The BIG 7

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Adoption is a lifelong, intergenerational process that unites the triad of birth families, adoptees, and adoptive families forever. Adoption, especially of adolescents, can lead to both great joy and tremendous pain. Recognizing the core issues in adoption is one intervention that can assist triad members and professionals working in adoption better to understand each other and the residual effects of the adoption experience.

Adoption triggers seven lifelong or core issues for all triad members, regardless of the circumstances of the adoption or the characteristics of the participants:

1. Loss

2. Rejection

3. Guilt and Shame

4. Grief

5. Identity

6. Intimacy

7. Mastery/control

(Silverstein and Kaplan 1982).

Clearly, the specific experiences of triad members vary, but there is a commonality of affective experiences which persists throughout the individual's or family's life cycle development. The recognition of these similarities permits dialogue among triad members and allows those professionals with whom they interface to intervene in proactive as well as curative ways.

The presence of these issues does not indicate, however, that either the individual or the institution of adoption is pathological or pseudopathological. Rather, these are expected issues that evolve logically out of the nature of adoption. Before the recent advent of open and cooperative practices, adoption- had been practiced as a win/lose or adversarial process. In such an approach, birth families lose their child in order for the adoptive family to gain a child. The adoptee was transposed from one family to another with time-limited and, at times, shortsighted consideration of the child's long-term needs. Indeed, the emphasis has been on the needs of the adults--on the needs of the birthfamily not to parent and on the needs of the adoptive family to parent. The ramifications of this attitude can be seen in the number of difficulties experienced by adoptees and their families over their lifetimes.

Many of the issues inherent in the adoption experience converge when the adoptee reaches adolescence. At this time three factors intersect: an acute awareness of the significance of being adopted; a drive toward emancipation; and a biopsychosocial striving toward the development of an integrated identity.

It is not our intent here to question adoption, but rather to challenge some adoption assumptions, specifically, the persistent notion that adoption is not different from other forms of parenting and the accompanying disregard for the pain and struggles inherent in adoption.

However, identifying and integrating these core issues into pre-adoption education, post-placement supervision, and all post-legalized services, including treatment, universalizes and validates triad members' experiences, decreasing their isolation and feelings of helplessness.

Loss

Adoption is created through loss; without loss there would be no adoption. Loss, then, is at the hub of the wheel. All birth parents, adoptive parents, and adoptees share in having experienced at least one major, life-altering loss before becoming involved in adoption. In adoption, in order to gain anything, one must first lose--a family, a child, a dream. It is these losses and the way they are accepted and, hopefully, resolved which set the tone for the lifelong process of adoption.

Adoption is a fundamental, life-altering event. It transposes people from one location in the human mosaic into totally new configuration. Adoptive parents, whether through infertility, failed pregnancy, stillbirth, or the death of a child have suffered one of life's greatest blows prior to adopting. They have lost their dream child. No matter how well resolved the loss of bearing a child appears to be, it continues to affect the adoptive family at a variety of points throughout the families love cycle (Berman and Bufferd 1986). This fact is particularly evident during the adoptee's adolescence when the issues of burgeoning sexuality and impending emancipation may rekindle the loss issue.

Birthparents lose, perhaps forever, the child to whom they are genetically connected. Subsequently, they undergo multiple losses associated with the loss of role, the loss of contact, and perhaps the loss of the other birth parent, which reshape the entire course of their lives.

Adoptees suffer their first loss at the initial separation from the birthfamily. Awareness of their adopted status is inevitable. Even if the loss is beyond conscious awareness, recognition, or vocabulary, it affects the adoptee on a very profound level. Any subsequent loss, or the perceived threat of separation, becomes more formidable for adoptees than their non-adopted peers.

The losses in adoption and the role they play in all triad members lives have largely been ignored. The grief process in adoption, so necessary for healthy functioning, is further complicated by the fact that there is no end to the losses, no closure to the loss experience. Loss in adoption is not a single occurrence. There is the initial, identifiable loss and innumerable secondary sub-losses. Loss becomes an evolving process, creating a theme of loss in both the individual's and family's development. Those losses affect all subsequent development.

Loss is always a part of triad members' lives. A loss in adoption is never totally forgotten. It remains either in conscious awareness or is pushed into the unconscious, only to be reawakened by later loss. It is crucial for triad members, their significant others, and the professional with whom they interface, to recognize these losses and the effect loss has on their lives.

Rejection

Feelings of loss are exacerbated by keen feelings of rejection. One way individuals seek to cope with a loss is to personalize it. Triad members attempt to decipher what they did or did not do that led to the loss. Triad members become sensitive to the slightest hint of rejection, causing them either to avoid situations where they might be rejected or to provoke rejection in order to validate their earlier negative self-perceptions.

Adoptees seldom are able to view their placement into adoption by the birthparents as anything other than total rejection. Adoptees even at young ages grasp the concept that to be "chosen" means first that one was "un-chosen," reinforcing adoptees' lowered self-concept. Society promulgates the idea that the "good" adoptee is the one who is not curious and accepts adoption without question. At the other extreme of the continuum is the "bad" adoptee who is constantly questioning, thereby creating feelings of rejection in the adoptive parents.

Birthparents frequently condemn themselves for being irresponsible, as does society. Adoptive parents may inadvertently create fantasies for the adoptee about the birthfamily that reinforce these feelings of rejection. For example, adoptive parents may block an adolescent adoptee's interest in searching for birthparents by stating that the birthparents may have married and had other children. The implication is clear that the birthparents would consider contact with the adoptee an unwelcome intrusion.

Adoptive parents may sense that their bodies have rejected them if they are infertile. This impression may lead the infertile couple, for example, to feel betrayed or rejected by God. When they come to adoption, the adopters, possibly unconsciously, anticipate the birthparents' rejection and criticism of their parenting. Adoptive parents struggle with issues of entitlement, wondering if perhaps they were never meant to be parents, especially to this child. The adopting family, then, may watch for the adoptee to reject them, interpreting many benign, childish actions as rejection. To avoid that ultimate rejection, some adoptive parents expel or bind adolescent adoptees prior to the accomplishment of appropriate emancipation tasks.

Guilt/Shame

The sense of deserving such rejection leads triad members to experience tremendous guilt and shame. They commonly believe that there is something intrinsically wrong with them or their deeds that caused the losses to occur. Most triad members have internalized, romantic images of the American family that remain unfulfilled because there is no positive, realistic view of the adoptive family in our society.

For many triad members, the shame of being involved in adoption per se exists passively, often without recognition. The shame of an unplanned pregnancy, or the crisis of infertility, or the shame of having been given up remains unspoken, often as an unconscious motivator.

Adoptees suggest that something about their very being caused the adoption. The self-accusation is intensified by the secrecy often present in past and present adoption practices. These factors combine to lead the adoptee to conclude that the feelings of guilt and shame are indeed valid.

Adoptive parents, when they are diagnosed as infertile, frequently believe that they must have committed a grave sin to have received such a harsh sentence. They are ashamed of themselves, of their defective bodies, of their inability to bear children.

Birthparents feel tremendous guilt and shame for having been intimate and sexual; for the very act of conception, they find themselves guilty.

Grief

Every loss in adoption must be grieved. The losses in adoption, however, are difficult to mourn in a society where adoption is seen as a problem-solving event filled with joy. There are no rituals to bury the unborn children; no rites to mark off the loss of role of caretaking parents; no ceremonies for lost dreams or unknown families. Grief washes over triad members' lives, particularly at times of subsequent loss or developmental transitions.

Triad members can be assisted at any point in the adoption experience by learning about and discussing the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Kubler-Ross 1969).

Adoptees in their youth find it difficult to grieve their losses, although they are in many instances aware of them, even as young children. Youngsters removed from abusive homes are expected to feel only relief and gratitude, not loss and grief. Adults block children's expressions of pain or attempt to divert them. In addition, due to developmental unfolding of cognitive processes, adoptees do not fully appreciate the total impact of their losses into their adolescence or, for many, into adulthood. This delayed grief may lead to depression or acting out through substance abuse or aggressive behaviors.

Birthparents may undergo an initial, brief, intense period of grief at the time of the loss of the child, but are encouraged by well-meaning friends and family to move on in their lives and to believe that their child is better off. The grief, however, does not vanish, and, in fact, it has been reported that birthmothers may deny the experience for up to ten years (Campbell 1979).

Adoptive Parnets' grief over the inability to bear children is also blocked by family and friends who encourage the couple to adopt, as if children are interchangeable. The grief of the adoptive parents continues as the child grows up since the adoptee can never fully meet the fantasies and expectations of the adoptive parents.

Identity

Adoption may also threaten triad members' sense of identity. Triad members often express feelings related to confused identity and identity crises, particularly at times of unrelated loss.

Identity is defined both by what one is and what one is not. In adoption, birthparents are parents and are not. Adoptive parents who were not parents suddenly become parents. Adoptees born into one family, a family probably nameless to them now, lose an identity and then borrow one from the adopting family.

Adoption, for some, precludes a complete or integrated sense of self. Triad members may experience themselves as incomplete, deficient, or unfinished. They state that they lack feelings of well-being, integration, or solidity associated with a fully developed identity.

Adoptees lacking medical, genetic, religious, and historical information are plagued by questions such as: Who are they? Why were they born? Were they in fact merely a mistake, not meant to have been born, an accident? This lack of identity may lead adoptees, particularly in adolescent years, to seek out ways to belong in more extreme fashion than many of their non-adopted peers. Adolescent adoptees are over represented among those who join sub-cultures, run away, become pregnant, or totally reject their families.

For many couples in our society a sense of identity is tied to procreation. Adoptive parents may lose that sense of generativity, of being fled to the past and future, often created through procreation.

Adoptive parents and birthparents share a common experience of role confusion. They are handicapped by the lack of positive identity associated with being either a birthparent or adoptive parent (Kirk 1964). Neither set of parents can lay full claim to the adoptee and neither can gain distance from any problems that may arise.

Intimacy

The multiple, ongoing losses in adoption, coupled with feelings of rejection, shame, and grief as well as an incomplete sense of self, may impede the development of intimacy for triad members. One maladaptive way to avoid possible reenactment of previous losses is to avoid closeness and commitment.

Adoptive parents report that their adopted children seem to hold back a part of themselves in the relationship. Adoptive mothers indicate, for example, that even as an infant, the adoptee was "not cuddly.'' Many adoptees as teens state that they truly have never felt close to anyone. Some youngsters declare a lifetime emptiness related to a longing for the birthmother they may have never seen.

Due to these multiple losses for both adoptees and adoptive parents, there may also have been difficulties in early bonding and attachment. For children adopted at older ages, multiple disruptions in attachment and/or abuse may interfere with relationships in the new family (Fahlberg 1979 a,b).

The adoptee's intimacy issues are particularly evident in relationships with members of the opposite sex and revolve around questions about the adoptee's conception, biological and genetic concerns, and sexuality.

The adoptive parents' couple relationship may have been irreparably harmed by the intrusive nature of medical procedures and the scapegoating and blame that may have been part of the diagnosis of infertility. These residual effects may become the hallmark of the later relationship.

Birthparents may come to equate sex, intimacy, and pregnancy with pain leading them to avoid additional loss by shunning intimate relationships. Further, birthparents may question their ability to parent a child successfully. In many instances, the birthparents fear intimacy in relationships with opposite sex partners, family or subsequent children.

Mastery/Control

Adoption alters the course of one's life. This shift presents triad members with additional hurdles in their development, and may hinder growth, self-actualization, and the evolution of self-control.

Birthparents, adoptive parents, and adoptees are all forced to give up control. Adoption, for most, is a second choice. Birthparents did not grow up with romantic images of becoming accidentally pregnant or abusing their children and surrendering them for adoption. In contrast, the pregnancy or abuse is a crisis situation whose resolution becomes adoption. In order to solve the predicament, birthparents must surrender not only the child but also their volition, leading to feelings of victimization and powerlessness that may become themes in birthparents' lives.

Adoptees are keenly aware that they were not party to the decision that led to their adoption. They had no- control over the loss of the birthfamily or the choice of the adoptive family. The adoption proceeded with adults making life-altering choices for them. This unnatural change of course impinges on growth toward self-actualization and self-control. Adolescent adoptees, attempting to master the loss of control they have experienced in adoption, frequently engage in power struggles with adoptive parents and other authority figures. They may lack internalized self-control, leading to a lowered sense of self-responsibility. These patterns, frequently passive/aggressive in nature, may continue into adulthood.

For adoptive parents, the intricacies of the adoption process lead to feelings of helplessness. These feelings sometimes cause adoptive parents to view themselves as powerless, and perhaps entitled to be parents, leading to laxity in parenting. As an alternative response, some adoptive parents may seek to regain the lost control by becoming overprotective and controlling, leading to rigidity in the parent/adoptee relationship.

Summary

The experience of adoption, then can be one of loss, rejection, guilt/shame, grief, diminished identity, thwarted intimacy, and threats to self-control and to the accomplishment of mastery. These seven core or lifelong issues permeate the lives of triad members regardless of the circumstances of the adoption.

Identifying these core issues can assist triad members and professionals in establishing an open dialogue and alleviating some of the pain and isolation that so often characterize adoption. Triad members may need professional assistance in recognizing that they may have become trapped in the negative feelings generated by the adoption experience. Armed with this new awareness, they can choose to catapult themselves into growth and strength.

Triad members may repeatedly do and undo their adoption experiences in their minds and in their vacillating behaviors while striving toward mastery. They will benefit from identifying, exploring and ultimately accepting the role of the seven core issues in their lives.

The following tasks and questions will help triad members and professionals explore the seven core issues in adoption:

List the losses, large and small, that you have experienced in adoption.
Identify the feelings associated with these losses.
What experiences in adoption have led to feelings of rejection?
Do you ever see yourself rejecting others before they can reject you? When?
What guilt or shame do you feel about adoption?
What feelings do you experience when you talk about adoption?
Identify your behaviors at each of the five stages of the grief process. Have you accepted your losses?
How has adoption impacted your sense of who you are?
Credits: Deborah N. Silverstein, Sharon Kaplan

Adoption: Trauma that Lasts a Lifetime

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

As You Like It Act 2, scene 7, 139–143 (Shakespeare)

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we came from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.
—Alex Haley, author of "Roots"

Adoption: Trauma that Last a Life Time

Vicki M. Rummig

June 11, 1996

They just cannot understand. The perfect child Mr. & Mrs. Smith adopted 15 years ago is now skipping school, talking back, experimenting with drugs, and is involved in a sexual relationship with her 20-year-old drug addicted boyfriend. Until a year ago she always had good grades and enjoyed spending time with her parents; she was the ideal child. They have sought treatment from a family therapist. Nevertheless, they just cannot seem to get through to her. There have been no new stressors in the household. What could be the problem?

For many years adoption has been viewed as a perfect arrangement for all involved. What has not been taken into account are the emotional effects adoption has on all members involved, most specifically, for the purpose of this paper, the adoptee. These effects, or issues, can be managed as long as they are recognized and acknowledged. Adoptees’ psychological issues need to be addressed by mental health professionals in order to recognize and effectively treat symptoms of low self-esteem, lack of trust, and dissociation.

The adoptees’ trauma begins the moment she is separated from her birth mother. Some psychologists believe that an infant is not able to differentiate her mother until at least two months of age. At the same time they believe that the infant does not know she is her own entity (Kaplan, 1978). What do mental health professionals believe the infant thinks for these first two months? They will suggest that she is in some type of limbo, that she does not have the capacity to think or know until two months of age. Yet, she somehow knows to cry when she is uncomfortable and how to ingest her food. Psychologists will call this instinct, but we should also look at the possibility of the newborn instinctively knowing who her mother is. After all, they were connected for 40 weeks.

Since an infant does not see herself as a separate entity, we must believe that she sees herself as part of the person she was physically attached and bonded to for 40 weeks (Verrier, 1993, chap. 2). When separated from the one thing to which she has connected, the infant will feel she has lost part of herself.

Many doctors and psychologists now understand that bonding doesn’t begin at birth, but is a continuum of physiological, psychological, and spiritual events which begin in utero and continue throughout the postnatal bonding period. When this natural evolution is interrupted by a postnatal separation from the biological mother, the resultant experience of abandonment and loss is indelibly imprinted upon the unconscious minds of these children, causing that which I call the “primal wound.” (Verrier, 1993, p. 1)
When the adoptee is separated from her birth mother, she undergoes extensive trauma. She will not remember this trauma, but it will stay in her subconscious as she lived it (Verrier, 1993). An event from a person’s infancy can and will stay with them through life. An example of the subconscious effect of an early experience would be Marc. Marc was in an orphanage for the first year of his life. Because of the lack of human touch, he would rock himself in his crib. Marc is now 42 years old and still rocks himself whenever he is watching television, listening to music, or sitting on a park bench. He does not remember rocking himself as an infant, but this practice has stayed with him through his subconscious his entire life.

The adoptee will always carry this issue of abandonment with her wherever she goes. It is no different from when a husband leaves a wife. She may remarry to a wonderful man, but will always wonder if her new husband is also going to leave her. She must work through the abandonment issue to regain trust. The abandonment issue has to be acknowledged, before it can be resolved.

Even if the “primal wound” as described above was not a factor in the adoptees’ emotional well being, the knowledge of abandonment will always be there. She may have been told she was “chosen” by the adoptive parents but it will not be long until she figures out she was abandoned by the first set of parents. Julie P. responded to a question on the Adoptees Internet Mailing List (an Internet support group that consists of approximately 1000 members) about the feeling of being adopted, “No, I am not depressed, miserable, angry, or negative...but I have always felt second best. Sure I was told that I was the (chosen) one, but first I was rejected.” Regardless of the circumstances, it will always feel like abandonment to her.

The adoptee is given very little information about her relinquishment. She is expected to leave the past behind and concentrate of her present and future. Out of respect for the adoptive parents, she will often not ask questions or talk about her adoption if it is an uncomfortable subject in her home. She will wonder about her relinquishment and her birth mother. To attempt to fill in the gaps she will create fantasies of acceptable scenarios of the circumstances of her conception, birth and relinquishment, that she can emotionally handle.

As a small child, she will not understand how a mother could give her up, or abandon her. Adoptees may feel they must have been a bad baby or that the birth mother was an uncaring person. Other thoughts will occur, such as she was stolen from the birth mother, either by public authorities or her adoptive parents. Often children will fluctuate in their thoughts and fantasies depending on their perception of the adoptive parents at any given time. (Lifton, 1988 &1994; Verrier, 1993; Brodzinsky, Schechter & Henig, 1992; Reitz & Watson, 1992; Adopting Resources, 1995) She will generally outgrow believing her fantasies and begin to see them as just that, but a part of her will always wonder.

The “chosen” child story also has negative affects on a child for other reasons. The child may feel that she has to be perfect to live up to her “chosen” status. Her role model adoptees include Superman and Jesus. This is a hard image for the average child to live up to. She may either become the compliant “perfect” child or she may act out and misbehave to test the commitment of the adoptive parents. Either way, often times she is not being herself, but rather acting a part. This acting can be very emotionally draining and confusing, and may last until the early adult years and beyond. When the adoptee can not live up to her perfect “chosen” status, it will contribute to the feeling of low self-esteem. This will be further exacerbated if the adoptive parents are not aware of the issue and their actions reinforce the adoptees beliefs, i.e., sending her away for residential treatment or openly wishing her to be more like themselves.

The adoptee is also aware of many ghosts that follow her through life. These ghosts include the person she would have been had she not been adopted, the ghost of the birth mother and birth father, and the ghost of the adoptive family’s child that would have been (Lifton, 1994, chap. 6). She may find herself trying to connect to her ghosts through her actions. Either being her image of her birth family, living her life according to her fantasy birth family, or acting as her vision of the adoptive parent’s natural child.

When the adolescent adoptee acts out it may be her way of trying to connect with the image she has of her birth mother or may be that she does not feel worthy of the adoptive parents love. Adolescence is a confusing time for any child, but the adoptee has many more identity issues to deal with. She may also be testing the commitment of the adoptive parents, seeing if they will send her away for being bad.

A great many of these young people are in serious trouble with the law and are drug addicted. The girls show an added history of nymphomania and out-of- wedlock pregnancy, almost as if they were acting out the role of the “whore” mother. In fact, both sexes are experimenting with a series of identities that seem to be related to their fantasies about the biological parents. (Lifton, 1988, p. 45)
As the adoptee begins to become aware of her adoptee status she will notice the differences she has from her peers and other family members. I noticed in my family that I did not have the nose or ears of any of my adoptive family. This is normal for an adoptee and can make her feel left out or misplaced in her family. A particularly tough time for the adoptee is when first learning about genetics in school. The first lesson in heredity and genetics usually is regarding eye color. If the adoptees’ own eyes do not fall into the proper genetic pattern she is left with a distinct feeling of not belonging. There are many instances in growing up when she is again faced with the knowledge that she is different; when asked about family history by a doctor, when asked if she has a sister because the inquirer knows someone who looks just like her, when asked about ethnic background, in regular day to day conversations.

Physical differences are not the only ones that are noticed. A difference in personality or talents may further misplace the adoptee from her family. In talking with other adoptees, I have described this feeling as “feeling like my adoptive family is in a big circle but I am on the outside looking in.”

With the adoptee not having a role model who resembles her physically or psychologically, it is more difficult to define where her life shall lead. She may come from a biologically artistic family, but adopted into a scientific family. She may not only feel the need to follow in her adoptive family’s footsteps, attending similar colleges, choosing similar careers, but she did not have the artistic role model to show her that way of life. This further complicates the identity formation of the adoptee. “One’s identity begins with the genes and family history...” (Reitz & Watson, 1992, p. 134)

Adoptees also lack the ability to see their physical characteristics as they will present themselves in the future. A natural born daughter would be able to tell how big she is going to be, if she will have a tendency to be overweight, or if she is going to go grey early in life, but the adoptee is denied this genetic role model and will not know these things until she reaches that stage in life herself. This adds to the curiosity of wanting to know their genetic background.

Rachel says that families are a hall of mirrors, “Everyone but adoptees can look in and see themselves reflected. I didn’t know what it was like to be me. I felt like someone who looks into a mirror and sees no reflection. I felt lonely, not connected to anything, floating, like a ghost.” (Lifton, 1994, p. 68)
The adoptee will feel even more dissociated when conversations regarding other family members or peers births are brought up. She is missing the story of her birth parents meeting, her conception, her birth, and in some instances, some time after her birth. On the Adoptees Internet Mailing List one member described this feeling as the “floating cosmic blip.” It is often commented that the adoptee feels hatched not born or that they are some type of space alien. Non-adoptees take their own life story for granted, but the adoptee is acutely aware that theirs is missing. So now, not only does the adoptee feel dissociated from her adoptive family, but also from her peers, for she is different.
Adoptees are faced with a feeling of loss and grief that they are not allowed, by society, to actively mourn. “With adoption, the child experiences a loss (like divorce or death) of an unknown person, and doesn’t know why.” (Adopting Resources, 1995) She is aware that family members are lost to her, but is expected to not mourn the loss of this family member she has never known. She will often be chastised when asking questions of her birth family from her adoptive family.

Not all of these issues affect adoptees to the same extent. Some may spend a lifetime dwelling on it, others may not even appear to notice. This would be true of any group of people that lived through trauma, such as Vietnam War Veterans. It should be noted that adoptees are over represented in residential treatment centers.

The number of Adoptees in the adolescent and young-adult clinics and residential treatment centers is strikingly high. Doctors from the Yale Psychiatric Institute and other hospitals that take very sick adolescents have told me they are discovering that from one-quarter to one-third of the patients are adopted. (Lifton, 1988, p.45)
In recent years there have been more works written on the subject. In 1978 Sorosky, Baran, and Pannor wrote the Adoption Triangle. This was one of the first written books that spoke specifically of the psychological issues of adoption. In one reference book written for psychologist by Reitz and Watson (1992) it was noted:

Despite the proliferation in recent decades of the literature on both family therapy and adoption, there has been little focus on the treatment of families involved in adoption. We offer our approach both as one sample of the current state of the practice art and as a way to generate hypotheses. Little, definitive, formal research findings are available, we have cited them; we believe, however, that findings from practice are valid field research. The clinician’s skills in observing recurrent themes and patterns resemble those of the formal researcher who looks for patterns in statistical data. Both clinicians and researchers must then interpret their findings. (preface)
In the early 1960s Dr. Marshall Schechter, child psychiatrist, was challenged by social workers when he first made the observation that there were a disproportionate number of adoptees in his clinic ( as cited in Lifton, 1988, p. 44). He later teamed up with Brodzinsky to research the psychology of adoption and to write various books (1990, 1992) on the subject.

There are many books written by members of the triad (refers to the three sides in adoption; adoptive parents, birth parents, and adoptees) that are geared toward their triad peers. (Lifton, 1988 and 1994; Verrier, 1993). These are an excellent resource for triad members to begin to explore the issues of adoption. Although they are not written with psychologists in mind, they would be a good first step for mental health professionals to begin to also understand adoption.

In researching basic child psychology books, if adoption is mentioned, it is in the following context: “It should be obvious that neither I or anybody else knows enough about the psychology of adoption to offer any firm advice.” (Church, 1973)

Although there are both more studies and writings on the subject, mental health professionals remain ignorant of adoptees’ issues. Thomas Danner, PhD, a local family counselor, discussed some of his educational experiences and views on adoptees issues (personal communication, May 17, 1996). He stated he had not given the adoptees issues any prior thought. When presented with some of the repercussions of adoption, he was in agreement that these things could play into the emotional well being of the adoptee. He was open in disclosing that he had little knowledge of adoption issues and was willing to accept the ideas this paper has to present.

Betty Jean Lifton, PhD, Adoption Counselor/Author and adoptee, also commented on the subject (personal communication, May 20, 1996). When asked what lead to her studying adoption issues. Her reply was: ‘Are you an adoptee...then you know.’ This illustrates how most of the research done on adoption issues has been raised by someone who has been touched by adoption. It is easy to understand how someone who has not lived it, would not give the subject much thought. Mental health professionals need to be made to give the subject some thought or they will be doing a disservice to their adopted patients.

The first step to communicating the psychological effects of adoption to mental health professionals is to educate the public in general. There have been more recent books, movies, and such on adoption but they fail to acknowledge the special issues. Through accurate media representation, the general population can receive information needed to better understand the adopted person. In turn, the mental health professionals can begin to study the subject and explore alternate treatments for their adopted patients.

College and university professors need to begin teaching the special issues and treatments unique to adoption, just has they teach unique approaches to dealing with sexual abuse, divorce of parents, Attention Deficit Disorder, and the many other problems youth are faced with today. The subject must also be included in the college text books or the students must utilize the reference books written on adoption (Reitz & Watson, 1992; Brodzinsky & Schechter, 1990).

Adoptive parents must also be aware of these special issues so they can find a counselor who is trained to deal with them. Too often, counselors of adopted children are not aware that special issues exist and they attempt to treat the least disturbing problem and thus they fail to get to the core issue of adoption. Parents who called me have taken their child--usually an adolescent adopted at birth--from therapist to therapist, without ever having come upon one who is knowledgeable about adoption. The child now has become what Kirschner calls a “secondhand patient.” Therapists who do not see adoption as a core issue cannot reach the child. The Adoptee remains isolated and continues to act out... (Lifton, 1988, p. 273)

After realizing all the different issues adoption holds for their daughter, Mr. and Mrs. Smith received a referral for an adoption specialist in their area. They are now attending family counseling and making some progress toward their daughter’s recovery through open communication and understanding of the trauma she still experiences.

Works Referenced

Adopting Resources (1995) Common clinical issures [sic] among adoptees. [Online]. Available: World Wide Web, http://www.adopting.org/commmonis.html.
Brodzinsky, D. M., & Schechter, M. D. (1990). The Psychology of Adoption NY:Oxford University Press, Inc.
Brodzinsky, D. M., Schechter, M. D., & Henig, R. M. (1992) Being adopted: The lifelong search for self. NY:Doubleday.
Church, J. (1973) Understanding your child from birth to three. NY: Random House.
Kaplan, L. J., (1978) Oneness and separateness: From infant to individual. NY: Simon & Schuster.
Lifton, B. J., (1988). Lost and Found: The adoption experience. (2nd ed.). NY: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc.
Lifton, B. J., (1994) Journey of the adopted self: A quest for wholeness. NY: Basic Books/HarpersCollins Publishers, Inc.
Reitz, M. & Watson, K., (1992) Adoption and the family system. NY: Guildford Publications.
Sorosky, A. D., Baran, A., & Pannor, R., (1978) The adoption triangle. NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday
Verrier, N. N. , (1993). The Primal Wound: Understanding the adopted child. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, Inc.

Open Adoption Not "Enforceable"

© Photographer: Eric1513 | Agency: Dreamstime.com

Grandmother turned away after agreeing to adoption
By Kathleen Allen
Arizona Daily Star
Tucson, Arizona | 12.27.2009

It took 74 years for Lyn Tornabene to build a life she treasured. It took a year for her to lose it all.
In late 2004, her only child died unexpectedly. Wendy, a 37-year-old single mother, left behind a 2-year-old son.
Less than three months later, Tornabene's husband, Frank, died after a long struggle with pulmonary fibrosis.
Wendy had not made arrangements for what should happen to her son in the event of her death. A father had never been in the boy's life. And Tornabene decided that at age 74, she couldn't raise him.
So in August 2005, the grandson she adored — her only remaining connection to her husband and daughter — was adopted by longtime family friends of Tornabene, now 79, and her daughter. It was an open adoption, and Tornabene understood that she would be part of her grandson's new family.
By the end of the year, however, misunderstandings and miscommunications soured the relationship. The boy's new family limited visits to once a month for a few hours; they canceled mediation that the lawyers had agreed on; and they eventually cut off contact altogether.
This is Tornabene's story of how she lost it all, and what she learned along the way. By speaking out, she says, she hopes others can escape the heartbreak that consumes her.
•••
On Nov. 19, 2004, Tornabene and her daughter planned to visit preschools.
Wendy didn't answer her door. Her car was in the driveway, and the front door was locked.
Tornabene started to panic. She called a family friend to see if she had heard from Wendy. She hadn't but rushed over to be with Tornabene. Rural Metro broke into the house.
"She was dead," says Tornabene, the grief rising from deep in her chest with great, gulping sobs. Her grandson "was in his high chair, watching TV. He turned around and said, 'Hey, baby,' which was his new thing."
Lyn held the boy, then handed him to the friend, who offered to watch him while Lyn went home to break the news to her husband. Despite their age difference, the women had been friends for years — Tornabene says she considered her a second daughter. When Wendy moved to Tucson, the two also became close.
The night Wendy died, the friend and her husband came over and said they wanted to adopt the boy. The Tornabenes weren't ready to make that decision, but they did agree that the boy should stay at the couple's house for the time being. He knew and loved them and their children. He would be comfortable there.
Ten days later, the cause of Wendy's death was determined: Sudden Adult Death Syndrome, usually defined as cardiac death of an apparently healthy young person.
"Frank used to sit in that room there, howling at night," Tornabene says, pointing to a small, book-packed library in her elegant, art-filled home. "We both howled a lot. There's no way to deal with it. There's no way."
The boy stayed with the family friends through the holidays, as Frank's illness progressed. They brought him back after the new year.
"I don't remember very much from that time," Tornabene says. "I remember sitting here a lot; I remember people coming and going — and I remember giving away her clothes.
"We had put her house on the market. Frank didn't want anything out of it. We sold her car. . . . Wendy had a lot of life insurance, a house and a car. So suddenly there was an estate for (the boy). I had to become guardian or custodian or something."
Then, in early February, Frank succumbed to his lung disease.
"There were all sorts of legal things going on all the time, and after Frank died, it got so complicated. And so terrifying," says Tornabene.
"Maybe I would die and leave (my grandson) and he would be a foster child. I wanted to adopt him. I had gone to court to become his legal guardian — whatever it was I could be — and the lawyer said, 'You're too old to adopt him. They'll never let you do it. I'll try if you want, but it will take a long time.' And I was afraid I would die, as everybody was dying, and (he) would be left alone.
"I had nannies here 24/7 so that if anything ever happened, he would be taken care of."
Adoption seemed the right thing to do. People from around the country — cousins, friends, strangers — expressed interest. But Wendy had wanted her son brought up in the West. And the couple who had been helping so much were good friends — the woman had been with Wendy in the delivery room.
Tornabene would place her grandson in a loving family that lived close by. She would be able to see him, and shower him with her love.
Adoption proceedings began.
•••
Under Arizona law, when a child is placed for adoption, the parental rights of both birth parents are severed.
"They cannot make decisions for the child, no legal rights, no physical custody," says Patricia "Pogo" Overmeyer, a Tucson attorney specializing in family law who was not involved in Tornabene's case.
What goes for the birth parents goes for the birth grandparents. But where parents may have some recourse — for instance, including visitation privileges in the adoption papers — grandparents do not.
"The grandparents become, legally, strangers to the child," says Tucson attorney Ann Haralambie, a certified family law specialist who also was not involved in this case.
Tornabene had her usual lawyer — who hadn't done an adoption in some time — represent her. She trusted him, and she didn't ask many questions.
She admits to her naivete, and curses it.
•••
It felt like everything was happening fast.
"I signed the documents," she says. "But I didn't know that I was giving up my legal rights — I had no idea."
Tornabene had a visitation agreement drawn up, but it was never signed — her attorney told her it wouldn't hold up in court.
That wasn't really a concern. They all got along so well. In August, right before the adoption, Tornabene and the adoptive family went together to Coronado in the San Diego area. The Star is not naming Tornabene's grandson or his family to protect the child's privacy. They declined to comment for this story.
"There was an understanding from the beginning that I would be part of the family," Tornabene says. "In a lot of our e-mail exchanges, I was called 'Grandma Lyn.' "
On the early August day that her grandson legally joined another family, a photo shows everyone — including Tornabene — smiling. It looked like one big, happy family.
•••
When school started in September, the boy's mother would drive him there, and Tornabene or the nanny she retained would pick him up.
He would stay at his grandmother's house until his mother got home from work. Tornabene still feared she would die while caring for her grandson, so a nanny was always at the ready.
Soon, things started to change.
For starters, the boy's mother admitted to being uncomfortable with the nannies Tornabene continued to employ.
"There was a lot of hazy stuff, and it began to decline," Tornabene says.
"I was grieving beyond measure. I don't think I was ever easy to get along with on any of these matters. I know I wasn't."
Tornabene asked her lawyer to initiate mediation with her grandson's parents. Lawyers for both parties agreed, but the parents canceled.
"I just wanted to know what I could do — what was I doing wrong?" says Tornabene.
The final blowup, she says, came when she got a call from her grandson's school. He was running a high fever, and they couldn't reach the baby-sitter, who was staying with the children while their parents were out of town.
By the time Tornabene reached the school, her grandson's fever had hit 105. She wrapped him up in a blanket and rushed him to the doctor.
"When I got there, there were four calls from (his mother) saying I should take him home directly from the doctor's office," says Tornabene.
But she had a sick child who she felt needed her attention. So instead of taking him to his home, she took him to hers.
His mother called several times. He needs his own bed, Tornabene remembers her saying. "He's so sick, and he's asleep," she says she retorted.
Things got ugly.
"Finally I said, 'Why don't you call the sheriff,' and hung up," she says. "When he woke up he was feeling so much better and his fever was down. The nanny took him home. But that incident really did it."
Looking back, Tornabene recognizes that she escalated a damaged relationship into an all-out feud.
"I had just lost my daughter and my husband," she says. "I didn't react the way I would under normal circumstances."
Lawyers got involved. At one point, the boy's parents agreed to supervised visits at a neutral site — two hours once a month.
A report by the supervisor from an August 2007 visit — their first — speaks of the bond between Tornabene and her grandson:
"... Gave each other a lot of hugs and kisses .... Talked to each other. ... Child sat on grandmother's lap and put his arms around her neck as she read to him . ... Made music together. ... Danced around the playroom. ... When it was time (to go), child said, 'Are you sad? Are you mad at me?' He laid his head on grandmother's chest; he hugged her again and again. ...He asked a lot of questions: 'Will we do this again? When will I get to visit you again?' ... Told grandmother he loved her, he put his arms on grandmother's shoulders and around her neck and he touched her eyes."
After two more visits, the parents stopped them without an explanation, she says. She later learned from their lawyer that his parents said he came home upset from their visits.
More lawyers. Tornabene tried to reverse the adoption but says she decided it was not the best thing for her grandson. When she felt his parents were saying untruths about her, she sued them for slander. The suit was later dropped.
"I didn't want money," she says. "I wanted to see my grandson."
Several of the lawyers Tornabene contacted to get visitation rights dismissed her once they realized she had signed the adoption papers.
Finally, Tucson attorney Susan Ames-Light agreed to take her case, arguing in court papers that the adoption order "failed to terminate the Grandmother's right either as a Grandmother or guardian, and only terminated the rights of the mother, who was already deceased."
Just moments into the 2008 hearing the judge turned to her. "I'm sorry for you, Mrs. Tornabene," she remembers him saying. "You have no legal rights."
•••
While her grandson's new parents declined to speak to the Star for this story, some of their complaints were documented by one of Tornabene's lawyers after he spoke with the boy's mother.
In the mother's view, the lawyer's letter to Tornabene said, "you have spread comments and rumors about them that (she) feels are very hurtful."
Among them were comments that the boy's parents had spent all his money, "e-mails that say 'if you don't do this, I'll get you,'" and the incident that ended with Tornabene telling the mother to call the sheriff.
Other complaints included the perception that Tornabene favored her grandson over his new siblings, and that he had come home upset after visits with her. "She has to run the show, and she is mean," the mother told the attorney. "She made all the wrong moves."
•••
What could have prevented so much pain?
"This is a perfect case for family mediation," family law attorney Haralambie says.
"I would say take a deep breath, apologize to the longstanding friend and say, 'This was a tough time for me. Can we back up and renegotiate this?' "
The issue is close to Haralambie's heart — she was adopted as a child.
"As an adoptee myself, I know there is a real desire on the part of many adoptees to have some kind of contact with or knowledge about the birth family," she says. "Adoptive parents who do not support that, and who actively subvert that, risk tremendous alienation of their children, especially as they get older."
She always gives would-be adoptive parents the same advice: "A birth family is not a threat to you — your relationship with your child is based on your relationship with your child."
Keeping a child and a grandparent apart could "have a long-term impact on a child," says Tucson psychologist Thomas Brunner, an expert on the developmental needs of children and adolescents. The degree of the negative effect, he says, depends on the strength of the bond.
Maxine Ijams understands the fear adoptive families may feel. She is a retired clinical psychologist who did her dissertation on the adjustment of children adopted in infancy and has adopted four children herself.
"When the adoptions were final, it was such a relief," she says of her own experience. "I knew from the beginning that the possibility of them being taken away from us was there. Every time the doorbell rang, I had an anguish and a fear it was the birth parent, who didn't want to go through with it."
But there's a danger, Ijams says, when an adopted child is denied contact with or knowledge of the birth family.
"Research shows that children at a very young age have emotional memories," she says. "The adoptive parents stand to lose in the long run. A child can grow up loving the adoptive parents but resenting not being able to see the grandmother. And if she dies, look at the resentment there."
She agrees with Haralambie — what's needed in cases like this isn't lawyers, but communication.
"I used to tell clients when they came in with things that were not going right that they first have to recognize, define their problem. And then ask themselves, 'What is my part in this problem? What am I contributing to the problem? Then what can I do about it, and am I willing to do it?' Then, do something."
•••
Tornabene has seen her grandson twice in the last two years, both times by accident.
The last time, a few months ago, he was at a grocery store with his mother.
"He planted his feet," she remembers. "He stood up and looked me in the face, and raised his hand. He stood his ground and looked at me with all the love in the world."
She dreams that someday she will be allowed to embrace her grandson again. But she isn't hopeful.
In the meantime, she wants other grandparents to learn from her mistakes.
"You had better be informed," she says. "In a moment, somebody dies and everything changes, and maybe you'll be lucky and go through life the way grandparents should.
"You're not safe, Grandma, Grandpa. The law's not on your side should anything happen to your child. You will have no advocacy at all."
But, she says, maybe, just maybe, things can change if enough people speak up.
"The point is to sound the alarm and to find compassionate people who have some power, legislative and otherwise," she says.
"I want to get grandparents' rights talked about, and get it fixed. I don't expect it will happen in time for me to see my grandson, but I want other people who are caring and loving and honoring their roles as grandparents to not be in my position."
Contact reporter Kathleen Allen at kallen@azstarnet.com or 573-4128.

Black Kids in White Houses

Black Kids in White Houses Thu Dec 4, 2008 6:41 pm (PST)

(The extensive comment section at the end of the article on the
website is excellent.)

November 25, 2008
FEATURES
Black Kids in White Houses
On Race, Silence, and the Changing American Family
by JEN GRAVES

I Want to Know More
After all this time, there are still things we don't talk about.
Its a century and a half after Emancipation and a year before the
election of Americas first black president. This is October 2007.

This workshop is called "Race and Transracial Adoption Workshop with
Lisa Marie Rollins." Rollins is the black woman at the front of the
room. She says that a social worker labeled her Mexican, Filipino,
and
Caucasian because people didn't want black kids. But she looked more
and more black as she grew older. Her parents still said she wasn't
black. She was. Finally, they admitted it too. Then once, as an
adult,
visiting home, she found a mammy doll in her mother's kitchen, in
among the other knickknacks. That's the end of the anecdote. She's
still basically speechless about it.

She says it is time to watch a video called "Struggle for Identity."
In the video, people tell their stories, stories like the ones in the
room. A black woman who was adopted by white parents boils it down:
"Don't think you can make black friends after you adopt a black
child.
If you don't already have black friends, you shouldn't be adopting a
black child." Then the lights go up. There are several white people
in
the room who have said they have already adopted black or Asian or
Guatemalan children, or that they are right now waiting to leave for
Ethiopia to pick up their adopted children. All of those people"the
white people"are crying.

They are crying because they have heard things they did not want to
hear. But there is more to it than that. They are also crying because
they do not know how else to respond to the great, big cultural
silence that has been broken here.

It would be easier for white people if race did not exist. Or if
everyone could agree that race did not matter, that is. According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "transracial" first appeared
publicly in a 1971 Time magazine article. The article introduced
transracial adoption, or adoption across racial boundaries"most
often
white parents adopting children of color"and reported a strange
phenomenon. According to a study in Britain, some white parents
"tended to 'deny their child's color, or to say he was growing
lighter, or that other people thought he was suntanned and did not
recognize him as colored. Sometimes the reality was fully accepted
[by
the parents] only after the very light child had grown noticeably
darker after being exposed to bright sunlight on holiday.'"

It's such an outrageous finding that it sounds like a joke. Stephen
Colbert's dimwitted white-guy alter ego has a joke like this, when he
says on The Colbert Report, always in the most ridiculous of
situations: "As you know, I don't see color." The joke is funny
because in so many ways it's true. Plenty of white people don't see
color. We refuse to look at it, prefer not to see too much
difference,
because difference almost always makes us feel bad by comparison.

Transracial adoption is awkward to discuss at first, because although
it is designed to chart a radically integrated future, on the surface
its structure repeats the segregated past. Just look at the basic
structure of a family and apply race to the equation. The most crude
way to put it: Whites are in charge, children of color are
subordinate, and adults of color are out of the picture. And that's
not even talking about class.

And yet there are more of these families now than ever. The exact
number of transracial adoptees in this country is unknown, but the
practice, which began in earnest in the 1970s, has been on the rise
for at least 10 years. Twenty-six percent of black children adopted
from foster care in 2004â€"about 4,200 kidsâ€"were adopted
transracially, almost all by white parents, according to a New York
Times analysis of data from the National Data Archive on Child Abuse
and Neglect at Cornell University and the Department of Health and
Human Services. That figure is up from 14 percent in 1998 and,
according to adoption experts, it has continued to climb. The 2000
census, the first to collect information on adoptions, counted just
over 16,000 white households with adopted black children. In the last
15 years, Americans have adopted more than 200,000 children from
overseas, but that trend is cooling off, partly because international
adoptions are so expensive.

In spite of all that, a person has to slog through layers of silence
just to meet someone else at the surface for a conversation about the
topic. When Mark Riding, a black father in Baltimore, burst out last
November on an NPR blog with a long narrative he'd clearly been
waiting to tell someoneâ€"about adopting a white daughter, getting
glares on the street, and trying to censor his own family's talk
about
"white people" at homeâ€"he found himself in a debate with another
commenter, who told him repeatedly to "rise above the race issue" and
talked about "membership in the human race." There's a silencer in
every conversation about race.

But anonymous commenters can be great sources of information, because
they'll write what they'd never say. On The Stranger's blog, I wrote
about the woman at the workshop who said you shouldn't adopt black
children if you don't already have black friends. An adoptive parent
named Teresa took serious offense. Biological parents don't even get
screened, she wrote. "My husband and I are white, and we adopted a 9-
year-old Hispanic boy four years ago. The amount of training and
inspection that we went through was incredible.. .. You don't know
the
whole story. You can't possibly. You aren't part of those families."

"P.S.," she wrote at the end, "It isn't that hard to get a white
person to cry."

Teresa's comment was long, and it built to a climax before the P.S.
Her point: If you don't silence these disgruntled adopted adults,
then
adoption policy could become race-conscious, and if adoption policy
becomes race-conscious but white people still mostly aren't, then
white people could be denied the right to adopt, and if that happens,
then children of color are going to go without good, permanent homes.

Don't talk is the ideaâ€"it can't lead to anything good. All it leads
to is shouting, and suing, and then, finally, resilencing.

B arack Obama may as well have been a transracial adoptee.

He grew up with white grandparents, without black role models. His
Kenyan father and his Kansas mother were not constant presences. As
an
upperclassman in high school, he realized what it meant to be black
in
a white world and became sick with the particular loneliness of a
transracial adoptee. His grades dropped, he smoked pot, he snorted
coke, he came close to trying heroin with an acquaintance in a meat
locker: In short, he nearly destroyed himself. To his family, he
simply fell silent. "I was trying to raise myself to be a black man
in
America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me
seemed to know exactly what that meant." So they didn't talk about it.

In the world of transracial adoption, you don't have to look very
hard
to figure out why no one talks about this stuff. Federal adoption
laws
mandate silence. Social workers aren't allowed to talk to families
about whether they already have black friends. They aren't allowed to
tell families they might want to get some. Any of that would be seen,
according to federal law written in 1996, as a violation of the 1964
Civil Rights Act. The 1996 law prohibits the placement of an adoptee
on the basis of race, color, or national origin. Race does not
matter,
the law says. The American domestic child-welfare system is
officially
colorblindâ€"or, more to the point, colormute.

There's one exception: The law doesn't apply to Native American
children. A separate 1978 law governs them and says the opposite:
that
in-race adoptions are preferred. Both laws were written by people who
said they had the best interests of the children in mind. Yet today,
as a report released this past May by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption
Institute shows, Native American and black kidsâ€"despite being
governed by philosophically opposite lawsâ€"both on average stay in
the
child-welfare system longer than children of any other race. Why are
these kids still stranded? If one way of helping minority foster
children doesn't work, and the opposite way of helping minority
foster
children doesn't work either, why are we still pretending one is
right
and one is wrong?

A doption has never been simple for adoptees, and increasingly,
adoptive parents are learning that making life easier for their
children may make it more complicated for them. Today, many parents
acknowledge absent birth parentsâ€"always present to the adopteeâ€"as
a
presence in their families too. For a transracial adoptee, race is
like another missing parent. In fact, transracial adoptees hunger for
heritage at a younger age than their white counterparts, searching
for
their parents on average five years earlier (25.8 versus 31.2), and
looking not just for parents but also for a racial identity.

We know this because of a study cited in the 2006 anthology Outsiders
Within, which is the first book ever to be written entirely by
transracial adoptees and to include academic research, scholarly
papers, memoirs, and artworks. It's a landmark book representing a
new
voice, or an old voice finally speaking up. Why did it take so long?
Gratefulness. Gratefulness is the most powerful silencer in the
adoption world. Even if a transracial adoptee breaks the silence to
make a criticism about his or her experience, the immediate response
always is: Would it have been better if you'd never been adopted?
It's
a rhetorical cul-de-sac, a false runaround that continues to stifle
conversations about more complicated subjects, like what's the
difference between a family that's tolerant and one that's actively
antiracist, or why are there so many children of color adopted in the
first place?

That old stifling question is starting to die.

These are the voices that are coming out instead:

"I can't be alone in thinking that being transracially adopted, we
have lost something: lost our languages, traditions, cultures, and
most importantly the subtleties and nuances of those cultures. We
have
lost something we never had, which we may not have even valued had we
had it, and yet we continue to mourn. Am I alone in this grief?"

That's M. Anderson, writing in Outsiders Within. Here's Rita Simon, a
researcher at American University who has been studying transracial
adoption since 1968 (she's talking on NPR):

"What we find consistently is that the white families cannot raise a
black child as if it was its own birth child. They have to make
changes in their lives. In other words, love is not enough."

And this from the Donaldson report this past May:

"Two principles provide a solid framework for meeting the needs of
black children and youth in foster care: that adoption is a service
for children, and that acknowledgement of race-related
realitiesâ€"not
'colorblindness'â€"must help to shape the development of sound
adoption
practices." (Emphasis mine.)

The Donaldson report, commissioned by the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission, calls for a change to federal adoption law.

P am LaBorde, a Seattle pediatrician, is in her kitchen making black-
bean burritos for dinner. "My white friends don't really get it when
I
say this, but I basically have these kids because of poverty," she
says.

Her willingness to talk openly is surprising; I find myself wanting
to
silence her for her own protection.

Pam and her husband, Bill, both white, adopted two black children,
Theo and Simone, whose mother, Amanda, lives in Texas. Amanda had to
give them up because she's poor and has been dealing with illness in
her immediate family. The semi-open adoptions cost almost $20,000
each. "Some of my white friends think there's something wrong with
the
birth mother for giving up her kids. Okay, she could have used
contraception, but not everyone I know is perfect in that way either.
There's nothing wrong with her. It's important that my kids know
that.
I've thought before, what if I'd just given that money to her?"

In international adoptions, the poverty of the parents is usually
blamed on corrupt governments or bad political situations, Pam says.
"But when it's domestic, we blame the parents."

The Transracially Adopted Children's Bill of Rights, by adoptee Liza
Steinberg Triggs, includes this rule: "Every child is entitled to
parents who know that if they are white they experience the benefits
of racism because the country's system is organized that way."

Pam is the sort of personâ€"maybe all self-critical parents (people?)
are this way out of necessityâ€"who can't help but believe in
opposing
ideas. She and her husband, who studied black history in graduate
school, were interested in adopting black children "from a social-
justice point of view." Both because more black children than white
children need homes, and because the LaBordes believe in the civil-
rights dream of an understanding and connection between different
races of people.

A year ago, they moved from the lily-white Proctor neighborhood in
Tacoma to the racial mix of Columbia City, and Theo, now in
kindergarten, goes to school at John Muir Elementary, where the
LaBordes are hoping to meet and befriend black families. (They want
not only black peers but black role models for their kids.) Their
adoption agency gave them a few tips about respecting black culture
and sent them on their way. "It's not enough," she says. "Honestly,
we
could have gone and moved to a white gated community in northern
Minnesota, and nobody would have done anything about it."

Some days, Pam does feel like moving to a white neighborhood, not
that
she would. Several months ago, on a bus in Columbia City, a young
black man asked her whether her kids were adopted. She said yes. He
chanted, "That's fucked up, that's fucked up." Then he told her that
when her son got older, he'd get up in the middle of the night and
kill her, so maybe the man would just kill her now, there on the bus.
Another time, a black woman in a car yelled at Pam and the kids when
they were walking on the street in Columbia City: "How does it feel
to
steal black babies, you white bitch?"

There are times when black parents or grandparents smile at her
knowingly, or randomly hug her, or give her unsolicited help, but
usually she feels nervous around black parents. "I feel that I need
to
do it right," she says. "I need to prove that I'm capable of
parenting
these children."

She gives herself only middling marks. Neither she nor Bill have
close
black friends yet. And they aren't Christians, so they can't join a
black church. "It's complicated, " she says. "It's only going to get
harder as they get older. I think you have to be willing to talk
about
it constantly, and over and over."

I 'm a moderate racist.

My personal data "suggest a moderate automatic preference for
European
Americans compared to African Americans." This data came from
something called the Implicit Association Test, which is hosted on
the
website of Harvard University. The test, developed in 1998, is
intended to gauge unconscious bias. It measures how long you take to
answer questions (by keyboard) that ask you to associate faces of
different races with good (e.g., "joy") versus bad (e.g., "failure")
words.

This is the test that King County employees of the state's Children's
Administration department are going to be taking, because Washington
has a problem. It's the same problem pretty much everywhere around
the
country, and not a new problem either: Too many kids of color are
coming into foster care and staying in too long. In King County, the
Children's Administration is writing a plan with five parts, one of
which is "staff development, which begins with self-examination, "
says
director Joel Odimba. "We're going to train in knowing who we are."
The five-point plan includesâ€"in addition to soul searchingâ€"a
review
of policies, the formation of an advisory committee, and a possible
Cultural Competency Center.

Those are pretty quiet, bureaucracy- as-usual ideas compared to the
idea that made Seattle famous on this issue. In 1999, Washington's
Department of Social and Health Services launched a pilot project
that
four years later became the full-blown Office of African-American
Children's Services (OAACS, pronounced "oasis"). It was staffed with
people trained to handle the particular issues of black foster kids,
and most of the county's black kids were routed through
itâ€"blatantly
defying the colorblind mandates of federal adoption law. Quickly, it
was the talk of the nation, a test of dealing with race head-on in
public policy, as if it matters. And it was invented out of a sense
of
desperation not uncommon around the country: In 2004, while black
children made up 7 percent of the population of King County's kids,
they accounted for 30 percent of the kids in King County foster care.

It was a stab, an effort, a start. But it got complaints. Its
management turned over often, and it was criticized by the rest of
the
department. Last spring, just as OACCS's approach was about to be
validated by new researchâ€"two months later, the Donaldson report
would call for an emphasis on race in the child-welfare
systemâ€"OACCS
was killed. The federal Office of Civil Rights declared it in
violation, and the state decided to let it go. The state's foster-
care
administration would no longer deal with race in a direct way.
Meanwhile, the OAACS building would be renamed the Martin Luther King
Jr. officeâ€"an apt linguistic elision. Now it operates like all the
others, taking cases on the basis of where the kids live. You'd never
know that a major experiment on the role of race in families went on
there, and whatever it might have been on its way to learning appears
to have been lost.

T here are not that many movies about domestic transracial adoption.
In one, the 1995 movie Losing Isaiah, Halle Berry stars as a
crackhead
named Khaila who leaves her baby, Isaiah, in a trash can while she
goes to find some crack. He's discovered, taken to a hospital, and
adopted by Jessica Lange's character, Margaret. When Khaila cleans up
and discovers her son is still alive, she wants him back, and a judge
orders his return. But it is too lateâ€"the toddler is attached to
Margaret, and he doesn't respond to Khaila. Khaila is forced to admit
that Margaret has become her son's mother. The last scene shows
Margaret and Isaiah reunited over some toys, and Khaila playing
alongside them. A title card flashes: "And a little child shall lead
them, Isaiah 11:6."

A little child shall lead them.

That phrase hits me hard. One of the reasons I was at that October
2007 workshop (at Seattle University), and that I'd been looking into
transracial adoption, was to teach racist family members of mine a
lesson. I had other reasons tooâ€"I've been debating whether to
become
a parent for a whileâ€"but this one was the most embarrassing. In my
fantasy, I hadn't considered how exactly I would protect my child.
The
child was a means to an end, a healing agent: Want to rid your
parents
of their overt racism? Give them black grandchildren and defy them
not
to love them! Need to atone for your own covert racism? Adopt a black
child and let him teach you!

Part of the genuine appeal of transracial adoption, it's true, is its
potential to transform our culture. "I often think about transracial
adoption as a grand social experiment," writes John Raible, one of
the
first mixed-race children adopted to a white family in the 1960s and
something of a spokesperson on the topic.

Even so, children shouldn't be the day laborers on the job, says Chad
Goller-Sojourner. Would you want your children to be the test cases
in
a grand social experiment?

"What I'd ask parents is, are you willing to be the uncomfortable
one?" Goller-Sojourner says. This is how he'd question a prospective
parent if he were a social worker. "Because somebody's gonna be
uncomfortable, and it seems the burden is on you. You have to be the
uncomfortable one."

He means that if white parents of black children, for instance, don't
live in black neighborhoods, join black churches, have black friends,
and send their children to significantly mixed-race schools, then at
least they should cross the thresholds into black barbershops even
though it's awkward, or drive out of their way to shop at grocery
stores in black neighborhoods. Parents should be careful to raise
their children to live in this world, not the one they wish existed.

"If you're buying a house and you have a dog, don't you spend more
time looking for a big old yard for your dog?" he says. "Love is but
one of many components of parenting. You're raising children to live
in a world that may not be your world. If you go to the pound, they
won't just give you a dog. There are rules. They'll say, 'That dog's
not good for your house, we'll get you another dog.' But when you ask
that question about kids, people freak out."

Goller-Sojourner is a performer. This summer, he put on a one-man
show
at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center called Sitting in Circles with
Rich White Girls: Memoirs of a Bulimic Black Boy. As a big, gay, dark-

skinned black adoptee of white parents living in white University
Place outside Tacoma, he has had to explain himself many times, from
many different perspectives, to many different kinds of people. He's
developed multiple metaphors: the dog-adoption analogy, one involving
a seven-foot child with five-foot parents ("It's not that one's
better, it's just an acknowledgement of likeness or nonlikeness" ),
and
one about lions and a gazelle.

"Let's say I was a gazelle adopted by lions," he says. "I pranced
around happy until I got to first grade and all these lions tried to
attack me; it's like they didn't get the memo. The other gazelles,
they smelled the lion on me and didn't trust me, so I stood open."

He can also tell it literally: "The difference between when I got
called nigger and when other black kids got called nigger is that
they
went home and got love, and I went home and got love from people who
looked just like the people who called me nigger. As a child, you
don't have the ability to bifurcate."

P hebe Jewell is gay. She and her partner, Dawn, adopted a boy named
Isaac. He has the same mother as Bill and Pam LaBorde's two children,
the poor woman from Texas, Amanda, who for the most part finds it too
painful to be in contact with the children she's let go. Isaac, Theo,
and Simone all live in the same neighborhood, and Theo and Isaac go
to
the same school (Simone is too young). When friends from school come
over, they are often confused about why Isaac, Theo, and Simone don't
live together. But then somebody explains it, and that's that.

Isaac is 6 1/2, the oldest of the three, and he is not a quiet kid.
You can hear him across the aisles at a store. Phebe worries that
some
people will see him as "dangerous, a thug," but she knows that if he
were quiet, he'd probably get teased as an Oreo. At his school, many
of the kids are black. He comes home talking black, calling her
"girl." It makes her proud, that he's getting black culture, black
cadence. Even though she's white, she knows it herself, having grown
up partly in the South. She jokingly calls him "boy" in return, but
she knows she'll eventually have to stop herself, because of that
word's old association with power and slavery, something Isaac
couldn't know about now.

Isaac does know about slavery. He learned about it a year ago.
Eventually, he used it against his mother when she tried to tell him
what to do. "White people don't own black people anymore, so you
can't
own me," he told her.

Ingenious, she thought. That's my son.

O ver at Theo and Simone's house, they have just finished eating
their
black-bean burritos, and it's time to put on swimsuits and get in the
car to go for lessons. Lessons are at Medgar Evers Pool, a place
named
for a man who was intimidated from voting just 62 years ago, who was
on his college debate team, who married a woman named Myrlie, who had
a Molotov cocktail thrown into the carport at their home, who was
nearly run down by a car, who was shot dead in his own drivewayâ€"in
the backâ€"by a Ku Klux Klan fertilizer salesman who was not
convicted
of murder until 30 years later. Everything good that happened to
Medgar Evers was because of Medgar Evers. Everything bad that
happened
to him was because he was black and refused to apologize for it.

Theo and Simone are sitting in the backseat of the car. Pam is
explaining how she dresses the children carefully. If they were white
children, she might dress them as "little Goodwill hippies," but she
doesn't want black or white people thinking of them as poor
maltreated
urchins, so she dresses them up. Theo is wearing a white button-up
polo shirt and glasses. We are driving past Garfield High School,
where on Halloween night, a black teenager was killed in what police
think was a gang shooting. Since then, black teenagers have been
walking around the Central District and riding city buses along
Martin
Luther King Jr. Way in sweatshirts that say "RIP Lil Q" for the kid
who died.

Theo doesn't know any of this. He doesn't know that he's going to a
pool named for Medgar Evers. He doesn't know that there was a
shooting
here at this same place, another shooting of a black man. He doesn't
know that this is my neighborhood, where I live, where I'm learning
about the meaning of race, the moderate racist in the front seat.

He does know about Obama, though. What does he know about Obama? I
ask
him. He puts his fingers to his chest and says, "Black." Then he
says,
"White House." That's all he says.

All contents © Index Newspapers, LLC
1535 11th Ave (Third Floor), Seattle, WA 98122

Three Decades after Adoption, DNA reveals painful Truth

Three decades after adoption, DNA test reveals painful truth
By Frank D. Roylance

Baltimore Sun reporter
October 12, 2009

For Cockeysville businessman Ron Ryba, the long walk from the parking lot to the stadium in Philadelphia was a 29-year trail of memories.

He had come to meet the son he and his high school sweetheart had never seen when they gave him up for adoption nearly three decades earlier. Now, the baby was a grown man. What would he say to him? What would he look like?

For Phil Bloete, too, the 2004 meeting at a Phillies game, was the culmination of a lifelong dream. He was 28, a high school English teacher in New Jersey. He had enjoyed a happy childhood, and was well-loved by his adoptive parents. But he had always wondered about his birth parents.

Mostly, Bloete said, he wanted to know more about his genetic heritage. He and his wife wanted to start a family, and "if there were any inherent risks, I wanted to know about them."

Their meeting was warm, if a bit tentative. "We laughed a little bit, and talked, and hugged," Ryba recalled. And he was astonished at Bloete's appearance.

Bloete is 6 feet 2 inches tall, 240 pounds with dark hair. He's been a swimmer, lifeguard, soccer coach. Ryba played football in high school and college, but he's blond, 5 feet 8 inches tall, and tips the scales at 175.

"I'm thinking to myself ... 'Man, did he get the good genes,'" Ryba said.

As it has turned out, Bloete, Ryba, and Ryba's high school girlfriend, Kathleen Butler, share no genes at all.

More than three decades after Ryba and Butler gave up their baby son to Catholic Charities of Trenton, N.J., for adoption, and four years after the agency facilitated their "reunion" with Bloete, genetic testing revealed last year that none of them are related.

Lisa Thibault, a spokeswoman for Catholic Charities of Trenton, acknowledged that the situation is "tragic," and that a "mistake" was made somewhere. But she said the agency has done all it is legally able to do for them.

That has shaken Ryba's lifelong faith in the Catholic Church, or at least in those who lead it. And, it has launched him on a thus-far fruitless quest to find the son he believes Catholic Charities has "lost."

Their story began in 1975.

Ryba was a high school football star. Butler was a cheerleader. They were crazy in love, but when Kathy became pregnant at 16, they knew they were both too young to provide a proper home and a secure future for their child.

So, they agreed to give their baby up to Catholic Charities, which arranged an adoption. They were promised updates on the boy's well-being, and assured the agency would mediate a reunion -- if the boy were willing after he grew to adulthood.

"The solace for me was the fact I would someday reunite, and know that the journey I took was for a good reason," said Ryba.

Catholic Charities' assurances were "a very big reason why I believed that what we were doing was the right thing. I never lost faith in that," he said.

Ryba went on to graduate from high school and earned a degree from Glassboro State College. In 1982, he moved to Maryland to open a sporting goods store in Cockeysville. Now 51, he lives in Timonium with his wife and two children. He owns and operates a business that sells uniforms to the U.S. Department of Defense.

But he has never forgotten the boy he and Butler gave up for adoption. And for three decades, Catholic Charities seemed to have kept its promises to Ryba and Butler.

Their baby was born Nov. 25, 1975, at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden. On Dec. 1, according to documents given to Ryba, the infant was transferred to St. Elizabeth's Home in Yardville, a home for unwed mothers run by Catholic Charities. And on Jan. 7, 1976, Phil -- identified on the state adoption consent papers as "Baby Boy Butler" -- was adopted by Anne and Edward Bloete, of Brielle, N.J.

Ryba and Butler split up after high school, and went off to college. They stayed in touch, but married others and lived separate lives. Both have their own children.

Over the years, Catholic Charities case workers sent Ryba baby pictures and information on his son's progress. And in 2004, the agency contacted Bloete and mediated the first direct communications between him and Ryba, which led to the "reunion" in Philadelphia.

Phil Bloete is 33 now, with a wife and daughter of his own. He said he had a happy childhood, and was well-loved by his adoptive parents.

"My whole life I grew up believing that Ron's story and Kathleen's story was the story of my [birth] parents," he said. "Catholic Charities had provided that all along."

Ryba said his long dream of a reunion with his firstborn son, and a resolution to decades of heartache and hope, seemed to have been realized in 2004 when he and Bloete agreed to meet for the first time at a Phillies game.

For Bloete, too, it was the culmination of a lifelong dream. "I had sorta prepared myself my whole life for the possibility that this day would never come," he said. "When it did, I was just surprised."

In the years that followed Ryba, Bloete and Butler grew closer, visiting, sharing photos and family stories and introducing relatives. They set aside the difficulty they all had in seeing family resemblances.

Ryba thought maybe Bloete got Butler's eyes. "You try to make it fit, in a way," Ryba said. "They told me this was my son, so it's my son. You want to believe."

They all tried, but Butler said there weren't any tall genes on her side. Ryba's wife and their 16-year-old son didn't see much resemblance either. Doubts nagged.

So, four years after they had become "family" and friends, as Ryba prepared to add Bloete to his will, he asked for a paternity test. Bloete, with his own doubts, readily agreed.

When the initial test found a "zero percent chance" that he was Bloete's father, Ryba called Butler, and posed the difficult, but inevitable question: Was there someone else? Butler told him, in no uncertain terms, "If you're not the father, then I'm not the mother."

So, they all agreed to a $1,200 DNA test that would stand up in court, if need be. The results again were conclusive. None of them were genetically related.

"We were all just stunned; shocked," Ryba recalled. "Now I realize we don't know who or where our son is. And then I realize Phillip has no origins."

The next call went to Catholic Charities.

"I said, 'You told me for 30 years this was my son. Can't you just go in your files? Maybe you mixed up some files,'" Ryba recalled.

Catholic Charities did provide some documents, but there was nothing to reveal who Bloete's real parents were, or where Baby Boy Butler might have gone.

A meeting was arranged for Ryba, Butler and Bloete with Catholic Charities director Francis Dolan. Ryba was hopeful.

"I'm feeling we're all in this together," he said. He expected that Catholic Charities would agree to search its files, find his real son, and uncover the records for Phil's birth parents.

Instead, the meeting with Dolan ended for Ryba in disappointment and anger, with few answers to his biggest questions. "I finally said to him, 'Are you here to help us?' His recollection is that Dolan replied that his agency had no further obligation to help.

"I don't think there was anything he could have said that could have been more hurtful," Ryba said.

Dolan chose not to speak directly with The Baltimore Sun. Lisa Thibault, his spokeswoman, said that throughout Catholic Charities' contact with Ryba, Butler and Bloete, "we have been mindful of the tragedy inherent in their situation, and have on numerous occasions ... expressed sympathy for them and their situation."

Ryba felt no such sympathy from this agency of the Catholic Church, to which he had belonged all his life.

"The one time I've turned to them ... for their cloak of comfort and help and justice, and they slowly closed the door on me, and said, 'We can't help you,'" Ryba said. "It doesn't diminish my faith in God. It diminishes my faith in the men who lead us to God."

Thibault acknowledged that the situation is "tragic," and that a "mistake" was made somewhere, although she suggested it may have been made before the Butler baby was moved to Catholic Charities' custody at St. Elizabeth's.

Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute in New York, a leading research and policy organization in the field that has long advocated an end to secrecy in adoption records, said, "The secretive ways of the past don't yield very good outcomes."

The mix-up in the adoption of the baby given up by Ryba and Butler -- and the mystery of Bloete's origins, even his true date of birth -- is "an abject lesson on how to not conduct good, strong, ethical adoptions," he said.

Catholic Charities did take one other step to try to shed light on the mystery. In September 2008, the agency went into Superior Court in Mercer County, N.J., asking for permission to release information from its files that is normally barred from disclosure under state or federal law -- information it said "would be helpful to [Phil's] search for his identity.".

In April, however, a judge denied the request, and in a June 5 e-mail, William Isele, Catholic Charities' attorney, told Ryba that the documents in the case were sealed. So were the judge's reasons for the denial.

"You can, of course, use your own counsel if you want to petition the court to unseal the Statement of Reasons and the underlying medical documents in the file," Isele told Ryba. "Our client, Catholic Charities, tried to do just that and was told 'no' by the Court."

Contacted by The Baltimore Sun, Isele declined to discuss the case, noting that records in the matter were sealed.

For Catholic Charities, Thibault said, the court's refusal to open the records was the end of its legal options. But perhaps not for Ryba, Butler and Bloete.

Birth records that reveal the identities of adopted children in New Jersey were sealed by a law passed in 1940 and are closed to both the general public and the parties to an adoption. The laws were designed to protect adoptive families from the interference of birth parents.

But there are exceptions when parties to an adoption can show "good cause" to have them opened, according to Steven Sacharow, an attorney with extensive experience in New Jersey adoptions.

"In the case of adult adoptees," he said, "the burden of proof should shift to the state to prove that good cause is not present. I would think the state would have an interest, in the best interests of all the children potentially involved in this situation, to determine what occurred, and as to the integrity of the adoption," Sacharow said.

The experience has sown the seeds of doubt in Ryba's mind. He wrestles with dark suspicion about what happened back at St. Elizabeth's. "How do we not let our thoughts go that way when they're not willing to help us?" Ryba asks.

Angry, and worried about his first-born son's fate, Ryba consulted with a private investigator. He even tried to file missing person and kidnapping reports with the New Jersey attorney general's office. He said he was turned away.

As Ryba continues to search for answers, he recognizes that a lawsuit may be his only option. But so far, he has been unable to find an attorney willing to take his case. He also worries about the cost.

Still, he said, "I would like to know where my son is."

In Adoptee's Search for Roots, Loss & Gain Collide

August 11, 2008
In Adoptee’s Search for Roots, Loss and Gain Collide
By SARAH KERSHAW

GALWAY, N.Y. — The phone rang on a Wednesday evening in February, and the voice sounded to Doris A. Weiland like a ghost, like her son, Michael. Or perhaps like what Michael might have sounded like had he lived to turn 50.

The man on the line said he was Michael’s twin. The boys had apparently been separated at birth, and they were adopted by different families.

The man, Mark Cellura, during a search for his birth mother, learned six months ago, at the age of 50, that he had a twin.

The twin was Michael, Mrs. Weiland’s adopted son, who died 21 years ago of AIDS at the age of 29.

Mr. Cellura, raised by a typographer and a waitress in Buffalo, started searching old newspapers in the local library at age 11 for clues about his birth family, and set out more seriously to find his mother nine years ago.

But along the way, he found Mrs. Weiland. Their first phone conversation lasted two hours, the next one three hours, the next four. Soon, after she told him to stop calling her “ma’am,” he was calling her “Mama D.”

They met for the first time in June. He traveled to her farmhouse here in upstate New York and slept in his dead twin’s bedroom.

“I feel like my son’s been resurrected,” Mrs. Weiland, 73, a retired legal secretary, said the day after she met him. “I wanted Michael back. Then Mark blows in the doorway.”

She said she believed that the twins were identical, but Mr. Cellura is still trying to determine if that is true.

Mr. Cellura, a former vice president of Merrill Lynch who is single and has no children, said he had always felt “like an arm or a leg was missing.” Finding out he had a twin, he said, gave him a sense of completeness after a life of feeling frustrated and adrift.

Over and over after he found out he had a twin, he imagined their initial meeting: Michael would come visit him in Chesterfield, N.J., and stay in the room with the gold-painted walls; they would travel together to Europe; and they would dress alike and trick people into thinking one was the other.

“Where have you been?” Mark would ask.

“Where have you been?” his brother would ask.

“Looking for you,” Mark would answer.

In the course of six weeks, Mr. Cellura had found and then lost a brother. It was, he said, like riding a roller coaster: excitement, sadness, hope, longing.

Mr. Cellura is among a growing number of baby boomers who were adopted when the process was veiled in secrecy and are now hiring professional genealogists and harnessing the Internet to track down their birth families. Their quest to find their roots has fueled a thriving business in searchers, like the one Mr. Cellura hired after seeing her Web site, and driven a national debate over whether to open adoption records without birth parents’ permission.

Eight states allow adoptees access to their birth records, and legislation to do so is pending in five more, including New York and New Jersey. But critics say such transparency violates the privacy of birth mothers who may not want to be in touch with the offspring they gave up.

For people like Mr. Cellura, the yearning for a lost twin is particularly powerful, psychologists say.

“It opened up a wonderful new world of possibility for him,” Nancy L. Segal, a psychologist who runs the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, said of Mr. Cellura’s search. “It’s one of the most exciting discoveries an adoptee can have. This changes his whole conception of himself, to think, ‘There is another one like me.’ ”

A Lifetime of Frustration

After a lifetime of wondering, Mr. Cellura, whose father died 10 years ago and whose 89-year-old mother has dementia, began contacting New York State in 1999 seeking his birth records. He signed up with New York’s Adoption Information Registry, created in 1983 to connect adoptees and birth parents if both parties are interested. He heard nothing. He also made a separate application for information about biological siblings, but heard nothing.

“I was always frustrated with not knowing more information,” Mr. Cellura said. “I would always say to my parents, ‘This is all we know?’ It was not about being unhappy with my family so I was going to find another one; it was about wanting to know my history.”

After writing in 2000 to the State Health Department, which maintains the sibling registry, he received a sheet of paper known as the “non-identifying information report.” It said that his birth mother was 18 when she had him and was Roman Catholic, that the pregnancy was normal, that he weighed 5 pounds 3 ounces, and that two other babies were born to her before him.

It was not until Mr. Cellura hired a genealogist in New Jersey, Pam Slaton, that he made real progress. Ms. Slaton quickly tracked down Mr. Cellura’s birth mother and, through talking to a neighbor of the birth mother, learned in January of the existence of the twin.

Ms. Slaton wrote to Mr. Cellura’s birth mother but she did not respond, and Mr. Cellura said he did not want to pursue her further.

At that point, they began a frantic search for Michael.

Ms. Slaton dug through records across the country, networked with other genealogists and called the parents of men named Michael who were born in New York on Mr. Cellura’s birthday, Jan. 14. At one point, Mr. Cellura, who was arriving at his offices across the street from the World Trade Center on the morning of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, looked on the Internet at all the photographs of the people who had been killed. He saw one man who looked like himself, but hesitated to call his family.

In February, Ms. Slaton found Michael: in the Social Security death index. The news could have marked the sad end of a long journey for Mr. Cellura. But it was, in a way, the beginning.

He learned that Michael J. Weise had been adopted by a family living in a small town in upstate New York, near Saratoga Springs.

He wanted to find out who his twin was, and in the process, he said, he would learn who he was, too.

Over the last few months, he talked regularly with Mrs. Weiland, whose second husband, Dick, is a retired state trooper.

“I think Mark needs a mother and I’m it,” Mrs. Weiland said. Later, she added, “There was a song Michael used to sing called ‘Somewhere Down the Road,’ by Barry Manilow. He used to sing it to me and send me tapes. I said to Mark, ‘That’s what’s happening. Somewhere down the road, there you are, you’ve appeared.’ ”

Mr. Cellura also quickly developed a close relationship with Michael’s sister, Mary Kay Groesbeck, 45, who told him, “You didn’t get Michael but you got the rest of us.”

Like Mrs. Weiland, Ms. Groesbeck said that she felt like she had Michael back, or some older version of him, or even a different brother she felt like she had always known.

Mr. Cellura, who retired this year after taking a buyout package from Merrill Lynch, spent long hours questioning the family about Michael — what was his favorite vegetable, his favorite color, who were his friends?

Mrs. Weiland liked that Mark seemed so responsible, that he had saved enough money in 28 years working for Merrill Lynch that he could retire at 50. Michael, an artist, had struggled with drug addiction.

“Mark could have saved Michael,” she said. “He could have seen the road he was taking and stopped him.”

Mr. Cellura, who likes to say now that he was “from the nerdy side of the womb,” said, “I could have grounded him and he could have lifted me up.”

Mrs. Weiland told him that one day, when he was 17, Michael came home and declared that from then on he wanted to be called Max, and he signed some of his paintings as Max. Mr. Cellura said he was shocked because when he was 18, he told his friends the name Mark was boring and that he wanted to be known as Max from that point on.

Ms. Slaton, an adoptee herself who has conducted thousands of other searches, said she was moved by the relationship between Mr. Cellura and Mrs. Weiland.

“He’s giving her a gift; she’s giving him a gift,” she said. “It gives him some kind of peace. He understands now what that void was about, that makes sense to him now.”

Fantasies and Ghosts

The search for birth relatives stems from the desire to replace fantasy with reality, some psychologists and people who are adopted say. Wendy Freund, a Manhattan therapist who specializes in adoption issues, says such a search can end the “ghost-fantasy life” that runs parallel to adoptees’ existence.

In this case the ghosts and fantasies have not been totally put to rest. Mr. Cellura now has a new fantasy built around the ghost of his brother, while Mrs. Weiland sees in Mr. Cellura a ghost coming back to life, creating new fantasies of the person she wished her son had become.

“It seems somewhat dangerous all around,” said Ms. Freund, who sometimes works with Ms. Slaton’s clients when they have found their birth relatives. “For the mother, it’s a constant reminder of her loss. And it puts a tremendous burden on the surviving twin to sort of repair this other family that’s so hurt and in so much pain.”

Mrs. Weiland said that she knew her son was a twin, but was told that his brother was not available for adoption. Michael knew, too, but he didn’t show an interest in searching for him, she said.

Mr. Cellura, who has a binder filled with notes on his search (“6/6/2008: Went to social services; original form mailed to Albany 11/17/1999; mother surrendered 8/7/1959”) is working on a timeline of his and his brother’s lives.

They were placed in foster care at birth and adopted at age 3; Mr. Cellura is trying to determine if they were together until then.

He has already spent about $10,000 on his search, and Ms. Slaton, who charges $2,500 per search, is still working to track down his birth father and the other sibling, a sister, who was listed in the state report. He is also trying to determine who made the decision to separate the twins, which is now considered unusual and harmful.

With the help of Michael’s sister — an adoptee who last year tracked down her own birth mother and half-sister and began relationships with them — he is trying to locate and meet people who knew his brother.

A Second Funeral

After months of getting to know Michael’s family by phone, Mr. Cellura made a request: Could they plan a funeral Mass for his dead twin, since he had missed the first one? They agreed, saying they felt he should have a chance to mourn his brother.

On a Saturday in June, Mr. Cellura made the four-hour drive to the Weilands’ house here in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. He spent a night in what had been Michael’s room, and, over dinner, introduced his own family to his twin’s sister, cousins and nephews. He spent hours with Mrs. Weiland, showing her his high school yearbooks, home movies and childhood photographs.

By their second day together, Mrs. Weiland was already teasing Mr. Cellura about how often he digresses. At one point, she slapped him on the wrist and said, “You’re like a tornado.”

On the morning of the funeral Mass, Mr. Cellura wore a black suit and sunglasses, rosary beads wrapped around his wrist. Mrs. Weiland hugged him and said, “You look nice, Mark.”

His adoptive sister, Rosemary, and her two sons, were there, and he pointed to a picture of Michael on the wall and told his nephews, “Kids, this is your Uncle Mike.”

Mr. Cellura had sent five flower arrangements to the small Catholic church: lilies, carnations and daisies. At the altar, he placed three of his brother’s artworks, including a self-portrait that portrays three identical faces forming one person. Mr. Cellura calls it his brother’s “picture of us.”

The organist asked whether he should play “Amazing Grace” or “On Eagles’ Wings.” Mrs. Weiland and Mr. Cellura looked at each other.

“Mama D?” he asked, touching her arm.

She said it didn’t matter; she would cry either way. They sat in different pews because they said if they sat together they would fall apart.

Mr. Cellura, alone in the front row, wept through most of the service. At the end he got up to speak and said, “My brother has been called home to be with the Lord.”

He also said that he was thankful “for the opportunity to have new family and new friends.”

When it was over, the families drove to the graveyard where Michael’s ashes were buried, and Mr. Cellura saw the grave for the first time. “That’s my big brother,” he said. (Michael was born a few minutes before him.)

Mrs. Weiland held a plastic bowl of water for the consecration, and Mr. Cellura handed everyone a red carnation, plucked from the arrangements at the church, telling them that he now knew that Michael’s favorite color was red.

He held three carnations, kneeled over the gravestone, crossed himself, kissed the stone and laid down the flowers.

After the funeral, the families went to lunch, and then Mr. Cellura went back to Mrs. Weiland’s house.

She teased him and said, “So Mark, how many more weeks are you going to be here?”

He asked if he could stay a few more days.

“I’ll be like gum on your shoes!” he said.

She told him to stay.