Is It Stalking or Sleuthing?

February is Eric’s birthday month – he’ll be 24 on the 24^th. I shrieked a little to myself in the car the other day when I realized that he’ll be just three years younger than I was when I had him. Wow – no real sense of what I was doing when I was 24. Probably my last year living in Tucson – planning, as it were, for a move to the Big Apple (actually, Jersey City, NYC’s wormy little brother across the Hudson River). I had a job of sorts, but no real plans for the future. Definitely not planning to have a baby and place him for adoption. Calls to mind that great John Lennon quote:

life is what happens

So birthday gifts are always a bit of a challenge. I didn’t get anything for the first few years. Later, at my sister’s recommendation, I’d buy gifts as I saw them and just hold on to them. Even after we’d opened the adoption (I learned the Stanfields’ address before Eric’s 3^rd birthday), I never wanted Kathy and Bruce to feel pressured or threatened. When Eric and I finally met in person for my wedding – he was 16 – I gave him all the gifts I’d been keeping for him. Most of them were Christmas ornaments – one per year – and small stuffed animals I’d collected from the various places I’d traveled through the years.

He’s a sensitive kid, so he seems to appreciate thoughtful gifts as much as fun ones. Usually I try to do a little of both. I remember Kathy telling me that when Eric was in maybe second or third grade, he came home with that typical childhood project: the family tree. Sensitive, brilliant kid that he was – even as an 8- or 9-year-old – he asked for two pages, so that he could do two family trees: one for the Stanfield family and one for his birthfamily.

family tree

As it turns out, I have rather detailed family trees for both sides of my family. A cousin on my dad’s side did some fairly sophisticated research, so that tree is bigger, with many more branches. My mom’s tree is kind of like her family – a bit scattershot, misspellings here, wrong dates there. But it’s a good start and contains a lot of info I wouldn’t have access to were it not for the fact that somebody thought to record even these convoluted details.

So this year for his birthday, I was thinking I might finally try to put a family tree together for Eric, since I do have most of the pieces from my side of the family. Felt a little silly to realize that both of my sides still equal only one side of Eric’s family tree. Which means I’d need to research Tony’s family tree in order to do both sides justice.

I lost touch with Tony a number of years ago. The last time we saw each other in person was February 2002. We had a failed attempt at a reconciliation, after he broke up with a woman he’d been living with and was feeling lonely, I think. Back when Eric graduated from high school, I took some time and finally tracked Tony down via Facebook and other online tools. It was a circuitous process, but I’m a good researcher. I couldn’t find Tony outright, so I started with his Aunt Judy, which led to his sister Wendy, which led to him – and his wife. That enabled me to find his address in Bedminster, NJ – which it turns out was just 10 minutes from the house where Eric grew up and where he once again lives with his family. No surprise, when I stopped to consider the vast number of coincidences that have occurred and helped shape this entire adoption relationship.

I wouldn’t call it stalking, necessarily, but every now and again I would try to check in on Tony and Wendy. She posts much more frequently – and it was on her page that I learned that their dad had passed away a few years ago. My most recent foray revealed that Tony and his wife have split up – so that address I found for Eric a few years ago won’t do him any good now.

hatchet cake

Ever since Eric’s college graduation last May, I’ve been thinking on and off about reaching out to Tony, just to let him know his kid is all grown up – a smart, good-looking, thoughtful man. Glad now that I didn’t send a copy of the graduation photo to that address I had for him. But my walk down Memory Lane via Wendy’s FB page was a reminder that Tony really did cut ties with both Eric and me rather completely. There were photos from the time we were dating – but none of Tony and me. It almost felt like I never existed in his life. Perhaps not so surprising, in that this was his sister’s feed – but as much time as I spent with his family, you’d think I might have shown up in one picture. There’s actually a photo of him and his dad in front of a Trump casino in Atlantic City, wearing identical leather jackets. I remember that trip – I’m standing frozen in time, out of frame, but just a few feet away from them. A very similar picture of Tony and me was taken – I actually gave that to Eric a few years ago.

dale & tony

I was also reminded about the Christmas when Tony and I went gift shopping together – for his family. Turns out, he didn’t get me anything, and then took all the gifts I’d helped him wrap and toddled off to Baltimore to spend the holidays with his family, leaving me on my own in Jersey City. Yeah – there were some real douchey moments, and I was an idiot for sticking around as long as I did. Live and learn, isn’t that what they say?

Why do I still think about getting in touch? I guess because I really do want Eric to have all the information he can – before people die and there’s no way to retrieve it. This is his birthfather’s family – people who are his blood relations. Tony told me he’d told Molly (the live-in girlfriend from 2002) about Eric and still planned to tell his family, but I have no idea whether that ever happened. How could he NOT? ricochets through my head – but pretty easily, I’m guessing, if he still compartmentalizes the way he used to.

I remember a while back seeing that Wendy was pretty invested in the whole genealogy fascination, so the thought occurred to me that I might reach out to her, instead of Tony, and just take my chances that she’d get back to me, regardless of whether or not she’d ever learned she has a nephew (or that her daughters have a cousin). If anyone would have their family tree info, it would be Wendy. Reading through her FB posts, I believe we’d get along a lot better today than we did 29 years ago – but considering further, I recognized that her loyalty will always be to her brother first, so I think I’ve pretty much talked myself out of that idea.

Instead, I decided to take a 2-week trial at Ancestry.com and see what I could dig up there. Learned the date their dad passed away – July 6, 2015 – and that he was a college graduate. I would not have guessed that. Tracked down the family’s old address in Cedar Rapids, and confirmed the birth years for both Tony’s mom, Diane, and dad, Dale. But not much more than that. If Wendy’s been working on a family tree of any sort, it’s not public.

One night back in the late ’90s, when we were out playing pool at a bar near work, Tony was a little drunker than usual for a worknight and he (accidentally?) let it slip that there was adoption on both sides of his family. Apparently his Aunt Judy, on his mom’s side, was a birthmother who’d relinquished a baby in her teens. He had no idea whether his cousin had been a boy or a girl – or whether Judy had ever had any sort of reunion. Then, there was his dad’s side – where things get really complicated. The way I remember Tony telling the story was that his dad was one of seven kids, all of whom were adopted out of the family due to what he assumed were financial complications. It was the late 1940s/early 1950s – not sure what other reason there could have been. A few decades later, his dad finally located the last of his brothers – and it was such a big deal it was written up in the local paper. That was the only time Tony ever brought any of this up – so my vague memories of that conversation were all I had to go on.

When I was looking through Wendy’s FB page to try to figure out how long ago their dad had died, I came across an image of that story from the Cedar Rapids newspaper. I didn’t read it at the time, but now that I’m looking for every clue I can find about their family, I went back and pored over it with a microscope. Either I remembered the story incorrectly, or misinterpreted the information, because according to the newspaper article, Dale was one of 15 kids – seven of whom were adopted out. The story doesn’t fill in too many more blanks. But between it, my memory of meeting an aunt and uncle who lived in Tucson, and a few photos I perused on Wendy’s page, I’ve been able to put names to 10 of the 15 siblings. Still no names, dates, or locations for great-grandparents, although I did find separate photos of Diane’s mom and dad.

finding lost brother

And that’s where this story ends, for now. I’ll probably take as stab at the family tree, though I’m not sure I’ll get it all compiled in time to send as a birthday gift. If by some miracle Eric were to decide he’d like more information, I might one day try to contact either Wendy or Tony. Should that happen, I’ll let you know. In the meantime, I’m gonna hang up my sleuthing ways and let bygones by bygones.

______________________________
Laura Orsini is an author, speaker, consultant, and publisher who coaches other authors to make and market exceptional books that change the world for the better. She is birthmother to Eric, who recently graduated from college and began his engineering career. Their adoption has been open for the better part of Eric’s life. She continues to toy with the idea that these posts will one day become a book. In the meantime, you can learn about the first book, The Least Likely Criminal, from her brand new publishing company, Panoply Publishing.

“You’re Not Going to Become a Stalker, Are You?”

Learning the identify of my son’s family was a big deal for me, and it took a while for the significance to sink in. Bruce may not have been happy about it, but the adoption was now on the verge of being fully open. I sat with that for quite some time before I did anything about it, other than tell the Stanfields about my discovery.

In a short time, the adoption was already becoming more open, and while it seemed Eric and I would eventually have a direct relationship, I knew that would probably take some time. In the meantime, I was quite curious about where he lived with his family. So, after about three months, I made the decision to put my investigative skills to use. It took me about a half-hour and cost me $2 to find Kathy and Bruce’s address through a property ownership website. Things are even easier now, as I was able to use social media and pay nothing to locate Eric’s birthfather’s address when I recently went looking for it.

Now that I had the Stanfields’ address, what to do with it, what to do with it…? Go take a peek, of course!

Again, it took a few months to work up my nerve. Then, one Friday night, I got in my Volkswagen Passat with Moondanz, my Jack Russell terrier, and we set off. I went late – about midnight – figuring I’d be less likely to run into the family at that time as I prowled through their neighborhood. This was way before GPS, so I had to rely on printed directions from Mapquest.

As I write this, I can’t imagine how I screwed up the nerve to make that drive – it felt like crossing a line and something very taboo, but it was also something I needed to do. “What are we going to do if they come outside just at the moment we pull up to their house?” I asked Moondanz. “We’ll say hello!” I answered my own question.

So we went, Moondanz and I. It was a short trip, relative to all the pre-planning. Before long, we turned the corner onto their street, and there it sat. A big, squarish house on a long, beautiful block of homes that dwarfed the house where I’d grown up – not to mention how lovely the area was compared to the Jersey City neighborhood where I was living at the time. The lots seemed vast, with long driveways and mailboxes at the street. Even that was something new to me – the mailbox at my childhood home was at the front door, and the ones in my New Jersey apartments were in the vestibules.

So we parked and sat just looking at the house for a while. Then we took a little drive around the neighborhood, before circling back to see #80 one more time. All was still – most houses were dark and there wasn’t another car on the street anywhere. I needn’t have worried about being spotted. Satisfied at having seen Eric’s home, I took a deep breath, and we drove off. And I did not return until October 2012 – at which time I was invited by Eric’s family.

I was in a Spence-Chapin support group at for birthmoms at the time of my field trip, and I remember telling the other members about my grand adventure. As I told the story, Judy Link, the group moderator and a birthmother caseworker, was dismayed by my confession. “You’re not going to turn into a stalker, are you?” she demanded to know, with utter seriousness. All the other birthmothers and I laughed at her. They understood something she did not – my goal was never to stalk Eric or harm him in any way. I just wanted to see where – and to whatever degree possible, how – he was growing up.

Now, Hollywood and the mainstream media have made a cottage industry of telling adoption horror stories about birthmothers coming out of the woodwork to steal their children back from loving, doting adoptive parents. You may remember the famous Baby Jessica and Baby Richard stories from the early and mid-90s. I think it was those cases that prompted my friend Lynn Franklin to write her book, May the Circle Be Unbroken. I have my own opinions about those cases, which I may share in a future post.

I had no thought of doing anything disruptive – not even checking out his church or his school. I just wanted to know where he lived. And once I did, that curiosity was sated and I could move on with my life. At some point over the next year or two, Kathy very casually asked me if I had been by to see the house yet. “Yes – probably about six months after the incident with Barry,” I told her.

“I figured as much,” she said. No worry. No death grip on the kid. No terrified packing up to move out of the country. Just confirming what she already knew. I’m pretty sure that’s how a healthy adoption relationship is supposed to work.

____________________
Laura Orsini is an author, speaker, and consultant who coaches other authors to make and market exceptional books that change the world for the better. She is birthmother to Eric, who is finishing college in Boston this summer. Their adoption has been open for the better part of Eric’s life. She continues to toy with the idea that these posts will one day become a book. In the meantime, you can learn about her novel in progress, Stan Finds Himself on the Other Side of the World.

No Longer Such a Thing as a Closed Adoption

I was born a researcher – or maybe I was just a good student. My dad started taking me to the library by the time I was 6, and I wrote my first research paper on the Great White Shark in second grade. I’m not sure where it came from, but we had reams of that green and white striped continuous-feed computer paper, which I used to make a stuffed Great White Shark that accompanied the paper. My next paper was on Vermont, including details about Montpelier and how maple syrup is made. Point is, by high school, writing was like breathing and research was second nature to me. No wonder my first real job was as a research librarian at The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson.

I’m not sure at what point the Spence-Chapin Agency began offering fully open adoption as an option – meaning that both the adoptive parents and the birthparents had full contact information for each other, and some sort of agreement for ongoing contact. The agency would have no role in facilitating the continuation of the relationship, once the adoption papers were signed. Optional counseling would, of course, still be available, should either party choose to pursue it. When I asked about open adoption in 1994, I was told, “We don’t really do that at Spence-Chapin.” Interestingly, that was enough for me at the time, and I moved on without pursuing it any further. Perhaps I knew that if I waited long enough, we’d get there in our adoption.

The thing that’s always perplexed me, though, even way back when I was still pregnant with Eric, was the notion that in 1994 – more or less the dawn of the Information Age – any adoptive parent could believe, even for a moment, that a fully closed adoption was still possible. I’d seen the TV shows. Fictional private investigators could find a person based on a single word scribbled on a matchbook cover. And I once heard of a real-life game (I was unable find details tonight on the interwebs after a comprehensive 10-minute search) wherein a person was assigned the task of finding a stranger in New York City simply by asking random people if they knew that person. On average, it took contestants just 6 hours to locate the person in question.

Closed adoptions? Pshaw – the agencies and attorneys were just conning these prospective parents into believing their adoptions would be closed. If they could string the parents-to-be along under this misapprehension, an adoption transaction would likely transpire – what happened after the papers were signed wasn’t really their concern.

As for me, Nancy Drew Jr., I was stashing away details that Kathy and Bruce revealed to me in the back of my mind for later review and use in tracking them down, if need be. Not to steal Eric away – just to find out who and where these people were. After all, they would be raising my son.

Case in point: Eric’s family lived less than an hour away from New York City by train, in a New Jersey township. Throwaway facts until you realize that there are 565 municipalities in New Jersey, each of which falls into one of five types: 254 boroughs, 241 townships, 52 cities, 15 towns, and 3 villages. So now I’ve narrowed down the place to a township within roughly 30 miles of Manhattan. Then, at one point during a pre-adoption visit, Kathy revealed that their church had recently had a new roof installed on it. Bingo! A New Jersey township within 30 miles of NYC whose Catholic church had a new roof – we were in business. I was a trained researcher. How hard could it be to find this church and surreptitiously inquire about the family who’d recently adopted a baby boy born in Hoboken?

As it turns out, I would not need any of this information, as the single detail I would need – their last name – fell, almost literally, into my lap. What began as a “closed adoption” would soon enough become open. Hence my entire premise: regardless of what the adoptive family is promised, in terms of privacy and security, any domestic birthmother with enough will power, information collection savvy, and research tools (now readily available at her fingertips) could probably discover the identity of her adoptive family. And if a birthmom could pony up the bucks for a private investigator? All bets would be off.

Please understand, I am not advocating for birthmothers to go sneaking around to find their kids. A direct approach is almost always a better option. But sometimes, less adequately counseled adoptive parents mean well while the baby is still unborn – yet, once he or she is delivered and the papers are signed, they let their fear take over and they run or hide, regardless of the plans for openness they promised, pre-birth. If such a breach of contract were to occur, should the birthmother just slink away, without any recourse? No – she most certainly should not. And what about the birthmom who didn’t know she really would prefer an open adoption? Should she be shut out because the window for agreeing to something she didn’t know would be important to her has now closed? Again, I say no.

Here’s the thing: like it or not, in the internet age, a guarantee of privacy is a thing of the past. Even people who avoid virtual exposure at all costs can be found. A year or so ago, I found online a copy of the original deed to my parents’ house – the one where I grew up – with my dad’s signature and all. He died in 2005 – and he dabbled with the internet for perhaps 9 months, back in the early days of AOL. He most certainly did not knowingly put that kind of information in a public place where people like me could stumble across it. It’s just the way life is in this technology age.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure the search process would be quite as easy for international birthmoms – which seems to be why so many couples find international adoption such an enticing option. In my opinion, however, whatever adoptive parents “gain” by avoiding the birthparent interaction is nothing compared to what their children lose when there is no information available about their bio parents, from medical history to cultural identity to the origin of distinctive personality traits. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, one of the things adoptive kids long for most is a sense of who they are. Yet much of that so often is lost with an international adoption.

According to the bulk of the literature I’m reading online these days about the adoption process, closed domestic adoptions seem to be mostly a thing of the past and are highly discouraged. Thank god! Of course, I met a woman recently who told me she “just didn’t think she’d want any connection” to the birthfamily – something about not wanting them “meddling” and fearing the thought of “being in constant competition” with them. Thankfully, she’s not an adoptive mother – and if she were, I’d hope she’d receive plenty of counseling before being greenlighted to enter into this most unique way of making a family.

Opening an Adoption

There are coincidences and then there are COINCIDENCES. My friend Beth Kozan has written a book about the many coincidences – or synchronicities – she has seen in adoptions over her long career in the field. For one of my birthmom friends, it was snowshoes. For one couple in Beth’s book, ADOPTION – More Than by Chance, it was three trout.

The synchronicities in Eric’s adoption are almost too many to enumerate. I discussed the birthday-themed coincidences in yesterday’s post – and will write more about the others in future posts. The biggest one, though – the coincidence that really takes the cake – is the one that led to our adoption becoming open.

I had quit my job at Lehman Brothers (though I would later return in a different capacity) and was temping in New York City. In a short time, I had proven to the temp agency that I was pretty capable – resourceful, even – and therefore trustworthy to work on my own, as in not needing to be overseen by any sort of middle manager. I’m thinking that’s how I got the gig working for Barry. Now Barry was a curmudgeon of the highest order. He made the Grinch look like a nice fellow you’d want to have over for brunch on Sundays. I asked the assistant I was replacing why he was leaving. He mumbled something about going back to school, but I suspect he just needed to reclaim his life and was in a hurry to bail on a bad situation. I’d been there only a day or two before I understood completely.

Barry was writing a book – convenient for me, as I had a writing degree and an interest in the publishing industry. His book was an encyclopedia of military insignia – the patches and medals worn by American soldiers, dating back to World War I. The reason for his interest in creating such a book was that he owned a company that fabricated these patches and medals and sold them to the U.S. military branches. Only problem was that he’d been placed on leave from his company. It seems Barry’s company, along with its two major competitors, had conspired to rig the prices on said military insignia. The wheels came off the cart when an employee from Barry’s company became a whistle-blower about the price fixing.

At that point, Barry was relieved of his post – a forced sabbatical, if you will – which gave him plenty of time to work on his book. (A quick Amazon search reveals he’s written a handful of others since then.) Technically, he was not allowed any decision-making or influence when it came to the running of his company – a fact he literally cursed daily while I worked for him. However, he was still drawing a monthly 5-digit salary, even as he was sidelined from helming the company. I know this because, as his office manager, I deposited his checks.

That money didn’t roll downhill, though. I was struggling on my 19-hour-a-week temp gig for Barry, which was barely covering my rent and food. Yet it paid better hourly than my prior job at Lehman Brothers – and I had a lot more freedom. So I tried, for a while, to make it work.

Besides still getting paid very well for a job he wasn’t doing, Barry also had a beautiful young French wife and a baby daughter, maybe a year-and-a-half old. His wife would bring the little girl to the office in her carriage almost every afternoon, and the couple would bicker and argue something fierce – I knew this from the tone and body language, as they always fought in French.

One day, I’d just had enough. I was still dealing with the aftermath of the adoption, and Barry’s nasty attitude toward the world wasn’t helping at all, though he never really directed his venom at me. It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have to work for him – there were many other temp jobs to be had in New York City. So I decided to quit. In fact, my plan was just to go home and not come back. But as I sat in my apartment that night, I thought that maybe I should try to explain to Barry why he wasn’t the most put-upon guy in the world. So the next morning, I gathered up the most recent photos Kathy had sent and I want to work as usual.

I don’t really recall how I brought it up – I imagine I just waited for Barry to complain about something, which probably took all of five minutes. That’s when I said to him, “I want to show you something. This is the son I gave birth to about two years ago – he’s pretty close to your daughter’s age. But I chose to place him for adoption. This is his family, and…”

“Son of a bitch,” Barry said. I thought he was responding to the news about the adoption. The look on his face said otherwise.

“What?”

“I know him,” he said, pointing at Bruce’s picture. “That’s Bruce Stanfield. He’s my personal banker.”

Holy shit. In a city of 30 million people, I was office assistant to a guy who knew my son’s adoptive father. And though I had come thisclose to walking out and not coming back – I had instead decided to go in to work and show Barry these photos. I’d been a good girl and resisted looking at that file on Mary’s desk. But some things are just meant to be. I was supposed to know who my son’s parents were.

Things got a little complicated when I decided we needed to let Kathy and Bruce – the Stanfields – know about my discovery, as our agreement was a semi-open adoption: they knew our identities, but we didn’t know theirs.

Difficulty #1: Tony. “We don’t owe them anything.”

Difficulty #2: Bruce. “You weren’t supposed to show those photos to anyone – they’re private!”

Eventually I convinced Tony that we did, indeed, owe it to Kathy and Bruce to let them know we now knew who they were. So I called Mary. She was surprised – and not so surprised, it seemed – at my news, and immediately contacted Anna, their caseworker. I wanted to meet with them in person to share this information. For reasons I still don’t understand, Bruce did not want to meet in person, but grudgingly agreed to a phone call. Remember, he didn’t yet know about the name disclosure – and still, he didn’t want a face-to-face meeting.

I honestly don’t remember the specifics of the phone call – whether Mary broke the news or I did. I do remember Bruce’s reaction. He was really angry at me for sharing the pictures with Barry. He felt that the photos of his family were private, and I was in some sort of breach for sharing them. There was no confidentiality agreement of any sort regarding the pictures – and, as I will write about in tomorrow’s post, I believe that in the Information Age, the promise of a closed (or semi-closed) domestic adoption is a pie-in-the-sky fantasy dangled by agencies and attorneys to lure prospective adoptive parents. In reality, it’s pretty easy to discover someone’s identity, even if they think they’re doing a good job at masking it.

I actually understand Bruce’s upset – because I imagine he felt responsible for the disclosure, as it was he Barry identified. Kathy, of course, seemed OK with the information. I’m sure she did what she could to calm Bruce down and smooth things over.

Little by little, the adoption became more and more open. One of the nicest immediate results was that we no longer needed to communicate through the agency. Kathy would send photos and letters directly to my house and, on occasion, I would write back to her. Eventually, we swapped email addresses and stayed in pretty regular contact via email. Then Facebook entered the picture. It was Kathy who encouraged Eric to friend me on Facebook. That was really special, because to this day, Eric still hasn’t friended his mom, which I totally understand. What an amazing adoptive mom – no competition or jealousy that her son was in contact with his birthmom in a way she was not. Just blessings and gratitude for the progress in our relationship.

I may have kicked myself for not reading that profile on Mary’s desk – but sometimes a divine plan has multiple methods of delivery. If this coincidence isn’t one for the record books, I don’t know what is.

“Outed” as a Birthmother

Open adoption is a form of adoption in which the bio and adoptive families agree to provide access to varying degrees of each others’ personal information and have the option of direct contact. Although open adoption is becoming more and more the norm (67 percent of private adoptions in the U.S. have pre-adoption agreements of at least a semi-open adoption*), secrecy still often surrounds the adoption, in terms of birthparents revealing that they have placed children.

I’ve long thought that revealing one’s status as a birthparent must be similar to coming out as being gay, particularly for those who have kept the information secret, for whatever reason. You’re never sure how people will take this bit of news. Mostly, they seem to wonder why it took you so long to get around to telling them. How badly must you have thought of them to have been fearful of confiding in them?

A birthmother friend of mine, whose son is a few years older than I am, had the unusual experience of trying to remember exactly to whom she had revealed her secret over the years. She was 19 when she got pregnant in the 1960s, and was forced by her parents to go to a maternity home. Shame and secrecy shrouded her entire adoption experience, and she told very few people. Eventually, she put her name on the international adoption reunion registry, and in his 30s, her son found her. She met him – and their reunion went well. Having him in her life going forward, however, meant having to tell a certain number of people about him. She laughed as she explained, “I just didn’t remember which ones I’d told about my pregnancy, and which ones I hadn’t. Some people I assumed knew didn’t know – and with others, I was sure I was revealing a big secret, and they said, ‘Yeah – you told me years ago.’”

Up until my son was nearly 5 and I moved away from the New Jersey area, I did a fair amount of speaking to adoptive parents, prospective adoptive parents, social workers, and hospital staff. Typically, Judy Greene, the Spence-Chapin birthparent coordinator, would introduce me and any other birthmoms who happened also to be speaking. Judy wasn’t a birthmother – she was a social worker who’d ben working with birthmothers for about 26 years at that point. Nevertheless, every time she would introduce me, I would hold my breath waiting for her to trip up, to say something to misrepresent the birthmom experience. And never once, in all the times she made those introductions, did she ever misspeak on behalf of me or other birthparents.

Judy would begin by cautioning the audience that our identity as birthmothers was confidential. If by chance, we later happened to run into each other, they should be discrete about having met us and where. This came about because one birthmom who gave similar presentations to me was sitting on the stoop of her Brooklyn brownstone with a friend when an adoptive couple she’d met a few weeks earlier strolled past and yelled out, “Hi, Cheryl!” When Cheryl didn’t recognize them, they announced that they’d met her at an adoption panel. In this particular birthmom’s case, Chery’s friend knew about her adoption, but if she hadn’t, it could have been a very uncomfortable situation.

I never had any worries about being “outed,” and always told my audiences as much before I began my presentations. But I can respect any woman’s decision to keep that information private.

Here’s the thing, we can’t normalize adoption until we destigmatize the birthmother’s role. It really is rather strange to me that people seem to have more of an emotional reaction on hearing that a woman placed her baby for adoption than that she had an abortion. A good friend of mine, a birthmom I met through the birthmother support group at Spence-Chapin, got pregnant her senior year in high school. This would have been in the early ’80s in a Baltimore suburb. She said that a number of girls in her class got pregnant – but they either got married the week after graduation or they had abortions. She was the only one who chose adoption, and she was ostracized for it.

I’m not sure what makes people so uncomfortable about birthmothers. My guess is that it’s birthmothers themselves who unintentionally further the stigma. Many have unresolved issues with grief and guilt and shame. And if you walk around feeling bad about something – like many gay people did in the past (and, sadly, some are still made to today) – it’s hard to own up to it, wear the mantle proudly, identify with it, or be public about it.

We made a start by formally acknowledging birthmothers with Birthmothers’ Day, which has been commemorated annually since 1990 on the Saturday before Mothers’ Day. We say commemorated – not celebrated – because being a birthmom is, typically, bitter-sweet at best and has, for some women, been downright harrowing. Even those of us who have had pretty positive adoption experiences and/or reunions still went through some level of emotional trauma before, during, and after the placement of our babies.

And as nice as it may be, having a day that acknowledges us is a small step, really. A look at the adoption literature – even on a website dedicated to adoption-themed books like TapestryBooks.com – shows a dearth of books by, for, and about birthmothers, especially when compared to the scads and scads of titles written by, for, and about adoptive parents. And if you think birthmothers get short shrift – imagine being a birthfather! They are still pretty much personas non grata throughout the adoption world, so I’ve gotta imagine that guys coming clean about their status as birthdads is even rarer and more isolating than what birthmoms experience.

It’s time for birthparents – mothers and fathers – to throw off that mantle of shame that so many of us picked up somewhere along the way, and instead wrap ourselves in cloaks of majesty and dignity. We made a tough decision in choosing adoption over parenting or abortion. Whether others think it was awful, brave, or somewhere in between should not be our concern. However, we’ll give them a lot less reason to think badly of us if we come out voluntarily, speak openly about our experiences, and freely educate anyone willing to listen.

*SOURCE: 2007 National Survey of Adoptive Parents