A lot of adoptees are lucky enough to get the chance to get to meet or at least speak with their birth parents. Most people have some sort of idea of why their birth parents gave them up.
My question is, what were your thoughts on why you were given up and how much different were they from the reason your birth parent gave you?
Sunny
Favorite Answer
I was never given a 'reason' by my aparents. I was told she was "one of the youngest girls to ever come through" the agency.
This created for me a fantasy of a girl whom something VERY bad had happen to...was she raped? What kind of a girl gets pregnant at what, 12, 13? My child's mind just couldn't fathom what had happened to create this situation where I had to be adopted. I often wonder if this 'story' influenced my amother as well. Even though I was a very 'good' girl, I was always treated like a whore. Never trusted around boys. My amother even tracked my menstrual cycles--to make sure I wasn't knocked up like my tramp of a mother?
I met my nmother at 22. She was living in a house a five minute walk from the Pacific. She had never really worked. My DH called her a 'trustifarian'. She gets money from her very wealthy family. She was 22 when she had me. She had met my father at their parent's yacht club. The big 'problem' is that he wasn't 'ready' to marry her. And her mother pushed for me to me given away--NO ONE kept a baby out of wedlock in the early 1960s!
So, yes, my 'thoughts' (lies supplied by the Lutheran adoption agency) were quite different from the reality. Maybe, just maybe, had my parents been told the truth (!) I wouldn't have paid for my mother's 'sin', and had a shred of self-esteem as a child.
Secrets and lies are NEVER healthy!
?
I was adopted at 5 days old. I met my birth mother when I was 42. The reason for my being adopted was that my mother was still in school. The school counselor and my birth grandmother thought that the best thing to do was to send her away to a home for unwed mothers. That is pretty much what I heard all through growing up. Things are a bit different now and it's not so much taboo about being a single parent.
love my life
My parents told me the whole story of both of my adoptions. They didn't leave anything out. As I got older they answered any questions I had. They also never ran down my bio's. They were very honest so I didn't have unanswered questions. They told me at a very early age in a way that I could understand. I never doubted what they told me. I met and had a relationship with my grandma an grandpa. They were great people. They also told me what had happened and it was the same as my parents had said only with more detail about what my bio's life was like. So I guess I was lucky to have parents that were open and honest and didn't try to hide the truth. They were both very supportive to me if I ever wanted to look for my bio's, which I haven't.
LaurieDB
I was actually given two stories, one as a child and one when I received my non-identifying information at the age of 25. My adoptive parents told me that I had been removed by the state because of abuse. I believed this for a long time.
At 25, when I received the write up from the social worker, she said she didn't understand why my aparents thought this, since it wasn't true. She said that my natural parents came to social services on their own when I was a little over a year because circumstances in their lives had become such that they felt they couldn't provide properly for me. I asked my amom why she told me I was abused. She said that's what the agency told them. I know she wouldn't lie, so I realized my aparents were given incorrect information, probably to get prospective aparents to feel sorry for me. I was 2 years old, and not being an infant made it harder to place me.
When I reunited with my ndad (my nmom had already passed away,) I asked him what happened. The story he gave me was exactly the same as the one the social worker gave me when I was 25. The one thing I never would have guessed was that my nfather had been searching for me for years and missed me very much the entire time. We have a very, very good relationship.
Snow Flake
This is a very good question.
My aparents told me that my first mom gave me up because she wanted to finish college and couldn't do that and take care of a baby. This left me feeling my whole life like my first mom had chosen a degree over me and that she was either A) a selfish person or B) I wasn't worth keeping.
This reason may have been what the adoption agency told my aparents just to make them feel comfortable about adopting me. My aparents both have college degrees and hold education in high regard. It probably made sense to them to think someone would want to finish their education. I think that the social worker knew just what to say to them.
When I met my first mom, she told me that finishing college hadn't been the reason at all. She said that if she could have she would have kept me but her parents, my father and his parents all pressured her to place me for adoption. She felt like she had no choice but to do as they all wanted her to. No help was offered to her and it was made clear that she would be entirely on her own if she chose to keep me.
Apparently, after she gave birth to me, her family and my father's family told everyone that I was stillborn. Gives me the chills to think about to this day.