Earlier this week, I posted "Adoption versus Abduction" on HuffPost, and in no time, comments racked up from adoptees, fast to point out how satisfied they were with their adoptive parents and families. There were also adoptive parents on the board, eager to share their own feelings of contentment, calling adoption a gift and a blessing.
I once assumed my own adoption had been a gift and a blessing too. In fact, the term, "gift from God," was bandied about more than my own name. My adoptive mother, with a tumor growing in her spine, trusted that if she were truly meant to die, God wouldn't have given her a baby. For three years she had what some called a miraculous recovery and was able to leave her bed and walk intermittently. The tumor continued to grow however, and my adoptive mother suffered through many surgeries only to die when I was seven.
Analyzing the outcome with only a child's knowledge and ability to reason, I concluded the magic must have worn off and that surely I caused my adoptive mother's death. My father's death of a heart attack a mere eighteen months later sent me spinning. Many years later, my older brother (their natural child) ended his life with a single bullet to his brain due to depression; I became convinced I had doomed my family.
That's what magical thinking, the realm of children's minds, can do to a person. Magical thinking is black or white, good or bad, up or down. This way of thinking, a common consequence of surviving anything traumatic as a child, can grow to rule adolescent and adult thought patterns if not exposed and demystified.
Awakening began when I sat with my son at an eye specialist's office. My nine-year-old had neurological damage in his optic nerve and I had been sent to the specialist for further tests. The doctor asked a series of questions, one of which was had my son had a severe fall or a car accident? When I said no, the doctor asked about the circumstances of my son's birth and if we had ever been separated. In fact, yes was my answer, my son had been taken from me for most of four days. He was healthy, but hospital procedure for premature babies born earlier than 34 weeks' gestation required that he be, not in my arms bonding, but in intensive care for a battery of mandatory tests.
The specialist suggested I read up on infant separation trauma and the work of adoptive parent Dr. Nancy Verrier, who wrote on this phenomenon in order to better understand what was going on with my own son.
Verrier's work in Coming Home to Self, published in 2003, points to a study by Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Magical Child and Evolutions End, who states that it takes less than forty-five minutes for an infant separated from his mother to go into shock and this reaction has immediate impact on the brain and functions like sight.
Beyond Verrier's work, I found a study titled: Randomized controlled trial of skin-to-skin contact from birth versus conventional incubator for physiological stabilization in 1200- to 2199-gram newborns. This study showed that within six hours of separation from the mother, babies experienced "protest-despair" biology and "hyper-arousal and dissociation" response patterns. The conclusion of the Randomized Controlled Trial was: newborns should not be separated from their mothers.
Despite all this evidence, I couldn't budge from my conditioned magical thinking about my own adoption. I could accept that my son suffered trauma and neurological damage due to our four day separation and I could get him the treatment needed to restore his eyesight, but I could not release the belief that my adoption had been good and that my adoptive family had simply been unlucky, likely because they adopted me and I had failed to be a good enough child.
Next I read the work of Bert Hellinger, a former Catholic priest who spent his life in study of the energy dynamics within family units. Hellinger wrote Love's Hidden Symmetry, published in 1998. In that book, Hellinger states that adoption with ill intent leads to consequences in the adoptive family such as divorce and death. "In its most destructive form," Hellinger writes, inappropriate adoption can lead to "illness and even suicide of the natural children."
Finally my magical thinking shifted and I saw the outcome of my adoption made me a statistic in the context of Hellinger's research.
The last barrier to the magical thinking I'd been using my whole adult life came when I met my original mother and my birth family. Finally my nervous system and my brain had recognizable genetic markers to latch onto. My mother smelled right, sounded right, looked right, was right! I discovered that an essential part of me had been waiting to make contact with my homeland -- the mother who had given me life. Basic biology.
Make no mistake, my reunion was no panacea for me or my original mother. The wounds of separation, 47 years deep, will take a lifetime to heal; but I am now fully aware that I was not the cause of my adoptive parents' death, and to take that awakening a step further, I began to accept that my adoption was not such a blessing after all. I could see my truth from other perspectives. If separation from original mothers has negative effects on babies, as it had on my own son, then it had, necessarily, a negative effect on me. I did not have to be happy about my adoption, nor did I have to feel thankful for it.
At this point in my journey, post awakening, I feel strongly that adoptive parents need to examine their deepest intention around the desire to adopt and then set the intention to be of true benefit to the child first. This examination isn't only for the adopted child, it is for the well being of the adoptive family and for all of the future generations of that family.
Those who place their children for adoption would do well to study into their own decisions too. If it is true a mother cannot keep and raise her own child or keep her within the family -- maternal or paternal -- what are the other options other than adoption?
And society must look at its role in this unregulated industry of baby trading. What parameters can we place on the "for profit" side of adoption? What interventions can be put into place to properly screen, educate and prepare adoptive parents? What information can be provided for birth families about their decision, in order that they think more deeply before parting with one of their own?
Perhaps what we are exploring here, in this discussion of adoption, is the deeper understanding and value of motherhood. In British Columbia, at a conference called the Vancouver Dialogues, Deepak Chopra asked His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama this question: "If we make motherhood the most sacred profession on our planet, is there a possibility for world peace?" The Dalai Lama responded, "Yes, that's very good." Applause silenced the discussion for several minutes.
Every human being on the planet comes through the womb of a mother. To force a mother to choose between keeping her offspring or losing acceptance by the culture is to force her to split in half and as a result, to collapse. Rather than divide mothers, can we keep women intact, empower them and thus empower children to feel whole, safe and content?
Examining our own minds for magical thinking, reflecting on our intentions to adopt, exploring all of the options before giving our children up for adoption, and especially, breaking open the mythology that adoption is the answer can be a beginning toward an important collective awakening.
Jennifer Lauck is the author of Found: A Memoir, The True Sequel to Blackbird with Seal Press and her book video trailer can be seen on YouTube. She is also the author of the New York Times Bestseller Blackbird, Still Waters, Show Me the Way. She is a regular blogger on Prolifically Raw and Shewrites.com.
Follow Jennifer Lauck on Twitter: www.twitter.com/JenniferLauck
I'm now wondering if my son's vision problems, detected by his pedi when he was an infant, were the result of infant separation trauma. Strabismus, they call it, and he had surgery by a well-renowned surgeon at age 2, but even after patching, his eyes never have worked together properly. When he was 11 we found a wonderful optometrist who specializes in vision therapy, but we were past the point of very much help, which apparently ends around age 9.
Ours is an open adoption, but sadly both bparents have ceased to be in contact. This is a deep wound for our son, and we just pour our love and prayers into him, reminding him that they love him but just have difficulties in their own lives which keep them from being in touch right now. Thank you for your work, Jennifer.
I hope your son will find the courage to meet you and let you into his heart soon. It is so hard for adopted people...the guilt and the fear is soul deep. I firmly believe there will be no true healing until mother and child are allowed to freely re-unite and have their natural relationship.
thank you for continuing to post blogs about the need for adoption reform
i appreciate your willingness to share the dark places in your own life in an attempt to help readers feel what it was like For You.
i'm sorry so many feel it is easier to attack your views or challenge your experiences than to simply add their own testimony with respect for yours.
face it: many folks whose lives have been changed by adoption – for better, or worse, or somewhere in the middle – will never agree on every detail of what it has meant for them, nor what it should be for others.
but if we are ever to persuade the rest of the country that adoptee rights are valuable and worth protecting, and everyone deserves to know who they are and where they came from, we should consider what battles are worth fighting – open records for all – and which matters ought to be filed, politely, in the "Agree to Disagree" folder.
if we could harness the energy into positive change, we could leave a legacy that truly matters.
Human beings are good, we know how to do the right thing, all we need is to know and to speak and to be heard. Our hearts will open,I have total faith in our best selves.
Jenifer Lauck based a part of her case against adoption on Bert Hellinger's studies that concluded that "adoption with ill intent leads to consequences such as death." Medical practice with
ill intent can also lead to consequences such as death; but we don't make that rare contingency
the cornerstone of health care planning.
Ms Lauck's contends that separating a child from his biological mother creates extreme
psychological and physical trauma. Why does she not mention the trauma inflicted
when a child is separated from his father? Isn't that a much more common problem in modern
America?
In 1990 I was invited to speak to a group of adoptive parents about adoption. I was 18 and looked about 12. I foolishly went. I said simply, to start "being adopted has been the most painful experience of my life" which is true, for me. The room erupted. It was amazing grown men began to shout and point at me, standing up out of chairs. It was different for their kids, it was different for them. Well maybe it was. No need to tear me limb from limb for it, but that is how strongly people want to protect denial around adoption .
Many other factors enter into individual adoptee's lives. Yes, there are broad legal injustices like sealed adoption records that do affect a whole class of people, adoptees, unjustly, but the emotional effects are individual, varied, and cannot be generalized to include all adopted people. To do so hurts the cause of adoption reform rather than helping, by making it look like just one more fringe movement with bizarre beliefs, rather than a civil rights violation worthy of legal redress,
where is this thought going? if a birth mother can't keep the baby and her family can't keep the baby and she doesn't give the baby up for adoption, then what? the other option would have been abortion, though you never mention that & i'm not sure if that's what you are suggesting here.
Although most people think of infant adoptions when they think about the concept of adoption, the majority of adoptions in the US are adoptions from fostercare.
"Current estimates of the annual number of infants adopted domestically (excluding foster and relative adoption) range from 25,000 to 30,000—more than all international adoptions combined."
source: http://www.adoptivefamilies.com/domestic_adoption.php
Over 50,000 children are adopted from foster care every year.
source: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/stats_research/afcars/trends.htm
However, "There are [still] about 115,000 children waiting for adoptive families in the United States foster care system."
source: http://www.adoptuskids.org/resourceCenter/about-children-in-foster-care.aspx
Maybe it needs to be regulated more, I don't know entirely how the system works. But I do know is that adoption in it's pure form way for unwanted babies (and you can blame them being unwanted on society, but that doesn't change the fact that they are unwanted) to find their ways into the homes of parents who want them.
We brought our second son home when he was 7 weeks old. His foster mom (transitional care provider is now the oh, so warm and fuzzy term!) described him as a very, very happy little guy who didn't sleep very much. We brought him home, and he slept all the time for his first week with us, at least. I so vividly remember one of those first days. I was giving him his bottle, and he was grooving on that bottle. Then he looked up, saw my face, and his little face crumpled. He began to cry. Actually, I would say he sobbed. I felt such compassion for him! I held him close, rocked him a bit, and said, "I know, I know, I know. You thought it
***
Where are the sight problems in the 95% of us born in hospitals in the last 60 yrs, who, yes, were separate from our mothers from more than 45 minutes. to be cleaned, to sleep, to eat, and many other things.in the hospital and later at home?
***
You might but it's because your parents died, and in the case of your mother, a terrible death when you were very young.
could it be that if they were healthy and live thirty yrs, you'd be fine?
and now you are believing in pseudoscience and fake medicine re: your son's eye troubles.
and it wasn't biology that made you have this "look right, smell right" connection to your biological mother but simple psychology-you made yourself believe that based on your own personal beliefs about adoption.
You seem to gloss over it and attribute it all to adoption. and you seem to tell all adoptees what their experience is or will be.
You do not know them. You are not in their bodies.