I’ve been wanting to comment on Kateri’s trackback to Tertia’s “what if” post. Basically, if you don’t want to click the links (although you should ‘cuz I might have the story wrong but hey, we all get busy, right? so if you don’t have time then you can risk my rundown here) Tertia got to meet the child she might have adopted; she met the (adoptive) mother and the child together at a party. Many of the comments talked about how beautiful and wonderful it was that this child and this mother were put together and Kate rather forcefully wondered why no one was thinking of the birth mother.

I don’t know how adoption works in South Africa (where Tertia lives) so I don’t know how children become free for adoption. I just mention this because my feelings obviously have not been shaped by South African adoption and so my assumptions should really just be applied to adoption as I know it here in the states.

Happy domestic infant adoption announcements are a mixed bag for me. I am always happy for my friends’ joy but I can’t help but wonder what it means for the birth mom. I always feel like (and these are my feelings — doesn’t mean they’re right or should be your feelings) the adoptive parents ought to be just a little bit sad. Depending on how old that baby is, the birth mom may still be bleeding. And I can’t help but think about her sitting on a couch somewhere, crying, while the adoptive parents come home to a baby shower.

But it’s not like it’s the baby shower that’s the problem, right? It’s not that if the adoptive parents came home and covered the mirrors and wore all black that it would make things any better for the grieving birth mom. And I don’t think that we should send cards that say, “Hey, congrats and all but wow, that poor birth mom, huh?” or “We are thinking of you in your time of joy but all of our prayers are going out to the woman who made this incredible event possible and aren’t you being just a tad selfish?”

So in other words, when people announce that the papers have been signed and their baby is home I say what we should say which is, “Congratulations.” Happily, too, this is what people said to me and happily, too, many of them said that their thoughts were with J as well. In fact, the very first comment on Madison’s coming home post was from a birth mom, and hers strikes the perfect balance, don’t you think?

Oh I’m getting off-track. I really need to stop writing these things pre-coffee but that’s when Madison lets me.

What I’m trying (and failing) to say is that even if we don’t acknowledge it, there is always that whole story behind the arrival of an adopted child and it’s nice if we can send out a prayer to the parents who could not parent. It would be nice if that could be in the back of our minds and at the front of our hearts.

The most wonderous thing about the internet is that it mixes things up for us. You have birth mothers reading infertility and adoption blogs and adoptive parents reading birth mother blogs. You have people stepping into other people’s shoes and saying, “Wow, I didn’t think of that. I didn’t know that.”

Now you would think that infertility folks would be the ones to quickly recognize pain and react accordingly. You would think that we’ve had enough people telling us to get over our losses that we wouldn’t do that to other women grieving but then you would be wrong. For some reason there are a lot of women who intimately know what it means to lose the possibility of motherhood but who cannot put themselves out for a birth mom.

Why is this?

Some of it is obvious. Like we have a lot of wrong ideas about birth moms and about how adoption works. We’ve all read those happy orphan stories and we’ve all watched Lifetime movies. Birth moms, to our minds, are shadowy figures who by defintion ought to have given up their children and thankfully had the presence of mind to do so. They are heroes. They are angels. They are so unselfish! Except when they show up again. Or if they say they’re pretty unhappy about the way things worked out. Or get critical of the adoption system. Then we stop liking them so much.

For Kate to come into the story and say, “What about the birth mom?” made a lot of people more than uncomfortable — it made them mad. I don’t understand this. Maybe it’s because Kate is so angry (hurt) and people get uncomfortable with that much anger (hurt). But then there are all of these people crawling through her blog and finding things to bring up that they hope will invalidate her feelings. What they’re saying is, “You chose this! You chose adoption! How dare you complain!”

I mean, really, people. We all get to complain. And if you’re infertile you’ve likely already had people telling you its all your fault. The thing is that life doesn’t always turn out like we planned. Our families don’t get built the way we expected. Our adoption plans don’t turn out the way we hoped. We grieve more for our losses than we thought we would and we have regrets — all of us have some regrets.

I don’t think it’s possible to always say the right thing or to include everyone’s possibilities in everything we say. There will always be an adoptive parent, a birth parent, an infertile parent, a fertile-myrtle parent who will say, “You forgot about me — You forgot about my pain.” My feeling is that the correct response to that is, “I’m sorry.”

edited to add: Tertia, by the way, has been so classy as all of this has played out. You can see her reply to Kateri if you follow the links above.

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