Adoptee Steve Jobs RIP UPDATED

Many people may not know that Steve Jobs was an adoptee. From those that do, I have heard all kinds of representations of his adoption over the past day in commentaries and pro-life press about how great it was that he was not aborted, the loving placement etc. etc. Those stories make two big assumptions: that his birthmother considered abortion and that the placement was totally her decision.

His adoption story is not quite as rosy and simplistically “good” as that. It has some interesting birthparent search aspects as well.

In his commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, he described the adoption as “It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.”

So the adoption agency presented adoptive parents to her in a last-minute situation that were not what she had asked. She wanted college graduates.

That brings up another question on why she placed. The speech does not explain the “why” part. Todays ABC article Steve Jobs’ Estranged Father Never Got Phone Call He Waited For by Colleen Curry explains it from the birthfather’s perspective.

“Steve Jobs’ estranged father, who had given up his infant son for adoption, had been hoping that his grown son would call him. That hope died today.

Abdulfattah John Jandali had emailed his son a few times in a tentative effort to make contact. The father never called the son because he feared Jobs would think the dad who had given him up was now after his fortune.

And Jobs never responded to his father’s emails.

“I really don’t have anything to say,” Jandali, vice president at Boomtown Hotel Casino in Reno, Nev., told the International Business Times.

Jandali, a Syrian immigrant, had been quoted by the New York Post recently saying he didn’t know until just a few years ago that the baby he and his ex-wife, Joanne Simpson, gave up grew to be Apple’s CEO.

Jandali told the Post that had it been his choice, he would have kept the baby. But Simpson’s father did not approve of her marrying a Syrian, so she moved to San Francisco to have the baby alone and give him up for adoption.”

This sounds like typical maternal grandparent coercion to place because of his ethnicity and conceiving out of wedlock.

Steve did search for his birthmother and met her before he died. CNN says the search was with the help of a private detective.

His birthmother married his birthfather “on December 26th, 1955 and on June 14, 1957 in Green Bay, Wisconsin she gave birth to another child a girl they named Mona. 4 years later Joanne and her husband got a divorced or he might have walked away from Joanne and her daughter.

At age 34 on April 23, 1966 she remarried George Simpson in NV she changed her name to Joanne Simpson taking her husband’s last name a name that her daughter Mona also took, Mona Simpson is the famous novelist famous for her novels such as Anywhere but Here, The Lost Father, A Regular Guy, My Hollywood and Off Keck Road Joanne’s children met each other until they were adults when at age 27 Steve tracked Joanne down. Mona got married to the Simpsons writer and producer Richard Appel who as you might be thinking named Homer Simpson’s mother. ”

His birthparents are successful people in their own right and they married after the placement. No one knows what his life would have been like if he was not placed for adoption. Adoption has a lot of complexities. His adoption was no different. His story should be the truthful one with all the pains that it was and not be twisted into something that it wasn’t.

Update: I failed to mention that it was Steve’s close relationship with Mona that was the catalyst for him having a relationship with his biological mother.

Since news of his death hit Syria, there have been many discussions about his life and whether nature or nurture was the reason for his success. The Wall Street Journal Opinion page 10/12/11 “The Arab World’s Unknown Son” by Fouad Ajami talks about his biological father and how he was a Sunni Muslim immigrant who earned a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin in 1956. He had a short stint as a professor in Nevada before becoming successful in the gaming industry in Nevada. It again reiterates that the reason Steve was given up for adoption was because ” Ms. Simpson’s father would not agree to his daughter’s marriage to a young Syrian.”

It also mentions that when his father, Mr. Jandali, learned who Steve was in 2005 that ” he sent him his own medical history in the hope that it might help him.”

The author is biased towards the nurturing of the adoptive parents and dismisses any biological reasoning for his success when he says,” A proud national chavinist or two nother the educational accomplishments of Job’s biological father, his doctorate from an American university, and argued the son’s genius was an extension of his father’s.

But there were wiser and more honest commenters. It was nurture not nature that decreed Steve Job’s outcome–the family that raised him…”

Of course both positions fail to acknowledge that he had an intelligent biological mother too. The ever-good adoptive parent over bad biological parent position continues and the failure to voice the coercion in this situation is just plain sad.

Update 2: “The intensely private Jobs sought out his biological mother and sister in the mid 1980s, saying that he felt something was missing from his life. He became very close with his biological sister, the novelist Mona Simpson. But he decided he didn’t want to meet his father, Abdulfattah Jandali, who had left his mother when Mona was still young. (The couple gave Jobs up for adoption when they were both in graduate school.)

“I learned a little bit about him, and I didn’t like what I learned,” Jobs says in new audio recordings released by Isaacson. “I asked her to not tell him that we’d ever met and not tell him anything about me.”

But it turns out they had already met, even though neither man realized it. When Mona Simpson tracked down Jandali, he told her about a restaurant he used to manage in Silicon Valley that was very popular. “Everybody used to come there, even Steve Jobs used to come there,” he told her. “He was a great tipper.” Simpson was shocked, but didn’t reveal that Jobs was Jandali’s son.

“I remember meeting the owner who was from Syria, and it was most certainly him, and I shook his hand and he shook my hand and that’s all,” Jobs told Isaacson.

Jandali, now 80, said he sent Jobs’ birthday emails after he found out he was his father, and claims that one time he received a response that just said “Thank you.””

Steve Jobs’ unusual meeting with his father
[The Lookout 10/24/11 by Liz Goodwin]

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