Lorraine Florence Fisher, the spark plug who ignited the adoption-reform movement in 1971, died peacefully on Sunday, October 1. She was 95, and in failing health for several months.    While she has long been retired from active work in adoption, she founded the largest adoptee-rights organization, Adoptee Rights Liberty Movement, better known as ALMA, which at its heyday in the Eighties had 50 chapters in cities large and small across America and about 50,000 members. At the time, it was the largest national reunion registry, numbering about 340,000 searching adult ..read more

  Jane Two obituaries in the August 6 Oregonian caught my eye. The first of a woman, Kathleen, born in 1933. She majored in Home Economics at Oregon State College; in 1954 her studies culminated in a ”Home Ec Practice Home,” a six week live-in course where each week a student was assigned as cook, housekeeper, or baby-tender of an actual toddler…”  Kathleen became an adoption social worker.  Adoption agencies placed babies entrusted to them for adoption in these college “practice homes” both to give students baby-tending experience, part of the essential education of yo ..read more

   Lorraine I am obsessed with the trial of E. Jean Carroll against Donald Trump for defamation. She is me and I am here. I remember the era of the Eighties and Nineties in which we newly liberated women flirted and tried to carry on like men sexually--throw off the shackles of the past. People openly flirted at the office, sexually laced jokes in nearly every setting were the usual, and we didn't let anything bother us. We were cool, smart, sophisticated.   But we knew enough not to go to the police when we were raped.  Because we heard the cops wouldn't take ..read more

The work of my life Why do some mothers reject reunion? Because they have closed up that hole in their heart. It's still there, underneath the scab, but they are afraid to let anyone rip it off. Besides they haven't told...the people in their lives today.  There's more to say than I did in a previous post and so I am continuing the except from the new edition of Hole In My Heart, Love and Loss in the Fault Lines of Adoption, which to the end of the day is on sale for $2.99 in ebook.  Now about those mothers: ...These women may have told their partners. O ..read more

Daughter Jane and Lorraine It was a bracing morning being brought back to reality about how the world see the woman who gave up a child for adoption. Not nicely is the short answer.  A ten-minute morning interview for drive-to-work radio show in the New York/New Jersey area led to be being mentally whacked for having a relationship with a married man, which I did, and his having an Irish Catholic background seemed another reason for criticism. She gave the listeners advice--don't have an affair with a married man, look where that led for this stupid person I'm interviewing. We di ..read more

Lorraine  Besides the debatable differences on the grief scale for those involved in open or closed adoptions, there is a second issue: What happens later. And that requires looking at the impact of shame, humiliation, grief, and gossip—and the subsequent secrecy—that surrounded the mothers who relinquished their children decades ago. For months, the pregnant women, some of them high school teenagers, hid their growing bellies from the outside world. They were forced to drop out of school and go into seclusion, possibly with faraway relatives or in a maternity ho ..read more

Lorraine While the media is rightfully pouring ink and airtime out over the death of trailblazer Barbara Walters at 93, I'm reading about her and looking for somewhat different references than the general public: her relationship to adoption. Walters adopted a daughter, Jacqueline, in 1968, two years after I gave up my daughter for adoption. By 1976 Walters was hosting a show that would be the prequel to The View. Called Not for Women Only, she presided over a panel of experts, with knowledgeable audience members sitting at round tables close to the front to be easily be intervi ..read more

Jane and Lorraine, 1982  At last the unending grief of giving up a child to adoption is being recognized by others outside our closed circle! Today's New York Times has a piece Meg Bernhard about a social scientist and writer named Pauline Boss. She has been studying and writing about unresolved grief and I'm reading the piece and WHAM, I come upon these words:  "It [unresolved grief] can take many forms, often quotidian: an alcoholic parent, who when inebriated, becomes a different person; a divorced partner, which whom our relationship is ruptured but not erased; a loved o ..read more

Lorraine Dusky I sometimes open the New York Times Magazine and turn to The Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, to see if he's got another column about adoption, which seems to be his topic du jour on a pretty regular basis. While he proudly announces his highborn and mixed-race background, he has come down in the past for natural/birth mother privacy with the thud of insufferable and clueless  righteousness.  Today it was Bingo! again for the headline reads: "The Son My Sister Placed for Adoption Wants to Find Her." What Should I Do?  Well, of course, I answer, Call your s ..read more

A preview of the new cover of hole in my heart. Coming soon.  How we think about life and its exigencies, its ups and downs, cultural shifts and societal norms, the everyday incidents and the big moments that change the course of our lives are framed by the language we use. My daughter was born "out of wedlock," a phrase that most understand, but rarely use; yet it was commonly heard when my daughter was born--if people talked even talked about this. (Of course they did, but all very hush-hush.)  I've ever shied away from saying: I gave her up. When an acquaintance--an adopt ..read more