Polarity
Ok, so back to the way we punish women who are without their children. I’m not sure what I want to say about it really but for a few months I’ve been thinking about it because of a story a friend shared with me, (which I can’t share here but I’m just mentioning that it’s been a few months that I’ve been brooding on this beyond adoption).
When I was working on the Salon piece the original essay didn’t have much of Jessica in it and they kept asking for more about her. Obviously I needed to talk to Jessica before I did that so I asked them what exactly it was that they wanted so I could call her and be specific.
“Well, we want to know why she placed,” said the very nice editor’s assistant. “She seems so together so we can’t really understand.”
See, they had this image of what a woman who makes an adoption plan must look like and the word “together” wasn’t really part of it. Jessica had to have a reason. Some obvious reason that fit into the “brave birth mother” stereotype. Heroic! Sacrificial! Unworthy of parenting her own kid and the good sense to know it! So I called Jessica and told her that I was getting frustrated with the edits and wanted to talk to her about them because I felt like what was coming up was a good illustration of the things that made me hesitate to publish the piece. I kind of ranted to her about it, which is ironic because you know, obviously Jessica already knows about the prejudices people bring to her story. But this wanting a reason, it’s a big thing in people’s minds. Like some other people who read the piece before I sent it felt that Jessica didn’t seem too realistic; they felt she appeared “too good to be true.” (Hey, I didn’t make up any of her quotes.) They wanted her story to slip into some kind of predetermined sense only that wasn’t going to happen because there is/was no one reason. Jessica’s decision wasn’t a tidy little If x = y then z type of thing. It was more like:
.
(I’ll add that I refused to share more even though Jessica was game and so the piece says, “We talked about the adoption, too, about what her plans were and why she chose us to be part of it. Those reasons are complex and not ones I feel I can share here.”)
This is true of some members of the antiadoption community, too, who are living as rife with stereotypes as the rest of the world. Jessica, by definition, must be a deluded, delusional person without a right to her decision. Like the editor’s assistant at Salon, they can’t believe Jessica could be “together” either. (In my interviews with some of the activists we debated about this but I always lost the debate because the person on the other end of the phone/email would finish things by saying, “I’m sure Jessica is lying to you anyway because she’s terrified you’ll close the adoption.”)
So where does that leave Jessica (and every other mom whose children are being raised by other people)? To be brave and courageous she has to have a reason and that reason will damn her. If she’s unworthy of parenting this child then how much harder will she have to work to prove she’s worthy of parenting the next? Or the ones she already has?
But if she doesn’t have an acceptable reason she will be damned, too, because then she’s just “selfish.” I mean, it’s got to fit that simplified equation in people’s minds. (I’ll add that there are people who would ask about Jessica and then be relieved to hear she’s young because then they could fit THAT to her reason. Now if she’d been an underage mom, they would totally have given her a free ride.) (And if a woman can be selfish for — gasp! — working full-time for the love of it and not just to put food on the table, imagine how selfish a birth mother must be! Talk about mommy wars!)
And of course, Jessica will be to blame for whatever happens next. Either it will be her fault for her bad genes or her fault for making an adoption plan. Unless Madison turns out “good” and then it’ll be because we’re such fabulous parents. In other words, Jessica gets kicked coming and going.
That’s the part of that primal wound article that really hit me. On the one hand, you have members of the adoption industry saying, “Placing your baby is the most loving thing you can do” and you have members of the antiadoption movement saying, “Placing your baby is the most hateful thing you can do.” I understand why the adoption industry does this (cold hard cash) and I understand why the antiadoption activists do this (because they are vilifying adoption even if some mothers get harmed in the making of a movement). I’m also sure that people perpetuating these stories believe them (especially on the antiadoption side) but that doesn’t make it any less damaging.
For Jessica, to get out from under these assumptions she’d have to denounce her decision. To be given the right to grieve it, to critique it she has to reject it, which isn’t fair either. There should be room for ambivalence in adoption, in abortion, in infertility, in mothering. While the rigidity in our birth mother visions are most clear, we (all women) are stuck with the polarity of saint and sinner.
(I think there are productive ways of discussing primal wound and adoption grief that will be informative to moms thinking of placing and give them tools to make good decisions. But jeez, we can’t even get a predatory industry to clean up its act on big issues (like ridding coercive lies like this) so I’d say it’s unlikely that we can get adoption counselors to talk about adoptee issues reasonably and fairly to potential first parents. Our agency talked to us about adoptee issues; they didn’t talk to Jessica about them. Leaving that part out in the name of “protecting” Jessica from guilt about her decision is infantilizing and it IS lying by omission. )
That link to the “single parent list” gives me the heebie jeebies. I have long worried about subtle coercion, lack of information, half-truths and the role they play in adoption. There is so much fear wrapped up in “ads” like that one. It is like the agency is too worried about keeping its numbers high than about “helping” questioning mothers. There will always be a need for adoption, but I think there is so much that can be done to make it better for all parties.
As usual I have way too much to say on this. But I think you have said it better than I can. Great piece Dawn, truly.
Wonderfully said. That single parent link is horrible.
That single parent link… holy cow. That’s just disturbing.
I really think all this stuff around how birth, bio, first, second, foster, adoptive mothers, etc has a lot more to do with the way the culture forces women into the choice of Madonna/Whore dichotomy. Unmarried mother? Whore! Virgin? Madonna. doesn’t offer much room for grey, reasonable decision making. No wonder some pregnant young women give birth in hotel rooms or somewhere else and put the babies in the trash.
“There should be room for ambivalence in adoption, in abortion, in infertility, in mothering. While the rigidity in our birth mother visions are most clear, we (all women) are stuck with the polarity of saint and sinner. ”
Perfectly said and really the crux, isn’t it? We are all — birth parents, aparents, first parents, mothers, SAHMs, working Moms, women who choose not to have children — stuck into boxes of other people’s making!
Debbie
This is good. I especially liked the part that Debbie already quoted and this: “(And if a woman can be selfish for  gasp!  working full-time for the love of it and not just to put food on the table, imagine how selfish a birth mother must be! Talk about mommy wars!)”
I wrote a few lines about mommy wars two weeks ago. I think you got to the heart of the problem when you said that there should be more “ambivalence” and flexibility in these issues, not just “black and white”, “saint and sinner.”
Yes, yes, yes.
Wow, you really made that birthmother balancing act so clear.
Thank you.