Stessa says
In her blog, brave boots, Stessa is writing about birth parent issues and she includes this quote from a book (go to her blog to see the whole excerpt — it’s worth it):
Smith says (and I include some of my own expansions here, too) that building a sense of entitlement involves three steps. A first step is in being honest with oneself about the motivating factors that brought you to adoption… for adoptive parents that means dealing with infertility or honestly acknowledging the good and the bad about other motivations for adopting; for adoptees this step involves understanding and accepting why a birthparent chose adoption rather than parenting; a grandparent may need to embrace his child’s philosophical drive to make the world a better place or to mourn the loss of his genetic connection to this particular grandchild. The second step is coming to understand and deal positively with a concept first discussed by sociologist H. David Kirk: that adoption is different from being related by birth in significant and unavoidable ways. The third step in building a sense of entitlement is to learn to deal straightforwardly with society’s widely held and broadly spread conviction that adoption is a second best alternative for everybody involved.
Entitlement is a tough one. I’m just quoting this here (too tired to write more) because I want you go to go over to Stessa’s and read the whole bit.
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