Adopting a more positive outlook

Having recently set up support groups for natural parents and adopted people in Clare, a Miltown Malbay resident spoke to Nicola Corless about sexual violence, her unique perspective on adoption and the most destructive influence in her life – guilt

Bubbly Australian Traci Stone describes herself as ‘an open book’. She talks candidly about her life, the decisions she made, those that were forced upon her and how being adopted has completely coloured her life.
“I was adopted as a baby. I knew from a very young age. I don’t remember when I was told or by who but I always knew,” she recalls.
Traci was raised as an only child. Her adoptive father was from the Czech Republic, her mother from Austria. Both were Jewish immigrants to Australia having survived the Holocaust.
“They were both suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome from the war. They had gone through horrors I don’t even know. A lot of the other adults in my life were Holocaust survivors too,” she remembers.
Traci recalls her childhood as a lonely time. Both her parents worked and she went through a string of child minders. At the age of 21, Traci recalled a long hidden memory of a family friend sexually abusing her as a child.
By the time she was 12, her parents had separated and she had become rebellious. Traci remembers her young self “going off the rails” before her parents sent her to boarding school.
“I was very messed up as a teenager and I was very promiscuous. I had been gang raped and was using drugs and was just a complete mess and my parents’ answer to this was just to put me into boarding school. I was pregnant in boarding school but I had this psychological condition called ‘denial of pregnancy’, so I didn’t know I was pregnant,” Traci says.
“I suppose I knew on one level because I remember lying in bed at school saying ‘this is not happening to me, this is not happening to me’ over and over because I could feel the baby moving but I was thinking ‘if I don’t believe it, then it isn’t real’,” she continues.
While visiting home one Sunday evening, her adoptive mother noticed Traci’s bulging stomach. Suspecting it was a cyst, she took Traci to the doctor where they discovered the 14-year-old was seven months pregnant. “It was very traumatic and how she handled it was to cry on my shoulder and say ‘what are we going to do?’ so I had to be the strong one. Then my parents, they were divorced by then, organised a doctor and a hospital. The doctor organised it so the baby would be born during the holidays. The birth was induced a month early. It was all this big secret and shame like I was bad. It was just a horrible, horrible situation,” Traci remembers.
“I didn’t want to give up my baby at all. It was my parents. Now, a 14-year-old can’t really look after a baby, let’s get real, however, my mother could have helped look after him,” she says.
“It was forced on me like many women who were older than 14. Everyone kept saying to me ‘this is the best thing, you will forget about it and get on with your life’,” she adds.
Traci found her son’s birth very difficult emotionally. She felt isolated and ashamed.
“The birth was horrific. The nurses in the hospital treated me just revolting. I remember giving birth and it was just an awful, awful situation. Once I knew he was being given away, I suppose I wanted the best for him so I had to survive and not really think about it,” she says.
“It is just a survival thing. I asked what gender the baby was. They wouldn’t have told me if I hadn’t asked. I felt love for him. I felt like a mother. I felt like I am a mother and that is my child and no piece of paper will change that. Everyone was so awful to me except this one male nurse, who held my hand. God knows whether he really existed. Maybe he was an angel. It was a nightmare. It was so traumatic. Then I had to go back to school as if nothing had happened,” Traci continues.
After her son’s birth, Traci’s turbulent relationship with her parents deteriorated further.
“I think it is a horrible thing that they wanted to forget. My son was born in September and there was a photo of me from that Christmas. I am showing my mother what I got for Christmas. I remember what I got; it was a little manicure set and I’m showing my mother but no-one is looking at me in the picture. I was invisible and that is really how I felt, like during my childhood what I needed or wanted was irrelevant,” she reveals.
After that, Traci changed schools and was ‘self-medicating’. The drug-taking didn’t help her academic development. After she finished school, she attended a number of secretarial courses on the advice of her father, which she didn’t finish. From there, Traci went on welfare. She had her next child at the age of 21. Shortly afterwards, she began trying to contact her birth mother.
Traci put her name on the contact register and her father told her her birth mother’s surname. Non-identifying information was given to her by a social worker, including her natural mother’s first name. From there, all it took was the Sydney telephone directory. The fear of rejection was paralysing for Traci, preventing her from contacting her mother for a further three years.
“I obviously wasn’t ready. After the three years, I wrote her a letter. If someone else read the letter, they wouldn’t know what it was about but if she did, she’d know. She rang me straight away and came to see me that night, which was great but it hasn’t been so great since,” she recalls.
One of the major pitfalls of reunions between adoptees and their birth parents is conflicting expectations, Traci now realises.
“She didn’t touch me. I just wanted a hug from my mother. I wanted her to hug me. She didn’t touch me. We sat down for a cup of tea. I asked her for a hug. Then I started crying and she shushed me. Really all I wanted was to cry on my mother’s chest,” Traci explains.
Through subsequent meetings with her mother, Traci discovered that as well as nine half siblings, she also has a brother, born 15 months after her mother placed her up for adoption.
“My brother wants nothing to do with me. As an adoptee, I get quite angry. My brother forgets that I was a little baby. I had no say in this,” she states.
Traci is not angry at her mother for having her adopted, she claims, but instead she is angry that some of her natural family refuse to meet with her, writing her existence off as “just something from the past”.
“I was adopted because my grandmother told my mother not to come home with a baby. She said the same thing when my mum was pregnant with my brother but her fiancé, my mother’s soon to be step-dad, took her in so she had help… That was the difference just over a year made,” Traci muses.
Traci later met her birth father before his death, something she felt was very positive. She firmly believes that knowing she was adopted allowed her to understand herself better.
“The feeling of loss if you are separated from your mother at birth, it is a primal thing and it does affect you but it is unconscious. Your relationships might not be great and you put it down to just not getting on with people. Perhaps you think I can’t hold down a job or I get really stressed or I drink too much and all the time it is actually down to that,” she reflects.
After tracing her parents, Traci found out that she had Irish ancestry.
“I always found something about Ireland since I was really, really little. I would talk about Ireland. I loved Ireland. I always wanted to come to Ireland since I was four years old. But I remember thinking when I was a bit older, a teenager maybe, I thought that is just mad. It doesn’t make sense. I’m mad. Then I met my mother and she told me I have Irish ancestry and suddenly it made sense,” Traci surmises.
While her reunion with her birth mother wasn’t what she had hoped for, her first meeting with her son was better, though their relationship soon began to deteriorate. According to Traci, her son’s adoptive parents put his name on the contact register “because he was going off the rails on drugs and whatever. He was violent.”
Having moved her family across Australia to be with him, Traci was devastated when her son continued with the negative behaviour that she and his adoptive parents had hoped the move would save him from. He soon found himself in prison and is back there today.
The lack of support through the adoption process from all points of view, Traci believes, was extremely destructive. “It was dealt with very badly. It was all about covering everything up. The screening for adoptive parents wasn’t great either. My son’s adoptive parents were very upstanding citizens but they were in no way equipped to raise my son,” she states.
Traci recently set up support groups for adopted people and those whose children have been adopted. Such groups are badly needed, she believes.
“There is so much secrecy and shame for birth parents. There is so much shame and secrecy and pain and I would like to help people come out of the closet and get things out in the open more and not be so ashamed,” she explains.
“For adoptees, we have particular issues and sometimes it is really useful to be with people who have had a similar experience, when there is no explaining to do and no justifying. It would also be helpful for people who haven’t had reunions,” Traci outlines.
“It is not always easy to go to a group. I really get the value out of it when I go to one somewhere around the country but I feel very raw afterwards and so it would be important for people to have support when they go home too,” Traci advises.
According to Traci, identity is a big issue with adopted people and adoption itself and its reverberations have become central to hers. “I think things would have been different if I had raised my son and my mother had raised me,” she claims.
“I feel guilty for being born. I feel guilty for giving my son up for adoption. I find it a really strong emotion. I find it really difficult. It is such a destructive feeling but I feel so guilty about being born, I don’t mean that as a joke. I caused pain. I was inside my mother’s body and she was in pain because she had to give me up. I have embodied her pain and I have my own guilt too. The guilt about my son would be more so about…well I have to forgive myself because I was a young girl and I had a lot of trauma,” she says, before finishing, “I feel so guilty because I couldn’t save him”.
“I do get a bit sorry for myself sometimes but I’m grateful for life. I’m privileged to be alive and when you have bad experiences you have to take something positive from them,” she concludes,
For more information on the support groups, contact Traci by email on lovetraci@hotmail.com.
The Adoption Board or Adoption Authority of Ireland can be contacted on 01 2309300 with further information available from www.adoptionboard.ie.
For those affected by sexual violence, the Limerick Rape Crisis Centre operates a freephone number, 1800 311511.