Feeling lousy
May 26, 2004 Adoption
I’m just feeling bad that I jumped on Brave. Comments come into my email box as they’re written and so I don’t read them in a linear fashion. I forget that you all could be having conversations with each other since I generally don’t know when comments come after other comments (people comment on various entries throughout the week so it’s all mixed up). I was kinda hurt by what I perceived to be Brave’s comments to me and should’ve hit reply and told her that and then she could have filled me in and it would have been private. I will remember this whole situation and be more careful in the future.
I’m sorry everyone!
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Forgot it’s a dialogue
May 26, 2004 Adoption
I forgot that people often are not responding to me but to other commenters and I screwed up. I want to formally apologize to Brave and also to print her entire comment here as a sort of retraction. I’m sorry, Brave, for misunderstanding you and for misrepresenting you and for implying you didn’t explain yourself well when, in fact, I absolutely read you wrong. Here’s her comment explaining it all:
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
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.
And let me add that I love the books she mentions here; I think they’re excellent. Also I greatly appreciate Brave not blowing me (and this blog) off but coming back and explaining what was going on. Brave indeed!
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Tags: Infertility, open adoption
Adoptees and open adoption
May 25, 2004 Adoption
Per Rob’s request, here’s what I could scare up. Note that open adoption is fairly new — not that there hasn’t always been open adoptions but it’s only been formalized by the adoption institutions in the last twenty years. Its creation is in reaction to adoptee rights more than birth parent rights. When reading through the stories of adoptees, many of the issues that come up again and again can be — hopefully — somewhat addressed through openness in adoptions. In other words, open adoption came about because enough people involved with adoption felt that the old way wasn’t working.
We all make the best decisions we can with the information that we have. We all interpret information differently. When we start talking about openness and then get into the rest of adoption controversy — like the primal wound — it can get pretty heated. Personally, I don’t think that being adopted dictates how one has to live one’s life; I reject the notion that Madison is damaged because she was adopted. However I do accept that her adoption will have an impact on her development. I don’t think I can “save” Madison from any heartache or frustration or grief she may have about being adopted, but I do think that having an open adoption gives her more power in working through her life’s challenges.
On to what I found online and on EBSCO: Read the rest of this entry »
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Tags: adoptees, Erica, Madison, open adoption
Deadline ahead
May 25, 2004 Writing
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.
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From the comments yet again
May 24, 2004 Adoption
Sbcohen (aka “Brave”) said:
Prospective adoptive parents do go through counseling and screening before they are able to adopt — it’s called a homestudy! It include in-home visits with a qualified social worker, writing essays about everything from your childhood to your relationship with your partner, child abuse clearances,(PLUS INS clearance if you adopt internationally), possibly other adoption education classes and reading. I think adoptive parents typically do lots of education and self-weeding.
The homestudy is only as good as the social worker doing it. Likewise with the education and training. I’ve talked to other parents about the quality of their classes and homestudies and there’s a pretty wide range.
Heck, if you visit enough adoption blogs/message boards/listservs, you’ll meet a ton of people who really aren’t ready to adopt — maybe they haven’t resolved their infertility or maybe they’d just be lousy parents. Most of them get kids anyway. Frankly, the homestudy isn’t that hard to get through and whether or not you truly use that time as an opportunity to explore your issues is up to you when you’re going through it.
To say that adoptive parents are ready to parent just because they had to jump through more hoops than bio parents is crazy. They’re just hoops — they don’t actually mean all that much. It’s like saying that bio parents are ready to parent because they’re knocked up. Truly.
And she also said:
I think it is unrealistic to expect ANY parent not to let their insecurities or any other neuroses affect their parenting. Of course they do! Expecting people who became parents through adoption to be on a higher moral or emotional plane is not fair.
Unrealistic or not, why not put that out on the table? I expect all people who become parents to want to do the best they can for the sake of their kids. I’ve written lots of essays (in my now defunct column that was over at Myria back when Myria existed) about how regular old parents — adoptive or not — need to step up to the plate and not visit their own sh*t on their kids. Sure, it’s impossible not to let our insecurities/neuroses impact our children but we all ought to do our best and be aware so we can do a little less damage than we might otherwise do.
So really my response is that I won’t hold adoptive parents to a lower moral standard than I do bio parents just because we couldn’t make our own babies. Every parent has a responsibility to examine the issues that they bring to their parenting relationship; I’ve just been writing a bunch about the ones that come up around adoption because for some crazy reason they’re at the forefront of my mind.
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Tags: essay, Infertility