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Part I
Early Life Events, Crises, and Influences
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1
How Betty and Vincent Became Sally and Scott
Sally Bjorklund
Betty was born in Minneapolis on 5/16/51. She weighed 6 lbs., 9½ oz. and was 21” long. When she left the hospital on 5/22/51, she weighed 6 lbs., 6½ oz. She was a full-term baby, delivery had been normal, and the hospital had described her as a normal, healthy infant. When Betty left the hospital she was placed in a Children’s Home Society boarding home. A few days after her placement, she developed a tendency to spit up a good deal of her food, and she cried and appeared to be uncomfortable a good deal of the time. When she was examined by the agency’s pediatrician on 6/6/51, she was found to be a normal infant, but it was recommended that she be kept in a boarding home for a while longer to see if her feeding problems could be relieved. Later, she was placed on an Olac formula™. Her weight on 6/6/51 was 7 lbs., 14 oz.
July 18th, when she was again seen by our pediatrician, she was no longer spitting up her food and was adjusting very well on the Olac formula. She was also a much happier and more comfortable baby, and was beginning to exhibit many lovable characteristics. She was now smiling frequently and was responding more to any attention given her. The pediatrician checked her physical condition and her reaction, and felt that she was a normal, healthy infant. He recommended that she be continued on the Olac formula. At this time she weighed 10 lbs., 8 oz.
Due to vacation plans of the first boarding mother, it was necessary on July 18th to move her to a second boarding home. She adjusted to this change well, and if anything, did better in the second boarding home than in the first. The new boarding mother did not notice any feeding problems at all, and said that most of the time Betty had been sleeping all through the night. Betty was now able to take more formula without spitting it up and was even beginning to like her cereal better. She was getting an oatmeal cereal because pabulum was thought to disagree with her.
V.W. (social worker) 7/24/51
On August first an agreement between the Children’s Home Society and Rev. and Mrs. Clifford Bjorklund was signed, stating:
. . . That in consideration of the promises made between the adoptive parents, the Society places in the home of the adoptive parents Betty for the purpose of providing the child with a free home with adoption in view . . . The adoptive parents agree to relinquish to the Society all custody and right to said child whenever, prior to the adoption of the child, the Society shall deem it essential to the best interests of the child that the adoptive parents should relinquish their rights and custody. Adoptive parents shall have the right to return the child to the Society at any time prior to adoption, upon reasonable notice . . .
By mid-August, Betty is living with her new parents “with adoption in view.” Once the adoption is finalized, a doctored birth certificate is issued declaring the birth “legitimate,” showing the names of the new parents and renaming baby Betty “Sally Kristin.” The name of the biological mother was withheld, and the name of the biological, or as they called it then, “natural” father, was known only to the “natural” mother, who refused to disclose the name. She was allowed to keep his name a secret.
My mother died while I was in the midst of considering what to write for this chapter. I guess I should say my adoptive mother. I had flown to Chicago for the memorial service and was sorting through several piles of her few remaining earthly belongings. Sitting at the dining-room table at my cousin’s home, I opened the strongbox she had left in my cousin’s basement, fearful of it getting lost at the nursing home where she spent her final years. Before she lost her mind to Alzheimer’s, she had reminded me about the box so I could find it after her death. I sat looking through the birth, baptism, and death certificates of my adoptive mother, brother, and father. Maybe these papers had to be in a strongbox because of the power of the memories it held. There were two envelopes, one marked “Scott” and one marked “Sally.” You have just read much of what was in the envelope marked “Sally.” Someone told me it was the second boarding mother who gave Betty a name. Along with the social worker’s history for baby Betty was a note of instructions for the new adoptive parents, written by the second boarding mother. As I read the note I was surprised by my tears, brought on by this first appearance of tenderness in the case history. Who was this woman? She noticed what Betty liked and didn’t like. Along with instructions for amounts and kinds of food Betty ate, she wrote, “. . . Fusses some after 6 o’clock feeding so I have usually talked to her or rocked her and fed her again whenever she seems to want it. She coos and smiles when you talk to her. Needs to be burped often while eating. Prefers sleeping on her tummy.” The adoption agreement papers also included the option to bring Betty back if she didn’t work out. Good thing that was time-limited or she might have been returned as a teenager.
In the envelope marked “Scott” was a thicker pile of papers, because although he also was found to be a “normal” infant, by three years old he was showing evidence of developmental deficits and was eventually diagnosed with “mental retardation.” Baby Vincent had a full name, Vincent Carter Witsiepe, and his “natural” mother’s name, Renault Smith Witsiepe, was on the adoption papers. These papers state that “paternity of Vincent Carter Witsiepe has not been established . . . and that Vincent Carter Witsiepe shall to all legal intents and purposes be the child of Clifford and June Bjorklund and . . . [it] shall be the same as if he had been born to them in lawful wedlock.” It further ordered and declared that the name of said child be changed to Scott Christopher Bjorklund.
So now you know the literal details of how Vincent and Betty became Scott and Sally.
Sitting with the strong box at the dining room table, I remembered having first read the papers in the “Sally” envelope years before. I knew I was adopted since before I could understand what it meant. There is a genre of books called “chosen baby stories,” and I was read to from one. The book was about chickens and was supposed to help a child understand adoption. I don’t remember the story, but I know I heard it many times. There also was a book about chickens to explain “the birds and bees,” which came later, and made me wonder about chickens and their relation to me. The book about adopted chickens portrayed them as “special” and talked about how much they were wanted by their parents. When, as an adult, I discovered Betty Jane Lifton’s books about adoption (1975, 1979, 1994), I found that she helpfully pointed out that to be wanted by your new parents you had to be unwanted by someone else. (I think I wrote “someone else” because when you’re adopted you’re not supposed to think about having other “parents.”) Lifton makes the point that this part of adoption gets swept under the carpet in the happy story of being “special” and “wanted.”
When I read the contents of the “Scott” and “Sally” envelopes, I had this strange sense of confusion about what I’ve read before, what someone has told me, what the “facts” are, and what I have created. I learned from talking with other adoptees that they have a similar experience of filling in bits of narrative and images around the skeleton of facts and stories told to us by others. For example, I had this image for a long time of a room full of babies, and my adoptive parents walking up and down the aisles shopping for a baby. They chose me because I smiled at them. When I was a teenager and not getting along with them, I regretted that smile and the idea that it was me who picked them. I think I cobbled together this story from something I heard about how I first smiled at them when we were introduced and how good it made them feel. Many years later I recognized, on a greeting card, a photo from Life magazine from the 1950s of a hospital nursery full of cribs with babies. On the inside it read, “You’re one in a million.” What caught my attention was that it looked just like the orphanage in my fantasy.
This business about being chosen instead of – what . . . made? – is a tricky one to figure out with a child’s mind. I learned, from listening to other adoptees, that it’s not uncommon for adoptees to be told that they chose their adoptive parents. You recall the social worker said baby Betty “left” the hospital, as if she just got up out of her crib and hiked over to the boarding home. As I read the papers in the strongbox, I felt kind of detached, like baby Betty was someone else, like I was reading a case history. Actually, it is a case history – but “normal” people don’t have case histories. The social worker’s tone seems to encourage this reading, that this is all very medical, about how to get Betty to eat and gain weight and to become more lovable so she can be given to the waiting parents. I laughed out loud over how many times I/Betty was declared “normal,” since that is a designation that has been eroding, with some intentionality on my part, during my lifelong drift into queerness. It seems likely that Betty was spitting up because she needed a real mother to feed her. Reading that she was returned to “the Society” so that the first boarding mother could go on vacation gave me a knot in my stomach, and I felt “I don’t like that mother!” I know that back then educated people believed that anyone who took care of a baby’s basic physical needs was good enough and that babies don’t remember anything from infancy. Of course, now we know better (Bowlby, 1980; Stern, 1985; and others). Reading how baby Betty was treated, with a contemporary understanding of psychic development (Beebe, Lachmann & Jaffe 1997; Shore, 1994; Stern; 1985; and others) is painful, and makes me wonder why on earth they didn’t just let the adoptive parents figure out the feeding problems. The note from the second boarding mother felt different. There, I feel someone tuning into Betty, finding her rhythms, matching her, creating the “one in the third” that Benjamin (2004) describes. This mother needed to give the baby a name. Why “Betty,” I wonder?
As an adult and as a psychoanalyst, I came to understand something about the loss and immense grief women and couples may feel because of infertility. In my work, it has felt important to help couples process their loss before they turn to adoption. I get riled up when anti-abortion groups point to adoption as the morally correct solution to unwanted and emotionally complicated pregnancies. Despite having a pro-choice point of view, I am aware that if abortion had been legal in the 1950s, I wouldn’t exist. Still, it’s more complicated than that. I believe that my adoptive mother never stopped grieving her infertility or for the daughter of her imagination. How you become a family matters, although how it matters is different for different families. For many, it matters to not look like any of your relatives. My cousins and their children all resemble each other. At 5’ 2”, with hazel eyes and fair hair, I could pass better in our adopted Scandinavian family than my 6’ 7”, brown-eyed, dark haired, swarthy complexioned brother. His feet were so big his shoes had to be custom-made. We were an odd pair to introduce as brother and sister. Parents who have biological children with interests or an appearance very different from their own may be surprised, but they don’t wonder, did she get this from her biological parents? My adoptive mother dreamed of having a girly girl she could sew for and dress up and make doll clothes for. I was a tomboy who hated being dressed up and whose doll bed full of dolls looked like a doll museum instead of a home for beloved toys. I put baseball cards in the purse I was forced to take to church. It wasn’t so easy to turn Betty into Sally.
I was invited to contribute to this book with the idea of writing about my experience as an out lesbian analyst. As I considered it, I realized that my experience of being adopted was what I felt more compelled to write about. I had no idea how I would write about such a profoundly influential aspect of my personal and professional development. I knew I would have to begin with attachment and loss. John Bowlby (1980), in his research on attachment, found a link between psychiatric disturbances in children who have lost a parent, and the surviving parent’s capacity to talk openly, to visit the gravesite, and talk about how the lost parent died. When adults either can’t or won’t talk openly about how the dead parent died, the child is much more likely to have troubles. Adoption is an odd case of loss. It is a loss for the child of contact with biological parents and their kin, and a huge loss for the adoptive parents who are not able to “make” their own baby. In the case of Betty, she had lost three mothers by the time she was three months old and was “placed” with her adoptive parents. (Adopted babies are placed, not born.) These are losses that are seldom acknowledged or talked about because there often is shame, secrecy, and a well-intentioned use of denial to get this new “chosen” family off to a good start.
Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopp’d,
Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is.
Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus
In the 472-page volume by Bowlby called Attachment and Loss (1980), I found no mention of adoption as a cause of grieving for any member of the adoption triangle. Yet, there are many passages and literary quotes like the one above that resonate for me. Bowlby describes symptoms I recognize from working with adults who were adopted as children. I have had the experience, in professional consultation groups, that I am much more likely to attribute being adopted as a significant factor for patients than my non-adopted colleagues, although “relinquishing” a child is recognized as a significant factor. The pressures, conscious and unconscious, to make adoptive families equivalent to biologically created families is powerful.
Out of the closet
As mentioned above, when I was asked to contribute to this book, I felt pulled to write about my experience of being adopted, even though I would have enjoyed writing about how baby Betty ended up being not so “normal” after all. As an openly lesbian analyst, people are surprised to hear that I was previously married to a man and had no thought of being homosexual until I was in my 30s. For me, it was a choice, not a lifelong thing I struggled with or against. It makes me more anxious to confess to bisexuality than to say I’m lesbian. Coming out as adopted also makes me anxious. Hardly anyone knows this about me. Why would I tell anyone? I’m not ashamed (“Are you sure?” I hear myself ask), but it rarely “comes up.” Surely, now there can be no other closets for me to come out of. What will you, the reader, think of me? What if my patients read this? Actually, the information age has already taken away the possibility of hiding. There are various details about my childhood available in surprising ways on the internet, as well as vital statistics like that I was divorced, the name of my ex-husband, the name of my partner, and location of the property we own. Until this chapter, though, no one could find out that I was adopted, since adoption records are still sealed in most states.
As days passed and the deadline drew near, I started to worry that I would have to tell the editor that I wasn’t going to be able to finish my piece on time. I had six months to complete this, and was only able to begin writing with less than six weeks to go. It occurred to me that this is a familiar problem. There is something about writing on this topic, or doing anything connected to my adoption, that creates a tremendous amount of procrastination and anxiety. I can’t write because I can’t think. I feel blocked. My mind goes blank, and I don’t know what to say. Then, suddenly, things break loose and there’s a flood of thoughts and feelings.
Searching
I thought about doing a search for my birth mother for many years. If I mentioned it, people always said, “Oh, you should do it.” I can’t remember how old I was when she told me, but my adoptive mother said that when they signed the final papers, my father was able to read upside-down on the form and my birth mother’s name is ___.1 I remember the image of that handwritten piece of paper she showed me, with the name on it – written down, lest it be forgotten. I think I heard that my adoptive parents looked up her name in the phone book for the small town ___ was from. It was Farmington, Minnesota. Did they drive by her house? I think I heard they did. It was a nice house, not a trailer park. Thank God. My memory feels unreliable. I don’t know what I’ve made up about this part of the story, and what I was told or overheard. Someone said ___’s father was a banker. Wait! It feels kind of outrageous what I just did. I wrote her name down here for the whole world to see. No more secrets hidden in sealed records.
I was in the early years of my training analysis and ruminating about whether to do a “search,” as it’s called. I felt my analyst was encouraging me to do it. I found all kinds of reasons not to: I couldn’t afford it, what if it ruined ___’s life, what if it ruined my life somehow? My partner gave me the money, so I lost that excuse; I made the call. The adoption agency, which would do the “search,” sent forms and told me I had to write a letter that would be given to the birth mother when they found her. I sat down to write my “Dear ___” letter. What a daunting undertaking that was! We had a l...
