Mimi’s Adoption Testimonial

I tell people that I’m one of those fortunate ones who have been able to experience most of the full circle of the adoption experience. My first major exposure to adoption was when I was hired in 1977 by Catholic Charities of St. Louis to be an adoption assessor. I worked in that agency’s adoption/foster parent recruitment department for two years, leaving for my husband’s job re-location in Massachusetts. There we gave birth to our first child after 6 years of marriage and some minor infertility problems.

Over the next 5 years, we moved back to Ohio and attempted to have a second child. After two first tri-mester miscarriages and the death of a baby born prematurely at 7 ½ months in February, 1984, my husband and I decided to explore adoption as an alternative way to add to our family, thus giving me my second major exposure to adoptive parenthood. We started out approaching the few adoption agencies that we knew of in our area and were basically told that because we already had a child, that our wait for a healthy infant would be several years. We then started putting the word out that we were looking for a private adoption situation and were told about an attorney who represented the “Right to Life” group and who did a number of infant adoptions. Our first “match” set up with this attorney fell through and because the attorney felt bad about putting us through this loss again, he moved us up our list. Nine months later on June 21st 1985, we became the happy parents of a healthy baby girl, our second child, Abby. Now remember, this was 1985 and open adoption was not a common practice yet. We were not even advised that this could be an option. The most openness we had was a letter we wrote to the birthmother during the end of her pregnancy and the sending of flowers when the baby was born, all at the suggestion of our attorney. We had no response from the birth mother for either of these gestures and were given nothing other than a photograph of her two other children to eventually share with our daughter.

My daughter is now 19 years old and has never shown much curiosity at all about her birth family background. The most she has come forth with has been an inquisitiveness about where she got her physical characteristics from (she was a tow headed blonde with blue eyes and the rest of our family had brown eyes and darker hair). I sense that she has felt the loss of not having important information about herself, I, too, have felt at a disadvantage as a result of not having access to any information about her health issues, learning capacity, etc. She recently had to tell an ER doctor who asked about a family history of certain illnesses, that she didn’t know her history and has also had to deal with other unanswerable questions that come up for children adopted through a closed adoption over their growing up years.

I do not expect that my daughter would be one to go on an extensive search for her birth family as she is just not a curious person by nature. However, I know that she would be happy to have more information about her biological background if it could be made easily available to her. Thus the argument for openness in adoption. I hope I can one day achieve this for my daughter in a way that is comfortable and natural for her.

My third exposure to the adoption experience was a reunion about 8 years ago with a half brother that I never knew I had, who grew up in an adoptive family as an only child. Being born in 1948, his adoption was not only closed but secretive. His birth mother never even let my father know she was pregnant and he died without having the chance to meet his oldest son. When he tried to contact his birth mother, she totally denied being his parent and left him feeling more rejected than ever. Thus another argument for openness in adoption. My family’s reunion with my half brother and his family, however has been open and has been a very positive experience for us all. I feel very fortunate to have had all these adoption experiences while also working in the field of adoption for over 17 years. It makes for some interesting conversations at our family gatherings!