My mother was an adoptee brought up as an only child, but thirty years ago, soon after giving birth myself, I began a search for my mother's birth mother and found several aunts and an uncle, including a deceased uncle who looked like my brother and had the same neurological disorder, epilepsy and seizures. I also have a close relative who was recently contacted by the baby she gave up for adoption decades ago. So I can understand adoptees' wanting information about, and contact with, their birth mothers and people who are genetically related to them.
But why do the adoptees in Ruth Stein's article never mention their adoptive parents?
http://www.sfgate.com/living/article/Philomena-hits-home-for-adoptees-5063128.php
Why is the implication that the "real" mothers are those who gave them up? What about those who chose to make them a part of their lives and brought them up? Why is there so little acknowledgement that they have two sets of parents? I know that adoptees sometimes don't feel connected to the people who adopted them, but the same "poor match" can be felt by children who grow up with their birth parents.
When I was doing my search in the 1980's, I did it through ALMA. Now I see there's The American Adoption Congress. Maybe there should be an organization for people who did the nurturing and have been forgotten, or unacknowledged by the children they brought up. Isn't forgetting or failing to acknowledge a kind of abandonment?
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I don't think this is the kind of community-provided bench the SF Chronicle was talking about today in its article https://www.sfchronic...
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First, newspaper space is limited. If Ms. Stein had more space, she may have been able to tell more of their stories. Second, the focus of the article was on the adoptee search and adoptees are searching for the part of themselves that they don't know which is their biological heritage. Adoptees know about their adoptive parents so there is not an emphasis on finding this out. Just because an adoptee talks about this doesn't mean they have left out their adoptive parents. If you know anything about adoption, you know that the biological heritage of the adoptee is sealed away by law so that is why this piece is missing and articles are devoted to finding these pieces and putting them all together so the adoptee can make sense of it.
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