Birth Parents Strive for Contact in Adoptions

In 1964, when Deborah Mattson viewed her adult dilemma through the eyes of a young girl, her choices seemed clear. This kind of decision was made by adults, and they had concluded that an unmarried 15-year-old’s only choice was to give up her child for adoption.

“It was always: ‘You’ll want to give this baby up. You’ll want it to have a mother and a father, Debbie. You can’t provide that,’ ” she said.

“And it was true that I couldn’t provide those things. It was so logical. I couldn’t offer those things. Other people could.”

So Mattson relinquished the daughter she had named Melissa Kaye, signed papers saying she would never try to find her and walked away with just two photographs of her premature infant.

More than 20 years later, things are not nearly so simple. Mattson, now married and known as Deborah Roberts, is one of a growing number of birth parents trying to change an adoption system that they believe encouraged them to give up their children and keeps mother and child apart, sometimes for the rest of their lives.

Many of the changes have come in the last few years, in the form of “open” adoptions and legally established ways for birth parents to contact their children later in life. But much of the reform is too late to help mothers who gave up their children in the 1960s and 1970s; many of them still feel that they are viewed with disdain for doing so.

Roberts concedes that adoption was her only choice. In 1964, she had no money and no one to care for her daughter had she brought her home. Her parents were divorced, and she lived with her father and younger sister. But she resents the fact that the choice was never presented to her.

“I’m mad (because) I wanted to raise my baby,” she said. “But I wasn’t given any confidence that I could do it.”

“We relinquished the right to parent our children, but we did not relinquish the right to love them,” said Janet Appleford, branch coordinator for the San Diego chapter of Concerned United Birthparents, an international organization that offers support and assistance to birth parents. “And to not know where your child is, that’s cruel beyond belief.”

Historically, adoption authorities believed that complete separation of child and birth parent, secured in later years by nearly total confidentiality, was the best course for all parties in the “adoption triad”--child, birth parents and adoptive parents. That has changed in recent years, as unmarried mothers have become more socially acceptable and gained clout because of increasing demand for their offspring, officials said.

More and more often, arrangements are made at the time of adoption for birth parents to stay in occasional contact with their children or to receive periodic updates about their children’s welfare from the agency.

About 90% of the families who adopt children through San Diego County’s adoption agency continue to exchange letters and photos with birth parents, said Hawley Ridenour, chief of adoptions. About 5% of them allow phone calls or visits, he said.

Birth parents may now sign waivers of confidentiality at the time of adoption, giving their children the right to find them when they reach the age of 21. At that age, adoptees may sign similar waivers, which allow birth parents to find them. The adoptive parents’ consent is not needed.

Adoption counselors also routinely suggest the possibility of girls’ raising their children themselves, officials said.

But Roberts had no such opportunity when her daughter was born two months premature during what would have been Roberts’ sophomore year at Clairemont High School in San Diego.

The adoption agency would not accept a child that weighed just 4 pounds, 4 ounces, so Melissa spent weeks in an incubator--medical care that Roberts, as her mother, was billed for. But soon Melissa gained weight. A decision had to be made about bringing her home.

“I wanted to go back to school,” Roberts said. “I wanted to take journalism. I wanted to put out the school paper. I wanted to be a lawyer like E. G. Marshall in ‘The Defenders.’ I thought the whole world was open to me, until I got pregnant. And then it closed right in.”

She relinquished the child for adoption through the Children’s Home Society of California.

She was told that her daughter was going to the home of a banker, a family that could not have any more children. Roberts consoled herself with the thought that she was offering them the gift of a child. And her daughter would be raised in a style she could not hope to afford.

“Here was this beautiful family . . . this ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ family. It was just perfect,” Roberts said. It would be 20 years until she discovered that much of the information was not true.

Roberts bought Melissa three dresses and turned them over to the adoption agency. With just the snapshots as souvenirs, Roberts tried to put Melissa out of her mind.

“It was like I had to divorce myself from the whole process to be able to do it,” she said. “I had to become so detached so that I could do it.

“I knew what I had done. I accepted responsibility for what I had done, and I neatly put it away in the back of my mind,” she added. “And eventually, my days became easier, as if it never happened.”

According to Appleford, such denial is a typical part of a birth parent’s experience in that situation. Although they continue to feel a sense of loss, many suppress such feelings for 10, 20 or 30 years. Often, the feelings come tumbling out only when triggered by some later event, or when they begin to talk about their feelings in groups such as Concerned United Birthparents.

For Jim Shinn, a member of that group and an El Centro social worker, the feelings about relinquishing the son he fathered at age 17 remained buried for 10 years, surfacing when his wife became pregnant with their first child. He is still looking for the son born to his 15-year-old girlfriend.

“The loss never gets resolved,” Shinn said. “Any time I’m watching anything on TV that talks about the loss of a child, whoa, up comes the pain.”

For others, the passage of time is enough to spark a search. Maria Brown, a Scripps Ranch resident and Concerned United Birthparents member, said she began searching after realizing that her twin sons had reached the age of 18 and would be old enough to decide whether they wanted to see her. Informally, though, Brown had been searching since she gave up the twins when they were 2 years old.

“Every time I walked into a mall and I saw twin boys, I was looking in their faces,” she recalled. “I spent 20 years looking for those boys.” Brown was reunited with her sons in April.

Roberts noted her daughter’s birthday each year, but did nothing to find her. A year after giving up Melissa, she became pregnant again, bearing a child she sees as a replacement for the one she gave up. She married the baby’s father but separated from him before the child was born. She kept this daughter, Michelle, and went to live with her mother in Santa Barbara.

Years later, she married plumber Dennis Roberts. They have two daughters, Mona and Amber.

In the spring of 1981, Roberts read a newspaper article about a woman who had found the child she had given up for adoption and was forming a support group for others like her. The notion that finding her daughter was possible was a revelation to Roberts.

“I thought: ‘You mean, it’s true? I can find out something?’ ” she said. “Because (adoption counselors) had told me: ‘You’ll never know anything. You’ll never know where your baby goes. You’ll never know where your baby’s going to be.’ ”

Initial Doubts

Roberts joined the chapter of Concerned United Birthparents. “That first meeting, it was like somebody coming out of the closet who’s a gay,” she said. “That’s what we all felt like. We’re all saying, ‘I really gave this baby up for adoption. Don’t hit me. Don’t throw rocks at me. Do I have to wear a scarlet letter “A?” No! These people all understood.”

Like most birth parents, Roberts was initially plagued by doubts about searching for her daughter and put off seeking information about her. But as her attitudes changed, she found herself asking, “Why should she not meet me?”

“I’m not a bad person,” Roberts said. “I’ve been the PTA mom. I’ve been the room mother. I volunteer at the schools. I do all those neat things that mothers do. Why shouldn’t my first daughter want to know me too? Why not? What’s so bad about me that has to be hidden?”

She started by contacting the Children’s Home Society for the “non-identifying information” to which she was entitled. Melissa Kaye had been placed with a large Mexican-American family. The father, who was not a banker as she had originally been told, had been in the Marines and then went into business for himself. Roberts was given the ages of the children, their hair color, eye color and other non-specific information.

Most shocking to her, however, was the information that the couple had had other children after adopting Melissa, she said.

When the interview began, Roberts asked for her daughter’s adoptive name but was told that it could not be revealed. Just before leaving, she asked again. This time, the social worker bent the rules. The name was Gina.

“It was the greatest day of my life,” she said. “I knew my child’s name. She was a person. She wasn’t a baby.”

Elated, Roberts settled down to wait for Gina--wherever she was--to find her, even though there was no reason to believe Gina was looking. That was a crucial mistake. Months went by. There was no word from Gina.

Turned to Search Consultant

In the summer of 1982, Roberts changed her mind. Reasoning that Gina was now 18 and old enough to decide whether she wanted to speak to her natural mother, Roberts started looking for her.

She turned to a search consultant, one of a small cadre of people who conduct searches based on the shreds of information available to birth parents and adoptees. Like private investigators, search consultants use public records such as marriage, death and birth certificates; property records; probate information; old phone books, and city directories to find a child or parent. They talk to neighbors, employers and colleagues to find a family that has moved.

Critical to a search is ascertaining the child’s new first and last name, said Cathy Wolfe, who is certified as a search consultant by Independent Search Consultants, a nonprofit corporation based in Costa Mesa. The rest is creative thinking and a bit of luck, she said.

“Luck has a lot to do with it. You can be knowledgeable in search and you can be creative in search, but sometimes it’s just being lucky enough to say, ‘This is where we have to go now,’ ” said Wolfe, who did not conduct Roberts’ search.

Birth parent organizations and search consultants are reluctant to disclose specific details about their methods, fearing that authorities may restrict access to the records still available. Birth certificates, which are amended and sealed upon completion of the adoption, are particularly difficult for them to get. But some public agencies and private sources are helpful, they said.

Children and adults can also find each other through a computer registry in Carson City, Nev., and one kept by the Adoptees’ Liberty Movement Assn. in New York, which was founded in 1971 by Florence Anna Fisher, an adoptee who spent years looking before finding her natural mother. With 600,000 names in its registry, the association has arranged nearly 22,000 reunions, Fisher said.

Roberts will say only that a first search consultant, to whom she paid $250, turned up nothing. But a second one, to whom she paid $300, returned with her daughter’s name and location. Regina Martinez, age 18, lived in Oceanside.

Roberts’ elation was uncontrolled.

“Here she is an hour away from me!” she exclaimed. “She’s not in New York. She’s not in Florida. She’s an hour away from me. . . . It was incredible, the thought she was right there.”

Roberts planned to wait. She planned to think about the havoc she might raise when she contacted Gina. She planned to write a thoughtful letter to Gina’s parents in an attempt to start out right.

Call a Revelation

Instead she waited five minutes and picked up the telephone to call Gina’s parents. Saying she was an old school friend, Roberts learned that Gina was living in her own apartment and working in an Oceanside deli. She picked up the phone and dialed her work number.

The call shattered Gina Martinez’s world. Her parents had not told her that she was adopted.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Martinez said. “I was hysterical on the phone. I was screaming and crying on the phone.”

Roberts acknowledges that “I just really blew it when I did this.” She fabricated an excuse, telling Gina that she must have made a mistake. Maybe it’s my mother you want, Gina responded. She knew that her mother had been adopted.

But in reality, this was not the first time the thought of adoption had crossed Gina’s mind.

“I had thought a lot about it growing up,” she said. “I didn’t look like anybody in the family. People in school would ask you if you were adopted.”

But she had never pursued the issue. “It was a happy home,” she said. “They loved us all the same.”

Roberts called Gina’s mother, who at first denied the adoption, Roberts said. Later, she said she would discuss the matter with her husband and get back to Roberts, Roberts said.

“I’m so naive. I waited,” Roberts said. “I waited to be arrested. I saw myself doing time in prison” for violating the agreement not to search for Gina.

Long Conversation

When she had waited long enough, Roberts began to write letters to her daughter in care of the Martinez home. She wasn’t sure they were getting through, but she kept sending them. Finally, she did get a Christmas card to Gina. Gina called the next day, and they had a long conversation on the phone.

“It was like talking to someone I’ve known all my life,” Roberts said. “This was only the second time I’d heard her voice. She sounds like me. She thinks like me. And I’d never even seen her.

“I’m walking on a cloud, thinking, ‘I’ve always known this child.’ You may have put all these years between us. I may not have raised her. But she’s definitely my daughter.”

Roberts went out and bought her daughter a Christmas card for every one of the years they had been separated.

Gina said: “Later on, I started realizing it was true, piece by piece. I talked to my cousins and they started to say it is true.” She confronted her parents, who told her the truth.

“I felt like I didn’t know who I was,” she said. “I felt, gosh, I’m a part of somebody I don’t even know. I was angry. I just rebelled against everything.”

Still, Gina was not ready to see Roberts. Roberts again called Gina’s mother, who told her that she would never see her daughter. Gina was too confused. “We don’t want you in our lives,” Roberts remembered the woman saying.

“She thought there was this lady out there trying to take me away, trying to claim me,” Gina said.

Christmas, 1982, was tough. Roberts had bought presents for Gina and put them under the family tree.

“After Christmas, they were just left there sitting under the tree until the tree was taken down,” she remembered. “It was very sad.” But the ice was thawing. Gina would call occasionally or drop Roberts a card. Roberts tried to stay in touch.

Just before Gina’s 21st birthday, Roberts called her apartment, using a phone number she had learned from an old roommate of Gina. Gina called back the next day, her birthday. She told Roberts that she was free the following day if she was interested in getting together.

“I thought: ‘I’m finally old enough. I’ve put her through enough heartache in the last three years. I have to meet her,’ ” Gina said.

Neither of them could sleep. Morning finally came. Roberts and her husband drove to Gina’s apartment. After all these years of longing, Roberts froze, paralyzed by fear.

“All of a sudden I’m at the door and she’s at the door and we’re hugging,” she said. “I just couldn’t take my eyes off her. I was so in love with her.”

She brought Gina home, where they held a reunion party. Roberts gave Gina 21 gifts, one for each birthday that they had been apart.

“The reality of it hit me,” she said. “All my children are together. We’re sitting in the same room. We’re sitting at the same table. . . . I kept staring at her. I couldn’t get enough of looking at her.”

Today, the two women are more friends than they are mother and daughter. Gina has a son of her own, a baby she never considered giving up for adoption even though she’s not married. Roberts attended her baby shower.

“There’s a closeness with Debbie,” Gina said. “But then again, my mother is my mother. She raised me. She knows me a lot better. She knows me inside and out. Debbie, she gives me my time, and I try to understand what she’s going through.”

Roberts said: “I’m not a mother to her. She’s not looking for another mother. She has a mother. I’m her birth parent. I put her on this planet. . . . We’ve got a real good, friendly relationship.”