SPEAKING UP for the voiceless
Carol Shipley is an adoptee, an adoptive mother and works as a tireless advocate for open adoptions. She tells SHELLEY PAGE of the fantasies about her lost mother and the valuable insights she’s discovered along the way.
Carol Shipley’s clients came in all ages, dragging all sorts of baggage. Sometimes they were yearning, would-be adoptive parents who couldn’t conceive a child. Or children yanked from horrendous sexual abuse in need of safe havens. And one time, it was a 17-year-old drug addict with twins.
Shipley, a longtime Ottawa social worker, remembers the call she got from a panicked stepmother. Her 17-year-old stepdaughter had just given birth to twins and was hauling the newborns — by bus or stranger’s car — to area crack houses. The twins were dumped in drug dens, “crying and hungry; their smelly baby clothes encrusted with spitup and their bottoms stinging red from lying in sopping, poopy diapers.”
The young mother admitted to her stepmother that she couldn’t take care herself, let alone her baby girls. But she would only consider adoption if she could meet the parents and have ongoing contact with her daughters.
That’s where Shipley came in. Could she counsel the new mother and help her find adoptive parents willing to have an open adoption with an addict?
In her new book, Love, Loss & Longing: Stories of Adoption (McNallyRobinson), Shipley describes tracking down the mother, confronting the drug addict and dealer father, and drawing up a flexible adoption plan with even more flexible adoptive parents.
Now 77, Shipley spent 13 years amassing the personal stories gathered while she was an adoption professional — as social worker for the Children’s Aid Society, then later, for birth mothers, and as a private facilitator for domestic and international adoptions. She is a strong advocate for open adoptions, and the adoptees’ right to know their histories. It is essential, she says, to feeling whole and rooted.
“It is passionate concern for the voiceless client, the adopted child, that fuels my work,” Shipley says.
She writes with such feeling for adoptees because that is her history. She is both an adoptee and an adoptive mother.
Born in Winnipeg during the depths of the Great Depression, Shipley was adopted when she was four months old. At the time, adoption was viewed as a natural process by which children, especially babies, could be transferred with ease from one set of parents to another. Lickety-split. And so she was. Her new parents were told nothing of Shipley’s birth mother; only that Shipley had been a very happy baby. But then she wasn’t. She believes separation from her birth mother was the defining moment of her life.
In the weeks after her adoption, Shipley slept so much that her nervous new parents often checked the crib to see if she was still breathing. They described her as “unusually quiet and still.” Smiles couldn’t be teased out of her, especially by her adoptive mother, who wasn’t the type who “hugged, played, laughed and sang with her children. To cry was to ‘go to pieces.’”
A pervasive sadness held Shipley as she grew, as did fantasies of a lost mother who was a “beautiful, sensitive, poor girl, alone and isolated” and who loved but couldn’t keep her baby.
But she was an over-achieving girl, typical of the “adoption bargain” internalized by the adoptee — “to be a perfect model daughter so the choice that the adoptive parents made will have been worth it,” she writes.
Shipley married, becoming a mother of four, including an adopted aboriginal daughter. Depression still dogged her, so did the longing to know her past. As a young mother, Shipley picked up university courses and volunteered to support birth mothers making adoption plans for their unborn children.
“On the surface, I was trying my hand at social work,” she writes. “Subconsciously, I was checking out whether these women loved their babies. And each one did — unconditionally.” Shipley began to search for her birth mother, whom she knew nothing about, not even her name.
While working as a social worker in the women’s movement and for child welfare, she made several approaches to the Adoption Disclosure Registry in Manitoba but received limited information. Then in 1986, a rule change enabled her to learn her birth mother’s married name and empowered government officials to help her search.
In 1988, Shipley received a letter. “My birth mother had been in to sign the consent form and wanted to meet me,” writes Shipley. “I sat in my car, letter open in my lap, tears rolling down my cheeks. Fifty-two years — a lifetime of waiting.”
Letters were exchanged, then Shipley called. “It felt as though we knew each other from some faraway place long ago.” The details she learned stung.
Shipley’s mother had been unwed. After Shipley was born, her young mother visited her in the hospital every day, several times a day, for four months, to cuddle and nurse her. When the adopting parents came to get Shipley, they never met or learned anything about her birth mother. And her birth mother wasn’t allowed to know her daughter’s fate, although she frequently wondered.
When they met at the Winnipeg airport, they couldn’t get enough of each other — at first. The similarities in appearance and manner were uncanny. Shipley was euphoric.
“The discovery of people to whom one is biologically related, after a lifetime, produces an ecstasy that is unrivalled. Integral to this is seeing oneself physically in another person for the first time,” she writes. There was also a half-brother, who told her that their mother was on lithium and suffered psychiatric illness. This was part of Shipley’s genetic heritage that she didn’t anticipate or know how to process.
She couldn’t tell her birth mother how much adoption hurt her. “The adoptee goes through life not wanting to hurt others, and in doing so, buries her own hurt.”
There was a frenzy of calls and meetings. Her birth mother came to Ottawa to meet Shipley’s family, and eventually her adoptive mother. But as they spent more time together, she began to see her birth mother through a more accurate lens.
Shipley hauled out photo albums, but her birth mother wasn’t interested in seeing her childhood photos. She also had strong anti-aboriginal views, which horrified Shipley, whose adopted daughter is aboriginal. There were other intolerances. As Shipley writes, “the tearing down had begun” of the woman she idealized. “I had to face the truth that my mother had racist attitudes.”
Depression sunk Shipley as she was finishing her master’s degree in social work at Carleton University. This depression wasn’t something she felt she’d inherited from her birth mother, but first a response to abandonment and low self-esteem, and then to her reunion and the loss of her idealized, fantasy mother. She knew these feelings were typical. She’d done her master’s thesis on adoptees’ experience of reunion: all shared similar feelings to those she was mired in.
Then her two moms met, a gift to Shipley. Both mothers showed tenderness and compassion toward each other.
“The saddest day of my life was the happiest day of your life,” her birth mother told her adoptive mother as they sipped tea in fine china. “Of course, you were the one who got to change the diapers!”
After the reunion, after her two parts came together, Shipley writes of greater compassion for her adoptive family and their “unconditional, unselfish love” for her. She also felt her depression and lifelong fear of rejection recede. It has never returned.
She felt ready to fully turn to adoption work, feeling that she no longer had baggage, but instead valuable insight to share.
In her book, Shipley also writes of her adopted daughter’s story, from childhood to reunion with her birth family, after which she embraced her aboriginal heritage. And she dissects the consequences of closed adoptions. And without naming names, she tells the stories of children and parents she’s counselled, examining the differing degrees of choice that were available in adoption depending on the decade. She also writes in detail about an annual event in Ottawa called Birth Mother’s Day, which she had a hand in creating.
“I embrace such paradoxical truths in adoption,” she writes, including that adoption is founded on loss.
She believes adoptees have a right to know who they are and “this trumps the right to privacy of the birth parents and the adoptive parents.”
Her book is complex and provocative. Through her own story, and the stories of others, she shows why open adoptions might be uncomfortable for the parents involved, but is usually in the best interests of the child, who hardly ever has a say in the plans that are made on their behalf.
“Those who live adoption by holding on tight to what they have stand to lose it, while those who live in a spirit of openness and generosity stand to gain.”
‘It is passionate concern for the voiceless client, the adopted child, that fuels my work.’
CAROL SHIPLEY Author and advocate of open adoptions