Regular readers already know why Mother’s Day has a lot of added adoption layers for me personally, but for those unfamiliar with my writings, the condensed version is I’m an adult adoptee black-holed by the Ohio sealed records system, who just happened to be born (apparently, anyway) one Mother’s Day in the late 1960’s. Thus Mother’s Day many years falls upon the date my amended birth certificate claims is my birthday.

I’m a Mother’s Day Bastard.

Correspondingly, somewhere out there, (if she’s even still alive,) is a Mother who gave birth on Mother’s Day to a daughter who eventually disappeared into a sealed records adoption.

I’ve already written some preliminary thoughts about all this in years past:

2008

“Birthmother’s Day” and a Day without Adoption

Mothers’ Day and my day

2009

Weekend round up- “Birthmother’s Day”, and A Day without Adoption, & Mother’s Day and My Day

Now here we are in 2010. A third Mother’s Day blogging this sorry state of affairs.

This year, far from having good news to report about perhaps more states restoring original birth certificate access to all their adopted citizens, we’ve seen more than a fifth of the country vomiting forth horrendous bill after horrendous bill, some of which offer up a Faustian bargain of access for some at the direct expense of the rights of others.

This is what happens when legislators think they know just enough about “adoptee rights” to really fuck things up.

This is also what happens when adoptees themselves are willing to settle for less than full rights restored to all.

When individual adoptees are willing to set aside any concept of class Bastard (see point 1 on the link) and instead go rogue, beginning to bargain for table scrap “privileges” granted by the state to a lucky few by trading away the human rights of the Bastard standing next to them.

Bastard Nationals have long had a name for those who behave thusly, Benedict bastards (note Marley’s 2004 use of the term here, as but one example.)

The minute a Benedict bastard betrays the full human rights of the Bastard standing next to them they lose any claim to speak for class Bastard. (As Illinois State Representative Sara Feigenholtz is learning the hard way, at the moment.)

All of this is little more than evidence of what happens when some nebulous concept of “adoptee rights” is demanded without laying the educational groundwork in place beforehand.

Legislators need to understand what a genuine restored access bill is and isn’t.

That takes both people on the ground educating AND legislators willing to set aside their abortion mythos fears for time being and actually being willing to listen.

It means knowing history and how this current state of affairs came to be, knowing the courts findings, and understanding the complex webs of interests that have their own reasons they protect the existing sealed records systems. It means knowing both how sealed records legislation came to sweep the country in the first place AND the intricacies, personalities, and details of how individual states came to support sealed records locally.

But that takes work, and research, and is never so cut and dry as pure sloganeering or being willing to settle for table scraps.

Nope, this past year, has been a disaster for some states. Many stand on the brink of passing yet more black holing, ‘access for me, but not for thee’ legislation.

Saddest of all, in a number of these cases, it has been Benedict bastards willing to settle for so very little. While search and reunion oriented groups have been busy gutting Bastard human rights, they’ve pretty much freed up the industry to go after its long term proactive goals of restructuring American adoption. From the tax credits built into the health care reform bill to the massive child grab in Haiti, the industry has had its hands untied.

And Bastards, those of us who do care about class Bastard? We’ve been forced to defend on all fronts, both federal and now state by state against the very Benedict bastards so willing to throw our human rights away.

There have been times in this blogging adventure that I have felt glimmers of optimism.

But this period between Mother’s Day 2009 and 2010 has made it abundantly clear just how little self respect and fight some adoptees have left in them.

I’ve never considered myself an optimist, but clearly the exhaustion of the fight and the passing of so many years has left some willing to settle for so very, very little. The more Bastards have to fend off the deform efforts of Benedict bastards is the less time, energy, and resources we have left to fight what to many of us are some of the very core battle, the outright child selling, the lies and secrets that have always protected such practices, from Georgia Tann to today in China, and the all to human toll of what this does to parents and women.

There is more than enough genuine work to be done without having to fight junk legislation in multiple states at a time.

So another year gone by.

Right this moment, by many measures, we are farther away from the goals than we were last year at this time.

It’s a sobering assessment.

Julia Ward Howe, Anna Jarvis

But then Anna Jarvis ultimately lost her battle with the florists, and Julia Ward Howe ended up with a “Mother’s Day” more about Hallmark cards than world peace.

I can only hope Bastards can make our work more enduring.

I’ve already said pretty much everything I needed to say in last year’s,

Mothers’ Day and my day

Since I first wrote that piece, it’s been another year of ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same.’

May 10th, 2009 marks another year of still only one phone call to make.

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Sadly, Saturday slid out from underneath me due to other obligations, but, a bit late here, I wanted to also point out my post from last year pertaining to

“Birthmother’s Day” and a Day without Adoption

It too, covers the Saturday portion of these weekends, and deserves time and attention as well.

As to why “Birthmother’s Day” is in quotes? Read the piece, it’s simply not language I prefer to utilize.

Finally, lest this post seem little more than a poignant rerun, Lorraine Dusky (herself a Mother,) has a few choice words about “Birthmother events.”

In the spirit of letting Mothers speak for themselves, and NOT speaking for them or over them, here’s a link worth the read on a day like today.

What’s Wrong with Birthmother Events on Mother’s Day? Just about EVERYTHING

The entire piece is an important read.

While Mothers (of all stripes) react each in their own way to these weekends, I find these two paragraphs of Lorraine’s strong work most deeply mirror my own thinking about such.

Not surprisingly, I am not a fan of any “birth mother celebrations,” even if they were the brainchild of first/birth mothers themselves, as apparently some of them are. The Saturday before Mother’s Day is designated as “Birthmother’s Day.” Special gatherings of first mothers are planned in several states, I read. To all this I say, gag me with a spoon. I can not think of anything more depressing that getting together with other first mothers on the day calibrated to remind us of possibly the worst day in our lives…unless we were going to the theater, a super lunch, a day at the spa, or just getting together because we are friends.

This is the first year in several that I did not get numerous reminders to attend a Spence-Chapin gala in Manhattan, which I looked upon as a mawkish reminder of all that had been lost. I know a hasty email I sent offended at least one of the birth mothers involved in the planning. But I can not see how such a “celebration” for women who have relinquished their children–sponsored by an adoption agency–is anything more than a pat on the head for good service done, as in: You gave us product for our business. Thank you. Hey, have lunch on us, light a candle together, we share your pain.

What many don’t realize is that particularly for womyn who have never revealed their hidden status as Mothers, today may be a personal form of their own annually celebrated hell. For every Mother like Lorraine, boldly writing their truths, there are also other womyn locked in silence of a decades old secret.

I’m not sure any of the readily “visible”/above the waterline members (Parents, Adopted People, or Adoptive Parents) of the adoption pentagon go through this time of year completely unscathed.

Add in the bonus round “fun” of both families dealing with miscarriage or infertility and the lives of womyn such as myself, who are intentionally Childfree (not childless, but choosing a lifetime devoid of children of our own) and it becomes readily apparent, “Mother’s Day weekend” is fraught with emotional and systemic complexity and often unstated volumes worth of the reproductive biographical realities of all our lives.

What to Hallmark is so often reduced to inks and papers, to womyn ourselves is a weekend filled with so many of the “impolite” topics and conversations that form the very fabric of our lives.

Each year, over these weekends, whether I like it or not, my thoughts turn to each of us, each in our positions, each with their own stories to tell. I find so much of the landscape spread out before me profoundly disturbing and all too often tinged with genuine sorrow.

But it’s more than that.

I wrote yesterday about how today is all too often painful for many different kinds of Mothers for many different reasons.

What I didn’t mention though, are a particular subset of (Original) Mothers, those who for good or ill happen to have given birth on Mother’s Day.

Oh yes, birth happens on that second Sunday in May, just as any other day. So there are Mother’s Day Original Mothers/”Birthmothers”; those womyn who gave birth on Mother’s Day, who place or find their children in adoptions. Some even blog about their experiences, here for example.

Thus Mother’s Day takes on whole new levels of meaning for those “lucky” few.

Why write about them on a day like to today, a day all about Spring flowers and Sunday Brunches and all the heartwarming good feelings people fixate upon when they hear the words “Mother’s Day?” I mean come on, womyn losing their kids permanently, and into things like sealed adoptions? What a downer. Who the hell wants to talk about things like that on a day like this?

Well, I do, but not only out of empathy.

For you see, one of those few Mothers who gave birth on Mother’s Day in the late 1960’s in Ohio just happened to be my Mother. Which means Mother’s Day, also happens to fall on my Birthday many years. The particular day I was born, for example.

Being a product of a sealed adoption I can only imagine what that has meant to her decade after decade (both the good, and the potential anguish, perhaps even anguish a bit above and beyond the usual due to the arbitrary significance of said date.)

I certainly know what it meant to me. Being a sealed records adoptee who has a Birthday as Mother’s Day is it’s own particular hell.

I’ve also had somewhat of an insight into what it’s meant for my Adoptive Mother, though I won’t presume to speak for her, or to her feelings on this.

So today I can only make one phone call, when the reality is, I need to make two.

Though odds are I’d be willing to bet My Original Mother wishes she could call and wish me “Happy Birthday” as well, (although she too has been unable to cross the divide Ohio’s sealed records have created.) As is, I have no way of knowing whether or not she even knows whether I’m still alive.

So for the Mother I’ve never known, (having the Ohio sealed records system to ‘thank’ for that) all I can do is send my “Happy Mother’s Day” out across the net.

You deserved better than that.

Much of the language surrounding the day deals in stoic and mythic terms such as ‘honoring their “ultimate sacrifice.” Which to my ears says more about the lifetimes of loss and trying to cope with those realities than anything wonderful.

Does anyone really think reading bad adoption poetry and inviting Adoptive Mothers to share their experiences is really a particularly healthy way of dealing with the year in and year out realities that so many womyn locked behind a sealed records system, never to see their child (again, if they even did in the first place) have to deal with? A lifetime’s worth of not knowing whether the child you gave birth to is alive or dead hardly strikes me as something ‘celebrate.’

Far as I’m concerned, Original mothers are still Mothers; just Mothers who whether by consent or force were unable, unwilling or outright prevented from raising their children. They deserve Mother’s day just as much, if not more than most Mothers.

After all, your typical Mother thinks, “oh isn’t that nice, a day for me; maybe I get breakfast in bed, some nice flowers, taken out to dinner by my husband and kids, oh look, a Hallmark card.” Original Mothers on the other hand, get to spend not only their average day in and day out wondering but then get a special day of anguish.

For those for whom the birth and adoption is a secret buried even after all these years, their Mother’s day secret sounds more like their own private hell. Even years later, even after going on to have other kids, the ’secret’ haunts each Mother’s day.

Sealed records Mothers get no flowers, no Hallmark cards, no (adopted) kid. Even Original Mothers in reunion often run headlong into the language obstacle of whether they’ll ever hear the child they lost to adoption call them “Mom.” Mother’s Day even for those in reunion can be a day of divided loyalties on the part of their children, and feeling like a third wheel or ‘the other womyn’ for Original Mothers.

Which is not to say Adoptive Mothers and the non-consensually non-Mothered, are off the hook either. Mother’s day for couples dealing with infertility, or miscarriage, or simply not having a child but desperately wanting one are no picnic either. Even for those who were able to adopt Mother’s Day can be painful as they may feel like second class Mothers, or it can be a difficult annual reminder of their own inability to birth a child, leading to feelings of being a ‘failed womyn’ as in American culture “womyn” and “sooner or later giving birth” are viewed as synonymous. Inability, or even refusal to do so, results in many assumptions about the very core of one’s ‘womynhood’ or ‘womynly nature.’

Linguistically, I feel most comfortable when using the “Mother” terminology with “Mothers” and “Adoptive Mothers,” just as you would “Mother” and “Step-Mother.” The first is the default setting, the only/basic way by which people join the living, by way of biology, by way of Mothers. The modifier then goes on the social structure that deviates from that baseline. (Which is why it irks me to no end when people insist upon using terminology like “Mothers and BirthMothers” thus making the Adoptive appear the norm and the biological reality appear the ’special situation.’)

Let it NEVER be assumed that just because a child exists a womyn wanted to bear that child, further, let it NEVER be assumed that just because a child was placed for adoption that the Original Parents necessarily consented to that action.

People use terminology like ‘her choice” to cover over many things from lack of access to affordable birth control to lack of access to the financial resources necessary to raise a child. Adoption does not directly correlate 1:1 to consent.

In a world where adoption is so often a product of dire poverty, particularly internationally, the assumption that everything must have been fine, that consent MUST have been there, is simply denial of reality.

Does that mean no adoption is ever the outcome based on consent of Original Parents? Certainly not.

But that consent must be examined with an eye towards what consent means in relation to many factors, not just is there a signature on a piece of paper. Then there are good solid questions relating to just what exactly it was the Mother or Parents thought they were consenting to at the time, perhaps an “open adoption” without any force of law behind it, that went on to evaporate before their very eyes?

So all that said, by way of honouring those who had the opportunity to raise their children stolen from them, particularly so many Original mothers internationally, those who often have the least voice in all this, I share the following by way of personal commentary, because sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

(I know it’s a few days after Children’s Day, please bear with me)

Photo by Kim Bong-gyu/The Hankyoreh

A Day Without Adoption

Members of Adoptee Solidarity Korea, an adoptee-led organization based in Seoul, place coins around an airplane displayed at the Han River Park in western Seoul on Children’s Day, May 5.

ASK, which aims to raise awareness to issues related to intercountry adoption and advocate for change in South Korea’s social welfare system, celebrated Children’s Day by calling for A Day Without Adoption, a day on which no children are sent abroad for adoption. Instead, the group advocates for providing single mothers and underprivileged families with the opportunity to stay together.

The campaign featured the construction of an approximately 4-by-4-meter airplane, around the edges of which were placed 2,000 100-won coins symbolizing the exchange of young Korean children for various currencies both tangible and intangible.

Each 100-won coin was representative of 100 children adopted abroad since the mid-1950s to the present day, a total of over 200,000 by some accounts.

Here’s a link to Adoptee Solidarity Korea (ASK) (Korean and English languages.) I’ll be adding them to my blogroll as well.

The ASK press release pertaining to the Day without Adoption is poinent and worth the read as well.
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Oh, and as for Mother’s Day proper? Hah! Have I ever got a blog entry for you. Stay tuned same bat time, same bat channel.