Why it’s hard contacting birth parents for the first time
February 16th, 2007 by janetI 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.
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March 6th, 2007 at 4:44 am
I am 35 years old and I found out when I was about 14 that I was adopted; and not by my parents. Adoption had never been discussed in our house before. My sister and I are 8 months apart and look nothing alike, but that’s besides the point. Anyways we got to thinking, how can we be 8 months apart if it takes 9 months to have a baby? So we got to snooping around when Mom and Dad weren’t home. We found an adoption book, so that led us to look further day by day. Well, we found pictures of our Mom in the hospital with my sister but none of me, along with a hospital bracelet.
March 6th, 2007 at 7:50 am
Nicole, that is so sad. There are many stories like yours, and it’s hard to believe they still exist. The secrecy of adoption rears its ugly head again. Part of it, I think, is that some adoptive parents fear they will lose their child if they know they’re adopted, because they will search for the natural parents. What they don’t realise is that by concealing the truth, they have a very big risk of “losing” their child, because they have lost that child’s trust in them. What a terrible shock it must have been for you. I don’t know how you coped with it back then…it would have been very distressing. Some people confront their parents, while others clam up, bottle their feelings. Both scenarios can be disastrous. I can only hope that with the education potential adoptive parents get these days that secrecy no longer prevails.
May 28th, 2007 at 9:13 am
Hi, I’m actually doing a Mini PIP for society and culture.
I’m reseachin in class right now and came across this blog.
(How I don’t know when they censor 90% of the useful websites. -_-’)
Anyway I’m only 16 and I think I’ve been amazingly lucky in finding out about my biological family. My Grandmother (on my mother’s side) seems to have contacted my parents about 2 years ago, I got a call from a councillor person to see if I’d be ok with it and I said yes since I figured I didn’t really have much to loose.
I finally met my Grand-mother, my Aunties, cousins etc and they all turned out to share some striking similarities to me and some natural quirks too. ^_^
I have however omitted my mother.
She is from what I can deduce from talking with my cousin and poking around a few pamphlets, probably in a home for the mentally ill as she has scizophrenia. So I have had the interesting experience of meeting nearly everyone in my biological family except for my mother. =\
Anyway I have to finnish his up now as class has just ended.
I don’t know if this was even relevant but I have had a fair bi of trouble finding any online chats more based around the adoptee’s experiences than the parents.