It’s an annual tradition. My mom celebrates her birthday by taking my sister’s family and mine to the fair and spoiling the kids rotten. My kids look forward to it like they look forward to Christmas or Halloween. The very first words Madison said to me that morning were, “I’m going to have Italian ice and an elephant ear both!” The kid was still trying to focus her eyes but she was already planning ahead!
The fair we go to is the local county fair and it’s teensy-tiny, which makes it absolutely manageable on a weekday night. It’s always brutally hot and humid and sometimes it rains (not this year thank goodness) and there are just a handful of rides. It’s smallness makes it perfect because the boys can take off on their own without worrying anyone and it’s pretty impossible to lose anyone. You can also do every single thing two or three times if you want and still have time to check out the animals.
This year Madison was too big for some of the little kid rides and too small for most of the big kid rides. That was hard on Noah when it happened (later than it happened to Madison — she’s very tall for her age) but Madison took it in stride. And that picture there is her with Brett riding The Drop. First words when she came down the stairs after? “I am never doing THAT again!” But said laughing and excited and she is already planning to do it again next year.
The fair bookended a week of crazy fun for Madison. She had the PDX cousins in town and that meant visits to the ice cream shop and late nights through the week. Then Pennie took her out on a date (we watched Roscoe and Tommy had to work so it was just the two of them). Then Pennie and Tommy and Roscoe took her swimming and out to dinner and for more ice cream.
Let’s just say Madison’s bedtime routine has been a wee bit ganked and now with this awful heat, none of us is sleeping all that well so it’s been a bit crazy around here.
After her swim date with Pennie and family, Madison came home and cried and cried. She was sorry that it was over. She said, “I don’t want to be home with you! I want to be having fun with Pennie!” I said, “It’d be great if fun things never ever had to end.” And she said, “I don’t want them to end!” Then she conceded that I was fun “sometimes” because I let her walk on the low wall by the ice cream shop but that I am not as fun as Pennie because I was making her brush her teeth. I said, “Listen, honey, when Pennie chose me to be your Mommy Mama, she assigned me the job of being the mama who makes you brush your teeth. That’s my job but we can sit here while you’re sad for awhile more.” Eventually Madison brushed her teeth but she did not like it! And she only sorta liked me.
Honestly sitting there, I felt kinda like the divorced mom with the non-custodial dad who wines and dines the kids and then drops ‘em off, you know? I felt a little bit like that. I felt a little bit sad that I couldn’t be the Fun Mama. It’d been a long day and I was hot and tired and I’ll admit that I drooped and had to close my eyes and take a deep breath about it.
I want my kids to have great times with lots of folks and I don’t always have to (or want to) go along. And of course, I especially value Madison’s relationship with Pennie and I am grateful when they get to be with each other. I also LOVE that Madison is old enough to grab her carseat out of the van, stick it in Pennie’s car, climb in and wave good-bye. I love that she is old enough to take ownership in that way. Still. I had a moment there on the couch. A droopiing moment.
I was thinking, too, about them all heading out to go swimming. Roscoe looks just like Tommy and Madison looks just like Pennie and they are a beautiful little family together. I was thinking about that and about the glorious intimacy of swimming. Yanking on that sticky swimsuit, washing Madison’s hair free of chlorine afterward in the shower. The two of them having that time together makes me very very happy. (I know that being Pennie’s best beloved fills Madison’s heart up in indescribable ways and I believe it fills up Pennie’s heart, too.)
But, as I was telling LiaNotJuno (not linked here because I’m not sure that she needs/wants the traffic), I can see how this can be a challenge for people.
LiaNotJuno asked me how I got to this place in open adoption and I told her that in general (because in particular it has so much to do with Pennie) I can see three things that played into my orientation towards open adoption:
- I’m a feminist so I believe in Pennie’s right to create her own version of motherhood. (Note: My feelings about her freedom to do this have changed since learning more about the way the adoption industry works but I still absolutely believe every woman has the right to create her own version of motherhood.)
- I’m a crunchy granola earthmama who believes in a child’s intrinsic tie to the woman who grew him and gave birth to him.
- I’m a child of divorce and I understand that the boundaries of family are permeable.
Although I felt like the put upon divorced mom for a minute there sitting on the couch, I also know that in a zillion ways our open adoption is nothing like that. But I get that feeling and I was thinking on how that feeling might sit with someone who has a more troubled open adoption or has less faith in (or is more threatened by) the idea that their child has a profound tie to this other parent or who is a child of a much more contentious divorce and experiences that feeling as CONFLICT.
I have been trying to put myself in the place of parents who struggle more with their children’s relationships with their first parents because I feel like I really need to learn some more compassion and understanding around this. Earlier this summer I was put in the position where some parents with whom I philosophically don’t agree have been reaching out to me for support and even though some of what they said made my spine freeze up, I realized that if I want to be a counselor, I really need to tone down my activist reactions and start listening. Obviously online discourse is very different than one-on-one in-person discourse and I learned a lot by listening and then trying to dig through my own experiences so that I could identify with what they were seeing even if I still had strong feelings about what they needed to do. And what I found is that if I’m listening, it’s not that hard to understand where someone is coming from and I become a lot more useful to them AND a better advocate.
So as I sat there on the couch watching Madison drag herself to the bathroom to brush her teeth (tears, oh the wailing and the tears!) I thought, “Remember this right here and imagine what it would be like not to be interested in shrugging it off or not being able to shrug it off. Imagine making decisions from THIS PLACE of exhaustion and insecurity.” Because I want to be able to be a counselor who can say, “I get that. I hear you” but who still is working to get people to work through that and get back to where they need to be for their kids.
I hugely value the online activism that I have been fortunate enough to witness and sometimes participate in but now I want to do less of that to focus more on in real life service and learning, which is why I’m excited about school. I think that will make me a better activist long-term, too. So I’m gonna shut up and listen more.
Mostly. Because I’m still gonna talk.
Tolerating Intolerance
My mom always says the problem with liberals (and she counts herself proudly among them) is that we are always saying, “Ok, I see your point. I get where you’re coming from even though I don’t agree.” The ACLU is the epitome of this, right? Defending the KKK and neo-nazi groups?
Anyway.
We had a trollish person (but I don’t think an actual internet-defined troll) appear on Open Adoption Support recently and I blocked her. I NEVER block people. I’ve never blocked anyone here or there because I am a great believer of discourse. I know some bloggers who only push through their positive comments or handpick the negative ones to post only those they can answer to or are sure to invite reader defense and I am not one of those people. (Caveat: If people are just screaming obscenities or threats and you block ‘em? That’s not cherrypicking — that’s being sensible but fortunately I’ve never had those nutjobs so I haven’t had to block them either.) As long as someone is making a point or representing a perspective that is part of the discussion (however uncomfortable), I believe those commenters have value even when reading the comments makes me cringe or wince or get defensive or feel bad about myself.
But you know, Open Adoption Support is a labor of love. It’s cost me money over the years and keeping up on the tech is a headache. (It’s been inundated by spam that needs to be blocked bit by bit because an earlier incarnation was vulnerable and updates haven’t been able to close the doors that were opened then.) I had bigger picture plans for it but life interceded and now I see it mostly as a place to post the community wisdom questions and I think it has real value in that small work.
I set OAS up in August 2006 and I was never able to turn it into what I wanted to turn it into. (I think now — seeing how much work Support for Special Needs is — that I just didn’t have the time it needed to grow it like I hoped). But that’s ok because I like what it turned out to be. I like the community wisdom questions and appreciate the varying points of view there. I also have even LESS time to work on it so I’m pretty ok with going in as needed with time set aside to deal with the ever-encroaching spam. (Last month when I totally cleared the database in preparation for moving it over to a cheaper hosting solution, I deleted about THREE THOUSAND spam users. It was incredibly tedious because I had to do it by hand.)
This is all to say that when someone came over there and started posting an anti-openness point of view (she says she’s not anti-openness but you wouldn’t know it from reading her comments there), I got fed up. And I resented it. I’m not some huge conglomerate like Adoption.com getting rich by pandering to agencies. I’m not obligated to appeal to as many people as possible. Any community member can go to just about any other adoption discussion group and get support for anti-openness rhetoric. The poster herself proved this by going back to one of the forums complaining about the response she got to a post on OAS. To my mind her original question was clearly someone seeking permission from pro-openness people to shut down aspects of her child(ren)’s adoption. We get some of those. Heck, I get some of those here. People say, “Sure, you’re all OPEN THIS OPEN THAT but what about THIS situation????” But they don’t want problem-solving; they want pro-openness people to acquiesce to their pro-closed decision, which is not reasonable. It’s like going to an Orthodox Jewish site and trying to get them to see the wisdom of the Gospel. It just ain’t gonna happen.
I have met many adoptive parents who have closed their open adoptions but in a spirit of openness. Seriously, you can do this. It’s not as contrary as you might think. These are parents who realize that for the safety of their child’s well-being, the adoption needs to be less open or even closed entirely but they seek to allow their child connection within the necessary constraints of safety. They continue open dialogue. They honor their children’s mixed feelings. They own their own frustrations, anger or resentment. They revisit their decisions as their children grow or as the first families make other decisions. In short, they are pro-open parents living the reality of our imperfect world. So I know — I KNOW — that openness is first and foremost an attitude.
Likewise I know adoptive parents who are in theoretically open adoptions who are not open at all. They may send photos and letters and they may even have visits but they segregate their children’s adoptions. They shut down discussions. They make their children’s first parents jump through hoops or tightly control contact for no reason except that having an open adoption makes them uncomfortable.
Open Adoption Support is there to support those families with an attitude of openness whatever their circumstances and to ask families with an anti-open attitude to reconsider their decisions. The bias — it’s right there in the title — is OPENNESS.
You know, like I said, I’m working to more compassion but I cannot be compassionate when someone is defending her right to offend other people in the community by playing ignorant. I mean, you really care about your adopted kid? Read some freaking research. Do it before you adopt for God’s sakes. I’m not saying go on Adoption.com and say, “Hey, openness. What’s up with that?” I’m saying GO READ THE RESEARCH. I’ve read the research and you know what it says? It says it’s in your child’s best interest for you to figure out how to have a healthy, happy open adoption:
Read the whole summary right here if you want more.
Now none of us can control how the other people involved in the adoption behave; we can only control our behavior. And this is when that attitude of openness comes in. When adoptive parents are able to own their frustrations and not visit them on their kids, that’s a real and true commitment to their child. When they are able to sit down and talk to their kid in age appropriate ways about the challenges in the open adoption (drug addiction, struggles with mental illness, past abuse) or even why they need to limit or close the adoption, to my mind that’s “respect, empathy and valuing of the relationship.”
I know that’s not easy — that’s why I built the dang site.
Ugh. I’ll just post part of the snippet here (because I’m barking mad about it). You CANNOT come to OAS and type something like:
you can be the birth, biological, first etc but mother, mom, mommy is a title earned by the sleepless nights, the worry, the support financially and emotionally .
And then say, hey, so what. It’s an OPINION. It’s so outside the culture of that site that it has no place. I mean, I wouldn’t go to a freaking unschooling site and tell everyone they need to assign homework and then say, “What?!? It’s an OPINION!” Know your audience, people! And if you’re talking about your experience? OWN IT!!!! Don’t put it on every other first parent at the site and then act confused when someone (like the moderator) confronts you.
Except that I think she’s trolling. And that pisses me off. I have no time for trolls! I feel like that’s an abuse of my time and attention!
Wow. I am really mad about this. I’m sort of amused by how annoyed I am about it. I think I’m more annoyed by her posting it there then if she’d posted it here because there I don’t have the same recourse as here because I always tried to keep all nicey-nice and neutral there and I don’t here. But now I’ve dragged it over here to bitch about it and I feel much, much better. In fact, I think I’m done being annoyed because I went ahead and blocked her and then posted about it here.
Venting. The secret to low blood pressure! Ta-da!