More on Maddie
Jul 14, 2006 Adoption
She’s clingier today but that’s ok — I want to squish her more often. (Yesterday I patted her little bum and said one of those stupid parent things, “Who’s little tushie is this?” and she said, exasperated, “It’s mine. I a person, Mommy!”)
I am feeling very grateful but a tad uncomfortable with the kudos to my post below. It’s good to know that you guys felt like I read her right and it’s especially good to have the support of those of you whose lives have been touched (or in some cases hammered) by adoption. I’m glad to know that people in the know feel that I’m doing right by Madison. But it’s not heroic, you know?
Awhile ago Suz (edited to add link!) wanted to know what informed my adoption, ummm, attitude and I’ve been thinking on that. I don’t know. It’s hard to say but I’ll try.
As I’ve written on here before, there is a woman in my extended family who lost a child to adoption during the baby scoop era and I’ve seen what impact that had on her and on our family. There’s that and it came back to me many times during our wait. The other thing is that I was raised by a feminist with a strong belief in reproductive choice and our discussions about that made it clear that there is nothing shameful about getting “caught” by pregnancy.
Now this is huge, really, because it’s been very clear to me since I was young enough to have an inkling about sexual politics, (which was pretty young) that the only difference between a woman who falls pregnant before she wants to and a woman who doesn’t is luck. Yes, yes, yes, you can say that so-and-so was smart enough to keep her panties on but I knew that smarts had nothing to do with it. (My incredibly smart mother has had unplanned pregnancies so how I could I not know it happened??)
Sex and pregnancy were never hamstrung (is that a word?) as a simple good/bad issue in our house. I knew that good women could and did have sex and that good (and smart) women could and did get unhappily pregnant. My mom was the adult to whom my friends came with their pregnancy tests tucked into anonymous brown paper bags because they couldn’t trust their own parents.
In a very profound way, my mom raised me to understand that we women are too often forced to live with the consequences of our reproductive circumstances in a world that severely limits our options. So when I couldn’t become pregnant, it didn’t take long to understand that this was the flip-side of the fertility coin. I strongly identified with those women reading our profile and trying to figure out what to do next because I used to feel … victimized (it’s a strong word but at the worst time of it, I did) by my own fertility story. And so I had a lot of sympathy for these women I never met. This is why when T (the woman who chose our profile first) decided not to place her son I didn’t grieve about it. I mean, I was sad that we weren’t going to have a baby as soon as I wanted but we (Brett and I) both really felt like we were there to be of service to her. It was a very humbling experience and we felt lucky that we got to be part of her decision-making — that she had to choose us to know that she couldn’t place. And it made us feel good about the birth parent social workers when we got to see that babies stayed with their parents, too; that convinced us that this was an agency that was working ethically.
I know that my over-identification with Jessica (because frankly for most of my life I figured I’d have an unplanned pregnancy, not an unplanned lack of one) made things harder for me at the beginning but I also think that it makes it easier for me to let this all be what it will be. I don’t see myself as losing anything in facing Madison’s grief because what is Jessica’s was never mine to begin with.
Also wanted to give a shout out to our first adoption trainer — an adult adoptee, adoptive parent and adoption social worker — who recommened the Twenty Things book and thus allowing us to get our adoptive parent groove on.
July 14th, 2006 at 6:21 pm
That all sounds very well-reasoned on your part, just like most of your adoption essays do– brave and from the heart and much-thought-about.
Your mom is one of my new heroes– I hope I can be that kind of mom for my girls and their friends, that none of them will ever feel alone if they do have an unplanned pregnancy.
July 14th, 2006 at 6:28 pm
oh, link away. i appreciate the traffic.
i am no longer hiding. feel free to reference me, link when you want to, etc.
oustanding post. love it.
July 14th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
It’s been very hard for me to not to take our infertility “personal”. As it’s medical, it’s not anything we really had control over. However, I think I would have a hard time not feeling as if a birth (first) mother’s choice to place her baby with us as personal. That’s one of the main reasons I know we just aren’t ready yet for such a leap - a leap of faith to realize their choice is solely their own. Am I making sense?
July 15th, 2006 at 11:50 am
I totally get what you are saying about feeling lucky to be part of the process of a natural mom choosing you, even if they change their mind and decide to parent. That happened to us the first time and while I was dissapointed for us I remember trying not to cry on the phone because I wanted her happy for her decision and not sad for us.
I don’t agree about the whole it’s only luck thing. People, women and men need to be resposible for thier reproductive lives. You can’t rely on luck when you are taling about creating a child. We waited until we were ready to be good parents before we tried to get pregnant. Little did we know we were going to face infertility.