Among adoptees, things are a bit different in terms of gender.
When you get to adult issues, the balance of primarily female involvement begins to shift and be less prominent.

However, still less men than women show an interest in “searching” and finding their roots etc. Women, generally speaking, are more able to identify with a woman dealing with a crisis pregnancy. Men deal less well with their feelings of rejection, hurt, abandonment and often feel and express it all in anger or “I don’t care” denial because of fear of being rejected once again.

Betty Jean Lifton’s books on adoptee psychology describes the fantasies of adoptees growing up not knowing. They fantasize in extremes: their mothers are either movie stars, princesses or whores. Women vacillate; men tend toward the darker fantasies.

Single mothers are often very judgmental of mothers who have lost children to adoption, claiming “I don’t know how anyone could do that!” and not being able to find the compassion or empathy to walk a mile in the shoes of someone who may not have had the options she did. I have written about other ways n which adoption pits women against women and it is quite sad,IMO. It is, sadly, very classist.

I couldn’t help noticing your comment that Pennie was apprehensive to hold Madision. Of course! One, she and Mdisonhave had a long separation and lacked th ebonding you and madison had. Even if Madison has bene in an incubator that whole month, Pennie would have seen and touched her.

On some level every mother who loses a child to adoption has to internalize that she is not fit to be a mother and that you are “better” and more deserving, etc. Now she needs to “perform” right in front of you where she is being compared to – and comparing herself – to you! I’ve been there! It’s a very unpleasant position to be in.

Finally – I have a new question for you: When you are out and about and people admire Madison. Do you offer that she is adopted or allow then to assume that she might be your by birth?

Mirah

Women get to deal with the pregnancy. They live with the baby inside of them day-in day-out for 9 months. They deal with the birth. They hear the baby cry. Their colostrum leaks. Their milk comes in, and when there is no baby to nurse, if often stays in far longer than they would have preferred.

It’s more “there” for women. Emotionally, physically, etc.

Often when people talk about adoption they talk about it as if they’re talking about the time your dog had puppies when you were 10 and it bothered you to give them away. The lack of respect toward birth moms bothers me, even though I’ve never been involved in an adoption! (Not adopted, haven’t adopted, haven’t given up for adoption, don’t know anyone adopted.)

Men are also better about bottling things up and pretending that it doesn’t matter. There are probably a lot of men out there that are hurting over their loss and that just don’t feel able to deal with it or mention it or seek out support.

Oh yes. I think that I had no idea how distant we were from both strangers and fairly close friends of color until we had our baby and that protective distance was gone.

Having a mixed race baby changed how we think about everything, of course, but we particularly noticed the gap in our experiences: I was a young mom and got a lot of positive support from the AA community (roughly 40% of our small town, many people that I’d known all my life). I actually heard my high school choir teacher, a pillar of the AA church-going community, commenting to her 97 year old mother from the next aisle at Drug Mart: ‘Well, Mama, I don’t know who the daddy is either, but I always knew that girl was all right.’ Since she had always specifically disliked me, this was as close to an experiment on human subjects as I can think of. Seeing that little brown fist waving form the sling made me a new kind of person to her.

Mrs Phoenix, OTOH, who was fortyish when we had a baby, had a somewhat different experience that she described as ‘thawing’. People of all races in my historically mixed hometown warmed up to her a LOT once we had a little brown baby as her cultural passport. She is from a white/Asian part of the Northwest so being invited into the black hair salon to try product on her baby? The kind of cultural shift that she wasn’t really expecting.

For anyone wanting THE BEST SLING EVER: http://www.kangarookorner.com/

(sent via email and posted on blog)