Posts Tagged ‘Ireland’

Never Will I Know

Thursday, May 29th, 2014

A woman born and raised in England discovers her Northern Irish roots and longs to know the father she was too late to find.

Father – “unknown,” his name is John.
He has blue eyes, just like me, I am told.
To my 5-year-old-self, the mystery of my origins began.

The earliest search started within my heart,
In my imagination,
Searching the faces of strangers,
In the street, in pictures, on television,
Anywhere that I might find the connection,
A deep sense of loss, a yearning, emptiness,
A marrow-deep need to know, and to belong.
There were no words to describe the longing,
Only an intangible feeling, etched in my soul.

His name is John…

And here I stand, not alone, for my brother holds me strong,
Your firstborn son, sharing my grief, bringing me to you,
I am too late, my journey’s end, no more searching, no more hope, just the cold, hard truth.
As frigid as the tombstone before me, you are gone, the dream is over.

Never will I know —
The warmth of your hugs,
Hold my hand in yours,
Hear the sound of your voice, your laughter,
Feel your kisses planted on my head,
The tousle of my hair beneath your fingers,
Your acceptance of me,
Your love for me.

His name is John…

Your headstone majestic, yet humble, in death, as you were in life,
The grief threatens to overwhelm me—my knees buckle beneath me,
You will never be there to catch me when I fall.
Silent tears for all that is lost overwhelm me.

I light four candles at your graveside– beacons of light, of hope,
For the grandchildren you never knew,
Who bear your ancestry, and who live because you did.
My existence denied in death, as in life.
No acknowledgement of me, the relinquished one.
Silently I scream, I am here, I am yours.
No acknowledgement of the loss I feel,
I was your firstborn, the first wain you held in your arms.

His name is John…

I still grieve for you every day.
I live a life full of love and gratitude in deference to you.
Your grandchildren will always be proud of the man you were—
They will respect all that you achieved and acknowledge their heritage,
Even though we are denied and eradicated from your life.

I often wonder…
Did you ever think of me? Did you ever question what became of me?
Did you ever grieve the loss of me?
Would you have protected me from the hurt and shame?
Would you have loved me and accepted me for all that I am?
Will you forgive me for not finding you in time?
Would I have been enough?

His name is John. He is my father. And he is gone…

Thanks for visiting our online community. In addition to stories like this one, you can find valuable resources, discover your rights to your original birth certificate, meet other adoptees, and join the discussion by commenting (below) or on our Facebook page.

Subscribe to our blog to receive more adoptee tales, and consider adding your voice to the Secret Sons & Daughters collection.

Secrets in Review, Issue 3

Saturday, April 19th, 2014

Since Secret Sons & Daughters launched two months ago, we have enjoyed connecting with adoptees through their powerful stories, comments and through our social media.

It’s exciting to watch the voices of the adoptee community grow more candid and outspoken.

We are honored to have shared adoptees’ tales about searching, reunion, and what it was like for those in their 40’s or 50’s to discover that they’d been adopted. We’d also love to hear stories about what it was like to reunite with your biological father. Have you experienced rejection from your families, and if so, how have you dealt with this hardship? Are you an adoption rights advocate? What event inspired you to work for open access in your state? Maybe you’re an adoptee who’d prefer no contact at all— we’d like to share those stories, too.

We’re happy to offer you writing ideas and editorial assistance. To learn more—read our submission guidelines.

At Secret Sons & Daughters, we are passionate about helping adoptees connect, and hopeful that through our stories, we will create a groundswell of people to support original birth certificate access across the United States. Today, only eleven states (see Discover Your Rights) allow adoptees to have that access.

As noted in a New Era for Ohio Adoptees Began Today, Ohio is soon to be the most recent state to join that short list to provide original birth certificate access to all adult adoptees.

The adoptive story collective holds power. We’re seeing that stories beget more stories, from a writer who shared his search angel information to help another writer, to these comments that speak to what it’s like to share an experience—

Amy, and adoptee, enthusiastically related to Scott Baker’s inspirational reunion story when she said, “I am in tears! I have looked for years on and off, but have recently started searching with all my heart. I have an emptiness inside that I can’t explain compounded by the recent death of my adopted father. Please continue to share your story with as many groups as you can as it gives such extreme hope! I am in NY, and it seems when search angels hear that they seem to shy away a bit. Thank you so much for the wonderful story, you are very blessed!”

Another reader and adoptee, Mary, summarized the potential healing effect of writing her story after reading Paige Strickland’s interview on self-publishing a memoir: “I like what Paige said about ‘writing got a lot of “garbage” out of my system.’ That’s what is happening with me now as I just started my search at age 65. I didn’t realize how much I had suppressed, and how it has affected my life…I didn’t realize how many adoptees are out there, as I have never personally known anyone who admitted to being adopted…I felt odd about wanting to know who my family was, especially after the things I was told—like there was something wrong with me for being inquisitive. Thank you Paige, and all the [adoptees] and search angels out there— for freeing me and giving me the opportunity to know the real me.”

Many others supportively connected with our contributing authors. Here are the highlights from the past month:

An Adoptee Comes Full Circle When He Finds His Birth MotherAdoptee, Scott Baker

An Irish Adoptee Talks Adoption over Tea with Philomena LeeAdoptee, and Journalist with The Irish Independent, Catriona Palmer

An Ohio Adoptee Finds Her Way Home to HerselfAdoptee, Molly Murphy

An Iowa Adoptee’s Thoughts the Night Before He Meets His Birth MotherAdoptee, Dan Koerselman

Paige Strickland, Author of “Akin to the Truth: A Memoir of Adoption and Identity,” Speaks About Self-Publishing Her BookCofounder of Secret Sons & Daughters, Heather Katz, interviewed adoptee, Paige Strickland.

New York’s Spence-Chapin’s New Modern Family Center Offers Support for Adult AdopteesCofounder of Secret Sons & Daughters, Christine Koubek, spoke with adoptee, Misha Conaway, Outreach Manager, and Dana Stallard, the center’s Adoptee Services Coordinator about the center’s opening.

New Era for Ohio Adoptees Began TodayChristine also spoke with Ms. Betsie Norris, the executive director of Adoption Network Cleveland, and an adoptee whose father was partially responsible not only for Ohio’s sealed records practice, but also for its reversal many years later.

Coming up next are new late-discovery adoptee tales, and stories of secret daughters finding their strength through difficult reunions. In addition, Christine will share the highlights of her recent trip to San Francisco where she met a few adoptee tale writers and many others who are making a difference in the lives of adoptees at the American Adoption Congress Conference.

We’ve also reorganized our “News” section, which is now “Secret Talk.” Within it, you’ll find posts grouped under: Words of Wisdom, Legislation News, Secrets in Review, and Blog posts (which are our thoughts on various adoption related topics).

Please be sure to subscribe (here on our sidebar) to receive the latest Adoptee Tales and updates. And like us on Facebook to connect with other adoptees— help us reach 600 “likes” this week.

Thank you for spreading the word about Secret Sons & Daughters. We hit over 20,000 views yesterday!

Best wishes,

Heather & Christine
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An Irish Adoptee Talks Adoption over Tea with Philomena Lee

Tuesday, March 18th, 2014

An Irish adoptee who has had a secret relationship with her birth mother, finds hope through a conversation with Philomena Lee.

For the past 14 years I have been having a secret relationship with my birth mother. We meet in hotel bars across Dublin, preferring darkened corners where we can catch up in peace, avoiding conversations with strangers, and evading any questions about our physical similarities with a polite smile.

The relationship feels clandestine, almost like an affair. Our rendezvous are arranged by text message – we never speak on the phone – and I have long stopped bringing her bouquets of flowers, knowing well that she cannot explain their heady extravagance back home.

This is the story that I told Philomena Lee while we sipped tea in the fancy bar of the Ritz Carlton hotel in Washington, D.C. Philomena is in town with her daughter, Jane, as part of a publicity tour for the Oscar-nominated movie about the son she bore in a convent in Roscrea in 1952 and whom she lost to forced adoption when he was three-and-a-half-years old.

I was meant to be interviewing Philomena but before long she had turned the tables on me. My journalist’s notebook sat empty as I found myself opening up, telling Philomena the story about the woman who gave me up for adoption 41 years ago in Dublin and who every day since has lived with the festering secret of my existence, a ballast around her heart.

Philomena knows all about secrets. For 50 years she told no one about her little boy Anthony, who won over even the sternest of nuns with his dazzling smile and gentle kisses.

Having given birth to Anthony in the mother-and-baby home in Roscrea, Philomena was forced to work in the convent laundry, the price of admission for “one night of romance” with a handsome lad whom she met at a carnival in Newcastle West and never saw again.

For one hour of the day, over three and a half years, Philomena was allowed to play with Anthony and, despite this depravation, they formed an unbreakable bond. But because Philomena was a “sinner,” her child could never belong to her.

The week before Christmas 1955, Anthony was dispatched to America, Philomena unaware of his departure until she saw his tiny face searching for hers in the back window of the car that was taking him away.

My own mother – let’s call her Sarah, not her real name – made the mistake of falling in love with a swaggering man-about-town in a rural Irish outpost in 1971. The day she told him she was pregnant he pretended not to hear. That day was the last she would ever lay eyes on him.

“You just believed everything that they told you,” Philomena says when I tell her about Sarah’s pain. “I carried my secret all though my life, and even when I left Roscrea, it never left me because I thought, ‘I can’t tell this to anybody. It’s too serious. I’ve committed a grave sin.'”

“We were so ostracized and so browbeaten into thinking that we had committed a sin, a mortal sin,” she says.

Now as unofficial ambassador for the shamed women of Ireland’s past, Philomena is using her new-found celebrity to usher those such as Sarah out of the closet, urging them to liberate themselves from the time machine that has left them stuck in the backward Ireland of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

“I was in the same situation. I was so afraid to tell. I was afraid that my children would reject me,” she says. “But they are the most wonderful daughter and son. I should have known better.”

“Please, please, women my age, will you please come forward and tell your story like I did?” Philomena says in reference to the older Irish women, like her, for whom time is running out. “For my age group you need them to tell your story because for a lot of this group, it’s the siblings that are looking for them.”

Philomena’s argument is a compelling one but the plucky 80-year-old has her work cut out for her. Despite all the economic and social progress that Ireland has made in recent decades, the shame and stigma – enforced by the unhealthy relationship between church and state – still has a vice-like grip on the minds of these women.

The Irish Government last year had to be dragged kicking and screaming into an apology for the forgotten Magdalene women who washed the dirty laundry of the Irish public in penance for their “crimes.”

Philomena, as head of the newly created Philomena Project, is now advocating changes in Ireland’s arcane adoption laws to allow adoptees like me access to our original records. (Despite permission from both Sarah and my adoptive parents, I am still denied access to my records.)

The Irish State – which stood by, and in many cases profited from the imprisonment of unmarried mothers in religious institutions – has a lot for which to answer.

Sitting next to Philomena and her daughter Jane during our tea in Washington is Mari Steed, another “forgotten” Irish child born in a baby home and sent to America when she was 18-months-old. Mari, in a cruel twist, became pregnant as a teenager and was forced to relinquish her own child for adoption.

It struck me that the Ritz Carlton in downtown Washington had never had a tea party quite like it before – four Irish women, some holding hands and shedding tears, each of our lives irrevocably altered by Ireland’s messy relationship with the Catholic Church.

Back at home that night, I felt somehow altered. The interview with Philomena had felt like a benediction, her grace and forgiveness in the face of the terrible injustice she had suffered like a healing balm. I poured myself a glass of wine and paused in the kitchen to send Sarah a quick text message. It was nearly midnight in Dublin but I guessed that she would be awake.

“Just met Philomena and told her about you,” I typed in a hurry. “She had such empathy for you. Said you are not alone.”

Sarah’s reply was instantaneous: “I think it took her 50 years to open up,” she wrote. “I’m praying for a miracle for myself.”

Caitriona Palmer, Christine Koubek, and Heather Katz at a Donaldson Adoption Institute event in support of birth mothers

Caitriona Palmer, Christine Koubek, and Heather Katz at a Donaldson Adoption Institute event in support of birth mothers

Note: This piece originally appeared in the Irish Independent and is reprinted here with the author’s permission.

Image: with Philomena Lee provided by Caitriona Palmer.

Thanks for visiting our online community. In addition to stories like this one, you can find valuable resources, discover your rights to your original birth certificate, meet other adoptees, and join the discussion by commenting (below) or on Facebook.

Subscribe to our blog to receive more adoptee tales, and consider adding your voice to our Secret Sons & Daughters collection. 

The Philomena Effect—An Adoptee Reflects on Truth and Silence

Wednesday, February 26th, 2014

When Philomena first debuted in theaters, I’ll admit I was afraid to see it. It wasn’t because I thought it would be no good (Judi Dench stars in it after all). I was afraid it would be too good. A friend had texted: “Have you seen Philomena? Just saw it. SO good. Made me think of Ann.” By the end of the movie’s first week, two more friends had emailed, “thought of Ann through the movie.”

There was no way I was going to see that film now. My birth mother, Ann, passed away four years ago, and I was hesitant to trigger the very lonely, and very “complicated grief” (therapist’s term) I struggled with in holiday seasons past. Why see a movie about a naive Irish teenager who had made love, got pregnant, was sent away, and then forced to give up her son for adoption and keep quiet? A trajectory that was the same as Ann’s, and a son whose existence was a secret, like I was, albeit not for 50 years.

I had work deadlines, holiday shopping, a packed month of basketball games and holiday events to attend—and a determination to avoid anything that could cast a somber tone on Christmas.

And then, on December 18, after the last deadline was met, and the presents were bought, and our guests were due to arrive, I had a change of heart. We had been quietly working on Secret Sons & Daughters for months. I had to see the film, so I texted Heather: “Philomena —11 am tomorrow?”

And off we went. We sat in a nearly empty theatre, a few rows in front of a group of college girls home for break, and I discovered that there was everything and nothing somber about Philomena.

I laughed when Philomena spoke bluntly about her sexual parts, and felt my heart rest as I listened to her soft way of saying hard things in scene after scene. Ann had both those qualities. Then there was the irony—the scene where Philomena asks Martin if he could use a fake name for her in his article, “or maybe Anne, Anne Boleyn” she mused.

What surprised me most though, was that I was as captivated by Martin Sixsmith’s storyline as I was by Philomena’s. To me, he was sort of like Nick Carraway to The Great Gatsby’s Jay Gatsby—a peripheral narrator whose life changes as he witnesses a story and becomes part of the action unfolding. Sixsmith’s interactions and observations are what cause us to think about the role we play in viewing our pasts, and the role of faith, as we watch Martin’s faith and beliefs about human nature (or at least “human interest” stories) be tested during his pursuit of Philomena’s story.

Perhaps that’s how Philomena might change others too, not in a Martin Sixsmith journalist sort of way, but maybe in the way we decide what to keep secret.

In the days after I’d seen the film, there was one scene that lingered. It’s the part when Philomena grapples with which is the greater sin—what she did, or keeping the secret for 50 years—and I couldn’t quite put my finger on why until I was talking about the movie with an editor I often work with, who is also a friend and adoptive father.

Preparing to launch Secret Sons & Daughters has a strange coming out of the closet feel to it for me, I shared with him. I’m thrilled one minute, and then truly dread that someone will actually read through it the next. The site’s mission goes against a natural impulse.

I’m from a generation that was supposed to keep quiet about adoption, be thankful, be loyal—why dredge up the past? Don’t dredge up the past—that’s the kind thing to do. And yet there’s a part of me that believes that the kindest thing you can do for another person is to listen and try to see him or her, the true him or her, and honor those stories—even stand up for those stories, as Philomena’s daughter Jane, and Martin Sixsmith and Judi Dench, and Steve Coogan have done with this film.

In our own small way, that’s what we hope to do with each Secret Son & Daughter story shared. If you have a story to tell, we’d love to hear it. And your thoughts on Philomena too—what parts of the movie struck you?

Image Credit: JUDI DENCH and STEVE COOGAN star in PHILOMENA, Photo by Alex Bailey © 2013 The Weinstein Company.

An Irish mum and U.S. original birth certificates

Friday, January 31st, 2014

In the months since Philomena debuted and went on to receive four Oscar nominations, Philomena (both the real person and the movie version) has brought international attention to Ireland’s adoption history and helped drum up support for legal changes that would allow Irish adoptees to access records that could help them trace their origins.  

What I hadn’t realized until last year, and many of our friends who had been adopted hadn’t either, is that there are 39 U.S. States with years, if not decades, worth of sealed records—even now in 2014. This means millions of American adoptees have restricted access to their origins, ancestry, and in some cases—to medical history that could help an adoptee and his or her children with genetic-related illnesses, as Darlene Coyne’s story on this site shows.

Shining a light on that fact—and putting a human face on those numbers—was what inspired us to create Secret Sons & Daughters and begin collecting stories. With that said, it’s important to clarify that advocating for a right to one’s original birth certificate is often confused with advocating reunions. To us they are separate issues.

Having unrestricted access to your original birth certificate means having the right to the truth about your origins, your ancestry, your medical history—the nonfiction version of your life’s first chapter if you will. It’s a right every non-adopted adult enjoys, as well as adult adoptees in almost a dozen U.S. states. What you do with that truth, whether or not you initiate a relationship, and at what level of contact (if available), is something very personal, something to be worked out within families, and something beyond the realm of legislation.

It’s also something incredibly complicated, as we know from our own experiences. In order to get information beyond what an original birth certificate offers, you have to make contact. For some adoptees, connecting with biological families is meaningful well beyond an exchange of information, for others it’s not, and for others still, any sort of contact is not worth the potential complications. As you’ll see, we honor all perspectives on this site.        

To find out where your birth state stands on records access, visit our Discover Your Rights page.