Rejection by Birth Father

The man I believe is my bfather doesn't want to even think of the possibility. It does hurt but I guess we need to be thankful for what we do have. Hugs

I sent contact letters to both bparents two months ago. I haven't heard from my bmom yet. I have been speaking with some regularity to my bdad. I plan to send one more letter and ask her to just tell me yes or no to any kind of contact. As with most of us, I have no idea what she is going though in her life right now. Not everyone can turn those feeling back on after having had turn them off for so many years. If you feel the urge, you can try again some day. And unless he tells to outright stop it, I would keep trying every now and then. He may change his mind. I wish you the best. Keep your head up, pete

My birthmom was the one that rejected me though (again). She has even denied me to her whole family saying she never had a baby. Fortunately though i was able to meet her mom, her brother, and a few cousins and they all accepted me. They all say i look just like her which is hard for me accept knowing she rejects me. It is also difficult for me because she signed an affadavit stating she does not know my bio father's name. I feel i will never have the chance to even search for him not knowing his name. So the loss of both bioparents has been hard. SO I know how you feel. I would try to look at the postive side you know your bmom and it's his loss not yours.

Hi there I also was rejected by my bmom, and I can understand your disappointment. It has taken me years to try and figure out why she hasn't wanted me in her life. Unlike you, I was not able to meet my bsibling, as my bmom refuses to tell her. On a brighter note, I have met my bfather and he has recieved me with open arms. I have gained lots of history and medical knowledge and in the process have met my 2 half sibs. As much joy as this relationship has brought me, the same amount of pain if not more came from the rejection of my bmom. Having said that, I value the time that I have spent with all my biorelationships...no matter how long they have lasted, or to what their end result. I hope eventually your bioparents will change their minds and realize that a relationship with you can be very fulfilling. tlee

Hi, I'm not adopted but was rejected by my birthfather who I haven't seen since I was three. It was one of the most painful phone calls I've ever made. It was clear from the moment he knew who I was that he didn't want anything to do with me. His first words were, "This is long distance isn't it costing you alot of money"...and it just got worse as the conversation progressed. I had a nice long cry over it then I got angry. Finally Father's day of that same year I sent him a card and included a picture of our family. I also included our phone number and wrote...just in case. Even though his rejection was hard to understand and was a hard thing to accept I finally did and got closure. I can tell because I no longer have those romantized day dreams about our meeting one day. Instead I have forgiven him and am leaving this in God's hands. I'm blessed to have the family I do have and just maybe God doesn't want him in our lives for some reason. I may never know the reason but I'm okay now. BTW- All of the other family members on his side of the family who I also haven't seen since I was three welcomed us with open arms including his mother who I got to have a nice visit with just months before she died. Judy

Met both of my bparents approx 20 years ago. Have gained a full brother with three children and a half sister. My bfather 20 years ago welcomed me with open arms and took me to meet most of his family. Awkward to say the least. Have not seen him since 1993 and have had no contact. I believe that I have stirred up quilt in which he does not want to face. It hurts terribly especially when he is in my brother's life. Understand that after I was given up for adoption, my bparents wed and had my brother and later divorced. I feel that it is his loss because I have three great children to offer him also. His loss. Bmother is in my life more but not to the extent of which she is my siblings. I can't understand why after giving me up, and then meeting me 20 years later they act as if my life as a whole for the most part is irrelevant to them. So I do know how you feel. I have no answers, just compassion.

Fellow soldiers, I put in the above search hoping to find a thread that would help my friend, T. Just now she is feeling rejected by her birth father's lack of response. If you can say anything to help, please post. I have not been rejected by my birth father. I have yet to meet him. I have made contact with his family, but my "siblings" are leary to allow me to meet him because of his advanced age. I continue to make the snail's crawl journey toward winning their approval / trust in order to get the chance to be rejected. I realize this is an older thread. Perhaps some have some encouraging updates. Carolyn Kay

I was rejected my birth father, too. It was a really bad set of circumstances, actually. I was too nervous to write to him, so I had my husband send an e-mail, just to ask if he actually was my bfather. He admitted he was, so I sent another e-mail looking for more information, maybe contact. Got a mail back from him, but it was somehow deleted before it could be read. Wrote again to say that it had been deleted and I didn't know what he had written. I never heard back. A few months later I got an e-mail from his girlfriend with what he had written, which was basically a message saying that he didn't want any contact with me, along with an addition from the girlfriend that he had died. He knew he was dying when he wrote the message the first time and I like to think that he didn't want contact to try to spare my feelings, but the fact of the matter is that he had very little contact with his other daughter, either. He was around for her first few years and then pretty much disappeared from her life except for occasional contact. I don't know, maybe I'm better off not having gotten to know him, but it'll always be hard knowing there are things he could have told me but I'll never get a chance to even talk to him.

I keep thinking about this thread and I know that sometimes all opportunity is over but I just wanted to offer another thought. When I turned 18, my birth mother contacted my mom (a. mom) and asked if she could make contact with me. At 18, I didn't need anyone's permission but my birth mother was nice enough to go that route. Anyway, I loved my mom and I was afraid contact with my b. mother would hurt her in some way. I told mom that I did not have any interest in meeting this lady. I didn't even talk with her on the phone. After that mom started thinking about the whole situation. I was their only child, but she knew that I had half-siblings. She felt it would be good for me to at least meet this birth family. Realizing mom's love for me exceeded the fear that she had of the unknown, my meeting my birth family, we started searching for them. No luck. Some five to six years later, my birth mother tried contact again. This time I was excited to have the opportunity to meet her. I met her parents, several of her siblings, my five siblings, their father (a wonderful man) and other extended family. Still a relationship with this family was slow in coming, mostly due to me. My mom and dad (a. parents) died over ten years ago. I was surprised how much my love for them and fear of hurting them had stiffled my desire to get to know my birth family. Now some 30 plus years after my b. mother first tried contact, I am only beginning to really know this family. I have enjoyed a really wonderful, close relationship with a couple of my siblings for this last decade. And I am glad my birth mother did not take my initial rejection as final. Carolyn Kay

Here is a website that many who are experiencing rejection might find helpful: [url]http://www.rejection-network.org/[/url] Many blessings, California Website: Other great websites to check out: [url]http://www.adoptionchat.com[/url] [url]http://www.adoption.com[/url] [url]http://www.adopting.org[/url] [url]http://registry.adoption.com/[/url]

"Why Won't My Natural Mother Meet Me?" by Carole Anderson Why did your birth mother refuse to meet you? There are probably as many answers as there are birth mothers. From some of my own feelings and those of other birth mothers, though, I do have a few possible themes to suggest. Maybe some of the possibilities are behind your birth mother's refusal to meet you. Your birth mother lost a great deal when she surrendered you. She lost the chance to give you all of the love she felt for you, that all mothers feel. She lost the opportunity to share in the important and the humdrum events of your life. She lost all the joys and problems of raising you, of guiding you from infancy to adulthood. She may feel guilty that she was not there. She may feel cheated because she was not allowed to be there. Either way, loss is both painful and unnatural. In addition to the pain of the losses themselves, there is the additional pain of feeling different from other people, outcast from society. Often there is the pain of feeling that the loss was unnecessary and that the separation need not have occurred "if only..." If only her parents had helped her. If only the social worker had told her what adoption would really be like for you and for her. If only society had supported single parenthood at the time you were born. If only she had not believed she was unworthy of you. If only she had had the money to support you. If only she had somehow found a way to keep you. If only she had believed in her own feelings instead of in what others told her would be best for you. The list of "if onlies" is endless. Knowing you could make her losses more real to her, and thus more painful. She may have worked very hard at denying her feelings, at convincing herself that your adoption was necessary, at telling herself that giving birth does not make a woman a mother, at pretending that she was not a mother and so did not lose anything. She may have denied to herself that it ever happened. If she has succeeded at numbing herself to the pain by clinging to such beliefs, knowing you would remove the blinders from her eyes, exposing her to the full impact of all the years of loss and pain. She may have coped with losing you through fantasizing about what might have been. She may see you over and over in her mind just as you were when she last saw you, see herself raising you, see what you would be like at different ages. If your birth mother has other children, she may be terrified of losing them, too, if she had not told them about you. Many birth mothers were rejected by their children's birth fathers and by their own parents during their pregnancies. If the people she loved and trusted and whom she though would always love and help abandoned her when she most needed them, she may be unable to trust anyone now. She may regard all relationships as fragile, and fear that she will be abandoned again if she disappoints the people who are now important to her. Having already suffered the pain of losing one child, the fear of losing her other children and suffering that same pain again may overwhelm her. She may also fear losing you a second time around, if you want to see her only once. Many birth mothers have internalized others' rejection of them and believe they are unlovable. Not loving or respecting herself, she cannot believe that others could care about her if they really knew her. Suspecting that adoptees who search will ask about their fathers after they have satisfied their curiosity about their mothers, her rejection may be tied to her feelings about your birth father. If she loved him, accepting you could mean reopening the deep wounds she suffered in being rejected by him. IF she did not love him, she may dread having to admit that fact to you. She may not want to explain her relationship with your birth father or her feelings about it, and fear that you will reject her if she does not answer your questions about him. She may fear that you would prefer him to her and she could not bear to lose you to the very person whose abandonment made your surrender unavoidable. She may believe that your birth father is a terrible person and feel shame at having had a relation with him, fear that you hat her if you knew him. She may fear that you would be upset! or would think less of her or of yourself if you knew him. Mothers want their children to be happy, but they also want to feel needed and important to their children. They want to be the ones who make their children happy. Generally, a mother's needs and her child's compliment each other, so that both are satisfied by her raising her child, with each needing and receiving the other's love. The special situation of adoption, though, assures that the birth mother cannot win. If she believes your adoption was the best for you, she may feel worthless or useless as a mother because you did not need her. If your adoption was not the best, she may feel guilty that she did not protect you from whatever happened and she may therefore feel she failed as a mother and as a woman. Your birth mother's image of herself as a mother, a woman, and a human being may be at stake. If she has internalized society's judgments that "nice girls don't" or that only an "unnatural woman" could surrender her child or that "any animal can give birth but that doesn't make her a mother", it will be difficult for her to acknowledge to herself that it is she who is that bad girl, the unnatural woman, or only an animal in society's eyes. Subconsciously, some mothers feel that their babies abandoned them. Mothers were often repeatedly told that their babies needed or wanted more than they could give them, and that surrender was necessary for the child. Many mothers were told that to keep their children would be selfish, that they had no right to satisfy their need to love and nurture by raising their children, because the children deserve and need more. Other people spoke for you, telling your birth mother you wanted more than she could give. To your birth mother, this may have been experience deep within as a rejection by you, as her baby's deserting her for other people. Even though she knows on an intellectual level that this feeling is not rational and she may feel guilty for it, on an emotional level what she feels may be that, although she needed and wanted her child, her child was not there for her. Closely related are the problems of competition and sacrifice. Just as she may have felt that she was in competition with unknown couples for the right to raise you, a contest in which she was the loser, she was also placed in the position of being in competition with you. She may have been told that it was her life or yours, her needs or yours. Because you were not aided as a family but instead treated as individuals whose needs were in conflict, she may have felt that she was choosing between her own happiness and yours. If she wanted to raise you but believed that your surrender was necessary for you happiness, she may feel that she has sacrificed her life for yours, her happiness for yours. All people want happiness, everyone wants her own needs to be met, and there is usually anger toward injustice. She, however, cannot allow herself to feel or express her anger and resentment, because it was your birth mother herself who decided that you were more important and mattered more than she did, she herself who chose your needs above her own. If that choice was made by others such as her parents or by her situation instead of by your birth mother, there may be even more anger. There can be tremendous guilt involved for feeling anger, because we have been taught that parents gladly sacrifice for their children. Her anger may therefore be threatening to her, for what kind of person can she be that she could feel anger toward her child? Yet other parents, other people, do not make sacrifices of this magnitude. What society usually calls parental sacrifice is really more like an investment or a trade-off of some current comfort in exchange for other regards. To give up a full night's sleep in order to tend a sick child carries with it the benefits of holding and comforting that child, feeling necessary to the child, receiving the child's love and gaining society's approval. What most parents think of as sacrifices are small and temporary inconveniences for which they receive personal satisfaction, the child's loyalty and affection and societal sanctions. The sacrifice of a birth mother's life for her child's in unique. Rather than compensations, the sacrifice is generally answered with guilt, pain and emptiness. Society's reaction is most often condemnation rather than approval. The birth mother's sacrifice is unnatural, unrecognized and unrewarded. Some birth mothers felt less than human during the pregnancy and surrender experience, and may have felt they were regarded as subhuman by society. Just as infants have a need to be nurtured, so every mother has a need to give nurture to her child. You were placed with people who could meet your infant need for nurture, but your birth mother was given no substitute for you. Her need to nurture was not met. Understandably, many adoptees explain that their adoptive parents are their only real parents and they love them dearly, but that they searched to gain information about themselves. Newspapers are full of articles about adoptees saying that they are not looking for a mother, but for themselves or their own identity. Your birth mother may feel she is again being reduced to a data bank. Just as she once surrendered you to others while her own needs went unmet, she may feel she is now being asked for information but that again her feelings and needs will be ignored. She may feel she has given everything without receiving anything in return, and will be reluctant to give still more if she fears that you too, will take what you want from her and then abandon her with no thought for her needs. Even if she is able to struggle through the many pains and losses that have already occurred, your birth mother may fear that there are more to come if she accepts you now. It may hurt her terribly that she could not mother you. Opening her heart to you would make your birth mother vulnerable to a later rejection by you. If she welcomed you as the beloved daughter or son she lost, how would she feel at being only a friend or acquaintance to you? To what extent would you accept her? Would she be asked to your graduation or wedding? Would you want to spend Christmas or Passover with her? Would you regard her as the grandmother of your children, including her in events in their lives? Or would you want to see her on rare and secret occasions, carefully hiding the relationship from others? She may feel that not only have adoptive parents taken her place in your life as a child and in raising you, but that by accepting you now she would lose you again, this time by inches, by being relegated to a lowly and insignificant place in your life, if she were included at all. As an adult, you are unlikely to want your birth mother to be the mother she may, on some level, still want to be. Your image of motherhood will always be that of your adoptive mother, not your birth mother. You cannot relate to your birth mother in the same way you would have if she had raised you, nor can she relate to you in the same way. Neither of you are the people you would be if she had raised you. Although the similarities you are likely to share would make her keenly aware that you are her child, the differences resulting from your growing up in your adoptive home would make her painfully aware of the distance between you as well. Because meeting you requires facing all her feelings about your surrender and loss, it may also challenge your birth mother's beliefs about the value and meaning of life, the importance of family ties, religion and other basic concepts on which she has built her life. Many people want to believe that the world is fair, that everything comes out even, that people get what they deserve out of life. Adoption issues do not fit into such tidy categories. If the world is fair, what has she done that is so terrible she deserve such pain? If life is equal why did other people who expressed their sexuality before marriage pay not price for it? If this is justice why did her subsequent children have to grow up in an incomplete family, without their brother or sister. IF families are of primary importance and should be kept together why was her family separated? How could her church have told her God wanted her child to be adopted or that God created her child for other parents? How could a loving God want this pain for her? If she allows herself to acknowledge her experience, how can she reconcile it with what she believes about life? If the foundations on which she has build her life do not match her experience, it will be difficult for her to face her feelings and risk losing those foundations. Facing you may mean reconstructing! her entire view of life, rethinking all of her values. The issues a birth mother must face before she can accept her adult child are not simple ones, nor are they obvious to her. Often there are conflicts between what she thinks and what she feels or between her feelings and those of the people around her. Few birth mothers were told to expect these problems or prepared to deal with them. Since little or no hope of a future reunion was offered to surrendering mothers, there was little motivation for attempting to deal with them. Many were told that they would be abnormal if they did not forget about their children, that they should go on with their lives as if they had never had their children. Most birth mothers, despite the enormity of these issues, do face most of them in the years following surrender. Most people cannot sustain the fantasy that their loss was a nightmare and not a reality. Most people find the strength to face the truth of their own lives, but growth can be a slow and painful process with uneven progress characterized by temporary regression back to suppressed feelings. To some people, it might seem pointless to attempt reunions when so much pain, conflict and confusion seem to be involved. Reunion, though, does not cause these difficulties. Their source is the birth mother's unnatural separation from her child. The feelings already exist, and leaving them buried beneath denials and fantasies cannot resolve or eliminate them. However painful the separation experience may be, it is her experience, her life. Attempting to suppress the most profound experience of her life separates the birth mother from herself as well as from her child and is not healthy for anyone. It requires that much emotional energy be spent on denying or numbing feelings, limiting emotional growth in all areas. Your birth mother's fear and dread are evidence of the intensity of her feelings for you. If she had no feeling for you, you would be no more frightening to her than a store clerk or a stranger asking for directions. What she feels may be an overwhelmingly intense but undifferentiated fear and she herself may not understand the reasons for it. Her reasons are her deepest emotions, hidden under so may layers of intellect, rationalization and denial that she is unaware of them. She may try to give sensible reasons why she cannot see, understand or articulate the real reasons without much self analysis. You are offering the opportunity for your birth mother to grow by facing herself and becoming reconciled with her feelings about herself. You are offering the gift of knowing the person her surrendered child has become. These are enormous gifts and you should be proud for offering them to her. In order to accept them, though, your birth mother must climb a painfully steep and rocky path through her many feelings about your surrender before she can move forward to reconciliation. Her ability to walk a part of that path or all of it is not a reflection on you or on your worth or on your importance to her but on how well she herself can deal with the fears and pains that your loss and society's attitudes about the surrender have caused her. With time and support your birth mother may grow to accept the gifts you offer. by Carole Anderson Copyright 1982 by Concerned United Birthparents, Inc. 2000 Walker Street, Des Moines, IA 50317

I have the opposite problem! My bmom has rejected me, but my bdad has welcomed me. If I were you, I would send a gentle sincere letter and a way to get back in touch with you confidentially. It may take some time for him to come to terms. I have waited 4 years for my bmom to have a change of heart, but the day still has not arrived. I wish you the best and just keep saying those prayers. Kaydol

I've been in the same position. I orginally contacted my bfather about 4 years ago. At that time he would not say more than 3 or 4 words to me on the phone. I recently had 2 children and I was still wanting to contact him and get my family medical history. I finally talked to a friend who is a lawyer and he suggested that I call my bfather again and tell him that my child had to have some test, etc. I did that a couple of times about 1 1/2 weeks ago and left messages on his home phone. He called me back on Friday and we talked for 10 mins, and I think this may have opened the door. Maybe if you could do something similiar it might get the ball rolling. Linley