| When I hear people talk about our "choice to
relinquish"I want them to know that for many of us, there was
no choice.
It was 1980 and I was 17 years old when I gave birth
to my first child. I was single, a grade-twelve student in high
school. I had been hidden away by my parents during the time I was
pregnant, living in a wage-home, so that the relatives would not
find out. But I never expected what was going to happen to me once
I was in the hospital giving birth — no-one warned me that my
baby would be taken.
I went into labour at 1 am in the morning. My parents
drove me to the Victoria General Hospital on Fairfield Road and
signed me in. I expected a normal labour and delivery, with nothing
out of the ordinary. I didn"t expect to be treated differently
because I was "unwed."
After being admitted, I remember being wheeled into
a storage closet, on a gurney, and given sleeping pills and left
alone for the night to "sleep" for the first 6 or so hours
of my labour. But the labour pains kept me awake. The nurse checked
on me part-way through the night and I told her I had been unable
to sleep. I can"t remember if she gave me more sleeping pills
or not.
In the morning, I had been awake for 24 hours. Being in labour,
I was not permitted anything to eat or drink. The resident or intern
gave me Demerol for the pain, which only made me disoriented and
nauseous.
By the time I was fully dilated, at about 5 pm, I had been awake
for 30 hours, without food or drink for the last 18.
I remember being wheeled into a cold white-lit delivery
room and strapped flat on my back to a delivery table, feet up in
stirrups, my arms bound to the table with leather straps — at
the time i thought it was to keep me from falling down and to protect
my baby from germs.
My baby was immediately whisked out of the room the
moment the cord was cut. I could not even catch a glimpse of him.
(He was still my son legally, and was taken without my permission.
This how the system worked " to try to prevent me from bonding
with him so I would surrender him.) I passed out as the episiotomy
was sewn up (the same way it was made " without anesthesia).
I woke up in a hospital room a few hours later.
I was too weak to walk. No-one would tell me about my baby
and I was too scared to ask about seeing him " I was afraid
they"d say "no." I also had no idea that i had the
right to see him. The nurses told me to sleep and I was given heavy
sedation. On about the third day, when I could finally shuffle some
distance, finally I asked if I was allowed to see him.
The nurse said yes, much to my surprise. He was in a nursery
far down the hall from my room. The doctor had put me into
the gynecology ward rather than the maternity ward. Weak,
and hurting from bruises and a 4-inch-long stitched-up episiotomy,
i slowly walked alone to the other end of the hospital wing to see
my baby.
I had no idea that seeing my baby, for the first time,
would change my life.
I fell in love with my son as soon as I saw him. MOTHER-LOVE.
A love that comes from the blood and the body and the soul.
No-one had told that when he was born, I would ALSO be reborn, as
a MOTHER. No-one had told me about the instincts, the bond
of one-soul-two-bodies, the shared-needs of mother-and-baby, the
NEED TO BE WITH MY CHILD!!!! This is the reality of birth "
that happens to all women. This is what I found out about, first-hand.
I loved my baby more than life itself. With all my heart,
with every cell in my body, I loved him and I wanted to hug and
hold him and keep him!!!!!
But as I stood there in the nursery, the nurses kept
a watchful eye on me to ensure I didn"t pick him up. I felt
I was trespassing, just being there, committing a crime just by
looking at him sleeping in his bassinet.
I wanted to keep my baby, but the social worker had
other plans. She came to my hospital room to give me papers to sign
" both adoption papers and the "registration of live birth"
papers. I began questioning adoption, so she laid on the pressure
and my parents did also. The social worker told me that it was too
late to change my mind. She sent in another of her "clients"
who had surrendered a son three months previously, to talk me into
it, telling me in glowing terms how it was such a wonderful thing
to do. The social worker said that I was too young to be a parent
and that my son needed a two-parent family. She also implied that
the hormones from birth were making me irrational. And my parents
were firm that there was NO WAY I could bring home my baby "
I was already a family shame to them.
I cried when I signed those papers a few days after
his birth " but the adults around me all told me that I had
no alternative. They said it was the best thing for my baby
and that (in my parent eyes) the main thing was that I was giving
joy to a childless couple. Whatever papers I signed in the social
worker"s office, I was never given a copy. No lawyer was
there to explain my rights to me. I was never told if welfare
for single mothers under the age of 19 was available.
All I could do was to tell the social worker that
I would be back for my son in 19 years, when I was legally allowed
to search for him, and to tell the adopters that. I also asked for
her to ask them to write me a letter to tell me how he was doing.
She promised that she would tell them this. The letter never arrived.
And NO-ONE told me the truth about the aftermath.
No-one told me about the consequences (grief, pain, loss), although
I have found since that the social work profession at that time
WAS well-aware of them. Part of me died when that final phone
call from the social worker came, telling me that my precious Michael
(nicknamed "Micha", pronouced Mee-sha) had been picked
up from the hospital. {Twenty-four years later, I still cry
those tears and relive those moments emotionally, over and over
again. Reunion released the repressed memories and emotions from
deep inside me. The flash-backs are horrendous and often paralyze
me " re-experiencing the pain and memories over and over again
as if I am actually there. As well, the physical effects of post-traumatic
stress disorder (PTSD) have landed me in the emergency ward 4 times
with my upper intestine tying itself into knots }
So, having lost my son and with my emotions frozen
in a state of shock, I finished off Grade 12 in 4 months, but eight
or so months later the shock wore off, and I spent the next two
years failing at university while trying to cope with the deep pain
of losing my son. The pain of what happened to us both led
to the break-up of my relationship with my soul-mate.
And no-one ever told me about the pain that would
never go away " the extreme pain and loss that is a hundred
times worse than losing a close relative to death (comparing it
to when my brother and father died). And my soul-mate
fled into doing drugs to deal with his own pain. I was lucky in
eventually i buried the pain after several years of "extreme
living," not knowing that it would resurface again upon reunion.
All I had left was the waiting game: counting
down the years, months, and weeks until I was legally allowed to
find my son again. I tried searching for him myself, even hiring
a P.I. when he was about 8 or 9, but I had no success in finding
him. I had three more children in the meantime, in order to
try to fill that "black hole" in my heart. It didn"t
work. I found out the hard way that no child can ever replace
another child. That the pain does NOT go away.
This is my story. I never ceased to love my
son. I never ceased to miss him. And the anger
that i feel at myself for failing to find a way to keep him is stronger
than any anger he might feel towards me. But it comes down to this:
I was a 17 year old mother, manipulated and used as a broodmare
to produce a baby for the social worker"s customers. When an
underage woman is coerced by adults into having sex, it"s called
sexual exploitation. What about when they take advantage of her
fertility for profit? It is reproductive exploitation!
When I read the messages from young women on "birthparent"
message boards, saying how they think that adoption is the best
thing for their child, I wish there was some way I could let them
know the truth about what they will experience. I would not wish
this existance " the pain I feel every moment of every day
" even on my worst enemy. And when I hear adoptees talk about
our "choice to relinquish" " I want them to know
that for many of us, there was no choice.
Reunion Postscript: when my son was
19, my sentence for fertility-beyond-marriage ended and I was finally
legally-allowed to search for him. My banishment from his life was
over. I searched for him and found him. And when I looked into his
eyes, our souls recognized each other, and I recognized my child
whom I lost to adoption so long ago. I broke down uncontrollably
crying as the walls broke down inside me and the grief that I had
buried for 20 years came to the surface. My strong, tall, broad-shouldered,
blue-eyed son hugged me until I was able to stop crying. My beloved
son is once more reunited with his family " our family "
and with his Papa (what he calls his natural father). He is again
using his birth-name, lives with us, and we both hope in the future
for me to able to adopt him back so we can legally be family once
again. And my heart heals a little bit more each time he hugs me
and says "I love you, Mom."
|
The Premise: "Adoption practice works on the premise
that, in order to save the child, one must first destroy its
mother." " Dian Wellfare, founder of Origins
Inc.
The Proof: "Ramsay has only one mother, Karen,
and one father, me. Ramsay shall remain an integral part of
my family and shall not be "shared" in any way,
shape or form." -- post-reunion email from my
son"s adoptive father on October 16, 2001.
|
Adoption is NOT about unwanted children. It is about UNWANTED MOTHERS.
"It is the child welfare establishment that has
provided the picture of "birthmothers" as indifferent
-- as mothers who abandon their unwanted children with a wish
to remain forever hidden from them. They know that this is seldom
true, but it helps to facilitate their work for the public to
believe this. Society does not dismiss the importance of the
natural family as readily as the social planners, and so it
is useful to portray relinquishing parents as different from
caring parents. "The "birthmother" must be different,
an aberration; for if it were true that she had the same degree
of love for her child as all other mothers, the good of adoption
would be overwhelmed by the tragedy of it. adopters are presumably
somewhat relieved of guilt if they can be assured that the natural
parents truly did not want their child; for, under those circumstances,
it is possible to feel entitled to claim the child of others.
Neither society nor the mother who holds the child in her arms
wants to confront the agony of the mother from whose arms that
same child was taken." " From a speech by
Margaret McDonald Lawrence to the American Adoption Congress
in Washington D.C at the first National AAC Conference on May
4, 1979.
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