Excerpt from “Who Is a Worthy Mother?” By Rebecca Wellington

The United States has a complicated history of adoption. From the forcible removal of native children to the complexities of transracial adoption to the legal fights over women’s rights, there has not been any part of the process and how the system evolved that has been easy, both for the families and for the children being adopted. And although it’s been many years since adoption became a legalized process and millions of children have been adopted, there are scarcely stories that share an adopted child’s experiences written by said adoptee. 

This year, Rebecca Wellington, a writer, historian, educator, mother, and adoptee, decided it was time to shed light on the United State’s history with adoption and give voice to her own story with her book “Who Is a Worthy Mother?”. Therapeutic Family Life had the chance to connect with Rebecca, who kindly gave us an excerpt of her book so that we could share it with you. This book is for anyone related to adoption or whoever wants to understand it better, whether it’s social workers, prospective adoptive parents, teachers, lawyers, friends, psychologists, and more.

In order to understand mothers and adopted children, we must first know our history, how our system came to be, how we have perceived the mothers that form our nation, and how their stories and the stories of adopted children impact us all. So, without further ado, here is an excerpt from “Who Is a Worthy Mother?”  

“Who Is a Worthy Mother?”

Ancestors

“We acknowledge that everything that we know that feels like knowing is because someone who loved us taught it to us.” – Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck,and K. Wayne Yang

A sea anchor is a gigantic fabric balloon set from the bow of a boat in stormy seas. It is designed to stabilize the boat in massive waves that could otherwise rip the vessel apart and pull it under, never to be seen again. The sea anchor itself is a paradox. It is meant to decelerate and stabilize a vessel; but unlike a traditional anchor that drops to the sea floor and digs into solid earth, a sea anchor uses the wild, churning sea itself as a stabilizing force. And unlike a traditional anchor, made of heavy metal with sharp fukes that dig and pin themselves under rock and mud, the sea anchor is flimsy, malleable like a parachute. But when half sub-merged at the surface of a rough sea, this flimsy balloon becomes big as it’s filled with water and slows a struggling vessel, giving the crew time to breathe, gather forces, take in sail, and survive the duration of a storm.

I know what it is like to be at sea in a storm. After graduating college, I joined as a trainee on a sailing ship bound for a two-year voyage around the world. I joined the ship’s crew in the home port of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Canada, in the early fall of 1997. For a month, we painted, chipped rust, sewed sails, crossed yards, and prepped our ship—an otherworldly combination of a century-old, 170-foot clipper haul fitted with a newly built three-masted barque sailing rig. As fall progressed, temperatures dropped, prolonging our stay at the dock; stormy weather closed in, and multiple planned celebratory castoffs were canceled because of storm warnings. Our chances of a safe departure diminished.

In late October, under pressure to get the voyage off the ground, the captain took a risky gamble and decided on a departure date. Despite our weeks of painting, scraping, and bonding in the local pub, we were an untested crew on an untested rig. And we were sailing out into a full-blown North Atlantic gale.

Our first night at sea, we steamed south down the North Atlantic in forty-mile-an-hour winds, taking towering seas over the stern quarter of the ship. Through the night, the ship swung, dove, and climbed wildly, pitching and rolling twenty to thirty degrees minute to minute. Crossing the deck to stand watch or use the bathroom meant, at times, literally crawling on hands and knees, inching along, and holding tightly to anything solid a frozen, wet hand could grasp as hundreds of gallons of icy seawater surged across the deck.

We had no lifelines rigged on deck. Over half the crew was violently seasick and hardly able to function. Those of us who could function to stand watch were paired up with a buddy, to keep an eye out for someone going overboard. I didn’t eat the day of our departure because I was so full of excitement and nervousness for the start of this insane voyage. With the benefit of an empty stomach, I evaded sea sickness that first night out.

As I climbed up to the quarterdeck to stand my first night watch, I felt like I was clambering over the scaffolding of a swinging construction crane, holding on for dear life in the middle of complete darkness, only aware of the wailing wind and stinging sea spray. When I made it up to the deck, crouched low, white-knuckling the pin-rail as the ship bucked and swayed, I saw my watch crew and watch leader huddled behind the ship’s stack house, a mediocre shelter from the howling wind.

Our watch leader, the able-bodied seaman, or AB, was a young man who had clocked hundreds of hours at sea, was Coast Guard certified, and understood the magnitude of what we were experiencing. He screamed for me to move slowly, stay low, and hold on. Fifteen feet below, on the other side of the rail, was the black, roiling North Atlantic Ocean rushing past the hull of the ship.

The AB’s face was white and drained, and as he looked at all of our naive faces staring at him from under the wide brims of our soaked and bent sou’westers, he yelled loud enough to be heard over the wind, telling us to quickly and deliberately drive our marlin spikes into our eye sockets if we went overboard. The ship wouldn’t be able to get us, and it’d be a better death than slowly drowning.

Just hours after this gruesome warning to stay on board at all costs, a fellow sailor on the next watch lurched for the railing of the ship to vomit. At that exact moment, the stern was kicked high by a massive wave, and she was sent flying into the air, fortunately landing inboard of the bulwark, just barely missing getting swept overboard. But as she landed on deck, her foot crashed down on a huge metal bit next to the railing and broke violently in multiple places.

The sailor, writhing in tremendous pain, was carried down belowdecks where the ship’s doctor attempted to set and splint her foot, which was now not below her ankle but to the side of her leg. As the doctor worked to stabilize the sailor’s foot, both she and the sailor were pinned down for stability by other crew members as the rocking haul threatened to slam them both against the sides of the sailor’s bunk.

Our ship turned north, altering course almost exactly 180 degrees, and headed toward Halifax, the closest port with a major medical facility. Halifax is forty miles up the coast north of Lunenburg. We were now going past our departure point in the exact opposite direction of our plotted course and sailing deeper into the gale. Through the rest of the night, our ship clawed its way back north, sailing, directing into oncoming weather, climbing, and then diving into the relentless waves. In the morning light of the next day, we rounded into Halifax harbour to see an ambulance waiting for us on the dock, ready to transport our crewmate to the hospital. As I watched her being carried by stretcher into the ambulance, I knew two things about this voyage. One, the ship was our lifeline. Our lives depended upon it, literally.

We needed to stay on board it, and we needed it to stay afloat. Second, to keep our ship safe, upright, and moving forward, in order to make this journey happen, we all had to lean in and support each other as a crew, whether that meant deploying sea anchors to steady our ship or sailing directly into a storm to get an injured crewmate to safety. Nobody could do this alone. For the next two years, the ship became my home, and the crew became the family that would carry me safely through rough seas. In the morning light of that second day of our journey, at the dock in Halifax, I understood these two points clearly. But I did not yet know that this ship and its crew, like a sea anchor stabilizing me in a storm, would come to fill a void in my life, a void I wasn’t fully aware existed.

I was adopted at birth through a closed, private adoption process that kept the transaction of my tiny baby body from one family to the next totally secret and sealed away. It is time to tell this story, not just mine but that of millions of American adoptees whose births and lives have been shrouded in secrecy and shame, leaving a toxic void in our nation’s collective memory. The history and policies around adoption matter, even to those who aren’t adopted. Nearly everyone in America is affected by adoption. Some experts estimate that six out of ten Americans have a direct, intimate connection to adoption. An estimated five million Americans alive in 2015 were adopted. From a macro view, adoption is the lens through which we can see in stark relief how our nation differentially values humans.

The whole project of adoption is contingent upon making value judgments about a pregnancy—about who is a worthy mother and who is a worthy baby. In legal arguments heard in the Supreme Court case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that adoption could render the issue of abortion irrelevant. Justice Samuel Alito echoed this same sentiment in his 2022 opinion overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, in which he justified abolishing abortion rights by arguing that “the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.” This strategy of using adoption as a cudgel against reproductive rights involves a dangerous and duplicitous logic. Instead of affirming parenting and motherhood, as Barrett claims it does, this logic affirms the shame of fertility by imposing the burden of forced pregnancy on women, thus stripping them of their autonomy regarding fertility. Most damaging, it upholds the assumption that it is a woman’s destiny to produce children and raise them within the narrow confines of hegemonic motherhood.

Our nation has now entered a post-roe world, the implications of which are staggering for all Americans. If we want to critically unpack motherhood and womanhood in America at this precarious turning point, we must include our complicated history of adoption. This book is a critical analysis of our nation’s past and present relationship with adoption, fertility, and motherhood, framed through my personal narrative as an adoptee, a mother, and a historian. The sea and sailors’ experiences at sea are metaphors that I draw on to define my journey through adoption and motherhood. The wild precariousness of sea voyaging is an especially prescient metaphor at this moment in American history, when women’s value and identities are being thrashed in a political storm surrounding American identity itself.

If you liked this excerpt, you can check out a description of the book and where to buy it in our Recommended Books section. You can also check out Rebecca’s personal page here.