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Adoptive Families, the award-winning national adoption magazine, is the leading adoption information source for families before, during, and after adoption.
Motherhood? Me? You've Got to Be Kidding!
Having children was something that other people did. But giving birth has given me a sense of connection I never felt before.
by Alison Larkin
 When the non-adopted friends I grew up with in England were getting married to men who looked like Hugh Grant -- and having babies who didn’t -- I was on a quest to find my birthmother. I was twenty-five and living in London, two hours away from the very English village where my wonderful adoptive parents had retired. My birthmother, about whom I had known nothing up until this point in my life, was, I learned, American, and living in a cabin on Bald Mountain, Tennessee.
A few weeks after our reunion, in the throes of ‘I’ve just found out I’m really an American’ euphoria, I moved to New York City and became a stand-up comic. Then, in an attempt to somehow come to terms with my new identity, I wrote “The English American,” my one-woman show, in which I tell a comedic version of my adoption and reunion story. After that, I appeared on Broadway, and was put under contract by a Hollywood studio so ABC television could develop a sitcom for me to star in.
Broadway, Hollywood, t.v. deals! This was heady, exciting stuff, and consumed me almost as much as my exhausting and confusing relationship with my birthmother, so there was no room for thoughts of men or babies. “The key to dealing with a fear of abandonment,” I’d tell audiences at the comedy clubs with the authority of an expert, “is to date people you don’t like, so if they do leave you, it doesn’t matter. Either that, or guarantee devoted fidelity by dating someone no one else wants.”
Then I fell on my head on an icy New York City street. In an oddly fated moment, a man I had met in a comedy club, Jim Keenan, picked me up off the ice and took me to the hospital. A former rock and roll drummer from New Jersey, Jim looked like Paul McCartney. On top of that, he owned all the Fawlty Towers videos. After a three-year romance, during which time he was put through trust tests worthy of a medieval knight, Jim and I got married at my parent’s church in England.
I felt truly secure for the first time with this kind American with gentle brown eyes, who ironed my shirts and cleaned our kitchen while I told jokes at the Comedy Store, appeared on television and struggled hard to integrate what I had learned about my birth family into my sense of who I was.
Having children was something other people did, and I never gave it a conscious thought. Until the day I got a tummy ache. The doctor told me that if the problem turned out to be an infection, it could affect my ability to become pregnant. Actually, the problem turned out to be indigestion -- I’d eaten a platter of chocolate covered strawberries the day before -- but the visit woke me up. My ability to become pregnant? What ability to become pregnant?
To use an old cricketing term, I had been knocked for six. Suddenly I knew that I wanted to become pregnant with my own baby more than anything in the world.
My non-adopted friends had seen their mothers pregnant and knew all about morning sickness and the agonies of delivery. But in my family, babies came ready made, from social workers. You drove to a foster home, a nice lady gave you a baby, and then you drove home. So up until this point, for me, whenever I pictured entering the world, my birth took place in a wooden-paneled station wagon.
I knew nothing at all about what happened to a woman’s body between conception and birth, so I turned to books. One pregnancy book said that women who were too thin found it hard to conceive. So I happily gained fifteen pounds. Another said that Black Chicken eggs would do the trick. Concerned that nature might get it wrong in my case, after making love, I’d lie on the couch for hours with my legs in the air, to make sure no sperm dropped out. I initiated conversations with pregnant women all around Los Angeles, who suddenly seemed to be everywhere. I remember one conversation in particular, which occurred while on line at a car rental agency. She was pregnant and looked kind. I smiled at her. She smiled back.
“I think I might be pregnant too,” I whispered.
“Oh my God!” she said. “If you really want to know, stick your finger in your belly button.”
I stuck my finger in my belly button.
“Do you feel sick?” she said
“I do,” I said.
“You’re pregnant!” she said. Only I wasn’t. Month after month I wasn’t pregnant. And I felt a profound sorrow. I also understood an important part of my adoptive mother, perhaps for the first time. I’d ring her up and say, “Mum, it must have been awful.” And she’d say, “Not really, darling. After all, it meant we got you.” For my parents, adopting may not have been second best. But I now knew that it had been very much a second choice.
The month we stopped trying and decided to forget about the whole thing, I found out I was going to have a baby. I was in the Ladies room at the Comedy Store, about to go on stage. Mitzi Shore, who owns the club, had been encouraging me to talk about whatever was in my head at that time, rather than feeling restrained by prepared material. So in the middle of a joke I took the used pregnancy stick out of my pocket, held it up and said “Does anyone know what one of these is? Well after a year of trying, it just turned pink. I’ve just joined the human race.” It was the easiest applause break I’ve ever had.
I was in awe of the fact that there was a child growing inside me, and I loved every minute of my pregnancy. How lucky I felt. And how guilty I felt. Unlike the mother who raised me, I got to grow my own baby. Unlike the mother who gave me birth, I got to keep it.
It was during my pregnancy that I first sensed the depth of sorrow my birthmother must have felt at being separated from the baby who had lived within her for nine months. I also understood an important part of her, perhaps for the first time.
Even though my reunion with my birthmother had been far from easy, and I hadn’t seen her in several years, I was extremely grateful that I had been able to find her. Because we were in contact, my birthmother was able to provided medical information that turned out to be crucial. She told me that I had had a twin brother, who was stillborn. That during her pregnancy she had suffered from toxemia and other complications, which caused my twin’s death and nearly her own.
Without this crucial information, my doctor would not have known about my genetic predisposition to certain complications, and might not have known which precautions to take. It chills me to think it, let alone write it, but it is quite possible, if I had not been able to find my birth mother, that my children would not be with me today.
For me pregnancy was a glorious time. I went to a pregnancy yoga class so I could be around other pregnant women, who I watched with fascination. I approached women with children everywhere -- at the coffee shop, in the supermarket, at the park -- and asked them how their deliveries had gone. And, probably because I was pregnant and had a posh English accent, they would tell me everything, filling in the gaps in my knowledge that my adoptive mother could not fill. I ate everything in sight, put on sixty pounds, and was absurdly happy.
Of course, there was the occasional blip. Like the time the yoga teacher asked us to visualize our own birth. At first I pictured a wooden-paneled station wagon. But then I went somewhere else. My non-adopted friends left the room feeling relaxed. I left the room terrified.
Then there was the nightmare I had that I was leaving the hospital with my baby when the lights suddenly went out. When the lights came back on again, all the newborns had been stolen, including mine. A man with a stethoscope explained that he wasn’t really surprised, as babies were getting top dollar on the adoption black market that week.
By this time I had a trained counselor who was herself a reunited adopted person who had been through childbirth. She recognized all of it, and was able to help me through the blips, and because of that, the profound joy far outweighed the fear.
My son Toby was born first, after an eighteen-hour labor, followed by an emergency cesarean. Immediately after the surgery, feeling more dead than alive, struggling to stay conscious, I saw the dim shape of a woman holding my newborn son and heading towards the door. In a voice bossier than Margaret Thatcher’s on a bossy day, I said “Where on earth do you think you’re going?”
“Ma’am, I’m taking him away. To be washed.”
“Oh no you’re not,” I said.
“Bring him here please. He won’t be leaving my side until we’re home.”
Nearly two years later, I was devastated when I learned, after another eighteen-hour labor, that I was going to have to have a second cesarean. The doctor asked me why I was so upset. “I didn’t want my daughter’s first view of the world to be strangers in green masks, in a sterilized room, with bright lights and lots of horrid clatter,” I told the doctor. “I so wanted her to be able come straight to my breast.” And this doctor, Dr. Dwight, at Good Samaritan Hospital in downtown L.A., said, “Okay. We’ll turn off the lights, keep the room quiet, and, providing everything’s okay, we’ll cut the cord while she’s nursing. That way she’ll bond with you even quicker than if you’d delivered the other way. Is there any music you’d like to be played?” And everything went perfectly. And my daughter, Eliza, came out to the tune of “I’m Getting Married in the Morning.”
I was taken away from the mother in whose tummy I grew straight after I was born, and put in a foster home for six weeks before being adopted. I was determined to give my children what I had not had. For them there would be no bright lights, no sterilized hands ripping mother and newborn apart, no doctors, no social workers, no well-meaning strangers who smelled different, just us. Nursing and feeding in the safety of our bedroom, with the phone pulled out. And in those first six weeks, despite recovering from major surgery, and dealing with hormones and breasts that squirted milk all over the furniture, I felt a deep peace for the first time in my life. And the soul connection I had traveled the world to find was right there, with the tiny human beings who had grown within me.
Even though my adoptive mother did not have this experience, she was profoundly happy for me. To know, you only had to see the look on her face when she first held her newborn grand-children, and smiled at me.
My non-adopted friends now look at me perplexed, unable to understand why I, Alison Larkin, obsessed by my work, who used to sigh with boredom at the thought of children, now guard my time with my kids so fiercely I'll only answer the phone when they are sleeping. Why do I not complain about the exhaustion of mothering my children full time, while maintaining a busy career?
“I don’t know how you DO it. Why don't you get some help or at the very least take a break?” they say. The people who ask these questions were raised with their birth families. They don't understand.
And now I have two small children, aged two and four, and I know, as much as a mother can ever know, who they are and, most importantly, who they came from. It's the parents who raised me who they call Granny and Grandad. It’s my mother in England who I call when I’m trying to work out how long an 18-pound turkey should be left in the oven. It’s the parents in England who taught me “Polly Put The Kettle On”, and “What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor?” that are now my son’s favorite songs. He sings them over and over again to his little sister.
And yet, living with me, every day, crushing raisins into my couch and spilling apple juice all over my car, are two little people who have my birthmother’s coloring, and my birthfather’s spirit. My daughter and birthmother and I all have the same legs. The dramatic way my son speaks about his trains could be my birthfather talking about his country. The irrepressible energy is in their nature as irrefutably as it is in mine. I know it, I recognize it, and I know how to help them channel it. I found my birth parents so that I could understand me, so that I could understand them.
But I also know where my son’s kindness, and empathy, and sense of what’s okay and what’s not comes from. And I delight, as they delight, in the company of my sprawling adoptive family with their adoptive cousins, and aunts and uncles and grandparents who take such enormous pride in them. I had a glorious childhood, and it’s that, as much as the knowledge of where I came from genetically, that I want to pass on to my children. The childhood given me by my parents in England who, when my other parents couldn’t, sheltered me, fed me, and loved me constantly, giving me a solid base from which I would be able to go forward, face the tumult of an international closed adoption reunion, and ultimately move beyond it a better, rather than a broken person.
Motherly Advice
One of the advantages of being adopted and finding your birthmother is that you can pick and choose the best advice from, not one, but two mothers to pass on to your children. As my children are far too young to understand any of this, allow me to pass my mothers' advice on to you.
From my American birthmother:
- Don't spend your life cleaning the house. Either hire a cleaner, or marry one.
- If you're feelin' broke but you just gotta go shopping, hit the thrift stores.
- Keep your cigarettes in the refrigerator.
- If you don't know what to do, listen to your intuition.
From my English mum:
- Clean the floor first, then the surfaces.
- You get what you pay for.
- Don't smoke. It will kill you.
- If you don't know what to do, make a list.
- And, darling, denial is underrated.
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