Re: Know This About Today’s Column
Readers are beginning to share thoughts:
My husband is adopted and he has never wanted to find his birth parents but I would like to thank them because they had great genes! Your column touched a nerve though because a friend of mine who is adopted grew up in Dallas and when his wife was pregnant he found out who his birth parents were and ended up that his dad lived in HP. He approached his dad and his dad told him to go away because he had never told his family that he had fathered another child. Very sad for all sides because my friend is a great guy and his birth dad would be lucky to know him and he should feel good about the fact that he turned out so well. How weird for my friend that he lives blocks away from his biological father and half siblings and he can’t be acknowledged.
A bunch of Victorian Aristocrats.
I have a friend who experienced the opposite. When he looked up his birth parents, his birth father didn’t know about his existence previously but welcomed him into the family and they’ve since spent holidays together (although he’ll never be as close to the birth father as to his adopted parents). In contrast, my friend had several communications with his mother (who it turned out is a CPA like her biological son - guess it’s hereditary) but she has been unwilling to meet in person because she has never told her husband and children about the child she bore at the age of 16. She did tell him she always thought of him on his birthday, the 4th of July, and it gave her comfort that he had been raised by a loving family and was successful and happy.
An adopted Overheardian now in her thirties writes:
A lot of my friends have wanted me to try to find my birth mother to thank her. They think she’d be proud of me. But she had nothing to do with how I turned out.
Plus, I have a healthy ego…I prefer to think of her as a mensa biological mother who looked a lot like Princess Diana and had chaste sex with a George Clooney look-a-like. They both did the right thing-even though it broke their hearts.
I think there are two kinds of people that fit this criteria.
1) Those that want to know or at least meet their child, hoping and praying that they did the right thing, and
2) Those that don’t want anyone, including their current spouse, children and friends to know that they gave birth or fathered a child when they were too young to provide for their child.
I guess that my ultimate point of view is that it should be the child that gets to decide whether or not he wants to meet his birth parents because that is the absolute LEAST they can do once that person is an adult. And, for a parent not acknowledge that person is their child, is very sad.
We have coffee or lunch with acquintances, friends, even people we don’t particulary care for all of the time and to tell your CHILD to quietly go away is just wrong.
I am not adopted, but my wife is. She has never expressed an interest in meeting either of her birth parents, but if she one day decides to find out more, I hope that they will at least meet with her just one time to find out what an outstanding person she has turned out to be….no strings attached.
Certain secrets, whether kept or told, can sometimes turn into festering cancers. And for any man or woman who keeps hidden the fact they parented a child, hell is surely preferable to what they will suffer here. I’m a mother and I cannot imagine the pain a woman experiences, who goes through nine months of pregnancy, and then bravely gives up her child for adoption. You will get no judgment from me.
Bravo to all who have had the courage to deliver an out-of-wedlock child, instead of having an abortion, and arranged for adoption. In the end, tangled webs are not good for the soul. This is true. Indeed it is axiomatic. But sometimes untangling a web can do just as much harm.
And, forgive me if I am mistaken in inferring some suggestion that somehow the mother’s decision to remain silent has something to do with a desire to preserve her social station. It most assuredly, as anyone well knows if they are a mother, does NOT.
It may be hard to understand how a mom who makes this kind of sacrifice might feel shame or guilt years later; anyone who knew would laud her as a gutsy heroine. But so be it if she is reluctant to step forward. Social conventions are still firmly in place, even more firmly in place, perhaps, than her existing family structures. She has others now, too, to whom she owes a duty.
Maybe one day these conventions will weaken or fall away, though I certainly hope not. But unless that time comes, it is fairly undeniable that a birth mother’s existing family structure would experience a seismic event if her given-to-adoption child were to suddenly, after many years, appear and be enveloped in the family fold, after so many years of lies by omission.
So let’s applaud the mother’s sacrifice with compassion, understanding her situation, and not judge or condemn her. Because we can all agree that no matter what she ever does, from back to here on out, she will always be a heroine.