, humanity, and joy. Twenty years of slowly soaking it in has done wonders for me, even through the tears. I know who I am and where I came from.

I think my little brother needed someone to reach out to him and if I could have done that in younger years (instead I was so fearful of rejection that I was a people-pleaser and didn't really let anybody get to know me - probably because I didn't even know myself), my brothers and I could possibly be closer now.

I'm so thankful that adoption and reunion is being explored more and talked about. It will help so many as we navigate these unchartered waters, these overwhelming feelings, and these beautiful opportunities.

Original Birth Certificate a BIRTHRIGHT

Original birth certificate a birthright
by Peggi Sturmfels
May 19, 2010.

Within the next few weeks, legislators in the Assembly
will once again vote on whether many New Jersey residents have the
right to access their origins and be granted the right to have their
original birth certificate.

Sealed by court order when we were adopted as infants and children, we
as adults are told that we still do not have a basic right afforded
all other New Jerseyans. Opponents of S799/A1406 talk of protecting
birth parents and honoring so-called contracts of confidentiality.

But the truth is that no such lawful contract was made. No such
statutory language exists. Many of these birth parents were forced
into agreements at a time of desperation, fear and grief. Many of
these women, some of them unwed, under-aged mothers, signed away their
rights.

In those few terrible moments when they were faced with giving away
their children, many did not realize that not only were they handing
over their babies to strangers, they were agreeing to never knowing
whether or not their children were placed in loving homes or left to
languish in foster care. In those remaining minutes of unbearable
stress, they were asked to trust authoritative figures with no
knowledge of their motives or integrity. And in those final steps, as
they left the hospital empty-armed, those same strangers told them to
move on, to forget and time will heal.

Records are sealed upon adoption, not relinquishment. The absurdity of
this practice is that most of the adult adoptees who now search and
find their roots find out that so many of their birth mothers have
been searching for them as well. My sister tells me that when my birth
mother died two years ago, she told her how she always thought of me.
My sister and I have been in contact for four months. Finally found
after a 40-year search, I will get to share my children and
grandchildren.

This policy of so-called protection is particularly sad when played
out to the extreme, such as when siblings who are put into the system,
records are not sealed until a finalized adoption takes place.

The case of my daughter and her sister, placed into the system as
teens, shows the idiocy that has been the practice in this state for
more than five decades. Unable to adopt our daughter until after she
reached adulthood because of parental rights termination issues, her
records were sealed when the adoption was finalized. She now has no
access to her original birth certificate. Her sibling placed with
another family and never adopted has access to hers.

Two sisters, raised together until the ages of 13 and 14, have kept
contact into their adulthood. One sister can access her family health
history, one cannot. One can renew her passport, one (since 9/11)
cannot. So the argument that adoption seals the birth records for the
sake of confidentiality for the birth mother is asinine. Many adoptive
parents were given the name of the birth mother by the agency at the
time of placement.

So what's in a piece of paper? Our identity. Our health history, Our
ethnic background. Our heritage. Our legal right to be the same as you.

Open Adoption: Not So Simple Math

Open Adoption: Not So Simple Math
By AMY SEEK
Published: May 7, 2010

I WANTED my son to become the kind of person who appreciates the beauty of the world around him, so I smiled when, at 6, he asked to borrow my camera in case he saw “something beautiful.”

We were taking a walk in the woods outside Boston, and following behind him I was surprised by how much he moved like his father. We spent that afternoon showing each other icicles and hollow trees, breaking frozen patterns in the river ice, inching too close to the water to get a better view of the bridge above.

When we arrived home, Ben said that the reason he wanted to go for a walk was to spend time with me. It had been three months since I last saw him. I smiled sheepishly and stepped into the living room, where the woman who had adopted him six years earlier sat reading the newspaper.

I spent the evening chatting with her while avoiding direct interaction with Ben for fear I’d show too much affection, or too little. Open adoption is an awkward choreography; I am offered a place at the table, but I am not sure where to sit. I don’t know how to be any kind of mother, much less one who surrendered her child but is back to help build a Lego castle.

It is a far cry from the moment he was born, when my 23-year-old body seemed to know exactly what to do, when I suddenly and surprisingly wanted nothing more than to admire him nursing at my breast. When, after a drugless labor, my surging hormones helped me to forget that I was a college student, that I lived in Cincinnati, that I was passionate about architecture. During those days I was roused by the slightest sound of his lips smacking, innocent newborn desire that offered my deepest fulfillment.

In the months before I gave birth, when my boyfriend and I were just getting to know the couple we had chosen, I was able to comprehend the coming exchange only on the most theoretical of levels, but it seemed like gentle math: Girl with child she can’t keep plus woman who wants but can’t have child; balance the equation, and both parties become whole again.

During those months, my son’s mother, Holly, observed that birth mothers have to accomplish in one day the monumental task of letting go that most parents have 18 years to figure out. Days after his birth, when I struggled with letting go, Holly sat with me and cried — for the children she never got to have, for the fact the adoption would bring her joy while causing me pain, and out of fear that she had already grown to love a child I might not give her.

I decided to let her take him for a night, to see if I could handle it. She drove him to Dayton, Ohio, where she was staying with family, then called and asked: “Do you want him back? I’ll bring him right now.”

Meanwhile, the men in our lives stood by and hoped for the best. My boyfriend supported the adoption, and though we had broken up, he was there to help me through my pregnancy. We had met in architecture school, never suspecting that two years later we would be forever joined as birth parents, composing 111 questions to ask strangers about the most intimate details of their lives.

We had a list of qualities we wanted in a couple — basically ourselves, 10 years older. But when we met the couple we would choose, our list fell by the wayside, replaced by an overwhelming intuition that we could trust them.

I signed the papers on a hot August day in 2000, sitting at a large conference table with my sister, my son’s adoptive parents and agents from Catholic Social Services. I’d sat there several times before but hadn’t yet been able to say the words to relinquish all rights to my son. Each time I was left alone to think and, hours later, was sent home with him.

My ex was not there; the birth had made me a different person, and we couldn’t pretend that our losses would be the same. My sister had come from China, where she was teaching; she promised that if I kept him, she would move home and help. Her face was glazed in tears, but she stared intently at me as I prepared to sign the papers, as if to assure herself I knew what I was doing.

My pen rested at the intersection of two vastly different futures, and I struggled to see into the distance of each. It did not seem that a gesture as small as scribbling my name had the power to set me down one path while turning the other, its entire landscape, to dust. It was such a small gesture, but it was the first sketch of my life without a son.

One of the exercises I was given in adoption counseling was to envision the hours immediately after the adoption. What would I do after signing the papers? Pick up the towels that had been tossed in the corner when my water broke? Pack up the extra blankets I’d been given by the hospital workers who touched my shoulder and prayed aloud that I would find the courage to keep my son?

I had spent my entire life without a child, but I was newly born that night, too, and my old self disappeared. I could no longer imagine how a mother could give up a child and live. Adoption was not simple math; a new mother cannot know the value of the thing she subtracts. It is only through time — when my son turned 4, and I was 27; when he turned 6, and I was 29; when he turns 10 this year, and I am 33, and ready for children — that I begin to understand the magnitude of what I lost, and that it is growing.

The comfort is seeing my son with his family, whom I can no longer imagine him or myself without. He is an earnest child who seems to kick hard to keep his chin above water in the world, but his mother has a certain lack of sympathy that is good for him. When he wants to retreat into his own head, she pulls him back into the refuge of his family and makes him smile. I am ever astounded that I was able to see in her something that would still feel so right so many years later.

The greatest proof of her commitment to openness is that she talks about me when I’m not there. When my son was a baby, I was surprised that he always remembered me, even after long stretches when I couldn’t visit. When he was 7 and we were playing a computer game, he told me his password was “Cincinnati” because his mother had told him he was born there. I know that Holly represents me to my son in my absence and always encourages him to love me.

Holly jokes that with open adoption, at least you know what the birth mother is doing, that she’s busy at school and not conceiving a plot to steal her child back. It’s not so with closed adoptions; the birth mother is powerfully absent. But an open process forces an adoptive parent to confront the pain that adoption is built on. And openness for Holly does not mean merely letting the birth mother know about her child; it means cultivating a real love between birth parents and child. This requires exceptional commitment, which may be why some open adoptions become closed in the end.

I LOVE Holly for sharing such things with me, sentiments that show she is devoted to our relationship — and not because it is easy for her. And I have told her that a pivotal point in my grief was the moment I was able to say aloud that I wanted my son back, though I knew it was impossible — when I realized that his adoption had been both my greatest accomplishment and deepest regret.

And we continually redefine this relationship. I hide certain exchanges, like the time he was 4 and crawled into my arms and said, “Amy, pretend I’m your baby.”

I made sure no one was looking before I indulged his request, my entire body shuddering at the chance to hold him so close for the first time since birth. I suspect Holly knows about these moments, and when I visit she tries to help by sending me off with my son for walks in the woods, where we can freely explore my place in his life.

When I returned home to New York after my visit, I looked at the pictures Ben had taken with my camera: fragments of arms and legs, blurry close-ups of leaves caught in ice, too many spinning forest skies. Evidence to me that although he has his father’s distinctive gait, he shares my need to grasp and hold on to beautiful things, to document and to somehow preserve them forever — things he can’t possibly keep.

Amy Seek is a landscape architect who works on community food projects in New York City.

E-mail: modernlove@nytimes.com

* I don't know about you, but this article brought tears to my eyes. How can a "birthmother" STILL hold to the fact that adoption was her greatest accomplishment and biggest regret at the same time? Because she HAS to to survive and stay somewhat connected to the child she gave up and the people who adopted him. Yet, her words reveal the truth. She is still hiding. She is still uncomfortable. And that poor boy. He yearns for his Mother, still. I can't imagine his pain, watching his Mother come in and out of his life, hiding her affection in front of his adoptive Mom, and going away, over and over again. Not that I advocate closed adoption either. But that is the price everyone pays when you try to "improve" adoption when in reality it is STILL being practiced to the benefit of adults rather than children. Open adoption is just a new take on closed adoption ~ trying to use simple math to solve complex equations ~ it doesn't cut it for anyone, especially the child. When will America stop allowing the adoption industry to spew their rainbow myths of "win-win" adoption in order to fill their quota for the list of waiting couples? Adoptees are the pawn in this supply/demand system, and I pray we someday wake up and give proper honor to the mother/child bond that can't be bought for other's wants and needs.

Guatemala: Foreign Adoptions Are Back

GUATEMALA:
Foreign Adoptions Are Back – Along with the Doubts
Danilo Valladares

GUATEMALA CITY, May 10 (IPS) - The reopening of international adoptions in Guatemala in June might not only mean the chance of a better life for many children, but may also spell a return to corruption, fraud and the theft of babies, human rights groups warn.

A number of organisations expressed concern after the National Adoption Council, the central adoption authority established in 2008, announced in March that a pilot programme for the resumption of adoptions abroad would go into effect in June, under stricter oversight.

According to the Council, the situation was studied by experts from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Hague Conference on Private International Law, which approved the Hague Convention on Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption in 1993.

Nevertheless, human rights groups are worried.

"We are against the reopening of international adoptions now because the same structure of organised crime that generated a major international market to which the country exported between 5,000 and 6,000 children a year is still in place," the head of the Survivors Foundation, Norma Cruz, told IPS.

In 2008, the National Adoption Council suspended foreign adoptions, which were mainly to couples in the United States, to shut down a thriving business that profited lawyers, judges and doctors.

Until the suspension of foreign adoptions, Guatemala was the fourth country in the world in terms of the number of children placed in adoption, after Russia, China and South Korea, according to UNICEF. But in proportion to the population, it was the global leader.

Adoptions were suspended in compliance with the new adoption law in effect since 2007which created the National Adoption Council and banned "undue benefits, material or otherwise, to accrue to the persons, institutions and authorities involved in the adoption process."

It also put a priority on placing children with Guatemalan families and established that "the poverty or extreme poverty of parents is not sufficient reason to put a child up for adoption."

According to United Nations figures, half of the population of this Central American country of 13 million people is living in poverty, and 17 percent in extreme poverty.

Activists say that behind the booming adoption market in Guatemala was a "mafia" of lawyers, notaries public, "jaladoras" or baby brokers who entice poor young women into placing their children in adoption, so-called "casas de engorde" or "fattening houses" where the expectant mothers’ pregnancy and birth-related expenses were covered, officials in civil registers, pediatricians, adoption homes and foster families.

In order to generate confidence in the new adoption process, "the state should give signs that it is prepared to dismantle the child trafficking networks…which remain intact," Cruz said.

The activist cited the case of Alma Valle, a lawyer who was released on bail on Apr. 23, after she was deported from the United States and arrested in Guatemala for her alleged participation in arranging illegal adoptions.

Valle "was released after paying 150,000 quetzals (18,000 dollars) in bail. In just one quarter of 2008 she negotiated the adoption of 150 children. But since she is the wife of an army colonel and has links to the governing party, she was set free," Cruz complained.

The National Adoption Council reports that 214 children, including disabled children and youngsters over the age of seven, are currently available for adoption.

Since November, couples from Austria, Denmark, France, Israel, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States have expressed an interest in adopting Guatemalan children.

The executive director of the Social Movement for the Rights of Children and Adolescents, Felipe García, told IPS the country should not "race" to reopen foreign adoptions, but should first offer a decent life to the children here in Guatemala.

He said a priority has not yet been put on domestic adoptions. Nor have the cases of more than 27,000 children removed from the country under "irregular" circumstances before 2008 been resolved.

The numerous mothers who are demanding the return of children who were stolen from them should be given compensation, García added.

"The Guatemalan state should show a willingness to come up with the necessary mechanisms for children to stay in Guatemala and not have to be adopted by foreigners," he said.

García also said the state was still "under the thumb" of organised crime groups dedicated to illegal adoptions.

Before the new law went into effect, the illegal foreign adoptions of 4,000 to 5,000 Guatemalan children a year generated some 200 million dollars in annual earnings.

Adoptions, which generally took only a year, cost the prospective families between 25,000 and 50,000 dollars, according to human rights groups.

Byron Alvarado, executive secretary of the National Commission on Children and Adolescents, which includes representatives of both the government and civil society, said the National Adoption Council should be better established before adoptions are reopened, because "it has only been functioning for two years."

"Guatemalans don't even know yet what the role of the Adoption Council is," he told IPS. In his view, international adoption should be a last resort.

But Nidia Aguilar, director of Defence of the Rights of the Child in the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman, told IPS that foreign adoptions should be reopened because there are hundreds of youngsters in children's homes who are waiting for a family of their own.

She said there are much bigger hurdles now to prevent illegal adoptions, and that if any do happen, the cases should be reported to the authorities.

So thankful she is still here.




And I miss her so much...




*Participating in "Grown in My Heart's" Mother's Day Carnival. You can participate and visit all the blogs by clicking here.

With my birthday falling on or near Mother's Day every year, it is truly an emotional time for me. My First Mother passed away while searching for me. Just a few years after finding her, my adoptive Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer (the same disease that took my First Mother). She underwent a bone-marrow transplant and several years of health issues, but is now doing well. We just got off the phone making plans to attend our traditional Ladies Brunch and Tea tomorrow morning.

I'm so thankful for my friends in the adoption world who share their lives and friendships.
Happy Mother's Day!