Why did your
natural mother refuse to meet you? There are
probably as many answers as there are natural
mothers. From some of my own feelings and those of
other natural mothers, though, I do have a few
possible themes to suggest.
Your natural
mother lost a great deal when she surrendered you.
She lost the chance to give you all of the love she
felt for you, that all mothers feel. She lost the
opportunity to share in the important and the
humdrum events of your life. She lost all the joys
and problems of raising you, of guiding you from
infancy to adulthood.
She may feel guilty that she was not there. She may
feel cheated because she was not allowed to be
there. Either way, loss is both painful and
unnatural.
In addition to the pain of the losses themselves,
there is the additional pain of feeling different
from other people, outcast from society. Often there
is the pain of feeling that the loss was unnecessary
and that the separation need not have occurred "if
only..." If only her parents had helped her. If only
the social worker had told her what adoption would
really be like for you and for her. If only society
had supported single parenthood at the time you were
born. If only she had not believed she was unworthy
of you. If only she had had the money to support
you. If only she had somehow found a way to keep
you. If only she had believed in her own feelings
instead of in what others told her would be best for
you.
The list of
"if onlies" is endless. Knowing you could make her
losses more real to her, and thus more painful. She
may ave worked very hard at denying her feelings, at
convincing herself that your adoption was necessary,
at telling herself that giving birth does not make a
woman a mother, at pretending that she was not a
mother and so did not lose anything. She may have
denied to herself that it ever happened.
If she has succeeded at numbing herself to the pain
by clinging to such beliefs, knowing you would
remove the blinders from her eyes, exposing her to
the full impact of all the years of loss and pain.
She may have coped with losing you through
fantasizing about what might have been. She may see
you over and over in her mind just as you were when
she last saw you, see herself raising you, see what
you would be like at different ages.
If your natural mother has other children, she may
be terrified of losing them, too, if she had not
told them about you. Many natural mothers were
rejected by their children's natural fathers and by
their own parents during their pregnancies. If the
people she loved and trusted and whom she thought
would always love and help abandoned her when she
most needed them, she may be unable to trust anyone
now. She may regard all relationships as fragile,
and fear that she will be abandoned again if she
disappoints the people who are now important to her.
Having already suffered the pain of losing one
child, the fear of losing her other children and
suffering that same pain again may overwhelm her.
She may also fear losing you a second time around,
if you want to see her only once. Many natural
mothers have internalized others' rejection of them
and believe they are unlovable. Not loving or
respecting herself, she cannot believe that others
could care about her if they really knew her.
Suspecting
that adoptees who search will ask about their
fathers after they have satisfied their curiosity
about their mothers, her rejection may be tied to
her feelings about your natural father. If she loved
him, accepting you could mean reopening the deep
wounds she suffered in being rejected by him. If she
did not love him, she may dread having to admit that
fact to you. She may not want to explain her
relationship with your natural father or her
feelings about it, and fear that you will reject her
if she does not answer your questions about him. She
may fear that you would prefer him to her and she
could not bear to lose you to the very person whose
abandonment made your surrender unavoidable. She may
believe that your natural
father is a terrible person and feel shame at having
had a relationship with him, fear that you might
hate her if you knew him. She may fear that you
would be upset or would think less of her or of
yourself if you knew him.
Mothers want their children to be happy, but they
also want to feel needed and important to their
children. They want to be the ones who make their
children happy. Generally, a mother's needs and her
child's compliment each other, so that both are
satisfied by her raising her child, with each
needing and receiving the other's love. The special
situation of adoption, though, assures that the
natural mother cannot win. If she believes your
adoption was the best for you, she may feel
worthless or useless as a mother because you did not
need her. If your adoption was not the best, she may
feel guilty that she did not protect you from
whatever happened and she may therefore feel she
failed as a mother and as a woman.
Your natural mother's image of herself as a mother,
a woman, and a human being may be at stake. If she
has internalized society's judgments that "nice
girls don't" or that only an "unnatural woman" could
surrender her child or that "any animal can give
birth but that doesn't make her a mother", it will
be difficult for her to acknowledge to herself that
it is she who is that bad girl, the unnatural woman,
or only an animal in society's eyes.
Subconsciously, some mothers feel that their babies
abandoned them. Mothers were often repeatedly told
that their babies needed or wanted more than they
could give them, and that surrender was necessary
for the child. Many mothers were told that to keep
their children would be selfish, that they had no
right to satisfy their need to love and nurture by
raising their children, because the children deserve
and need more. Other people spoke for you, telling
your natural mother you wanted more than she could
give. To your natural mother, this may have been
experienced deep within as a rejection by you, as
her baby deserting her for other people. Even though
she knows on an intellectual level that this feeling
is not rational and she may feel guilty for it, on
an emotional level what she feels may be that,
although she needed and wanted her child, her child
was not there for her.
Closely
related are the problems of competition and
sacrifice. Just as she may have felt that she was in
competition with unknown couples for the right to
raise you, a contest in which she was the loser, she
was also placed in the position of being in
competition with you. She may have been told that it
was her life or yours, her needs or yours. Because
you were not aided as a family but instead treated
as individuals whose needs were in conflict, she may
have felt that she was choosing between her own
happiness and yours.
If she wanted to raise you but believed that your
surrender was necessary for your happiness, she may
feel that she has sacrificed her life for yours, her
happiness for yours. All people want happiness,
everyone wants her own needs to be met, and there is
usually anger toward injustice. She, however, cannot
allow herself to feel or express her anger and
resentment, because it was your natural mother
herself who decided that you were more important and
mattered more than she did, she herself who chose
your needs above her own.
If that choice was made by others such as her
parents or by her situation instead of by your
natural mother, there may be even more anger. There
can be tremendous guilt involved for feeling anger,
because we have been taught that parents gladly
sacrifice for their children. Her anger may
therefore be threatening to her, for what kind of
person can she be that she could feel anger toward
her child?
Yet other parents, other people, do not make
sacrifices of this magnitude. What society usually
calls parental sacrifice is really more like an
investment or a trade-off of some current comfort in
exchange for other regards. To give up a full
night's sleep in order to tend a sick child carries
with it the benefits of holding and comforting that
child, feeling necessary to the child, receiving the
child's love and gaining society's approval. What
most parents think of as sacrifices are small and
temporary inconveniences for which they receive
personal satisfaction, the child's loyalty and
affection and societal sanctions. The sacrifice of a
natural mother's life for her child's in unique.
Rather than compensations, the sacrifice is
generally answered with guilt, pain and emptiness.
Society's reaction is most often condemnation rather
than approval. The natural mother's sacrifice is
unnatural, unrecognized and unrewarded.
Some natural mothers felt less than human during the
pregnancy and surrender experience, and may have
felt they were regarded as subhuman by society. Just
as infants have a need to be nurtured, so every
mother has a need to give nurture to her child. You
were placed with people who could meet your infant
need for nurture, but your natural mother was given
no substitute for you. Her need to nurture was not
met.
Understandably, many adoptees explain that their
adoptive parents are their only real parents and
they love them dearly, but that they searched to
gain information about themselves. Newspapers are
full of articles about adoptees saying that they are
not looking for a mother, but for themselves or
their own identity.
Your natural mother may feel she is again being
reduced to a data bank. Just as she once surrendered
you to others while her own needs went unmet, she
may feel she is now being asked for information but
that again her feelings and needs will be ignored.
She may feel she has given everything without
receiving anything in return, and will be reluctant
to give still more if she fears that you too, will
take what you want from her and then abandon her
with no thought for her needs.
Even if she is able to struggle through the many
pains and losses that have already occurred, your
natural mother may fear that there are more to come
if she accepts you now. It may hurt her terribly
that she could not mother you.
Opening her heart to you would make your natural
mother vulnerable to a later rejection by you. If
she welcomed you as the beloved daughter or son she
lost, how would she feel at being only a friend or
acquaintance to you? To what extent would you accept
her? Would she be asked to your graduation or
wedding? Would you want to spend Christmas or
Passover with her? Would you regard her as the
grandmother of your children, including her in
events in their lives? Or would you want to see her
on rare and secret occasions, carefully hiding the
relationship from others? She may feel that not only
have adoptive parents taken her place in your life
as a child and in raising you, but that by accepting
you now she would lose you again, this time by
inches, by being relegated to a lowly and
insignificant place in your life, if she were
included at all.
As an adult, you are unlikely to want your natural
mother to be the mother she may, on some level,
still want to be. Your image of motherhood will
always be that of your adoptive mother, not your
natural mother. You cannot relate to your natural
mother in the same way you would have if she had
raised you, nor can she relate to you in the same
way. Neither of you are the people you would be if
she had raised you. Although the similarities you
are likely to share would make her keenly aware that
you are her child, the differences resulting from
your growing up in your adoptive home would make her
painfully aware of the distance between you as well.
Because meeting you requires facing all her feelings
about your surrender and loss, it may also challenge
your natural mother's beliefs about the value and
meaning of life, the importance of family ties,
religion and other basic concepts on which she has
built her life. Many people want to believe that the
world is fair, that everything comes out even, that
people get what they deserve out of life. Adoption
issues do not fit into such tidy categories.
If the world is fair, what has she done that is so
terrible she deserve such pain? If life is equal why
did other people who expressed their sexuality
before marriage pay not price for it? If this is
justice why did her subsequent children have to grow
up in an incomplete family, without their brother or
sister. If families are of primary importance and
should be kept together why was her family
separated? How could her church have told her God
wanted her child to be adopted or that God created
her child for other parents? How could a loving God
want this pain for her? If she allows herself to
acknowledge her experience, how can she reconcile it
with what she believes about life? If the
foundations on which she has build her life
do not match her experience, it will be difficult
for her to face her feelings and risk losing those
foundations. Facing you may mean reconstructing her
entire view of life, rethinking all of her values.
The issues a natural mother must face before she can
accept her adult child are not simple ones, nor are
they obvious to her. Often there are conflicts
between what she thinks and what she feels or
between her feelings and those of the people around
her. Few natural mothers were told to expect these
problems or prepared to deal with them. Since little
or no hope of a future reunion was offered to
surrendering mothers, there was little motivation
for attempting to deal with them. Many were told
that they would be abnormal if they did not forget
about their children, that they should go on with
their lives as if they had never had their children.
Most natural mothers, despite the enormity of these
issues, do face most of them in the years following
surrender. Most people cannot sustain the fantasy
that their loss was a nightmare and not a reality.
Most people find the strength to face the truth of
their own lives, but growth can be a slow and
painful process with uneven progress characterized
by temporary regression back to suppressed feelings.
To some people, it might seem pointless to attempt
reunions when so much pain, conflict and confusion
seem to be involved. Reunion, though, does not cause
these difficulties. Their source is the natural
mother's unnatural separation from her child. The
feelings already exist, and leaving them buried
beneath denials and fantasies cannot resolve or
eliminate them. However painful the separation
experience may be, it is her experience, her life.
Attempting to suppress the most profound experience
of her life separates the natural mother from
herself as well as from her child and is not healthy
for anyone. It requires that much emotional energy
be spent on denying or numbing feelings, limiting
emotional growth in all areas.
Your natural mother's fear and dread are evidence of
the intensity of her feelings for you. If she had no
feeling for you, you would be no more frightening to
her than a store clerk or a stranger asking for
directions. What she feels may be an overwhelmingly
intense but undifferentiated fear and she herself
may not understand the reasons for it. Her reasons
are her deepest emotions, hidden under so may layers
of intellect, rationalization and denial that she is
unaware of them. She may try to give sensible
reasons why she cannot see, understand or articulate
the real reasons without much self analysis.
You are offering the opportunity for your natural
mother to grow by facing herself and becoming
reconciled with her feelings about herself. You are
offering the gift of knowing the person her
surrendered child has become. These are enormous
gifts and you should be proud for offering them to
her.
In order to accept them, though, your natural mother
must climb a painfully steep and rocky path through
her many feelings about your surrender before she
can move forward to reconciliation. Her ability to
walk a part of that path or all of it is not a
reflection on you or on your worth or on your
importance to her but on how well she herself can
deal with the fears and pains that your loss and
society's attitudes about the surrender have caused
her. With time and support your natural mother may
grow to accept the gifts you offer.