Letters to the Editor

• Personally, I think women should wait until they're 30.

  [Read the article: Open adoption, broken heart]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Pregnancy can destroy your health. Turning 30 is the artificial point at which we can accept that we are no longer young and accept that we are never going to have the bodies we had when we were young. Destroying your health deliberately by getting pregnant earlier than that just seems like it's damn unfair, like deliberately aging ten years in nine months. And the fertility dropoff after 27 is way overrated. If you try before 34 and you don't get pregnant, odds are, you weren't that fertile at 27. Everyone's different (I got pregnant at 36 while breastfeeding *and* on the mini-pill. Others can't get pregnant when they start in early 20's. 27's a statistical average.)

  My mom had me when she was 19. She suffered pre-eclampsia so severe the doctor put her on a 1,000 calorie diet, and her health was never the same after that. At age 33, after having three kids (she finished up at 27), she developed type 2 diabetes, which at the time was fairly unheard of for a woman her age.

  I had my first biological baby at age 34. My health was great until I turned 30. It sucked a lot worse after the baby, but at least I had my ten good years of adulthood.

  Adoption is not a perfect solution, but often better than any available alternative. My mother was adopted, and was haunted by it her whole life. Recently she has come in contact with her birthfather's family, and has been amazed to discover how similar she is to them in many respects. Yet her *love* will always be for the family that took her in and raised her as their own. My stepchildren, which I acquired at the ages of 2 and 3, think of me as their mother and their biological mother as something more akin to a fun but flaky aunt who turns up randomly and takes them to the movies, only to disappear again sometimes for a year at a time. They are perfectly aware that biologically, I am not their mother, but they don't care. My husband chose to take his stepfather's last name and to completely cut himself off from his abusive biological father's family when he was 11 or 12 or so, because as many problems as he's had with his stepfather, the man's been far better to him than his bio father ever was.

  Blood is important. Knowing your blood is very important -- it tells you what is *you*, what is your environment, and what is from your family. But love is for the people who raised you, the people who cared for you. The people who wiped your butt when you were toilet training and read you stories and taught you how to ride a bicycle may be completely different from you as human beings, but they are who you will love and who you will look to as rolemodels. Your blood tells you where you came from but the parents that you love tell you who to try to be.

  It is vastly more important to be in a good place regarding your own readiness to be a parent, your emotional state, and your financial situation than it is to make sure that your kids are raised with their own blood. A child who becomes a parent (and some people are children even when they're 25) and cannot quickly mature to meet the demands of their new life will probably make their child's life miserable; a person who has a child too young is statistically much more likely to doom that child to a life of poverty, and here in America, poverty means you don't live nearly as long as if you were middle class or wealthy. Why would you cut ten-twenty years off your baby's life just to make sure you had one before your biological clock ran out? Why would you saddle a tiny baby with a miserable, immature mother (or father, for that matter) when waiting would make you a better parent? There are people who become great mothers and fathers even though they had children young. My mom was a great mother. My mom also knew from the time she was 4 that she wanted to be a mother, and embraced me eagerly even though I was unplanned and she was unmarried at the time, because she had wanted me (or someone like me) her entire life. Other people, not necessarily so prepared, or so capable of embracing their responsibilities. Parents need to be grownups, and in today's society most people simply don't mature until they're pushing 30.

  So is adoption perfect? No. But a closed adoption is worse than an open one, because people do crave to know who is their own blood. It won't reduce the person who feeds you your bottles and sings you to sleep and bandages your boo-boos to "a live-in nanny that [the parents] visit sometimes" -- the person who cares for a child is that child's parent, full stop, and as much as adoptive children crave to *know* their own blood, they *love* the people who stood as parents to them. The same is true of stepparents when bio-parents are not in the picture by their own choice. And having a child when you're not prepared to have a child is far, far worse than giving love to a child that isn't biologically yours, and people who say otherwise either totally misunderstand human nature, or are assholes. (You know, sheep can't adopt. An hour after birth, a ewe knows the smell of her lamb and will not accept a different lamb, no matter how needy. Humans, whether designed by God or made that way by the blind force of evolution, are capable of accepting and loving children of no biological relation to them. That is the way we are. You want to be a sheep, fine for you, but most of us would rather be human.)

  Permalink Thursday, March 9, 2006 10:23 AM