Men’s Issues in Adoption Get Equal Time : A panel discussion at a conference in Garden Grove focuses on birth fathers’ long, hard road into their children’s lives.

He was young and carefree and would have done just about anything to avoid the responsibility of a wife and child. So when his pregnant girlfriend decided to put their baby up for adoption, he didn’t argue.

Daniel Millward chose to “evaporate into the woodwork,” and by the time he had finished college and was ready to settle down, he’d put a lid on any feelings that might cause him to look back at his frightening brush with fatherhood at 21.

For years after he married, had two sons and started a career, he seldom thought about the daughter he’d never seen. If someone had told him that someday he’d become obsessed with finding her, or that he would talk publicly about the emotional awakening in his early 40s that prompted him to start searching for her, he wouldn’t have believed it.

But there he was last week at the Hyatt Regency Alicante in Garden Grove, sharing his story as part of a panel discussion on “Men’s Issues in Adoption” during the 13th annual international conference of the American Adoption Congress. The all-male panel also included the husband of a birth mother and two adoptees whose two-hour session was one of about 70 that attracted 400 people to the four-day conference.

The fact that most of the men’s listeners were women shows how lopsided participation has been in the reform movement through which groups like the American Adoption Congress are trying to bring adoption out in the open.

But, according to AAC spokeswoman Robyn Quinter, men such as Millward are beginning to come forward and take their places in a movement that is encouraging them to face the losses they have suffered as a result of adoption.

Millward, who runs a search operation in Leucadia that brings adoptees and birth parents together, said many birth fathers who walk away from responsibility when they’re young have regrets later. But in many cases, they remain in the background because “a lot of adoptees feel the birth father is the one to blame.”

Most of the adoptees who come to his search firm for help are looking for their birth mother, he said. Anger often keeps them from seeking out their birth father, although many eventually end up wanting to find him, too.

Millward didn’t even allow himself to think it would be possible to find his daughter--until he saw another birth father meet his child on TV. After that, he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind.

He began an intensive search, and eight months later, at age 43, he was embracing his 22-year-old daughter--and his grandchild--for the first time. Finally, he felt complete.

He admits that his search was hard on his family--sons aged 16 and 6 and a wife--when he put the rest of his life on hold so he could look for the missing piece.

So he listened with great interest when the “significant other” on the “Men’s Issues” panel, Bill Walsh of Leawood, Kan., talked about the difficulties he faced after he married a woman who had relinquished two babies long before he met her.

When he married Judy six years ago, Walsh told her: “That’s the past; let’s focus on the future.”

That was easy for him to say, but, he soon learned, impossible for her to do. Even though she was raising two children from a previous marriage with Walsh’s help, she kept feeling the pull of her past.

She dreaded New Year’s Day and Valentine’s Day, because her first child was born on Jan. 1 and her second on Feb. 13. And she was prone to mood swings even on days that had no special significance.

When she finally decided to search for her first-born daughter, Walsh supported her. But the depth of her need didn’t become clear to him until he saw 21 years of grief spill out over the phone when a tearful Judy was finally able to tell her first-born daughter, “You were given up because you were loved.”

When he saw mother and daughter quickly become friends, Walsh thought they would all be able to get on with their lives. But then Judy became obsessed with finding her second daughter, and this time she wasn’t warmly received at the end of her search. “She’d been riding the highs, and now she was riding deep lows. I tried to temper her passion with common sense, but she just saw it as me against her,” Walsh said.

As his wife searched for her daughters and then tried to weave the threads of the past and present together, Walsh was struggling with a confusing mix of emotions that often made it difficult for him to say or do the right thing to support her.

For example, he felt jealous when she began to grow close to her first-born daughter, and, at the same time, he was seeing the impact this had on her other children, one of whom asked him: “Why is she spending so much time on the phone? Aren’t we enough?”

Walsh, a management consultant, was also feeling the financial burden of the trips and phone calls that were part of the search and the long-distance relationship that followed. And then Judy started buying gifts for her daughter, who was about to be married when she found her.

Said Walsh: “She was making up for 21 years of not having a chance to give her things--how could I say no?”

There were times when he wished he could, when it all felt like more than he should have to handle. But there was never a time when he felt he had a choice, because his wife was doing what she had to after years of longing and waiting.

Walsh now sees that it would have been easier for him to understand what she was going through if he hadn’t felt like an outsider. He’s trying to change that by becoming active in the adoption reform movement. He wants to let other husbands or “significant others” know they can play a vital role in helping the birth mother feel whole again.

But, he stresses, it’s not easy to provide the support a birth mother needs during what can be a long--and sometimes disappointing--process. He hopes birth mothers who are digging up their pasts will remember that their husbands can’t be expected to absorb it all at once.

“Give us time,” he said.

Another issue that surfaced during the panel discussion was the question of why male adoptees tend to launch their search for birth parents later than women. The two adoptees on the panel had started families of their own before they felt the impulse to search for their birth mothers.

Martin Brandfon, a 41-year-old San Mateo lawyer who helps arrange open adoptions, said women tend to start looking for their birth mothers at about age 19, while most men start to search when they are in their late 20s or older.

This may be partly because women feel a need to connect with their birth mother as they reach their childbearing years, Brandfon suggested.

He didn’t think about his birth mother as he was growing up, he said. He was close to his adoptive parents, and “I couldn’t imagine there being another mom.” But as he got older, he experienced some of the difficulties that he said are typical among male adoptees. For example, he tended to stay in bad relationships too long and shy away from intimacy because he felt “abandoned” by his birth parents and feared being rejected again.

And when he became a father, it wasn’t easy for him to feel a close bond with his daughter at first because he had grown up thinking “we are not born--we are adopted,” and that made him feel disconnected from the birth experience.

“There was something missing. It was hard for me to attach to her,” he said.

Brandfon was 27 when he began looking for his birth mother. Although his three-year search ended at her grave, he said he makes a much-needed connection with his past whenever he studies her photograph--the only one in his family album that he resembles.

Like Brandfon, 47-year-old Robert Walter of Atlanta was slow to wake up to his need to make contact with his birth family.

In the early years of his first marriage, he concentrated on supporting his family.

“Like most men, I put my blinders on and went to work because I had all this financial responsibility,” he said.

But later, as his marriage fell apart, “I began to realize I was more than an object who could earn a living for someone. I had to take care of me.”

At 42, after a divorce involving a painful separation from his children that made him feel a bond with his birth mother, he began to search for her. He persisted, even when it became clear that his adoptive parents--who had never been able to talk openly about his adoption--felt threatened.

His search was successful, and the family history that his birth mother shared with him allowed him to put a lot of internal turmoil to rest. For the first time in his life, he felt he knew who he was.

“It’s a shame I waited so long,” he said.