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Show Kathleen Norris Says: The Adopted Daughter Speaks BeH Syndicate. WNTJ Feature. "At another time a girl friend said of me affectionately to my mother, 'Fan is always so gay everyone loves her!' ' By KATHLEEN NORRIS MANY hundreds of mothers, moth-ers, in the course of the last twenty years, have written me of the problem prob-lem of the adopted baby. Here is a letter giving the opposite angle, a letter from a girl, now 26, who was adopted when she was a foundling three Weeks old. "Natural parents," writes Frances Evans, "may or may not welcome the baby. It-may represent an expense, responsibility respon-sibility and incumbrance from which they would shrink if they cold. But with adopted parents it is different. They go out of their way to find the child of strangers, they want it enough to risk all the dangers of its possible parentage and inherited weaknesses, they announce an-nounce themselves fit and ready for the cares of parenthood. "Therefore, it seems to me, they should feel an additional obligation to be wise and good in their parental care. There can be great shame, bitterness and resentment in the lot of an adopted child; there should be a corresponding attitude of bracing, affectionate, sensible understanding on the part of the adopted parents, to meet it. "In my case there was real suffering. suf-fering. The man and woman I called 'Daddy' and 'Mother' felt that they had done me a great favor, in picking pick-ing me up as a desolate and deserted desert-ed baby, and all their friends praised them continually for it. When I was about five they felt it wise to break It to me that I was not actually their own child, and I was told that I must always be an especially good little girl, to repay them for their extraordinary kindness. They said all this in the approved manner, man-ner, of course. Mother had good advice on the subject. She told me lovingly that other little girls were born of their mothers, but that as God wouldn't send her and Daddy a baby, they had gone out and found one that they thought the sweetest baby in the world. "Even at five I was impressed by their goodness, and as I grew a sense of obligation grew with me. This was fostered by aunts and cousins cous-ins and by my own curiosity. Why had my own mother wrapped me in a blanket and left me in the dressing-room of a department store? Why hadn't she loved me? What was different about me? Suspected of Theft. "Presently, getting into the teens, I noticed thtt any mistake of mine, any youthful desire or foolishness, was quietly attributed by my anxious anx-ious parents to my inheritance from unknown forebears. Once, when I was thirteen, a five dollar bill was missing from mother's purse, and I was questioned several times, and reminded that possibly a tendency to steal was in my blood. 'We don't know, dear,' said mother in distress. dis-tress. When the five-dollar bill was found in her evening purse and she remembered hiding it there, she playfully spent it on a sweater for me, 'to make up for suspecting my Eood truthful Fan!' But the sweater wasn't warm enough to warm my heart "At another time a girl friend said of me affectionately to my mother, Tan is always so gay everyone loves her!" Later my mother said seriously, "I wish Daphne had not used the word gay. I'm afraid perhaps per-haps your mother was gay, too. Fan. We have to watch out for that.' I A ormal, human treatment. . . "Well, perhaps your readers will say that these embarrassments and humiliations are little enough to pay for a good home, love, care, education, educa-tion, and eventually an engagement and marriage carried out with as much beauty and generosity as any real daughter's could have been. My own life has already been blessed with two small daughters, and a third child is on the way, so that there seems no probability of my adopting a child, although I would love to, some day. His background might be quite as good or better than my own, but for many reasons some discouraged and overburdened mother moth-er might try to find for her child a home of comfort and security and opportunity rather than subject it to the crowding and penury of her own poor home. "I think I know enough to handle the whole thing gaily, on a basis of 'you needed someone and I was lucky enough to be that someone, I wanted you and waited for you, and you were sufficiently precious to your city to have the authorities exact ex-act all sorts of promises from me before they would consider me good enough to have you. You've paid your way from the very beginning in joy and delight to me, and now it only remains for me to bring you to the years when you can strike out for yourself, with very much the same heritage of good and bad and strong and weak and spiritual and earthly that I myself brought into the world.' You may think this ungrateful and petty," ends this letter, let-ter, "but there are many adopted sons and daughters who will agree with me." There are, indeed, Frances, and I agree with you too. Most adopted sons and daughters have received a little more normal and human and generally intelligent treatment than you did, but there are also many others who have suffered from the same pin-pricks. Mothers and fathers with adopted children, please take note. |
