The one the Mormon church stripped me of some four decades+ ago today.

The church who lied to us both, and deceived us.

The same church who went to great lengths to erase his birth family because that is how adoptions were practiced then and still are today.

The same church who brainwashed his adoptive parents that his medical history and birth family history does not matter, nor his ethnicity, or his natural heritage.

With the exception of one of his adoptive grandmothers who wanted us to meet, his adoptive mother has forbade him to have any contact with me, because she finds me threatening. She lives with the great deception that history doesn't matter.

They maligned my son since early childhood by confusing him as to his ethnicity. Instead of providing him with the factual information they had from LDSSS and his birth record, they lied to him and made him feel he was a mulatto. He was sent on a mission to Jamaica because he would identify with the native black people. He was never part negro. He is part Hispanic and Caucasian. He was raised as an inferior member of his family.

Made to feel like he had the mark of Cain. He became an indentured servant in his family instead of being able to pursue an education or career. He turned to drugs and alcohol after his mission, and became an atheist or agnostic. His adoptive mother and him were not speaking and hated each other when I found him twelve years ago.

And yet, she could not live with the idea of his and my meeting or to learn more of his origins. His grandmother told me if his adoptive mom knew even she was talking to me that she would be furious with her. She sent me notes and pictures on the sly so she wouldn't find out.

The social worker who helped me to find him told me most of her referrals came from Mormon birth families and adoptees because the Mormon church is the only adoption agency that literally erases any trace of the birth families.

He didn't know he was fully Jewish through me, his birth mother, when I found him. He does now. He didn't know his birth father was Hispanic before I found him. He does now. He didn't know his ancestors lived and walked with the Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, or their parents fought in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. He does now. He is a descendant of Pocahontas, and cousins of George Washington through both my maternal and paternal heritage. He knows now. One of his cousins is a Nobel prize winner in Physics. He is cousins to Olivia Newton-John, the singer. As many other notables through the Jewish side of his family tree. He was treated as an 'ugly duckling' for the first part of his life. I want him to know he is a BEAUTIFUL SWAN.

He didn't have a basic medical history on his birth family. He does now. He didn't know he had living half-siblings. He does now. I tried giving him some family history before communications shut down between us because of his adoptive mother's hatefulness toward me. He has more info now than he ever did if not for my having found him twelve years ago.

He was very excited when I found him. And had been looking for information on me from Salt Lake City the same year I was able to locate him.

However, Salt Lake City withheld vital information from him. They didn't provide him with a letter I wrote for him, or a poem I'd written for him when he was born that they promised me they would should he ever contact them. He still had no clue on where he came from if I hadn't of found him later that same year. SLC had the same vital records his adoptive parents did that he was part Hispanic yet continued to withhold that very important family history from him. The same SLC church leadership who sent him on a mission to a country of native blacks because they told him he was part negro, same as his adoptive family told him. Another bold faced lie.

Life is strange. But one thing I know is the bond between a mother and her child cannot be broken no matter the time or absence comes between them. I loved him fiercely and still do.

If he knows anything about where he came from, I hope that will be his main takeaway. That he still matters to me, and I still pray for him every day.

Happy birthday to my birth son. I've loved him with a mother's love since before he was born. It was my dream that we would meet one day, he would meet his half-siblings, and his other relatives so he could realize his unique place in his other family.

TSCC would erase his birth family. I hope he knows we exist and will love him for always. My mother always counted him as her grandchild. In heaven she is watching over him now, as his other ancestors from his birth family. Love is forever..

The Mormon church robbed us of each other. But love never dies. His history still matters and so does he to us, his birth family, and to me his first mother.



Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2017 05:45PM by Amyjo.

Happy birthday to your son, Amyjo.
I'm so sorry he was stolen (yes, stolen) from you. From your posts, you've always struck me as a heroic mother. He will know that in time.

Please have a happy day. I know your heart is heavy. A wife or gf in his life will very likely urge him to reconnect with you. It ain't over!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2017 12:06PM by kathleen.

Thanks Kathleen.

I haven't given up hope.

Wow. Thank you for sharing. I hope you are able to manage and cope well. Obviously you are very strong. Bless your heart.

Thank you. I try, but it hasn't always been easy.

Raising the children that I did certainly kept me occupied for a good many years. Now they're grown up and on their own.

They'd hoped to meet him too when they were younger.

It's been a disappointment to us all.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/22/2017 04:20PM by Amyjo.

I have a TBM niece..married to DH's nephew who gave a baby up for adoption just a couple of years prior to marrying nephew. Like most TBMs, they began having kids right away. We really don't communicate with this young mother but I've often wondered how she feels. She came from a well-to-do TBM family...pillars of the small-town, local community where they all still live. They could have easily supported her and her child. It seems so odd that just a year or two later she married and had kids right away. I'm sure she thinks of the baby she gave away and I'm assuming that, emotionally speaking it must make no sense whatsoever that she is separated from her first-born. The blame lies at the feet of the Mormon Church, surely.

It certainly does.

She will never get over what happened to her. Nor will her child.

It's well documented the children separated at birth never forget their mothers. It's in their subconscious and psyche.

It is sad her family didn't support her more when they could have.

Damn cult.

I just missed it.

Happy Birthday to your son from me, too!

I agree with you about a mother's love. I have no doubt he has always felt it.

Thanks Cl2. I hope he knows. If nothing else, that he knows I've always loved him.

His adoptive family was merciless to me when I found him (except for his grandmother.) As heartless as they were I can only imagine the loveless childhood he must have endured.

One of his extended relatives told me he had a hellish childhood. Learning that just made me angry because we were both cheated and lied to by TSCC.

I feel as though my children's birthdays are a greater cause for celebration to me than to them, and more important to me by far than my own birthday. I'm so sorry, Amyjo, that your relationship with your son is entangled in the web of the LDS adoption bureaucracy. Happy birthday both to your son and to his birth mother.

Thank you so much.

The church divides and destroys the natural order of families, to maintain the cult's appearance over matter.

It's all about appearances rather than substance.

Families are not forever to the Mormon mindset.

I've heard your story before it in pains me so much because I know of 2 other horrible stories having to do with LDSSS adoptions. Yes, they totally lie and have no concern for the child's mental and emotional welfare. Let alone the birthmother.

My daughter chose to do an open adoption with a non-LDS agency when she got pregnant in HS. I had a hard time with the adoption idea, but knew I had to support her decision--but was very vocal about her not going through LDSSS, despite what the bishop and her grandmothers were prodding her to do.

My birth grandson is now a sophomore in college, has a good relationship with his birth family and was raised in a wonderful non-LDS home with the most awesome parents who knew their child was better off knowing the complete truth about his family.

It pains me so much to think of you and your birth son and I will hold out hope forever that you will eventually have a relationship. I hope he can feel your love in his heart. Love and peace to you on this hard day.

What a blessing for your daughter and you that you were able to connect with your grandchild and that he had the love and support of both his families adoptive and bio.

Glad you were able to circumvent the Mormon baby mill. It would have had a very different outcome if she'd gone that route.

Amyjo, 32 years ago my nevermo unmarried sister got pregnant. Her Mormon mother contacted the bishop who arranged for adoption through a very wealthy man in the ward who was friends with the TBM family who wanted to adopt her baby. It was kept very secret who the adoptive parents were. My sister was always curious about her son and tried to make inquiries. Those in the know were very tight lipped and we couldn't get any information. Over 20 years passed and still she wasn't able to find him to see if he would be willing to meet her.

Finally, after thirty years, she was contacted by the wealthy man in the ward who had arranged the adoption. A meeting was set for her to meet her biological son and the family who adopted him. She finally got to meet him and it closed a very painful chapter in her life.

Here's the ironic part of the story... My sister is a nevermo and her child was adopted by a well-to-do TBM family. The adoptive father was a mission president, mentioned on this thread, who had an affair while mission president and excommunicated. His adopted son is no longer a member. The story had somewhat of a happy ending, I guess.

Oops - I meant to say the mission president has been mentioned on the Recovery Board forum, not on this particular thread.

That is a surprise ending in more ways than one. Glad your family and your sister were finally able to meet him. And that he's out of Mormonism too, along with his adoptive family.

:)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/22/2017 04:37PM by Amyjo.

Happy Birthday to your precious son, Amyjo. As an adoptee who was treated with nothing but love and compassion and given every opportunity by his adopted parents it makes me sad and angry when I hear stories like yours. Children are to be loved and cherished, not treated like possessions or chattel.

Thanks very much.

Your being able to meet your birth family gives me hope that someday my son will meet his. At the rate he's going he'll be doing good to meet his half-siblings. Sometimes I wonder if he's not only waiting for his adoptive mother to die, but for me too.

It may be easier on him to meet his half-siblings than me.

Your adoptive family was very loving and supportive. Wish I could say the same for his, but cannot.

You're very welcome Amyjo. I hope he gets to meet his blood kin. It's important that he does. My children are adopted too and my son found his birth family with our blessing. It was important to him...something I came to appreciate when I found mine.

Happy bittersweet birthday to both of you Amyjo.

Like you, like others, I believe your reunion with him is inevitable.

Thank you. I hope so as well.

:)

Oh Amyjo! I can’t fantom the pain and betrayal you and he both felt. I’m so glad you found him!

And the lies? Why won’t the church apologize in the name of decency? How could someone adopt and then make a child feel inferior? And the bit about ethnicity and race is so terribly wrong! This is pure evil!

Thank you for your friendship and wealth of wisdom. Sincere best wishes for healing and peace for your family. (((hugs)))



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2017 10:54PM by BYU Boner.

Hoping for an apology from the church BYU Boner, would be like asking a werewolf not to bite. It goes against its grain. It can't be wrong, ever, when it's blinded to its own folly against truth and reason.

It was evil to deprive my child of his ethnicity, and knowingly too. His racial or ethnic makeup mattered not to either the cult or his adoptive family. They pretended he was something he was not. He was made to feel inferior by his family, and was a laborer when he should have been allowed to be a child.

He was deprived of so much but especially the truth and a genuinely loving family. His adoptive mother sees him as a possession instead of a human being. She'd rather he suffer than be whole. Her selfishness matters more to her than his welfare.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/22/2017 04:25PM by Amyjo.

My birth son and I were physically ripped away from each other by his vicious father when Son was 11.

I had moved to another State to get away from his abusive father. The ex threatened both of us with extreme physical violence - even a suggestion of death - if we tried to thwart him. It was a terrifying time.

We had no direct way to communicate with each other, but a school friend of my son's, who was also in Boy Scouts with him (the ex is a bigwig in BSA, and this school friend has hated the ex since their scouting days and still does) agreed to be a go-between, so we could stay in touch. I would write letters to the friend's house, and the friend would pass them on to Son at school. That went on for years.

When Son turned 18, he moved to the State where I live. He has been here for more than 20 years. He has very little contact with his father, but he and I remain close.

People may try to come between children and their mother, but in many cases, the mothers and children will find ways to make end runs around the obstacles.

I'm very happy for you that things worked out for the best between your son and you.

Thank God for that!

Your patience and wisdom paid off.

:)

Oh, Amyjo, I'm so upset that you have suffered such a loss, because of the Mormon cult.

I tremble with anger, when I remember the LDSSS commercials on KBYU--advertisements promoting adoption! The LDSSS was blatantly trolling for babies! Their number one source of new members is newborn babies! The cult knows that babies born to a single mother are unlikely to remain in the cult. The remedy is to take these souls away from the birth mother, and place them in MOrmon homes--and make money doing it, besides.

The Mormon cult is pure evil.

I know that your son will learn the Truth any day, now, and he will contact you. I hope he knows where to find you. I'm sorry your son was raised in such a horrible, racist TBM. I was not adopted, but I was raised in a TBM family that physically and emotionally abused me. Abused children can, as adults, gather joy and happiness, in an effort to balance out the rest of their life. That's what I did. He could do that, with your help. Never give up hope.

(((hugs))) to you both, and Happy Birthday to your boy.

There was a TBM woman here about a year or so ago trolling for a baby from former Mormons. I asked her are you effing kidding? She was dead serious.

She came to the wrong place for that! Why she decided to choose to advertise on a recovery from Mormonism site is befuddling.

For all the damage the cult inflicts on its people, she was utterly clueless. She wasn't even a childless woman. She already had a large family and wanted more. Made me wonder what exactly was her motivation to adopt more children because of the high cost of raising children today ie, from birth to adulthood is demanding. For her it may fulfill a longing to have a large family. But I doubt she is that prepared to really take on that many children and do them each justice.

My birth son was one of only two adopted children. And he was still deprived of a proper upbringing and education by his TBM family despite the lies and false promises made to me by TSCC.

The tiny Mormon town he grew up in I learned was really good at hating on others. One of my friends lived in his hometown when her children were young (around the same age as him & during the same timeframe.) She told me the people in that town were so clannish and snobby she and her husband moved away to get their family out of there.

When her boys tried going to the boy scouts there, which was held at the Mormon church, they'd come home and tell their parents how their scout leader made them promise *not* to tell their parents that they were trying to convert them to Mormonism. Between the subtlety of their conniving by trying to turn the children into Mormons against their parents will, and the clannish snobbery of the small town, they had to move.

My birth son's family were some of the cult leaders in that tiny community. His adoptive dad was a scout leader during those years. Whether there's a correlation there I'll never know. But her relaying that family history of hers to me was most welcome because it shed new light on the dynamics of the small town community he grew up in. He was surrounded by thoroughly brainwashed and indoctrinated snobs and boors.

"I was not adopted, but I was raised in a TBM family that physically and emotionally abused me. Abused children can, as adults, gather joy and happiness, in an effort to balance out the rest of their life. That's what I did."

You're a survivor and an overcomer.

That's somewhat how I've come to see my past to now present.

It helps me to appreciate where I'm at now in my life over where I've been.

Difficult childhoods can either break us or make us. Like you, I chose to be a fighter. Living well is its own reward.

Amyjo, I like to think that love wins out. Hopefully one day your son will return to you.

Thanks Summer.

I hope so too.

Have faith. My SIL gave up a child. They met briefly about 15 years ago. Then the adoptive mother died. The child reached out to my SIL again. Came to visit, met her half sisters and my brother. Everyone got along so well.

Since then people have been visiting back and forth. The child even had my SIL come spend a week with her family last year.

I'm so glad for them it worked out as well as it has.

That's a very positive ending to a traumatic journey.

I am trying to understand the woman's side of this issue better. I understand the unbreakable bond between the mother and her child. It is difficult for me to see how easy it is for the church to get a woman to give up their child soon after birth. I don't blame or judge the woman in this case at all. What are the factors that force this tragic set of conditions on a woman after the child has been conceived? Do you feel betrayed more by your family, or by the church, or by the man that fathered the child? To what do you attribute the driving forces that separated you from your child (focus on after-conception issues to avoid blame or natural temptation issues)?

I used to know a mormon woman who gave up her first child (a girl) at age 16 and who has tried to locate the child ever since. She later became a sex addict (or at least a woman who uses sex to trap men that she appears to have no intent of loving) and who has repeated the cycle of out-of-marriage child baring, while going from one man to another, asking the man for his love and wanting marriage, and doing her best to destroy him afterward. She was excommunicated for her third time after her fourth child was conceived (two conceived in a marriage that ended tragically, two conceived out of marriage in different relationships, each that also ended tragically). The only words that seem to describe her accurately are 'complete sociopathy'. Each guy she was with seems to be a reasonably good person (all returned missionaries, one of which was me). At the end of every one of these relationships, the police and courts got involved in break-up issues at least once. Does this behavior sound like a predictable result of trauma caused by a woman having her baby taken from her? Or does this behavior by a woman seem unrelated to giving up her first baby at age 16?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2017 01:21AM by azsteve.

Not being a psychoanalyst, I won't venture why your ex-girlfriend turned out the way that she did.

I will say the Mormon church placed great pressure on its young women who became prego and unwed. It wasn't only teenagers.

I recall seeing a book while at the LDSSS that carried photos of the women the cult was conscripting to steal their children from them.

Many of them were older women. Not young girls like your ex-girlfriend, or others typically associated with unwed mothers.

No woman was good enough to keep her child if she was single and a church member. The pressure on teen girls was greater when the young women went away to have their children, placed in LDS homes away from their families so the cult could exercise greater pressure on them to give up their babies, using lies and deception typical of a cult.

We weren't told that us and our families would be erased as a result of the adoption. Or that the children would never know anything about their birth families because the cult designed it that way. We were used in the worst possible way by those who yielded unrighteous authority over our lives and our children.

Your girlfriend like many other birth mothers from the closed adoption LDS system, was scarred for life because of the baby mill that sacrificed her for her child. I haven't met one woman who gave up her child to the cult who ever got over it.

And the cult could care less about the damage it does to the birth families or the adoptees.

But it's a cult! What we didn't know back then *did* hurt us. We were scammed and so were our children.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2017 07:19AM by Amyjo.