For many decades we have been working toward a fundamental
re-thinking of adoption. The necessity
of re-thinking adoption is based on the flaws of our cultural, legal and
historical approaches to adoption. We
are culturally enveloped by an adoption savior mythology that often begins with
the orphan and skips the fundamental facts of loss and disconnection involved
in adoption---as though “orphans” were brought to adoptive parents by the
proverbial stork. We still are under a
legal approach to adoption that treats the adoptee “as if” she or he had been
born to the adoptive parents, with officially faked birth certificates---and
unfortunately still in most states original records closed even to the adult
adoptee. We have the horrific heritage of
the baby scoop era, when so many unmarried mothers were forced or pressured
into giving up their children for adoption---a phenomenon increasingly
acknowledged in many nations around the world.
Lorraine Dusky’s newly published book is in part a mother’s
gut-wrenching record of one of those baby-scoop era adoptions. Dusky goes further, however, and takes the
story into the intergenerational realm of reunion with her daughter, the
complex relations that follow with her adult daughter and adoptive family, and
what happens as her daughter also has a child.
I don’t want to give away any of
the story, except to say that the part of the book dealing with post-reunion
relationships is critically important.
This is not a book about “happily ever after” (although Lorraine herself
is definitely a survivor). This is a
book in which everyone bears scars and seeks, not always with success, to
overcome them. The story quite frankly is sometimes very
hard to read simply because it is so painful, and I admire Dusky’s courage in
telling it.
Hole in my heart is appropriately subtitled as “a memoir and
report from the fault lines of adoption.”
Indeed, adoption viewpoints have often been divided and stereotyped by
triad identification. The older
adoption savior mythology has often been identified with adoptive parents. First parents and adult adoptees often have
been politically aligned in challenging that culturally dominant
narrative. Dusky’s memoir suggests, however, that equally
important is the fault line between adoptees and first parents---and especially
between adoptees and their mothers. Most of us already know that reunions and the
relationships that follow can be difficult.
Although Dusky of course is only giving us one particular story, her
compelling narrative can give us increased insight into why those relationships
are so difficult. If we are going to
re-vision adoption correctly, we badly need this kind of brutally honest
narrative.
I was honored to be asked by Lorraine to write an endorsement
for her book, and was pleased to do so. Of
course the point of the endorsement was to do so as an adoptive parent, to make
it clear that this is not just a book for first parents and adoptees. Indeed,
as adoptive parents, Desiree and I helped arrange a very complicated reunion
between our daughters and their mother and family in India. While I personally believe in all-manner of
openness in adoption—open records, open adoption, open communication among all
triad members---I had already learned the hard way that there can be no “politically
correct” set of expectations around post-reunion relationships. They are complex and difficult because the
separations and traumas that preceded them run so deep. They are raw because they re-open scars,
which does not make them any less important and necessary, but sometimes makes
them painful even when they are healing.
Dusky’s book confirms what I have seen so often elsewhere---that the
adoptee journey of discovery and identity operates according to rhythms that often
clash with the desires and expectations of first parents, and that at least
some adoptees have difficulty getting past a core anger against their mothers
for not being there with them during their childhoods, no matter how good the
explanations.
Read Dusky’s book. It is one of the antidotes to the simplistic
adoption narratives we have been fed for too long. But don’t stop there. We need more stories like this. Not everyone can and should tell their
stories to the world, but we can at least tell them to one another. Dusky gives us courage and honesty, which is
a great gift and example.
David Smolin
Hole in my Heart is indeed a great book, a much needed addition to adoption literature. I'm a birthmother and reviewed it on my blog: http://www.secondchancemother.com/book-review-hole-in-my-heart/
ReplyDeleteI hope everyone, with or without a connection to adoption will read it!