Waiting to hear from the editor
So for those of you who volunteered on the post below (thank you!) when I hear back from her, I should hopefully have a better idea of what they’d like to see.
J came over tonight and I told her a little bit about the article. We’re both pretty much on the same page re., adoption reform. But Madison was being adorable and we didn’t get to talk about it as much as I would have liked. I also told her about this blog and said that I hoped when/if she reads it that she doesn’t think to herself, “I can’t believe I’ve allowed that crazy woman to raise Madison!”
You know, the antiadoption people assume that I will close the adoption at some point and maybe they’re speaking from experience but they’re also talking to a self-chosen population. I had a great conversation with a therapist (I learned a lot) who is also antiadoption although his stance is not as extreme as some. Anyway, he was talking about adoptee issues and birth parent issues and I said, “But the people who seek you out, it’s not necessarily a representative sample, is it?” He felt it was because he has talked at conferences and speaks regularly to people outside of the antiadoption movement. Still, I am sure that there are many members of the adoption triad who just don’t do much around their adoption. It may be that they’re in denial (as the antiadoption activists say) but it might be that they’re doing all right and don’t see a need to wrap the rest of their lives around it.
I don’t deny the grief that comes with placing your child for adoption but I also think that the grief is experienced in different ways by different people and that for some people it can be paralyzing but not for everyone.
The truth is that I don’t really know and I’m totally off-track anyway. What I wanted to say is that I can’t imagine closing this adoption. I wouldn’t do it to J and I certainly wouldn’t do it to Madison. But also, I love J — I love spending time with her. I love her as a person in her own right and I like talking to her. I wish I had more time with her and I’m going to be really sad if her life plans take her away from us. So I wouldn’t close it for selfish reasons either. I would miss her. I miss her already when I don’t hear from her for awhile. I like knowing how she’s doing and hearing about her life and talking to her about this and that and the other thing. I’m glad she’s in our family.
You are SOMETHING wonderful!
One thing the antiadoption movement and the proadoption people and the adoption reform people seem to regularly fail to remember is how many millenia adoptions have been going on informally–open, closed, etc. ad nauseum.
Many people not called “adoptees” have parent-child relationships with people not their bio-parents. Many people care for children in parental ways, never having any legal or official tie to them at all.
It strikes me that making family where you find it, as you need it is a basic human trait. Adoption just legalizes and formalizes it, much like marriage does. Getting caught up in adoption per se as a label to pathologize yourself or others when it’s actually just a very recent, modern label slapped onto healthy, normal human behavior can be a problem in and of itself.
Maybe it’s the frequent connection between infertility and adoption causing the confusion. Because when adoption is couched as a plan B after a bio family “fails” then it is always-already a problem, as an adendum to the fertility “problem.” If we could separate it out and just see it as its own thing, that might help simplify all the angst generated around it.
Or am I being hopelessly naive?
Um, could you expand a little bit about what the antiadoption people think before I go off half-cocked again?
Is this anti-ALL adoption? Or just interracial?
I’m in the process of a domestic newborn adoption with my partner, I would be interested in sharing our fears, hopes and confusion about open adoption. I’ve just started reading your blog so I don’t know what anti-adoption is and I’m a little afraid to find out.