Flowers for Peggy: On Respecting A Birthmother's Privacy
by Alicia Lanier
March - April 1998 Issue, Adoption Triad Forum
Flowers for Peggy: On Respecting A Birthmother's Privacy
by Alicia Lanier
March - April 1998 Issue, Adoption Triad Forum
The attractive dark-haired woman was carrying a bouquet of fresh spring flowers. She pressed the buzzer on the wrought iron security gate and then watched intently for someone to open the door only a few feet away. Her heart raced. The journey to this elegant home in this pictur-esque California coastal city had been far longer than the thousand plus miles from her own home in Texas.
Three years earlier, this woman now standing in front of a stranger's home had chosen to satisfy a lifetime curiosity about her biological identity.
Despite an M.D. behind her name as well as satisfying roles as a wife and a mother and a community volunteer, there was this overarching question that could no longer be denied: Sharon Bakos had been adopted in infancy and had no clue about her biological family.
Like thousands of others in 1995 and countless others before and after, Sharon had joined the adoption search underground, a loose network of individuals touched by adoption who circumvent sealed birth documents and court records to find even that most basic piece of information....a name. After all, one can't find someone...even a biological parent... without knowing a name. Sharon had been luckier than most. Her adoptive father, a widower in West Texas, had saved much information and willingly placed it all in her hands. "I wondered when you would ask," he said to his only daughter and the mother of his grandsons when she first confessed she needed to know her biological roots.
Sharon's husband initially was less enthusiastic. "What if your birthmother is clingy and dependent and wants to move in with us?" he asked. Sharon was unswayed and, armed with the name... Peggy...she had located the stranger who was her mother on the West Coast. After awhile, she wrote her birthmother a letter and explained she had enjoyed a loving family. Had grown up to go to medical school. Was now a practicing physician. Had married and now had two young sons. Wanted to meet Peggy if she were willing.
No answering letter came. After several weeks, Sharon took a deep breath and called Peggy. Her birthmother sounded tentative. "That was a long time ago," she said, when Sharon explained who she was. "I can't think about that right now."
Peggy repeated the phrases again during the phone call. Disappointed, though not devastated, Sharon said goodbye. Friends whom she told about the call advised patience. "After keeping her secret for 33 years, she needs time to catch up emotionally," said one. "It sounds as if she hasn't told her husband and children about you."
That had been three years ago and Sharon's infrequent letters and phone calls since had not been reciprocated by Peggy. Sharon had accepted the irony of her husband's early fears about Peggy possibly wanting to live with them and had learned that her dark hair and dark eyes came from her Armenian ancestors. But her primal need to see the woman who brought her into this life remained. Because her adoptive mother had died a few years earlier, she was too painfully aware of Peggy's advancing age and mortality. "I kept thinking: What if she dies and I never see her?" Sharon explained.
So, when a conference on the West Coast had come up, Sharon decided to make a side trip. And, now, here she was at the front gate to Peggy's home - without invitation and without having told Peggy she was coming.
The door opened. An older woman appeared and Sharon instantly thought: "She has dark eyes exactly like mine." The two women stared at each other for a long moment. Sharon sensed the recognition even though the woman asked, "What is it?" Sharon replied: "I have flowers for Peggy." The older woman released the lock on the gate and Sharon stepped onto the tiny front porch. She repeated: "I have flowers for Peggy. Are you Peggy?" Wordlessly, the woman nodded her head.
"I'm Sharon Bakos, and I wonder if you have time to talk." She handed the flowers to the woman with dark eyes so like her own. The woman furtively looked inside her door and replied, "No, I'm involved in something right now." But she accepted the bouquet and murmured, "Thank you."
The two women stood only a foot apart on the front porch. They exchanged another sentence or two. Peggy again expressed her thanks. Then, the older woman repeated, "I'm involved in something right now," and with a "Good Bye," went inside and closed the door. Sharon walked off the tiny porch, through the gate and to her rental car.
Afterwards, this adopted woman in a strange city drove to an oceanside park where she quietly reflected on what it meant, this finally having seen the woman who had dark eyes so like her own. Weeks later, Sharon was able to articulate the jumble of feelings: "I feel finally connected to something. She's no longer a fantasy birthmother ...this is who Peggy really is." w
Who Peggy is ...and her timidity about having a relationship with her own daughter ...was partially created by an accident of timing. She became pregnant without the blessing of marriage in an era in which legal couplehood was the only sanctioned state in which to bear and rear a child. Like other unwed mothers of her time, Peggy's punishment for "getting in trouble" was to give up her baby and then be shamed into silence.
Tragically, many of Peggy's peers were middle-class white American teenagers who had no choice about how to cope with their pregnancy and their newborns. As minors, they were packed off by their parents to maternity homes where they were told the social workers would find homes for the babies. Afterwards, they were told to go home where no one in the community would know and encouraged to "forget...and get own with their lives"
No birthmother alive, of course, ever forgot the infant she carried inside her or that nameless strangers were given her baby. Which is why tens of thousands of birthmothers have broken through the shame and silence and searched for a child missing in adoption. Searching, too, for peace of mind about whether the adoptee had been okay. There are also the birthmothers who accept with gratitude and tears a letter or phone call from an adoptee who grew up and decided to find his or her birthmother.
Statistically, a searching adoptee has a 90% chance of finding a biological mother who is receptive to be found. Sharon's birthmother, Peggy, is among the 10 percent contacted by a biological relative following an adoption search who is said to be initially unreceptive. However, half of these "found" individuals do change their minds and exchange cursory information, if not enter into a relationship.
Peggy is not the only birthmother seemingly still burdened with the intense shame imposed upon her. Like too many others, Peggy may also believe that because she signed away her right to be a parent to Sharon that she also gave up the right to know her.
As a birthmother myself, I'm sad for these women who, for whatever reason, cannot end the secret keeping. I know personally the emotional toll. To deny a part of ourselves...and a missing child...is to forbid joy and fullness and, in doing so, we risk emotional distresses like panic attacks, addictions, and numbed emotions. To quote a contemporary adage: Secrets can make us sick.
But, is it our role as adoption reform activists to fling open the emotional closet in which many birthmothers are still hiding? No.
On the other hand, should each birthmother take responsibility for the long-ago relinquishment and provide answers to the any questions that an adopted individual naturally would have? Yes.
This conflict between the opposing needs of an adoptee wanting to know biological identity and the birthparent still questing for privacy must be resolved before it will be possible to initiate a law in Texas, or anywhere else, which retroactively ends secrecy in adoption records.
We must understand that this is not a simple issue of wrong vs. right - with forces opposing open records in one corner saying, Birthmothers were promised lifetime confidentiality, and adoption reformers at the polar opposite declaring, Adoptees' rights to birth records and documents must be restored without any hint of compromise.
Until Texas began its recent Adoptee Rights Resolution effort, I personally believed that the Birthmothers were promised lifetime confi-dentiality argument was a fiction, a ruse manufac-tured wholly by the opposition to keep adoption records permanently in the dark ages. My own need as a birthmother activist to "right a wrong" blinded me to the tiny kernel of truth in this statement which allows opposing forces to keep this argument alive and which has stalled reform legislation in Texas and elsewhere.
Early this year, we began promoting our Texas Adoptee Rights Resolution which proposes "Adoptees deserve their original birth certificates and court records". Soon, heated discussions in precinct meetings and in district political conventions, made it obvious that John and Jane Citizen do believe that adoptees deserve to have access to their records and complete identity. But they are confused because John and Jane also have honest concern for the women who long ago chose adoption for a child. This was not politicalspeak. This was straight-from-the-heart disquiet. This was no political gambit. John and Jane Citizen were just now learning from us activists that adoptees in Texas can’t access their original birth certificates or court records.
I would assume that many spoke up because of birthmothers (or birthfathers?) in their own families who are keeping secrets still. And, undoubtedly, had never discussed this with the birthmother herself. After all, one doesn't dredge up secrets in polite Texas families.
However, their motives for concern are beside the point. As is the fact that we can document that birthmothers in Texas were never promised lifetime confidentiality from their adopted child but rather had it imposed upon them. We know that a birthmother usually signed a surrender document so intimidating in tone that there was little possibility of changing her mind. From personal experience, birthmothers can avow that any privacy desired was from nosey neighbors, not from our children or their adoptive parents. That contemporary birthparents have supported open adoption certainly bears this out.
But, John and Jane Citizen's gut reaction to our Adoptee Rights Resolution makes me believe that all activists must seriously consider this compelling question: What about Peggy and the minority of birth-mothers like her? Should there be empathy when creating a new law that gives an adoptee access to their Texas birth documents and court records?
Informally, of course, this empathy is already in place. The ever-growing numbers of adoptees who have searched and found biological families have overall honored the wishes of their birth families about contact. Sharon's three-year journey of patience is only one example, and she speaks for the legions when she says: "I'm not going to do anything that increases her pain."
Shouldn't the law allow adoptees to make their search journeys legally and allow access to the appropriate records and documents - and, by doing so, restore the basic right and dignity an adoptee deserves as much as any other citizen?
In my opinion, it would be wrong to leave in place a law that has severed half a million Texas adoptees and their own sons and daughters from their biological data when we understand that having a complete medical history can save lives. Intense concerns about a birthmother's privacy also ignores the truth that in Texas most adoptions are biological family adoptions, usually by a step-parent or grandparent. Yet, for all, a new "birth" document is still issued and the true birth certificate is not available to either the adoptee or the family.
And, how do you think it feels for a birth parent to be erased from their child's birth certificate?
Which brings us full circle to the question of whether lawmakers should restore the rights of adoptees ... which could also offer peace of mind for the majority of birthparents ... or to "protect" the relatively few birthmothers not ready for whatever reason to meet a grown-up child. Are we willing to find answers to this conflict?
Stephen R. Covey, in his inspiring bestseller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, urges us to "Think Win/Win" when we're solving any problem. Says he:
"Win/Win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win/Win means that agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial, mutually satisfying. With a Win/Win solution, all parties feel good about the decision and feel committed to the action plan. Win/Win sees life as a cooperative, not a competitive arena. Most people tend to think in terms of dichotomies: strong or weak, hardball or softball, win or lose. But that kind of thinking is fundamentally flawed. It's based on power and position rather than on principle. Win/Win is based on the paradigm that there is plenty for everybody, that one person's success is not achieved at the expense or exclusion of the success of others.A higher way...perhaps that's the path to follow."Win/Win is a belief in the Third Alternative. It's not your way or my way; it's a better way, a higher way."
Last updated October 22, 1999