The
Communicator Summer 2003
Newsletter of Concerned United Birthparents
by Carol Schaefer
"Sheila Ganz’s educational documentary film, Unlocking the Heart of Adoption,
stirringly reveals the enormous complexity in the lives of normal people, when they are
impacted by the profound losses inherent in adoption, and unflinchingly demonstrates the
disturbing repercussions of secrecy. But ultimately, these compelling interviews of
adoptees, birth parents and adoptive parents in both same race and transracial adoptions
are about the courage it takes to become conscious of one’s story and the deepening
understanding of love that results, no matter the ending.
An adoptee grapples with the fact that fundamental decisions were not hers to make.
Another describes the sense of being severed from his roots, of not having the
understanding of being in a continuum but rather feeling like 'I’m living in this
strange separated slice of time.' The daughter of a high-born Japanese woman and an
American serviceman with a tragic love story tells of suddenly 'knowing' that her birth
mother was already dead, as she held her firstborn for the first time.
A birth mother speaks of not being able to stop crying the day she brought her second son
home from the hospital, the full weight of the loss of her first son now realized. A
birth father tells of his anguish at the pain and damage he felt he caused his
fifteen-year-old pregnant girlfriend, whom he always loved and married nineteen years
later after they reunited with their son.
An adoptive mother’s joy, when finally her adopted daughter was placed in her arms
after years of waiting, turns to shock when she learns her daughter at nine was suffering
from a feeling of abandonment, despite being given all the love possible. An adoptive
father comes to understand why his biracial son always disappeared during his birthday
parties, and why he struggled in school. In several stories, adoptive parents overcome
their fears and meet the birth mother of their children.
The progress of a loving and very open adoption of twin boys is shown, up until the
adoption was suddenly and tragically closed five years later.
The film follows their articulate struggles with questions of identity, ethnicity and the
need to know the truth, and chronicles their searches and reunions. Many candid snapshots
touchingly enrich each story. Throughout the film, Sheila creates a sculpture of a
mother holding her baby on a hospital bed, as she tells her story of being raped at twenty
and finally giving into the pressure to surrender her daughter for adoption. Historical
footage is threaded through the film and serves as an illuminating background.
After meeting her once, Sheila’s daughter refuses to speak with her again.
'Every year I send her a birthday card and let her know that I will always love her.'
Sheila says. The depth of that love is evident in her mother’s beautifully
crafted film."
Carol Schaefer is author of The Other Mother (SoHo Press, 1991), Mary Queen
of Scots (Crossroads, 2002) and the stage play The Sacred Virgin.
Schaefer has appeared on many national and local television and radio shows, including
Good Morning America, CNN and MS/NBC, and speaks at conferences worldwide on adoption
issues.
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© 2008 Sheila Ganz