It signs the papers on demand, it puts the baby in their hands...

I was cleaning earlier today, picking up toys and cleaning things from the top of the TV (DVDs, Wii games, etc.). I came across the case of a favorite movie of mine -- "The Silence of the Lambs." And I had an epiphany. 

You see, there's a scene where Jodi Foster's character, Clarice, is watching a press conference with other students at the FBI Academy. Senator Martin is pleading with the serial killer Buffalo Bill to release her kidnapped daughter.  She keeps saying her daughter's name (Katherine) as she is pleading for her safe return.  Clarice's friend says, "Boy that's smart. Jesus, that's really smart."  Another student says, "She keeps repeating her name."  Clarice responds: "If he sees Katherine as a person and not an object it's harder to tear her up." (Click here to see scene )

Mary and Ethan are to me and my role in this adoption as Buffalo Bill is to Katherine and her skin.  Their letters have always read like diary entries, not real, honest correspondences with me. They never answered questions, just reiterated that everything is God's will along with a heavy dose of what Martin's been up to since the last letter.  They're impersonal letters, but I soak in every word because any news is better than no news.


Ten years of this passes.  Every 12 to 18 months I'd get a crumb tossed at me and I'd grab it like a starving animal who's been tossed a piece of meat. 

Then I start to find out the some of my friends also know Mary.  They tell Mary that they know me. Mary is dumbstruck to find out that we have friends in common. I'm sure that each person telling her this was a slap in the face. I mean really, how can WE have the same friends, with her being so holy and God-anointed and me being (in her eyes) this piece of poor, white trash that, to quote a Bethany representative, "spread [my] legs and got pregnant out of wedlock." I mean, we can't really have anything in common, let alone attracting the same friends. FOR SHAME!

So she and Ethan have cut me off.   They refuse to listen to anyone that says that I am not some podunk redneck, that I actually have a lot in common with her -- I work hard for what I have, I love my family, I pay my taxes, I take recyclable bags to the grocery, I have faith, etc. She doesn't want to listen to them or send me a direct email because if she gets to know me, if she sees me as a person and not some faceless "birthmother," it makes it harder for her to shut me out and treat me like shit.  If she has to relate to me as a sister in the eyes of God, as someone like her, then she can't justify her heartless actions. 

In their minds, I am sure that they envisioned this perfect adoption where I had no interest in Martin and simply handed her over like handing over a loaf a bread. That I would have disappeared into the background and would never have to be thought of again.  

But it didn't happen that way. I know who and where they are.  They can never change the fact that I am forever woven into the fabric of their lives, for the rest of their lives. And no amount of hemming or trimming can change that.  They know that they can't cut me out of the picture, so they have to dehumanize me, make me a threat in order to justify their behavior. 

Without that dehumanization, they wouldn't be able to sleep soundly at night without any guilt.


So, until June 11, 2017, I will sit here in my secure birthmother pit, waiting on the moment that I emerge and meet my daughter. And like the pit into which Katherine Martin was thrown, there are blood stains where I've tried to claw myself out to no avail. But there will be no Clarice Starling coming to spring me from my Buffalo Bill.  So I wait until the time that the adopters have no legal means to keep me at bay.

They have you, I have some grainy photos and B.S. documents

Dear Martin, 

You've been on my mind quite heavy since your adoptive father sent his little "care" package. (Thank you, Mary and Ethan, for waiting until Ana's birthday to send this! You put a dark cloud over HER day. Muchos gracious!)  I've been sifting through the massive amount of papers in the file I have on you and I wanted to post a few choice pieces. The photos are grainy, but they've all I have from my time with you before I handed you over to a couple that I thought cared about me. More itmes will come later,but for now, I give you the following:

"Thank you, Pam, for giving birth to my commission!" This was taken on June 11, 1999 shortly after Martins birth. My "counselor" / Mary and Ethan's baby seller congratulates me on my womb-fresh ware.

Your adoptive parents bonding with you in the delivery room while I am stitched up.

Bonding with you ... and not wanting to have to give you up.

Nurses notes. Notice that when Bethany was called to counsel me, my counselor came WITH MARY AND ETHAN! She talked to me after Mary and Ethan sat at my bedside, bawling, and begging me to "take a leap of faith" on them. (I did but they are now unwilling to do the same with me. Hypocrites.)  Ginger then played up my parenting fears from money issues to my vomit phobia. After being told by my "Shepherding" family and my counselor that I have nothing to offer you, I lost all hope and agreed to sign the papers from my bed the next morning.

Once I signed the papers, Bethany rushed me out of the hospital without even waiting to have me discharged! I can only assume that Mary and Ethan took over my room and played "new family" with you while waiting for your discharge. Grrrr!

My last moments with you. My eyelids were swollen from having cried for hours and hours on end.

I did manage to smuggle out your first blanket, hat, booties, and pacifier before Bethany could confiscate them and hand them to your adoptive parents for their scrapbooks.

After months of letters full of empty praise, lots of mentions of God's will, and absolutely no answers, I sent this letter to Mary and Ethan through Bethany. I never got a response.

One of the B.S. update letters from Bethany. I swear that flower logo makes me want to vomit.

After  going over a year without hearing anything from Mary and Ethan, I sent them a letter asking if they'd decided to close the adoption and to inform them that you had another half-sister coming in a month or so. This was Mary's reply.

As you see, Martin, there is so much to our story... so many things that you might never hear from your adopters. I hope that you run across this blog one day. Truth is power.  Mary and Ethan might be able to put me in a legal straight jacket for now ... but I've waited 11 years. I can wait 7 more. 

Until June 11, 2017...

The way it should have been ...

Martin,

I found this article online and wanted to share it with you. THIS is how it should have been with us. Had I known beforehand that the couple I'd chosen back in late April 1999 would act the way they have I would have honestly chosen someone else. 

Modern Love

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

from: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/fashion/09Love.html?_r=1&sq=modern%20love&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=all

Open vs. Closed Adoption

Dear Martin,

Your adoptive parents in the letter that they sent yesterday, made it a point to say that they were basically closing the adoption to protect you and your emotional state. This is a cop-out; they don't want me in the picture because they want to pretend that I don't exist, that they didn't have to buy a baby from an agency that uses coercion and scare tactics to get womb-fresh babies from their scared mothers. 

For example: 

In an in-depth study of adoptive parents in 12 open adoptions, Belbas found a relationship between adoptive parents' feelings of entitlement to the child and the degree of openness (ranging from letter writing to face-to-face contact) of the adoption.⁴⁷ The more frequent and direct the contact, the less the adoptive parents worried about being the child's real parents or about feeling entitled to the child. Parents who had letter-only contact worried most about the biological parents wanting to take the child back. All families in the study had adopted at least 3 years earlier, and many had adopted more than once. All children in this sample had been adopted before the age of 3 months.

In the larger California study of 1,396 adoptions of children from infants to 16- year-olds, Berry found that children in open adoptions had significantly better behavior scores (as rated by their adoptive parents) than children in adoptions with no access to birthparents and that the adoptive parents of children who were in contact with birthparents had more positive impressions of those birthparents. (http://www.openadoption.org/bbetzen/parent.htm#open)

 And this adoptive mother hit the nail on the head:

And as we reconnect birth and adoptive families and the two mothers come face to face, we must also acknowledge that our differences make telling the truth difficult sometimes. Our ages, the families that raised us, what we do, our ethnicities, where we live...the list of our differences could go on and on.

But Jack's birthmom and I share something that reaches beyond all of those differences. We share the desire for our shared child to be happy, to be able to be more than either of us could ever be. Each of us carries half of his "motherness" in us. Neither of us is fully complete without the connection to the other. The subtle knife of adoption has cut Jack's "motherness" into two pieces. And what it really comes down to is this: his birthmom and I can allow these two pieces to remain separate, or we can bring them together for him, so he can have both. (from http://www.openadoptioninsight.org/html/adoptive_parents.html)

 It angers me to no end that I have been treated like a pariah, a nuisance when I was the one who gave birth to you, who gave you life... the one who made THEM "parents." Without me there is no you. Without me and your brother's birthmother, there is no "Allison Family" -- there's just Mary and Ethan.  How snobbish to pretend that I am something that can just be cast aside like a used Kleenex or an empty diet Coke can. And how utterly cruel to keep the truth from the children they adopted.

I hope to one day meet Grant's first mother. And I hope to meet you someday so that you might know everything.

Until June 11, 2017 ...

I got a package from your adopters today ...

Martin,

I wrote a letter to your adoptive mother and sent it along with your birthday gift back at the beginning of June. I'll post a copy of that letter later day. In it I told them what had happened to me at the hands of Bethany and that I'd love to have a relationship with her but that I simply could not handle receiving another thing from Bethany in my mailbox. Well, today I received a package in the mail from your adoptive father. He had returned, unopened, the birthday gift I'd sent as well as a letter that basically told me to go away. (How nice of them to send this little care package this week -- they've placed a dark cloud over me during the celebration of both of your half-sisters' birthdays!)

In all honesty, it was nothing more than I'd expected.  It's the attitude they've had since they took you from me 11 years ago.

I am a Christian, but I hate it when so-called Christians use God to justify their own fears, biases, and prejudices. These people had hoped that I'd go away quietly once they'd taken you from my arms back in 1999. They lavished praised on me, of course, but they wanted this nice, healthy, womb-fresh baby without any "baggage." But I found out who and where they were.  Even though I came across that information in the Fall of 1999 I can honestly say that to-date I have never showed up at your front door or tried to push my way into your life. I've contacted them through letters only.  But they act like I've been a constant nuisance, a thorn in their sides. This is not true. I've written to them once every year or so. And all I've asked is for your adoptive mother to talk to me directly, not through Bethany Christian Services. I've not asked to see you at all. All I've asked is for her and me to talk, to form a relationship. I could possibly understand if I'd been pushy, showing up at your house or school, or asking them for direct access to you. I have not. 

This is last letter that I received from your adoptive parents: 

 

Sorry about the smudges, the letter got wet.  But read it. They are "sorry" that they do not know anything about your natural background. Well they would if they'd be open to having a relationship with me. I am not the one refusing to be open, they are. I am also likened to Nazi baggage. Seriously?  Baggage. I am nothing more than unwanted, harmful baggage.

In the letter I received today, they claim to fear for your emotional well-being if they have a relationship with me. How absurd! They know that I am not a threat and studies have shown that open relationships are much more beneficial to adoptees than closed ones. (http://www.kir.org/adoption/benefits-of-open-adoption.html) 

I cannot change their minds or hearts. They are fearful and, quite frankly, heartless. They have been cruel to me, all in the name of God, for the past 11 years. Just know that I have been here all along, pleading for the adoption I was promised, pleading for an open relationship with your adoptive parents. They are the ones who wanted a closed adoption. They are the ones that have kept your heritage from you.

For now I wait until June 11, 2017.