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Front Porch: What’s real to adopted children

A friend recently pointed out something she read in an obituary that just made her mad – and sad.

Among the list of surviving family members, several people were identified as children of the deceased and one person was named as the adopted child. “For those of us who are adopted,” she said, “that’s like a knife in the heart, as if we are somehow not quite as good as the birth children. We are separate.”

But might there be some other reason for that listing, I asked – that perhaps it was to identify the child whom the family had rescued from a difficult situation or brought to America from a foreign land and were most proud of, that her adopted status was special in a good way? My friend gently suggested I’d seen too many Hallmark Channel movies and pointed out how many times and places that distinction was made for no apparent purpose.

Of particular concern to this friend and to others I have since spoken to about this subject is the terminology surrounding who their real mother is. This again goes back to those sentimental movies in which the adopted child searches for his or her “real” mother. There’s a heart-felt reunion and – cue the violin music – a lot of happily-ever-aftering ensues.

Despite the blatant tugging on the emotions that those movies exploit, several people have told me that it really was important for them to find the woman who gave birth to them, even among those who had the happiest of upbringings. Sometimes the reunion was good and added to the adopted child’s circle of people who love them. Sometimes not.

“I don’t ever remember not wanting to meet my birth mother,” my friend Wendy said. “I wanted to look into her face and see if I could recognize myself there.” Wendy said she had that fantasy that apparently many adoptees have – that there’s this other woman out there who will make everything wonderful, who will make it clear that her birth child was loved and wanted and that there was some compelling reason why she could not raise the child herself.

“I wanted the mother who dwelled in that fantasy land where everything was perfect, where the family was perfect,” Wendy said.

And when she did find her birth mother after searching for 13 years, she met a woman with the same hairline and the same crook in her little finger. But she didn’t find the fantasy. Instead she found a woman who demanded things from her, provided almost no information and announced that she was expecting to move in with Wendy and be taken care of by her.

It was not a Hallmark Channel movie.

“Still, I’m glad I did it,” said Wendy, who decided after several years that she needed to break contact with the woman who bore her. “I would have always wondered if I hadn’t reached out. I also came to understand more about my mother, the mother who raised me, and how much she really loved me, even if our home wasn’t the fantasy I’d dreamed of. She was my mother.”

Another friend gave birth to a boy when she was a teenager and “quite a mess, hardly able to take care of myself.” She relinquished him in a closed adoption and never regretted it. She did straighten her life out and later registered with some of the agencies that help adoptees find their birth parents, but she has no plan to reach out to him.

As she explained to me, she knows that he has a perfectly good mother already and does not want to inject herself into his life. She just wants to make it easy for him to find her if he ever has questions or feels the need to meet her.

I know someone else whose children are getting to the age where they’re asking about their birth mother for all of the normal reasons children do that. “I understand that, I truly do,” my friend said, “and while I know it’s not a rejection of me, I do feel a little threatened, like maybe I’ve not been the mother they want or need, that they’ll choose her over me. But it’s an important thing for them, and when they’re old enough, I’ll help them make that connection.”

However, she added, she wished the media and others would stop calling the birth mother the real mother, just like my friend Wendy wants to be considered the real child, not the adopted child.

A woman I know named Jeanne put it best, I think:

“I know who my real mother is. She’s the person who tucked me in at night, taught me to cook, took me to church, suffered with me the first time a boy broke my heart, cried at my wedding, rejoiced with me when I gave birth to my first child, was there for me for all of it. That was my real mother.

“I also had a birth mother.”

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached at upwindsailor@ comcast.net.

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