VII. Have You Got What it Takes?, Page 2

What Are Your Attitudes about Birth Families?

Your adopted child is going to have had at least one previous family: her birth family. This family is of real importance to her and always will be. She may never have met any of them. On the other hand, she may have lived with her birth family for years and have many memories of them, good as well as bad. No matter. They and she are permanently and inescapably bound together by genetic ties. Their blood runs in her. Your attitudes towards them will colour her attitudes not only towards them but towards herself and you.

Can You Be Positive and Supportive When Discussing Them?

If you run down her birth parents your child will inevitably develop either a negative attitude towards them or compensate by unrealistically idealizing them. Running the birth parents down is wrong on two counts.

First:

You may be wrong. None of us knows enough about the birth family to make safe judgments about their behaviour or motives or morals. Even the social workers don’t know everything, and in the transfer of information from traumatised, angry, unco-operative or grieving birth parent to social worker (not always very sympathetic or from the same cultural background) and then to us overexcited prospective parents, with our own agendas and preconceptions, and then much later to the child (maybe too young or immature or mentally handicapped to really understand) there are bound to be distortions. Apparently unimportant but actually crucial items of information can get left out. These can wrongly colour the child’s understanding of the circumstances surrounding her adoption. Even the most apparently clear-cut case of abuse may have something mitigating behind it. You owe it to the parents and your child to understand not only that you have incomplete or even erroneous information, but that you may not know the full significance of what happened. This should lead you to try to put the best possible gloss on what you know, and to make it clear to your child what you don’t know.

Our son’s birth mother, we were told by his social worker, had never seen him after the delivery. He went straight to a pre-adoptive placement where he stayed until we adopted him at three months. We were told that the name on his birth certificate had been given him by the nurses; his mother had not bothered to name him. When he was ten he became very depressed about the fact that his mother had not wanted to see him (as he interpreted it), and also wanted to know why, when two previous children had been adopted into the extended family, he had been placed with strangers. We didn’t know. We told him we thought it might have been that the family was too full or poor and so she had had to turn to outsiders. Privately we thought the family might have been so disgusted by her repeated pregnancies that they had refused to help again. He became so distressed that eventually we decided to track his birth mother down. When we finally did and went to visit her, we found a very concerned mother, really glad to see her son. We learned that she had not seen him after birth because she was afraid she would change her mind, and she knew she could not care for him. He had been given for adoption to strangers because after having had two babies taken from her almost by force and seeing them being inadequately cared for by elderly relatives, she was determined to do better by her third child, and had gone so far as to conceal her pregnancy and his birth from them. And she had in fact named him, after his father (whom we also met), but it was never recorded. So some of what we had been led to believe was wrong, and even the best gloss we could think of to explain why he had been sent out of the family wasn’t positive enough.

Second:

A child’s self-image is derived largely from her family. Some of your child’s self-image will come from you, but in a culture like ours which emphasises biology a lot (in proverbs like “blood is thicker than water”) some is also going to come from her image of her birth family. You owe it to your child to make this part of her self-image as positive as possible. If you denigrate her birth family she will take that negativity and apply it to herself. She may even come to feel doomed to repeat the mistakes of her parents and create a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What About Meeting the Birth Family?

What would be your reaction to a chance to meet the birth mother at the time of placement? Many prospective adopters recoil at the idea. They may imagine some surly, tattooed, teenager in a leather miniskirt and dead white make-up, black lipstick, fish-net tights, with a cigarette hanging out of her mouth. The reality is usually very different. Most birth mothers are young and bewildered, usually without any positive family support. They love their children and would do anything they could to keep them. Many want to meet the adoptive family to have some idea of where their child is going. They’re not going to spit at you; they aren’t going to stalk you or try to kidnap their child back. They’re much more likely to be shy and even grateful to the family who they hope is going to give their child love and a better life than they can offer. If the social workers thought she would be abusive they would not suggest a meeting, and if you want, a social worker can be present.

By meeting the mother or other family members you will have much better information for your child. She may be able to answer questions you have about the family and the birth; about herself and her hopes for her child’s future. She will be reassured about her child’s being with you and better able to complete the grieving she will have to go though. She will have a chance to say good-bye and to be sure that any keepsake or letter she wants to give him will have got to you. What you gain your child gains, too, in terms of the information you can give him later and your own memories of his mother. And if the child is old enough, he will himself possibly want to say a last good-bye.

First-time adopters are much more likely to be resistant to the idea of meeting the birth family than more experienced parents, who are usually quite happy to meet them. This has to do with feeling insecure about their right to the child. But meeting the birth mother helps them know, from the mother’s own lips, that she has freely given them her child. There is no need for guilt. Meeting the mother, getting her permission, entitles the adoptive parents to the child, in their own eyes, and can make them feel much more confident about the adoption and even their ability to be good parents.

It can be a very sad occasion, but it can have long-lasting, positive benefits for everyone, and if you get the chance, take it. You can also initiate a request to meet the birth family yourselves, although the social workers will not force her to meet you against her wishes.

All this presumes that this meeting is a one-off affair. But it may be the prelude to a permanent relationship. You may even get to like each other! Stranger things have happened. I discuss continuing contact with the birth family after the adoption later on.

Can You Support Tracing the Birth Family at 18?

What will you do if your child decides when he is grown up (or earlier) that he wants to find and possibly meet his birth family? This is a common desire. It rarely means that the adoptee feels that the adoption was a failure or that he wants to return to the birth family. It is almost always to do with finding missing bits of his life; things like where his musical ability comes from, whose nose he has, why he holds his knife and fork differently from everyone else in the family — simply finding someone else in the world whom he looks like. It is perfectly natural. No matter how loved and secure an adoptee feels in his new family he may still feel the need to trace.

Not all adoptees want to trace. Some feel no need to chase after physical resemblances, and are not bothered by the lack of knowledge about their origins. Some harbour resentment towards their birth mothers and feel that they have no right to know how they have turned out. Some are afraid of what they might find.

Other adoptees would like to trace but they have been made to feel that to do so would be a betrayal of their adoptive parents. This feeling can be transmitted unconsciously by parents making an issue of the child’s loyalty to them, even if they don’t explicitly link it to tracing. Other times it can be out in the open: a refusal to discuss the matter, withholding or destroying documents, even threats to disown the child if he traces. This is very wrong. We have no right to try to influence our children in this very personal matter either way, including forcing a child to trace when he doesn’t want to. We do have a duty to make it positively clear that we support him if he decides to trace and will help where we can if he wants us to, and that if the results are painful, we will be there to comfort him.

If your own self-respect is so fragile or you feel so insecure in your relationship with your adopted child that you would deliberately discourage or frustrate tracing, you should not adopt. Adoption needs tougher people than that.

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