Tree of Strangers Page 15

  I am still amazed I live so close to the doctor’s house, the place where my mother laboured and lost. I imagine her sequestered in the attic — her existence hidden behind the tall macrocarpa hedge. Alone in a new country, unmarried and abandoned by her parents. A perfect candidate to provide a new baby to a childless couple.

  I walk by that house most mornings. The doctor is long gone. A corrugated-iron fence replaces the hedge. But I stop for a moment and look up to those high windows. And I wave to my mother.

  Notes about adoption

  There is enduring power in the language we use to promote any ideology. We use words to align the myths and to hinder the truth, especially when it comes to adoption.

  You may have noted I do not use the word adoptee unless I am quoting someone.

  For many adopted people, the suffix -ee denotes our role as the recipient of the act of adoption. We are adopted as newborns or young children when we are without independent agency. Adoption is a life-changing and lifelong event in which we have no say.

  When you use the word adoptee, you remind us of what was done to us. Irrespective of how we feel about that. I do not use the words adopted child either. How often, when reading about adoption, do you see these two words together? As a New Zealand judge said when denying a woman access to her files: ‘You are an adopted child of any age.’ This term reminds us that our status as adopted people limits our rights as adult citizens.

  I have also chosen not to use the words adopted mother or adopted father. For me it makes it sound like I adopted them. The suffix -ed is derivational. By affixing it, you change the meaning of the word adopt. I use the words adopting mother or adopting father because it places the action on the people who choose to do it. When speaking of adoption, I often use the terms forced, closed or stranger adoption.

  I write from the perspective of the adopted person. No one sought our consent to be removed from our mothers, heritage and cultures. Most of us lost our identity without any legal representation. There is no mechanism to reclaim our original identity.

  I do not use the term birth mother. This term is reductive. It’s static and limits a mother to the action of her body. It denies the profound relationship a mother shares with her child. It obscures what happens to women who lose their children to adoption. It ignores the coercion many women suffered. It papers over the many social and financial issues pregnant women experience.

  The systems and people that support adoption often ignore the impact on the mother. Mothers who lose their children to adoption can suffer deep grief. Many say it is worse than death because they don’t know if their child is alive, suffering or thriving. They often suffer lifelong depression.

  Recently, for the first time, British law defined the word mother: ‘Being a “mother” is the status afforded to a person who undergoes the physical and biological process of carrying a pregnancy and giving birth.’24 Let us call the woman who gives birth the mother. If parents enter a child’s life through adoption, let us call them the adopting mother and father.

  Others use the words relinquish, give or gave away in describing a person lost to adoption. But to relinquish is to cease to keep or claim voluntarily. We often hear that a mother gave away her baby. People are not objects. You cannot give us away. These terms ignore the fundamental human rights of the mother and her child. Every mother of loss I’ve spoken to experienced coercion and pressure to sign away their right to parent. Some of us see that as abduction.

  Positive Adoption Language (PAL) is a movement created by the pro-adoption industry as a way of normalising adoption. Natural parent is considered negative. The industry prefers the more clinical term biological. Real parent is replaced by birth parent, reducing a mother to her biological function. The word mother does not appear at all in the lists of positive language. Even reunion, with its implication of desire and longing fulfilled, is out, replaced by making contact.

  Language is how we transfer ideas or concepts. It seems to me that adopter-centric language is designed to minimise or negate the loss of being relinquished. Codified, the language disables adopted people from recognising and defining their experiences, and is geared toward adopters and the industry that serves them.

  No matter how you view adoption, the issue of authentic identity always arises. Adoption severs the past and creates an alternative future. Some adopted people are quite content with this alternate reality. Many are not.

  Adoption seeks to bind a child to a non-biological family. Birth records must be sealed to enable this. Authorities create a new or second birth certificate. There is no opt-out clause. You have no right to undo this action or to recover your original identity.

  Everyone has a birth certificate. If you are a non-adopted person, your founding document is a straightforward affair. It names your parents, their occupations, your name, date and place of birth. In most countries, there’s a small box at the bottom of the certificate. In New Zealand it states: ‘Any person who falsifies the particulars on this certificate or uses it as true, knowing it to be false, is liable to prosecution under the Crimes Act 1961.’ I have one of those birth certificates. It looks exactly like every non-adoption certificate. Except mine falsifies my details. It names the people who adopted me as birth parents. My name is not the one I received at birth. I am forced to use it, knowing it to be false.

  I want an original birth certificate, as promised under the law, unendorsed with my adopters’ details. When I complained to Internal Affairs, they explained the endorsements were to ensure I did not use the document to create a false identity. They went on to describe my postadoption birth certificate as statutory fiction. And then as lawful falsehood. Later they described my original birth certificate as essentially ornamental.

  The idea that adoption is now open is a misnomer. Open adoption is, in essence, an exercise in rebranding. Open adoption does not exist in law. Adoption is the same as it ever was: sealed records and a falsified birth certificate.

  A mother losing her child to adoption may opt for ‘open’ adoption, but she has still lost all legal right to her child. She has no say over schooling or medical procedures. She has no right to insist her child remain in the country or that any visitation agreement be upheld. Adopting parents control all movements and all contact, even when a mother believes she has an open contract with adopters. Those who are adopted today have no more rights than people taken at the formation of the New Zealand Adoption Act in 1955.

  In this memoir, I have stayed away from discussing surrogacy and the use of anonymous gametes. We use the language of human rights to insist that everyone who wishes to parent should be able to. Artificial reproductive technologies or ART extend the opportunity for people to experience parenthood. There is no legal need for a commissioning parent to reveal a child’s genetic or gestation status. These parents are often vocal in demanding we document their children as biological.

  Those created through ART do not have an intrinsic right to an authentic identity. The issues of belonging and identity are the same as for adopted people. In my view, we are creating a new generation of second-class citizens — people with fewer rights than their parents and peers and our wider society.

  In the last forty years, there have been ninety-eight unsuccessful approaches to successive governments to change the law. New Zealand is a signatory to the United Nations Treaty on the Rights of the Child. We remain in violation of that treaty on multiple grounds.

  The families of adopted people are as complex and diverse as any. Not all of us consider we have had unfavourable adoption experiences. But all of us must live our entire lives with a false identity and falsified documents. Everyone who loses their mother suffers some degree of physiological damage. No matter our individual experience of adoption, we are all grafted onto the tree of strangers — for our lifetimes and those of descendants.

  I do not know what it is like to grow up without a mother. But I know exactly what it is like to grow up with a mother who did not hav
e a mother.

  — Bonnie Sumner

  Notes

  1 Jennifer Harper, ‘Fetuses found to have memories’, Washington Times, 16 July 2009: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jul/16/fetuses-found-to-have-memories/.

  2 Napier Telegraph, ‘Bethany’s future in good hands’, 1978.

  3 Hannah Devlin, ‘Mothers more sensitive to crying babies thanks to hormone, study says’, Guardian, 15 April 2015: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26911697/; https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/apr/15/mothers-moresensitive-to-crying-babies-thanks-to-hormone-study-says.

  4 Deborah N. Silverstein and Sharon Kaplan, ‘Grief Silverstein Article’, American Adoption Congress: https://www.americanadoptioncongress.org/grief_silverstein_article.php.

  5 Jenni Laidman, ‘Adoptees 4 Times More Likely to Attempt Suicide’, Medscape, 9 September 2013: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/810625.

  6 http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout06-t6-bodyd1-d1.html.

  7 Nina Darnton, ‘90 Are Killed as Jetliners Collide on Madrid Runway’, New York Times, 8 December 1983: https://www.nytimes.com/1983/12/08/world/90-are-killed-as-jetliners-collide-on-madrid-runway-in-heavy-fog.html.

  8 https://www.the-philosophy.com/pascal-heart-has-its-reasons-which-mind-knows-nothing.

  9 https://innerwoven.me/2015/06/07/hiraeth-making-peace-with-longing/.

  10 Maria Teresa Sotelo, ‘Maternal affective bond scientific findings Review Article Corresponding author’, Journal of Clinical Review & Case Reports 3, no. 5 (2018): https://www.academia.edu/39074813/Maternal_affective_bond_scientific_findings_Review_Article_Corresponding_author?email_work_card=title.

  11 lga Khazan, ‘Inherited Trauma Shapes Your Health’, The Atlantic, 16 October 2018: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/10/trauma-inherited-generations/573055.

  12 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/william_makepeace_thacker_137822.

  13 Zygmunt Bauman, ‘From Pilgrim to Tourist – or a Short History of Identity’, Liquid Modernity (New York: Sage, 2000).

  14 Mirah Riben, ‘Living With Adoption’s Dichotomies and Myths’, Huffington Post, 20 January 2015: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/living-with-adoptions-com_b_6504642.

  15 Mathew Salesses, ‘“I never asked for this”: On Adoption, Luck, and Thankfulness’, The Toast, 25 November 2015: http://the-toast.net/2015/11/25/adoption-luck-thankfulness/.

  16 Taigen Dan Leighton, Zen Questions: Zazen, Dogen, and the Spirit of Creative Living (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2011).

  17 ICAAD, ‘Relinquishment and Adoption: Understanding the Impact of an Early Psychological Wound’: https://www.icaad.com/videos/relinquishment-andadoption-understanding-the-impact-of-an-earlypsychological-wound?fbclid=IwAR33eqyAEronBcPJ7gz9i3ekljJ-YSdF3VYyNQiyUJc4RvFeuVrFbIGkWFY.

  18 Marylyn Plessner, ‘Lady Mink: A Sort of Requiem’, in Vapour Trails (Montreal: Stephen Jarislowsky, 2000).

  19 http://emilyrlong.com/phantom-child/.

  20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlNe5pECpNo.

  21 Dr Catherine Lynch, The Australian Adoptee Rights Action Group, https://www.facebook.com/AdopteeRightsAU/posts/-5-tenet-adoption-is-only-bad-for-some-adoptees-but-it-works-for-others-all-of-th/309553613039831/.

  22 https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/einstein-s-spooky-action-distance-spotted-objects-almost-big-enough-see.

  23 Judge Ellis, Family Court, Napier (FP041/31/68).

  24 https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2019/09/30/what-is-a-mother-in-law.

  Further reading

  ‘Australian National Apology for Forced Adoptions’: https://www.ag.gov.au/About/ForcedAdoptionsApology/Pages/default.aspx.

  Brodzinsky, David M., and Marshall D. Schechter (eds). The Psychology of Adoption. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

  ‘Historical Trauma and Aboriginal Healing’. Aboriginal Healing Foundation, Ontario, Canada. Email: programs@ahf.ca.

  Lynch, Catherine M. ‘Campaign for Adoptee Equality, Adoptee Manifesto’: https://www.academia.edu/26367687/Adoptee_Manifesto.docx.

  ——— An Ado/aptive Reading and Writing of Australia and its Contemporary Literature. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2007.

  Meyers, Kit. Rethinking ‘Positive’ Adoption Language and Reclaiming Stigmatized Identities: https://www.academia.edu/5655199/_Rethinking_Positive_Adoption_Language_and_Reclaiming_Stigmatized_Identities_.

  Orman, Meghann. Adoption, Genealogical Bewilderment and Biological Heritage Bricolage. Wageningen: Wageningen University & Research, The Netherlands, 2018.

  ‘The Adoptee Journey — The Battle to Emerge: Resource Collection’: https://louisaleontiades.com/the-battle-to-emerge-resource-collection/.

  Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Nancy Verrier, 2003.

  Wolf Small, Joanne. The Adoption Mystique: A Hard Hitting Exposé of the Powerful Negative Social Stigma that Permeates Child Adoption in the United States. Authorhouse, 2007.

  Acknowledgements

  How do you thank someone who gives his everything? And then some. Thomas Burstyn, a man made for marriage. I will love you till my last breath.

  My daughters shape my world. Because of them, the sun rises. Bonnie, Rachel, Ruth, Lili and Amelia, I love you.

  My hope is that my grandchildren inherit a more enlightened future.

  Meryl Canestri read every word, chapter by chapter. I couldn’t have done it without you. Nicola Legat believed in me and supported this work from the first couple of chapters. Jane Parkin edited with finesse and sensitivity. Ken Duncum gave wise encouragement. Renée read an early draft. Her enthusiasm kept me going.

  Throughout the writing, Michael Talbot-Kelly helped me keep my balance. And Ron Law answered every panicked email with his scarily good research skills. Finally, my gratitude to lawyer Robert Ludbrook. No one in New Zealand has given so much and done so much to overturn the archaic 1955 Adoption Act.

  To all of us affected by forced, secret, stranger adoption — may we all find home.

  Author’s note

  All quotes used in this memoir are an aggregation of memory. Some names have been changed out of sensitivity to those concerned.

  First published in 2020 by Massey University Press

  Private Bag 102904, North Shore Mail Centre

  Auckland 0745, New Zealand

  www.masseypress.ac.nz

  Text © Barbara Sumner, 2020

  Design by Gideon Keith

  Cover photograph of the author as a young child © Barbara Sumner, 2020

  Extracts published with permission:

  Page 48: ‘Something Beautiful’. Words and Music by William J. Gaither & Gloria Gaither. Copyright © 1971 Hanna Street Music (BMI) (adm. in Australia & New Zealand by SHOUT! Music Publishing). All rights reserved. Used with permission.

  Page 145: Marylyn Plessner, ‘Lady Mink: A Sort of Requiem’, in Vapour Trails. Montreal: Stephen Jarislowsky, 2000.

  Page 157: Emily Long, ‘Phantom Child’, http://emilyrlong.com/phantom-child

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved. Except as provided by the Copyright Act 1994, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner(s) and the publisher.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand

  Printed and bound in China by Everbest Investment Ltd

  ISBN: 978-0-9951354-0-6

  eISBN: 978-0-9951378-9-9

 

 

 
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