'Fessing up and running straight into a fresh adoption...

Lorraine spills the beans

Last week in Virginia I met a woman whom I immediately liked and as we were together over the course of several hours, I ended up telling her my involvement with the Big A. You know, it's always a question: to tell or not to tell. And stay silent and avoid the slings and arrows of misfortune that may come your way when meeting new folks. When she first asked what I wrote about, I said, "feminist issues," as I have a long history of writing about women and the glass ceiling and gender bias in the legal system.

As we were in Virginia, just as the nutty bill to invade women's vaginas with an ultrasound probe before they may have an abortion was the issue de jour, she was eager to hear more. She herself had been at a protest rally the morning before. Incidentally, Gov. Bob McDonnell (who initially said he would sign the bill) and the anti-women Republican-dominated legislature backed down.


But as she asked more about moi, I pushed my luck and spilled the truth: I gave up a child for adoption and am an advocate for adoption reform and opening sealed records. It's this subject for which I am best known, I added.   

THERE'S ALWAYS AN ADOPTION LURKING SOMEWHERE
Ah! She had just came back from Atlanta where her daughter and husband had adopted a newborn, a Caucasian baby even though they had said they would adopt a mixed-race, and it only took two months for the whole process. Dear Reader, how to react? What to say? Do I allow a shadow to come over my face? Ohh...is what I said. She went on to say she had been there and she met the parents of the child.

But as she talked I found her response most comforting, in a twisted sort of way. She talked about how this adoption would be so different from how it was in the old days (that would be me), this would be an open adoption--no question about that--that the couple who were the parents were "just not ready" to be parents, the girl had some college, the young man, she thought none. But she ended adding that she could hardly look at them, and that she spent the time there working on a baby blanket. What she said by inference was that she got that this giving up a child was a sin against nature, that she understood how the mother had to feel, even if she was operating on remote control through this process of handing over her child.

I ended up feeling that the woman, more than her daughter, understood the terrible dynamics of the situation. I only could say that this open adoption might be more difficult for her daughter and husband than they imagine, having heard of so many open adoptions that snap shut. I said a few other things, about how difficult it was for me, how women go through with the adoption but later on come to realize what has been done to them, to their babies, but I was reacting to a done deal hundreds of miles away.

ARE MOTHERS WHO KEEP THEIR BABIES LOSERS? 
Later, I found myself thinking about pro-adoption first mother bloggers whose writings seem to be a way to convince themselves that they did the smart, right thing--they are not like those poor losers who keep their babies, drop out of school, take welfare, et cetera.  Jane and I talked about this last night, and she said that agencies do a great job of convincing prospective adopters and prospective providers (pregnant teens and women) that they are doing the right thing. Right for whom?

David Smolin, who understands

"Adoption involves the loss of relationship and connection to one’s original parents, sibling, and extended family. Any perspective on adoption that does not, at the outset, understand this is as a significant loss and harm to both child and original family is, I believe, dangerous and deficient....In a world in which we (outside the context of adoption) acknowledge that both nature (genetics) and nurture matter, pretending that genetic inheritance and nine months of nurture in the womb mean nothing makes no sense." --David Smolin, in a forthcoming book in which he and Elizabeth Bartholet, adoption promoter and Harvard prof go head to head about intercountry adoption. Professor Smolin is the adoptive father of two girls from India who he came to learn had been stolen from their parents. He spent six years locating the girls' family. --lorraine, feeling blue today
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Personal note: I am heading towards surgery in mid-March to repair a torn and tender rotator cuff, and typing remains difficult. I can do it, but it leads to a huge spasm between shoulder and neck. So I will try to write short posts in the coming weeks as possible. If I am unusually MIA, please understand.

For more on the Smolin/Bartholet debate: Selected Works of David M. Smolin
Click on the "download" icon in the upper left of the page.

And readers, opponents of transvaginal ultrasound, check this out