T A B L E++T A L K

Have you given up a child for adoption? How have you dealt with the aftermath? Share your stories in the Mothers area of Table Talk

R E C E N T L Y

Confessions of a teenage mom
By Tessa Souter
My son and I grew up together, will grow old together -- and saved each other
(04/29/98)

The worst mother who ever lived, and other light reading
Mythology may be the key to understanding the meaning of your pathetic mortal life
(04/28/98)

Fly girl
By Phaedra Hise
Flying with my toddler at the controls brings back the thrill I felt when my dad taught me to fly
(04/27/98)

How many working fathers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
By Elizabeth Rapoport
Dad helps out? Sure. Try this test
(04/24/98)

America's war on children
By Joan Walsh
"The War Against Parents" that nobody can win
(04/23/98)

BROWSE THE SECOND THOUGHTS ARCHIVES

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Mamafesto
By Camille Peri
Why it's time
for Mothers Who Think

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BY SALLIE TISDALE | A few weeks ago, a newborn girl was found in the waiting room of a patient unit in a big hospital near here. This is largely a children's hospital, equipped for the most dire as well as the most ordinary of pediatric needs. One can hardly imagine a safer place to leave a baby one cannot keep. The parent who did so had thought ahead about the choice, its proper place and timing -- this was no impulsive act.

The infant was healthy, normal, of uncertain race, attractive -- in other words, she had instant star power. And that's precisely what the local media decided she was: Baby Star. Her photo was all over the newspaper and the evening news for many days.

It's an old story, one of the oldest, one of our favorites -- the story of the baby left at the door. Our culture is steeped in orphans, from Snow White and E.T. to any number of hyperactively cute children on television. We love the orphan and everyone here loves Baby Star. Hundreds have called the state children's services and offered to adopt her immediately, no questions asked.

Instead, she went directly into what a social worker called "her first foster home." The "authorities" -- in our myth of the orphan, there are always nameless and faceless authorities -- went straight to the hospital security cameras, and with surprising dispatch found the image of a young woman holding a baby in that waiting room at just the right time. With equally surprising vigor, the same authorities found out who she was. They got her, and they've got her good -- for child neglect, for all kinds of crimes. No effort will be spared both to punish the mother and to reunite her with the child. In our love of the foundling are many contradictions; this dance of reproaching the mother and coddling her at once is only one of them.

"Our hands are tied," one after the other of the authorities says. "It's policy." And policy, of course, cannot be challenged, only followed.

I have been mother to an orphaned child, a child left right after birth much like Baby Star, and to one I most deliberately conceived. How I feel toward each of them has no more to do with those circumstances than it does with the color of their hair or the shortness of our various tempers. Adoption taught me that biology has nothing to do with being a parent; giving birth taught me the same thing.

The policy of confused family values we call our social welfare system is based largely on the belief that biology rules our hearts -- that blood bonds create emotional bonds. So Baby Jessica is taken away from her adoptive home as a toddler and returned, wailing, to the mother who gave her up for adoption at birth and the father who hadn't even known she existed and had a record of abandoning more than one other child. And untold numbers of children who were removed from bad circumstances are later reunited with their parents just long enough to be killed by them. And now Baby Star will probably pass through a series of foster homes while the "authorities" try to coerce her mother into taking on a responsibility that she either couldn't handle or didn't want.

And yet. I have another story. Families are complicated things, and one's past cannot be dismissed, even if the right thing to do is move on from it.

My oldest child, Rafael, is somewhere between 21 and 23 years old. We adopted him when he was about 10. He is profoundly deaf and had had virtually no education when we met him; the only language he knew was the private sign he'd invented.

His life before then involved a long series of losses -- first mother, then grandmother dying; first father, than uncle abusing him. Hunger, begging, overwork, fear, confusion -- until he and his younger sister, Lita, ended up in the Guatemala City orphanage. After a few years, an American family adopted her but didn't want him.

I didn't intend to be his mother. But it seemed from the moment I saw his face that I was supposed to be his mother. I thought that kind of intense connection meant our relationship would be easy -- it has not been so. I adopted him partly because I was naive about deafness and lack of language and the long-term effects of such a stressful childhood. Rearing him has been quite difficult, and we're not through with it yet. We couldn't have done it without a lot of help from people in the deaf community, where he's finally found a kind of home.

A few months after Rafael joined us, we found out that Lita had been adopted by a family who lived only 30 miles away. It was a strange and, we thought, truly wonderful coincidence. We had photographs of the two of them together; they look almost like twins. She was the one concrete fact about his past that we knew, and he needed facts.

We called her adoptive family to arrange a meeting, and they said no.

At first, they just said not yet. Give it a few months. We waited, and they said not yet. And then, just no -- no meeting, no letters, no photos for year after year. They would not even tell their daughter that her brother was nearby. We enlisted the adoption agency, the orphanage, the social workers on our behalf. All of them were also told no. One of the agency staff had adopted a little boy who'd been Lita's best playmate at the orphanage. She had the same excitement and received the same rebuff. The family said only that they wished to spare Lita any reminders of her painful past.

Last year, knowing Lita was now 18, I tried again, and this time she herself answered the phone. Her parents were out, and I talked to her for a long time. She had had no idea that Rafael was here, she said. She seemed nervous, curious; she promised to call us again.

The next day, her father called and screamed at me, calling me a harasser, cursing me, swearing none of them would ever have anything to do with "that boy" who was "not really her brother in any way that mattered."

That is where all this remains. Lita hasn't called back. I don't speculate about their motives. We keep her picture and perhaps one day will find her when she is away from her parents and see what happens.

I think about Lita when I read about Baby Star. The nature of family and our connection to those who bore and raised us is mysterious and not entirely knowable. I think it is wrong -- crazy, in a way -- for Lita's adoptive family to pretend that her past has disappeared, her memory has been wiped clean, that she became who she is only when she came to them. I suspect that someday she will be angry about this last, unnecessary loss. But I also think it is wrong, and crazy somehow, to force Star's birth mother to be the mother who raises her, to pretend that the fact of birth makes family.

What concerns me is not the bonds of name or birth, but the history that makes each of us who we are. Lita is important to us because Rafael's history is tied up with her; he is important to her for the same reason. I don't want Baby Star's history to be tied up with foster care, to be another of the hundreds of thousands of children who have been shuffling through the system most of their lives, like refugees on temporary visas. I want her to have the opportunity to make good on the chance her birth mother gave her.

I believe that in a vital sense we are all orphans -- foundlings -- each of us abandoned by childhood because we are bound to leave it, abandoned by our parents then and now because they are bound to leave us and us them. Family is what we make of ourselves in connection to others, sometimes accidental, sometimes deliberate, never simple.
SALON | April 30, 1998