Michael Reagan: ‘My adoption was treated as a celebration.’
Michael Reagan, who died on Sunday at the age of 80, was the son of President Ronald Reagan and his first wife, Jane Wyman.
The Reagans had a daughter named Maureen, a young girl who desperately wanted a brother. The Hollywood couple would go on to adopt Michael in 1945, just three days after his birth.
It was Maureen who told her brother he was adopted, a slip that wasn’t appreciated by the parents – but a turn that allowed them to relay to him how he was chosen and not an afterthought. But it was a one-off conversation. These days, parents are encouraged to start talking about adoption with children before they even fully understand what it means. Silence can speak its own language – and the cruelty of one’s peers can take its toll.
But back in the 1950s, some of Michael’s classmates, when they learned of his origin story, teased him about being adopted. It was a difficult chapter that took its toll.
“I started to equate that if I was the illegitimate child of the Reagan family maybe that was the reason my birth mother gave me away,” he reflected. “There had to be a reason because mothers don’t give children away.”
The young Michael was afraid to bring it up. In fact, he was afraid if he did, his adoptive parents might also give him away. Adding to the struggles was the fact that his parents were divorced, and he only spent weekends with the future president.
But an even greater hurt unfolded when a counselor at an after-school camp molested Michael. The abuse damaged him physically, emotionally, psychologically and spiritually. He refused to tell anyone about what was done to him.
“Anything that went wrong in my life, it was so easy to blame God,” he relayed. “I walked away from church.”
The tide began to turn after his wife, Colleen, said she was fed up with him blaming everyone for everything. Humbled and convicted, Michael turned back to the Lord and was baptized on Father’s Day in 1985. But it would still take until 1988 for him to share the trauma of his childhood. That revelation was therapeutic and he believed the Lord could somehow redeem the horror.
“I think what you see here is God saying people need to see the damage that is done to a child and to truly understand it,” he reflected.
Over the years, Michael Reagan championed adoption and enjoyed working with children in foster care. He said helping them may be a heavy challenge – but what they need isn’t complicated.
“They need to know they are loved,” he offered. And Michael Reagan always felt loved by his adoptive mother and father.
“My parents, Ronald Reagan and Jane Wyman never referred to me as adopted,” he said. “I was always their son. We are all adopted into Christ’s love but when you bring a child into to your home, that’s your child. You don’t have to pigeonhole them and say, that’s the adopted one.”
He also acknowledged and appreciated his birthmother.
“The greatest gift Irene Flaugher gave me was life,” he shared. “The greatest gift Jane Wyman and Ronald Reagan gave me, is really nurturing that life.”
In fact, a story from the end of the former president’s life perfectly sums up that nurturing closeness they enjoyed.
After each visit in the late 1990s and early 2000’s, Michael would hug his father and tell him he loved him – and his dad would tell him the same.
One day, deep into the president’s Alzheimer’s, after he could no longer talk or converse with great substance, Michael left the house and walked toward his car to leave. He turned around and there was his dad, Ronald Reagan, on the stoop with his arms outstretched.
“He was standing there with his arms wide open. He remembered that I had forgotten to hug him goodbye,” recalled Michael.
He continued:
As believers in Jesus Christ, father and son are now reunited with their Savior in a world without end.
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