It is my intent to blog about adoption from the viewpoint of the adoption professional. After almost 30 years in infant adoptions, mostly in Arizona, I have observed many changes in the adoption community. The bulk of my experience has been in working with birth parents: women and their partners who have placed infants and toddlers for adoption through private adoption agencies.
When I began to work in adoption in 1979 in Tucson, I realized it was a field in which I was not well versed. There are no ‘adoption classes’ taught in any formal learning environments, i.e., grad schools of social work or counseling. Many people who come to adoption as a profession are participants: people who have adopted a child or adopted persons all grown up, who have a desire to help others in a field close to their hearts. Fewer professionals are birth parents because it is still hard to admit one’s role as birth parent; therefore many birth parents are still ‘in the closet.” However, the movement toward open adoption has brought the cleanser of sunshine to adoption, and with it, a lessening of the stigma of being a birth parent.
So in 1979 I went to the Tucson library to check out books on adoption; there were three: Orphan Voyage, The Adoption Triangle and Shared Fate. Today, there are LOTS of books on adoption. Most of them are written to the audience of adoptive parents (how-to books, mostly) and adoptees (picture books for children to help them understand adoption, and search-for-self for adult adoptees who wonder about searching for the original parents who are by-and-large unknown to them). Fewer books are available for birth parents. That is the area that I intend to address, over the next few months, in this blog. But first, a little more about how I got here.
Orphan Voyage was written in the 1950s. The author, (as I recall; this book is out of print now) was the wife of an adoptee who wanted to talk to other adoptees, but in the fifties adoption was a shameful topic seldom discussed. The author put ads in big city newspapers inviting contact from individuals who were adopted, to tell their stories of growing up adopted. Many people had not been told they were adopted and only learned after the death of their parents, or were told but in a negative way and cautioned by their parents to keep it a secret. Adoptees who had told their friends were ridiculed and socially exiled. I experienced a flash back to a childhood memory.
Two new kids who rode the school bus from our country community were living with their grandmother because their daddy, a soldier, had been sent overseas and their mother had to work full time. Diana was my age; we were in the same second grade classroom. Her brother Donnie was in first grade. One day I overheard my mother exclaiming to my dad that an older ‘busybody’ neighbor had cornered Diana and asked her if her grandmother with whom she lived ‘treated her the same as her brother.’ She wondered because, after all, her daddy (the grandmother’s son) wasn’t really her daddy, like he was the daddy of her brother, and she was just wondering if her dad and his mother treated her as if she was loved the same way that Donnie was loved. Diana’s grandmother had been in tears as she told my mother what the busybody had said: that Diana was adopted and this raised the question of ‘equal love.’
The Adoption Triangle was written in 1961 and is a ground-breaking and still-revered book about adoption. Written by Reuben Panner and Annette Baran, two social workers from Vista del Mar, an adoption agency in the Los Angeles area, brought to the fore the issue of sealed records and the adoptee’s right to information about who they are and where they come from. That edition that I checked out of the library identified Arizona as an “open records state” which meant that the original birth certificate was available to an adoptee when he/she reached majority. I hadn’t worked in adoptions long, but I knew that Arizona was no longer (by 1979) an open records state. What I learned was that the law had been changed and applied retroactively, because in just a few years we started getting calls from adoptive parents who had been telling their children “when you turn 18 we’ll get your original birth certificate and we’ll find her to get answers to your questions.” These adoptive parents felt they had been lied to, and passed that lie on to their children because the lawmakers closed the records that they felt their children had a right to.
Shared Fate by H David Kirk read as if it was a doctoral dissertation (perhaps it was) written by an adoptive father who worked to help his children and other adoptees and adoptive parents to see their lives as interwoven, with the suggestion that the adoptive parent should help the adoptee understand Self. He went on to write other books on adoption.
It is my belief that people learn a lot from books, and that the current market of self-published and small press books have brought an awareness of adoption issues. However, unlike when there were fewer books, it’s seldom these days that a book on adoption is advertised. There are websites like Tapestry Books and Perspectives Press and EMK Press that showcase books in this niche market. In each upcoming blog I will discuss books on adoption.
I welcome your feedback and comments.
Beth Kozan – Phoenix, AZ
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