My mother was born 100 years ago. Nine days after her seventeenth birthday, the Nazis invaded Poland, and she was a slave in a work camp for more than five years. After emigrating to Canada, she had four children by three fathers; I was the youngest, and was given up for adoption at age eighteen months.
I was a ward of the State for a year, before being adopted into a family with four other older children, because the adoptive father wanted a brother for his son, and to keep his wife busy, since the eldest of his own children was about to start school.
My adoptive mother was a great person, but she died when I was nineteen. The adoptive father and his children never treated me as an equal, when I was a kid, or later in life. I no longer have any communication with any of them.
One of my biological half-brothers was shot and killed by his wife in a hunting accident. His full brother was in gangs as a teenager, he was shot in the leg, and it had to be amputated. My half-sister is a local celebrity in Toronto. If they made a TV movie about my biological family, we would be Black.
When I was about ten years old, my adoptive father told me that my parents had both been doctors who were killed in a car accident, and that I had no brothers nor sisters. I didn't ask him about that, he just volunteered the information. I think it was his way of saying that if I didn't become a doctor or some other similar profession, I would be disappointing four parents, instead of just two. Twenty-five years later, I found out that was all a lie, when the Children's Aid Society contacted me to tell me that my biological mother had made a special request to see me, because she was terminally ill.
The reunion did not go well. She was dead eighteen months after I re-met her, and this caused a rift with my adoptive father which was never resolved. At one point, he sent me a letter saying that "Miss Stewart" at the adoption agency had given him permission to lie to me. He was never one to take responsibility for his actions.
Family life was an ordeal for me, and I couldn't wait to get away. I started college, (CEGEP), in Quebec when I was sixteen, and never lived with my parents again after that, except in the summer when I was 17.
Adoptive parents are legally required to give their adoptive children any pertinent documentation, (Birth or Baptismal Certificate, and/ or Certificate of Adoption), when they attain age eighteen. I could easily have found my biological mother based on the Adoption Certificate when I returned to Toronto in 1984, if I hadn't made the mistake of believing the lie my adoptive father had told me. He's been dead almost twenty years now, and I still hate his guts.
Do you think parents who give up children to adoption have right to want them back in life after ?
Most definitely not. If a biological parent or child wants to be re-united with the other, it should only be possible if BOTH have registered their intentions with a third party Government agency. If a woman has a child as a teen, and gives that child up for adoption, often she doesn't want the 'skeleton in her closet' to resurface out of the blue decades later, especially if she had not revealed that information to her current partner.
Part of giving a child to Children's Aid is irrevocably surrendering any claim to that child. It's not a decision to be taken lightly, and not one where you can later change your mind. The biological parent can want the child back later, but the Right was forfeited in the adoption process.
