THE SECOND REJECTION
by Marcy Wineman Axness
Your phone call takes too long to be returned. Your letter goes unanswered for an unnerving number of weeks. You concoct exagerated scenes inside your overtime mind, clamoring to make sense of it all, to somehow feel sense of it all.
Ah, reunion.
Now that we as a movement have gotten past the reunion-as-panacea stage, we are beginning to address the very complex issues imbedded in the process, the relationship, the roller-coaster experience that attends reunion. And the big old elephant sitting squarely in the middle of this room, the one almost everyone sees–or rather feels, trampling their already-bruised toes–but hates to mention for fear of making it real, is named Rejection. But whether we name it or not, it’s very real.
For many adoptees, it’s experienced as The Second Rejection. My friend Amy’s birthmother, upon being found, said that she needed time to adjust. She told Amy to call her in six months, and upon doing so Amy found that she had moved to Germany. Amy has channeled her renewed feelings of abandonment into her own healing, thereby transforming what might have been an immobilizing turn of events, but she still knows frustratingly little about what’s at the heart of her birthmother’s rejection.
Dr. Randolph Severson explains that behind many kinds of reunion rejection lies a sort of grieving for the might-have-been. And people respond to that grief in different ways.
“I think there is a stage that some people go through where they feel rejected, really, by life. That all these things that could have been, or, along a different kind of life trajectory, would have occured, simply aren’t going to be–too much of life has already been lived. And people withdraw. The anxiety is just too great, the disappointment is too great.”
This kind of withdrawal can happen on the part of the adoptee as well. “What a lot of adoptees seem to go through is a stage where they realize that the birthmother or birthparents are really not going to be able to answer to their wish when their fundamental wish is ‘I wish none of this had ever happened to me.’ ”
Dr. Severson says that an underlying desire of many adoptees–subconscious, irrational, and understandable–is that through reunion they will somehow become un-adopted, become like everyone else.
“The second rejection sort of occurs when folks realize that this just simply can’t happen. And sometimes it creates a little bit of a distance that the birthparent then complains about, too. It’s like an almost impersonal rejection that occurs as a result of finding that the reunion simply can’t erase, eliminate or undo everything that’s gone before. The wounds still exist.”
It is the different way we address these wounds that is at the heart of my own experience with the second rejection. As long as I was still in the deep sleep of denial over how adoption etched me, my birthmother felt safe to be very forthcoming in our relationship. The fact that I’ve come to address these issues, these wounds of mine, holds a certain terror for her, I think, since she has always minimized her adoption experience, as in “I had a great pregnancy, I knew I was carrying you for Bee and Bob, and I’ve never believed in ownership of children.”
In her blithe attitude about this profound experience–one we intimately shared–I experience a certain basic rejection, a dismissal of the part of me who doesn’t regard it blithely in the least, the part of me who feels fundamentally shaped by it.
My birthmother’s response is a variation on a theme that Dr. Severson says often occurs in the reunion experience as birthparents encounter the fullness of their children’s emotions and responses. “They can be overwhelmed about the intense, deep sorts of needs and yearning that adoptees often have. And they can just withdraw, it’s just too frightening. I think most second rejections that occur literally, occur out of fear, mostly, and not knowing how to respond.” (It can also happen vice versa, with the adoptee overwhelmed by the needs of the birthparent.)
Sometimes the birthparent–most often the birthmother–doesn’t feel free to respond to her newly-returned “child” in the way her instincts would guide, hamstrung as she is by allegiances to her existing family, especially her husband, notes Dr. Severson.
“When the full weight of what this means bears in on a spouse, and for awhile the birthparent becomes almost a stranger, that spouse can put a whole, whole lot of pressure on the birthparent.”
This can lead to painful choices that pit a birthmother’s instincts and heart’s desires against the harsher demands she may feel pressing in on her. In this way, the birthmother- or birthfather–experiences another kind of second rejection, of the sort that occured when she had to reject an entire realm of response within herself–and indeed felt it rejected by those close to her–in order to relinquish her child for adoption. This can stir up old anger, another elephant in the reunion room, who sits in many laps.
Whenever I attend our local support group, I can count on hearing at least one birthmother complaining about her adult child’s confusing, ambivalent, “push-pull” behavior, which she will often perceive as rejection. I usually offer some insight into primal anger, for notwithstanding the old debate regarding Did-We-Or-Did-We-Not-Abandon-Them, I believe that regardless of how we–including adoptees–frame it within our adult, intellectual perspective, there is rooted in the adoptees’ experience a profound sense of rejection registered on the most primal level, at our most tender marrow. Dr. Severson cautions against regarding the anger as simply a “stage”, which implies some sort of term limit.
“It co-exists with all these other feelings, and it doesn’t go away. It exists because it’s reality-based. It’s human. And then when it comes boiling out it frightens everybody, especially if they’ve not read anything or talked to anybody, are not in therapy or a support group, and it’s kind of like ‘Where’s this anger coming from? It shouldn’t be there because after all, we’re having this nice, happy reunion.’ ”
Marcy Wineman Axness, an adoptee, writes and lectures nationwide on adoption and pre- and perinatal issues. ( 1995, by Marcy Wineman Axness
I came across an adoption ‘blog’ website at an article called ‘The Second Rejection’, meaning rejection by the mother in reunion. Written by an adopted person claiming to be well educated in adoption issues. But he began with the assumption that the adoption was a rejection by his mother – and all other mothers – of adopted babies. He didn’t even question it. So he’s encouraging other adopted people to continue believing their mothers rejected them or the adoption wouldn’t have happened. That’s how brainwashed adopted people are. People like him are encouraging other adopted people to go into a reunion with the pre-conceived belief they were rejected at birth – and expecting another rejection from their mothers. So the writer hasn’t grasped that when a person approaches their mother demanding to know ‘why’ he or she wasn’t ‘wanted’ by her, they are setting themselves, their mother and the reunion – up to fail. Then they blame their mothers who don’t react well to that kind of critical questioning attitude. More trauma for the mothers. The reunion is a disaster, which convinces the adopted person their mother has now rejected them a ‘second’ time. It’s a double whammy for the mothers. It’s a self fulfilling prophesy for the adopted person. It was the mothers, not heir babies, who were unwanted. Successful reunions depend upon the adopted person having sufficient pre-knowledge of the effects of forced, compulsory adoption on their mothers. Babies were taken to punish the mothers for their sexuality/ fertility. When those babies grow up they need to understand the traumatic effect their loss had on their mothers. Adoption is the psychological loss of a child. Imagine the shock when that ‘baby’ reappears as an adult. You weren’t rejected. You were taken to satisfy the financial needs of the adoption industry. Please, re-educate yourselves before reunion. Try to set aside all the brainwashing to which you were subjected to by your adopted families – who made you believe you were unwanted and therefore rejected. It’s not true. Don’t ruin your own reunions.
Interesting Jo Williams that’s you are perceiving the relinquishing parent as a victim in the adoption triangle. To then assert that adoptees are brainwashed into believing they were abandoned is insulting to say the least.
You may want to do further research into the studies that repeatedly show the significantly higher incidence of suicide, incarceration and depression among adoptees, although I think that you may not like what you read and would rather sit on you high horse judging adoptees.