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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Thank you for writing this. I've lived at the other end of this story, and I think that both mothers go through difficulties that are nearly impossible to express. Honestly, I never thought about my daughter's mother and the things she must have had to overcome. You've given me a new respect for her. I am warmed by your story and encourage to find that there are others out there who have been a part of successful open adoptions. Thank you again.
we were matched with an expectant mother who decided to parent, and in many ways she reminds me of jessica. i spent a day in the hospital with this mother during which time she continued to insist that she was planning to place her son with us, but as the day wore on, it became clearer and clearer to me that should would not. i had always imagined that when an adopted baby was placed in my arms, i would immediately love it as my own, but that didn't happen. not at all. i felt awe and wonder at this small child, but i felt very sure that he was hers, and seeing that, and seeing her struggle, i couldn't imagine ever feeling he would be mine. it was a painful disappointment when she decided to keep her baby, but on a deeper level, i knew it was the right decision for her, and even in some strange way, a relief for me.
three weeks later another baby was placed with us, in a closed adoption at his first family's insistence. we did not meet them, we did not get to experience their grief first hand. and there's a part of me that i'm not particluarly proud of that was so relieved that i didn't have to do that. as it was, it still took several weeks before i even started to believe that my son was really *mine.*
your story is so moving, and i'd like to think that had that first mother decided to place her son with us, i would have had the courage to both face her pain *and* embrace our son. i can only hope that i would have been able to do it with as much grace as you have done. i certainly envy you the richness of having madison's first family in your lives.
I've been reading Dawn's story for years now and to see it summed up so beautifully is overwhelming for me. I'm crying not because the story is sad, but because Jessica is such a wonderful and strong woman. To love someone that much is amazing and I wish we all had that in us. I've often thought that as we grow up we create our own families with friends and chosen family members. Dawn and Jessica have created their own family around Madison. And their family is perfect.
This was a lovely article: honest, bittersweet, real.
Although the guilt that "open adoption" mothers is undeniably real and admirable, I hope they can take solace in a little perspective.
Try to remember the devastating journey of birth mothers in the past. In the past year, I was reunited with my biological grandmother. I took with a fair amount of equanimity the revelation that my father was the product of a rape, but Louise has never recovered from that. What shook my world was the way this highly responsible young woman was treated by family and society in 1940. For most women of that era and prior ones, violence, or the threat of it, was constantly beneath the surface of daily life. Losing a child to adoption was . . . well, I cannot even begin to describe the emotional turmoil my grandmother went through, because she struggles for words describing it to me. I heard the anguish even in the voice of her husband, who was with her at the time but clearly not the father. I learned that most of the guilt was on their side, not my adoptive grandmother's.
And what of abortion? Look around you at women over 70, and try to see young women faced with a choice that was, truly, no choice at all. There are more of them than you think, and don't kid yourself, some of them are in your own family. The power of birth mothers to control the circumstances of adoption is directly related to their power of choice in the first place.
And then, when you have considered these things, if you are an adoptive mother, put your guilt in perspective. Not all happy choices are without a painful underside, just as parenthood itself is a bittersweet journey -- even feeling guilt is a privilege. Things could have turned out much, much worse for the birth mother.
Meeting my grandmother happened around the same time I found out I would not ever give birth. Someday, I may be an adoptive mother. And I choose to feel good about that.
Open adoptions are just plain wrong, and this very sentimental article, while trying to present the opposite viewpoint, merely solidifies the truth.
Only a society deeply conflicted about motherhood and the meaning of family could have ever come up with such an arrangement. Famililies are not (contrary to what one poster says) made up of "friends and people we have chosen", but are blood relationships that can't be easily duplicated by legal arrangements and fancy talk.
The people who are most rarely fooled by this legalistic folderol are children -- they know instinctively that they have a "real mother" and a "real father" out there, and that what makes one parent "real" and another merely custodial is biological and genetic, spiritual and literal. That's why adopted children nearly always want to search for a real biological parent, no matter what decent and good people have adopted them.
It's a tragedy when a young mother is forced by circumstance to have to give up a child, and certainly there are times it is unavoidable. You really have to wonder in the story here, as the birth mother is from a very wealthy family (country clubs, etc.). Surely this was not necessary from a financial point of view, and the birth mother was 19 -- not a child herself. I feel deeply that she will live to regret this tragic decision (perhaps forced by her parents?) for the rest of her life.
A lot of the people glorified as open-adoptive parents are merely selfish yuppies who have delayed childbearing for way too long, and in their self-aggrandizing way, simply want to take the babies of others who are less economically fortunate. At the same time, there is a desire to sooth the guilt by continuing a relationship with the birth mother -- keeping alive a pretense that all is well, everyone is fine, and it's just one big happy EXTENDED family.
I really have serious reservations about the birth mother in this story, who is deliberately choosing to place her bi-racial child with a white family -- why? what's going on with this? Yet everyone is too polite to ask or talk about it.
Open adoption is wrong for every party -- for the guilty adoptive parents, for the child raised with "two mommies", for the biological mother who thinks this arrangement will give her some contact and influence with a child she isn't really raising. It's like a case of mass delusion. And it only exists because of a shortage of (premium) adoptable babies for middled aged yuppies who were too ambivalent to decide on childbearing when they were of a reasonable age.
The real tragedy will not be apparent for decades, until the child adopted this way reaches adulthood and understand the the abnormality of the arrangement, and the conflicted feelings about adopted family vs. biological family, and which is "real" or authentic.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
