Yesterday
Nov 25, 2007 Adoption, Book work
I met with Kate, an online person who I met IN person at the conference. She’s a first mom and she’s got a lot of insights, which she is generous in sharing with me. We talked for FOUR HOURS yesterday and I confessed some things to her that I haven’t confessed here and you know how they say confession is good for the soul? It is. There were some things I needed to talk about with smart people who have experience in adoption because I can’t take the next steps in dealing with them until I had them out of my head and onto the table.
I left the meeting feeling like I’m on the right track with this book even though I’m still scared of writing it.
Ok — so do you guys want to know the working title? This might change — writers don’t always get to keep their titles. Sharing Motherhood: Confronting the Ethics of My Daughter’s Adoption. Becca had a better one: Sharing My Daughter: Confronting the Ethics of Adoption. I already know what my conclusion is but I’m not sure how I’ll get there.
Let me tell you. If I had it to do over again, there’s a lot I’d do differently. And sometimes I have a hard time knowing what to do with that feeling, you know?
November 25th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Dawn, I LOVE the title. Unless I am totally wrong, I can tell exactly what the book is going to be about but it is also intriguing enough to make me want to read it.
Even though our adoption never went through I know all about that feeling of wanting to have done it differently, especially from an ethical perspective. Fortunately we get to give it another go. I’m anxious to see what you have to say about it on that score.
November 25th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Yep. Sharing your Daughter is the way to go with the title - that’s the emotional crux and the part that scares everyone so. Keep going!
November 25th, 2007 at 3:19 pm
I’m going to be devil’s advocate here. I think sharing motherhood is much more challenging than sharing your child.
I think lots of people can get to the place that they can emotionally handle having the person who gave birth to their child in their lives and their children’s. But I think actually looking at that person as another parent, and naming that person mother beyond giving birth is a lot more to handle.
For me to share Mallory was relatively easy. I share her with a lot of people, my husband, my family, her first family, friends, teachers, etc. To share the role that is supposedly unique to me took more soul searching and emotional growth.
In the beginning I had all sorts of typical ideas about what mothering is- the getting up with the sick child, the holding her hand when she is scared, reading her stories. All that day to day stuff that people use to designate who is the real mother and who is the birth mother. I could build an argument that basically celebrated my mothered and based Noelle’s on the sole act of gestating and giving birth. And I had this reinforced by lots of people, society in general and so did Noelle.
It took me years to consider Noelle an equal in Mallory’s life. We have different roles, but we are equally her mother.
November 25th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Lisa, this is a really good point. I’m going to have to think more about this. (And I agree with you that people are more freaked out about Jessica being “mother” than they are recognizing that Madison is also her daughter. I hadn’t considered this.)
November 26th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
FYI - RSS feed is not working again.
November 26th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I think it’s working but slowly. I’m getting my feeds in batches several hours (and once a whole day) after the fact.
November 26th, 2007 at 3:56 pm
Exciting stuff!
November 26th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
Since I’m at the front end of things (i.e., just starting to investigate transracial open adoption, I’m curious about what you’d do differently and why. Assuming you’re open to talking about it…..
November 26th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Pronoia, some of it is regrets very specific to Madison’s adoption and Jessica’s situation so I’m not sure how helpful it would be to extrapolate although I’m working on figuring that out as I work through figuring out what to say in this book. I guess the short version is that I wish I’d relied less heavily on the expertise of our agency. I believe they did the best they could (and that they are well-intentioned) but looking back I wish we’d had more help and that Jessica had had more help. Again, that speaks to some specifics and some of ‘em I can’t even get into ‘cuz of privacy issues. (I’m not sure how helpful that was but I’m open to email questions!)