Deadline ahead
We’re at the library right now and Madison is sleeping in her ellaroo (review forthcoming) and Noah is playing on the computer across from me. Remember when the library was all about books? Yeah, I do, too.
If I had my druthers, I’d only write stuff that’s hard to write. Not the articles that are hard to put together — an expert here, an interview there — but the ones that are hard for me to write. The ones that have me all twisted up on the floor looking pained and waiting for Brett to come and help untie me.
I have an article like that due in mid-June and I’m not able to make my brain work correctly yet. The good news is that I’m thinking about it a lot, which is the first step to writing it, but the bad news is that my thinking is running around in ragged circles, all out of breath and limping. I think though that I’m just out of practice and as long as I keep chasing myself around, I’ll get back into shape.
I’ve gotten a few other semi-opportunities show up in my inbox but I keep saying no to them. Unless it’s something fabulous, there’s no way I can make myself follow through. I did volunteer to help out at Literary Mama and they were kind enough to let me into the fold. When they were first getting started, I didn’t have time and now ironically I do have the time because I don’t have as many projects on my plate.
I wanted to point out that Brave (aka Sbcohen) feels that I misrepresented her comment below. I didn’t do it deliberately — this is how it read to me. People misunderstand me all the time on here and it used to make me say, “Oh why can’t people read what I write correctly!” But after a humbling while, I realized that if people aren’t reading it right, it could very well be that I wrote it wrong. Anyway, whether the fault is in my interpretation or in Brave’s statement, I offer her here the opportunity to correct my thinking.
Dawn, the thing I noticed about your response to brave is that you sound angry. When I read her comment, I don’t feel what she said was particularly offensive. So, I feel puzzled and like I’m missing a piece of the story. I agree with your response, of course parents (myself included) should do all the work we can to keep from messing up our kids with our issues, but I know some are going to make it through anyway.
On a somewhat related topic, there was a man in this state who had five or six foster boys and turned out to be a pedophile who traded child pornograpy. I don’t know if the homestudy is different for foster care and adoption, but there was a lot of news coverage on how he filled out the forms and avoided and did the homestudy and carefully avoided any red flags. It certainly can be done.
Just to illustrate the point about how it’s easy to interpret people in various ways in this kind of setting–unlike cherylc, I read brave’s original comment much as you did, and it seemed pretty argumentative. Your response seemed like a reaction to that, not totally devoid of anything resembling hostility, but not some sort of unwarranted attack.
Of course, I’m still interested in any sort of additional stuff she wants to say or clarification she might want to make. Maybe it really wasn’t intended that way.
i feel the same way about writing projects– i feel so much more enriched as a writer and a person by the essays that were really difficult or challenging to write.
Here’s my perspective. I wrote my comments not to Dawn, but to another comment in the same thread that suggested adoptive parents be required to take a course before they are allowed to adopt. If it came across as hostile or argumentative - to Dawn or anyone else, that certainly wasn’t my intent at all. I was *only* trying to enlighten — by saying, perhaps in too clipped a manner ’cause I am at work, that adoptive parents, of which i am one, do go through a process of a home study — the best ones do some education and encourage adoptive parents to do additional self-education. I was lucky enough to have this kind of homestudy experience. I do, in fact, agree with much of what Dawn wrote before and after my comment.
For myself, my husband and I read, talked, and read some more on adoption long before we talked with any agency. Many people I know who have adopted, whether domestically or internationally, go through the same process. It’s mostly self directed and yes, I agree with Dawn, people can and do go through the adoption proces without doing this. It’s a real shame. The biggest loser tends to be the child ’cause the parents aren’t well prepared for what they are getting into. My understanding is that this emphasis on education (and adoption educators like Pat Johnston, who is also a publisher of books infertility and adoption at http://www.perspectivespress.com/, emphasize education to prospective adopters) is a relatively new thing like open adoption. I think it’s hard to mandate something like that by law unless classes are required and certainly in the US at least, the government doesn’t value social services enough to fund it. Some agencies do require classes in addition to a home study. Of course, there are ways to get around the system and ways the system could be improved (why doesn’t the US have a national child abuse database instead of 50 separate databases? doesn’t make sense.)
Also, I did feel that adoptive parents — again in response to another comment to Dawn’s post — were being held to a different standard of parenting than biological parents. I know that parenting child who was adopted is different than parenting a bio child, but that didn’t feel right to me and I wanted to comment on that. I certainly believe in self improvement and whatever is necessary to deal with one’s past in order to be a better person and a better parent and would never think it’s okay to just randomly inflict “whatever” on a child. I just want to be a parent, not forever held up as an “adoptive parent” separate but somehow not equal. There are some parenting issues that are adoption-related but most aren’t. That’s how I read the early comments that I responded to.