Some quotes, less whining
Yeah, I’m a little ashamed at my whining indulgence so I deleted it. Noah — listening to me whine — had some coping tips that sound suspiciously like what I tell him to do when overwhelmed by bad feelings starting with take a break by leaving the room. So tonight when I have to be here because Brett’s other brother is in town and there’s a big family dinner, I’ll leave the table early to work on the presentation.
Now! Quotes!
This is a paraphrase from Sharon Roszia who was quoting Suzanne Arms, the midwife. You may know Suzanne also wrote a book about adoption (scroll down). When Sharon asked why Suzanne was interested in writing about adoption given that she had no personal ties to it, Suzanne said, “The way we treat women in adoption is a portrait of the way we treat women generally.” Right on.
Sharon says that the system needs to stop asking, “Who does this child belong to?” and start asking, “Who belongs to this child?”
Then this woman named Marcia Pantoni, whose partner is presenting at the conference, said, “Forgiveness is giving up all hope of a better past.” (She told me this is a zen thing and I said I was crediting her because she was smart enough to say it at exactly the right time; whether or not she actually coined it doesn’t matter.)
Then John Sobraske pointed out, “Almost all hero’s journeys are taken by adoptees.” I need to think about that some and then reread my fairy tales.
My favorite presenter so far was a colleague of Margie’s named Chris Winston who did a great job talking about the challenges in finding our children a way to their ethnic communities in a transracial adoption. She gave me a lot to think about and some much needed inspiration.
My least favorite presentation was on opening up an internal dialogue (i.e., imaginary) between adoptive and birth parents only because it was very (as Susan Ito says) Adoption 101. That said, afterwards two women cried and thanked her for the exercise so even though it didn’t offer much to me, it was clearly an important presentation for other attendees so I have no quarrel with it.
John Sobraske is the guy who did the presentation about adoptee angst that I was hoping would apply to Madison. Only it didn’t give me much insight. Clearly a lot of the developmental challenges of life are exacerbated by the additional challenge of adoption and he did a good job of explaining how this looks but there wasn’t much practical information. I struggle with knowing if I’m feeding Madison’s fears or giving her the tools to deal with them. It feels awfully easy to cross the line into overbearing/overprotective. That said, I generally feel good about things when I go with my gut so I’ll just keep on keeping on.
Something else — it’s clear that people who experienced adoption in the closed adoption era feel that openness eliminates a lot of the pain, which I think is true. But sometimes there’s a tendency to downplay that there is pain in even the best open adoption. I’d like to see more acknowledgment that open adoption is still adoption and while the pain is often mitigated, it’s still there. If I didn’t already believe that, the survey responses would have convinced me. (This is why I want to tweak my presentation a little bit.)
I’m glad Chris was there - she’s really good on these issues! And it sounds like this conference is terrific - enjoy every minute of it!!!