New site, roundtable and openness
Jun 8, 2009 Adoption
First off, the new and way improved Open Adoption Support site is up. Now you can create a social networking profile, register a blog, set up a friends list, private message your contacts and set up groups or join existing groups. It’s a little like Facebook for Open Adoption. My hope is that it makes it easier to find YOUR people — the ones who will help you in your adoption experience. And I hope this also makes it easier for people to find each other in real life (eventually) because ultimately the goal is to give people the opportunity to create real life relationships and support. Because online is good but in-person is better.
The site uses BuddyPress, which is a set of WordPress plugins, along with BBPress, which is the WordPress-centric message board software. Setting it up is very nit-picky and I had to uninstall and reinstall eight or nine times to get everything working right. The software is all still pretty young so improvements are coming all the time.
Jenna is co-administrator and Heather is on board creating the definitive Open Adoption Bloggers list. Heather has also launched an Open Adoption Roundtable and her first discussion question is,
As with so many things in life, thinking about open adoption without having experienced it and actually living it out are two very different things. What do you know now that you wish you knew then? Has the reality of open adoption as it’s looked in your life matched your expectations? What one thing about open adoption would you tell your past self, if you could?
When I first started reading about openness it was in tandem to reading about adoptee grief and so my first reaction was dismay. I was used to thinking about adoption as an unadulterated good thing — for everybody. I believed the myths about birth moms who were able to move on (grieve, sure, I never doubted the grief but I thought it was compartmentalized somehow) and adoptees who never suffered more than curiosity. The more I read — adoptee stories, birth parent stories — the more I realized that adoption was never that simple.
So when I first read about openness, I felt threatened. I had to rethink my ideas about my role as an adoptive mom. I began to realize that I couldn’t simply replace my kid’s first mom and so my kneejerk reaction was immediate posessive jealousy. But at the same time my emotions went straight to fear, I also knew that this response was all about ME and that this selfishness was understandable but still selfish. And once I realized it was selfish, I could also see that it was unnecessary.
I’m trying to think of how to explain this. But I started to understand that this is the reality of adoption — that legal contracts don’t undo family ties. And once I had this epiphany, I quickly began to leave behind my preconceived ideas about how parenting an adopted child had to look and arrived in a place where I no longer needed adoption to be “just like” having a bio child. Frankly, everything got easier.
I still didn’t expect our adoption to be as open as it’s become but we grew into it. It wasn’t something I planned or that Pennie planned — it just made sense for our family. And I do think that open adoption relationships need to grow organically and need to suit the individuals involved even as I believe that they all need to come from the same place of respect for our children’s origins.
So the one thing I would tell my past self is that it’ll be ok. That mothering my adopted child will be just as wonderful, fulfilling, rewarding and fun as mothering my born-to-me child even though they are in many ways different. I would tell my past self that having Pennie in our lives would enrich my parenting experience instead of taking away from it. I would tell her, too, that seeing Pennie in our daughter would be just as moving as seeing Brett in Noah’s eyes. Finally I would say, trust your daughter; she will lead you. It’ll be ok.
Look alikes
May 23, 2009 Adoption
The other day Madison said to me, “Lucia looks like you.”
Lucia is my niece and Madison is right — Lucia does look like me. She looks exactly like my sister and my sister and I don’t look that alike but we must a little because Lucia looks just like my sister and a little like me. She definitely has my coloring. So I agreed with Madison. Then she said, “And I don’t like it! I want to look like you!”
I told her the truth.
“Well, I’m glad you don’t look like me because you’re prettier than I am.”
“Oh Mommy! You’re pretty, too,” she told me.
“I am,” I agreed. “I am very good looking but you are better looking. You’re downright beautiful. I love having such a beautiful daughter.”
Then we hugged a bunch and she seemed satisfied.
She’s sensitive to how her friends look like their mothers. Of course she looks like her mother, too — she looks just like Pennie — and she knows this because she announces it to people sometimes. She tells them this is why her skin is brown and why she has brown eyes and why her hair is curly.
I think most of the time she doesn’t mind not looking like me but then sometimes she does. It’s just how things are sometimes.
Tags: Madison, mothers, open adoption
This I can say
May 14, 2009 Adoption
The body has memory and even when we try to forget things, our body remembers. And our bodies remember in a primal way even when our minds try to forget.
So one pregnancy can certainly remind you of another and perhaps a lot of your usual coping mechanisms if you’ve had, say, a pregnancy that ended in a loss might not be of much help in the face of that primal way of remembering.
My labor with Noah was very difficult and ended in an assisted birth (vacuum extractor), a baby with a broken collarbone and lousy apgars and trauma for all of us including Brett. But I forgot a lot of my in-labor panic — all of it, in fact. I remembered the pain for a long, long time (I never had that forgetting some women have) but I didn’t remember the panic until I was having an SHG at the RE’s office. This is when the doc fills the uterine cavity with saline solution so s/he can get a good look at what’s going on in there and normally it’s no big deal. There’s some cramping when the saline goes in but as reproductive medical procedures go, it’s pretty minor. Only when my uterus started cramping while I was up in stirrups in a darkened room (to better see the ultrasound) with some guy in a white coat leaning over me, I started to panic. Like cold, hard, irrational fear and maybe I started to cry a little hysterically (enough to worry the doctor) and maybe the whole minor procedure became a huge major emotional mess all because my body remembered my panic even though I’d forgotten it until that minute when it hit me. And then I remembered being in labor and the fear and the pain, which my mind had carefully put away so I could move on. But the body remembers. It remembers for us even when we want to forget.
Tags: grief, open adoption, pregnancy
