I just re-read my blog about Chapter 8 of ‘Beyond the Red Door’, and thought it might be useful to write about how hard it is to take the first step and contact a birth parent. More importantly, people outside of adoption may not understand why it is so difficult. And I invite your comments as well. This is just off the top of my head.

It takes a lot of courage to make that decision, the decision to search. What makes it a hard choice initially is society’s inherent attitude towards adoptees, that they should be grateful for being adopted. How could they possibly want more than what they had - loving parents who chose to take them on?

It’s not something I was ever openly told over and over, but it cropped up either as a direct comment, or as an implied one. It was enough to stop me from expressing my real feelings to my adoptive parents, even though they were not the instigators of these comments. I was lucky, then, that they were the ones to bring up the notion to find my roots when I turned eighteen.

But even with their blessing, their support and my need to discover who I was, reaching out to my birth parents was frightening. What if I was rejected again? Was I really not good enough? And what “right” did I have to “intrude” into their lives?

These words, “right” and “intrude” certainly plagued my life, tripping me up all the way along the search and reunion track. Again, I think the belief that I didn’t have the right to contact my natural family, that I mustn’t intrude and cause them any hurt, came from covert and overt messages all around me. It makes building and maintaining relationships in adoption very difficult.

I suppose it didn’t help that in both initial meetings with my birth parents, I got the “not interested” and “don’t believe we’re related” messages. If someone had asked me “what’s the worst thing that could happen?” when setting out to make contact, I think I would have given these answers. Not a good way to start a relationship, if given the choice, which I wasn’t by my natural mother.

Another barrier to making contact is the fear of an aggressive response by the natural parent about being “found”. And here I am reminded of the laws that unfairly prevent adoptees from discovering their true identities, that it is somehow the product of a “warped or crazed mind” to want to find our families of origin. Just as I am appalled that Aboriginal people weren’t granted citizenship in Australia until 1967, I shake my head in disbelief at the lack of human rights to people affected by adoption. But spare a thought for sperm donor children whose records don’t even exist, and who encounter the abrupt “no contact” response if they are lucky enough to have identifying information.

The reasons I’ve listed here relate to my experience. There are many more reasons why adoptees find it hard to make that first contact with a natural parent. I’d love to hear your own experiences, and I’m not forgetting the other parties to adoption either. Feel free to make your comments.

Adoption reunions are so complex. Sometimes they run smoothly, sometimes they don’t even start. At other times, one party is desperate for connection while the other is reluctant. When the relationship is like this last example, when is it time to let go?

I read a great post by Mia

Mia (an adoptee with a reluctant birth mother) talked about not liking the term “letting go”, that she didn’t want to let go. What she says makes sense, and I have no problems with it.

My perspective is different, though. My birth mother “rejected” me in our first and only meeting. She said things like, “you’re nothing like me”, “I never thought about you”. Now I know these are all defensive comments, her way of coping, but they hurt. When I was reunited with her parents and sister - my birth grandparents and aunt - I always wondered if they might be able to make her change her mind. It took many years to finally see they couldn’t, that my birth mother would never change her mind.

I don’t think I realised that I’d actually let go of that hope until speaking with someone recently who has worked with many adoptees in counselling. She said, about my birth mother, “there’s still time”. I then realised that I wasn’t hoping or waiting, that I just knew nothing would change, and that I felt no anger towards my birth mother.

So for me, letting go has been the right thing to do. It had to be my decision, no-one else’s. Letting go has helped me to feel more settled in my life. But it is a long road before you get there!

Can you hear my huge sigh of relief? In trying to sort out the problem with my PayPal buttons, I’ve gone completely grey, developed insomnia, and lost weight!
But the problem is fixed and both the PayPal buttons work now.
So again, my apologies for any inconvenience I’ve caused you!
I’m looking forward to some non-technical dramas from now on.

I had an email from someone today who told me that the ‘Purchase Book’ link on my site (the Australian one) isn’t working! She tried about a month ago, and couldn’t succeed.

Please let me know if you’ve had similar problems. And those of you outside Australia, please let me know as well. This is the sort of nightmare nobody wants! Your help is needed here, and my sincere apologies if you’ve tried to order and failed.

Please email me at janet@janetshaw.com

Again, I apologise for any inconvenience. I’ll talk to my techie guru about remedying the problem.

I’ve changed over my feeds in Feedburner. The new one is:
RSS feed
Update your subscription to make sure you don’t miss out on a post!
Now just in case I’ve given you the wrong way of pasting this to your news aggregator - as I am still learning all this new techie stuff - here is the actual feed url:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/BeyondTheRedDoor

I said you’d need tissues for Chapter 7, and you’ll need them for Chapter 8 as well!

Get used to me saying that this was the hardest chapter to write, because I think the further I get into my story, the harder it was to write about things that happened to me.

So in this chapter, I take the big plunge and contact my natural father through a mediation agency. Straightforward? No, quite the opposite. Again with the tangle of emotions that I was carrying, together with a lack of understanding of the complex issues for all parties in the adoption triangle, I stumble into a reunion that just about knocks me out. I’d been blind (excuse the pun) to any signs that my natural father doubted our relationship, so when he threw me this curved ball, I wasn’t ready for it.

Months go by with very little communication, letters that go unanswered, questions hanging. Finally, the DNA tests are done, and our relationship is proven. In all this, my adoptive parents stood by me, as solid as rocks.

Does it get easier then, yu ask? No, it doesn’t. And you’ll have to read the chapter to find out what happens.