I gave Mauela big fat gold stars yesterday for taking on this post. Which brings me to here and then the need to continue with not true, but true horror stories of adoptions that should not be. Because it was said so well I want to quote her devineness here:

“It is unacceptable to me that this type of unseemly adoption takes place at ALL. Although this is an exaggerated parallel… if I were to compare this to say… oh… Civil rights in the U.S. back in the 60’s. I wouldn’t sit here and say, “Oh… well… don’t accuse ALL white people of being racist! LOTS of black people are treated with equal respect and rights.” Yah. So fucking what. It just means we have to scream even LOUDER until it’s understood that it’s not ok for ANYONE to be treated with less than equal respect and rights“

I don’t know if I really have the right to tell these tales as they are not really mine to tell. Let us say that they are stories known to some and with important messages that should be heard by all. Sort of like tales told by ones ancestors to prove a point. So, lets call them Fables for now and know that while I might be taking some artistic latitude in names, this was real.
Oh, an it all happened with in the last three years.

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The Legend of Zelda:

Zelda was a virgin when she went off half a country away to college and promised her mother to remain so. Because we know this is a story of birth and loss, you can guess that the promise did not keep. She met a boy and fell in love and did what most of us do in that situation..she had sex. And the sex resulted in pregnancy.

Zelda decided to place the baby for adoption and went to an agency. She had all the “right reasons” Her parents had second mortgaged their house to pay for her education, She had med school to attend to, goals and dreams. The boyfriend would not be around..he was to go to War. She was very sure in her decision and the boy supported her in what she thought best. She found a couple and adored them to no end. One could even say that Zelda had “informed choice” because she found her way to a pretty anti adoption board and heard many the stories of other natural moms, who shook their heads in fear and fustration because Zelda would not think to change her mind. She really thought that the prospective adoptive parents were the greatest folks in the whole wide world and she loved them and would not disappoint them.

Zelda’s boyfriend was going off to the War and he signed off on paperwork pre-birth and left his honey and child alone. Not that he had much choice really, he had to go. And Zelda hid at college the rest of her pregnancy refusing to go home to her parents.
She didn’t want to have her parents know and the agency supported her decision to be independent. In Zelda’s mind, her parents would be so disappointed in her and angry and she just couldn’t face it. She felt very bad about lying though, as it was as much of a sin as breaking the promise to remain a virgin. The other ladies begged and pleaded for her to tell her parents, as the reaction she feared might not be a true reaction. It was argued that he agency supported her not telling as it cut her off from a major possible support and resource based on her fear. Days before the birth Zelda did tell her mother who immediately flew out for her grandchild’s birth.

But Zelda was still too committed to disappoint the perfect people and she signed off anyway. And she held fast to her decision during the revoke period. And then it was too late. Her parents were mad at her, but not so much for losing her virginity and getting pregnant, but for not coming to them and finding a way to keep her child. Her twin sister was also very hurt by the secrets and lies.

Zelda maintained that she could not have parented due to her reasons. Just a few months later, the boy coma home and immediately asked her to marry him even though he was also angry that she had made him promise not to tell his parents of the child and then she ended up telling hers. They married and lived together while she was in school. Her twin sister soon became pregnant and the whole family gathered round to support the very same situation. And within 6 months the perfect couple received a match with ANOTHER young woman and adopted another baby.
IF Zelda had said “No” then all her reasons would have and DID change in just a few months, and even the perfect couple would not have been sad for long.

Would you like to know how very depressed Zelda was the last time I talked to her? That all she was trying to do was to get pregnant again. That she had to force herself to go to classes and didn’t care about anything anymore but how she missed her child. That the perfect romance was being tested and torn because her husband was now going to try to claim duress when he signed prebirth before going off to War? And Zelda did not feel that she could go to anyone for support because she was “told” and she didn’t listen. She was alone and very, very sad. And I wonder, often, if she had been able to remain among the living.

Moral of this story: If the agency had not enabled her fear and made her deal in a healthy way with her family, she would not have all this pain in her life. Oh, and she loved the agency and counselors too.

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The Story of LuLu

LuLu and her boyfriend conceived a child and decided that they could not be parents. They were very ambicious young go-getters with great plans for the further and a baby just would not do. Finishing high school, with plans for college, LuLu was an only child whose parents had talked of travel and fun when their daughter went on with her life. She didn’t want to bring them down. It wasn’t fair.

Lulu’s parents were horrified by an adoption plan and asked for help to stop it. The agency would have none of it. It was seen that her parents were “not supportive” and it was “all her decision” and not about them at all. They were acting controlling and not respecting her independence and treating her like a child. The agency appealed to LuLu’s feminine rights values and she, with their support behind her, battled her folks on every turn. The agency helped get a restraining order against her folks and they hid her hospital information from them and barred them from seeing their grandchild and daughter when they interned.

Lulu also could be considered to have “informed choice” though not from the agency, but from her own mother and father who made her read daily at an anti adoption board also, But because the agency was so “right” LuLu could not either hear the words of the “crazy women” her mother had found.

The perfect couple was selected and were there for the birth in the labor room. Later, Lulu would admit that all she really really wanted during labor was her own mother, but she couldn’t break down and ask. There was too much excitement and the perfect couple was sooo happy to see “their” baby be born that LuLu kept her desires to herself and wa “strong”

The grief got to her pretty soon after it was all too late. She didn’t go off to college. In fact, she didn’t do to much besides drink heavily for months. And she didn’t eat either. She also could not bring herself to see her child in the “open adoption” thus being a huge disappointment to the perfect couple. Her happy parents, ready to retire and travel, instead blamed each other and separated, later to divorce. LuLu talked of suicide and another pregnancy in the same desperate longing.

The moral of this story: The agency appealed to a young teens independence and their own “expertise” to provide a wedge between a family that only had the chance to grow and prosper if left to it’s own. Separated one by adoption and they all fell apart, broken to the core.

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The Tale of Greta

Greta was in love with a man who was a free soul. He was not the responsible type, but would go off and commune with the mountains and his guitar for days. When she found herself carring his child she sought out the help of an adoption agency.

One of Greta’s greatest fears was that she had no clue how to mother as she was abandoned by her own mother at an early age and that had a profound effect on her. She really believed that she could not parent herself and that Freely was equally useless.
But Greta was also informed of the heartache and pain that befalls a relinquishing mother, and she actually listened.

When Greta’s baby was born, Greta took her child and held her close for weeks. Alone in the dark of a single room, she nursed her babe, and whispered sweet stories and they laid together, arm in arm. Even though Greta’s child was content to be near mommy and nurse and sleep as one, Greta began to fear that she was not doing it right, and called the helpful agency in a panic. Suffering from pregnancy hormones and self doubt, crying jags scared her and she thought that she needed to see a doctor.
The agency quickly sent out a helpful person to talk to Greta and talk they did. For hours. And the agency talker promised to send Greta to a doctor for help as soon as she signed the relinquishment papers. After hours, Greta surrenders and signed and her baby was taken so she could “get well”. The friendly doctor provided by the agency gave Great some pills to take, after talking to her for 20 minutes about her “issues”.
Greta took them and SLEPT FOR TWO WHOLE DAYS STRAIGHT.
She woke up in a panic, realizing her mistake and wanting her baby, but it was TOO LATE. She had slept though the entire revoke period.

Later on Greta would look up the drugs given to her by the doctor and find out that they were major antipsysotics given to only those who suffer the most detrimental of mental illnesses which had never effected Greta and that she had never had any signs of. On a whim to check her theory, she took half the dose and could not wake up for 18 hours.

The “open” adoption was never to be. Made to dance though hoops for a year at the whim of a the new adoptive mother, Greta never got to see her baby again. The baby suffered great colic and was “fussy” with digestive problems that she never had in Greta’s care.

Though she often spoke of ending it all, and scared the heck of of some with her seriousness, she managed to keep breathing and had another baby soon after. They are both well and she is a great mother. Greta waits to see her first child again in 16 years.

The moral of this story: Instead of truly providing help when asked, agencies have used drugs and lies to help themselves to a scared woman’s baby. Ethcial?

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Common Threads in These Adoption Horror Stories:

• None of these mothers really needed to have their children taken from them
• All had the ability and support to keep their children.
• The “good” agencies used their fears and doubt to manipulate them.
• All mothers would have changed their minds once they realized that it hurt too much to live, but it as too late.
• All mothers were inconsolable in their pain.
• All of them spoke of killing themselves.
• All of them only wanted their babies back.

And just in case anyone wants to try to dismiss these as untrue, I have sat in chat with these women, begging them not to die. I have had many a sleepless night wondering of they still breath, or if when they signed off in a huff, I would never see hear from them again.