This is a continuation of thoughts based on a YouTube Comment, the first part: You don’t deserve to be a Mother. This is the part of the comment that is in the spotlight now: Growing up in extreme poverty is not what a child deserves I think that first we have a need to define “extreme poverty”. I immediately get a mental picture of the Save the Children” commercials: toddlers…
Quite a few years ago, I gave up on NOT sleeping with the TV on all night. I use to make a huge point of taking the “I-have-no-function-but-for-the-sleep-timer” controller, and using the sleep timer, since Rye HAD to have the TV on to sleep, but I hated to wake up at 3 am to an infomercial. Eventually, I lost both the battle, the clicker and lost the light sleeping that…
I really do not care that you think that I am overstepping my boundries. I personally feel that people who are so desperae for a baby that they troll on message boards and try to exploit women in vunerable circumstances to be predatory and unethical. Pre birth contact is considered coersive.
Of course, you would like to adopt her twins. And while I am sure that it sucks for you to be infertile, my sympathy really ends there. Sometimes in life you do not get what you want. I do not have to think of people like you.. my job is to think about moms who CAN be good mothers, who need help facing a crisis prenancy and perhaps just someone to tell them the truth.
In the midst of the conversation, we touched upon that just bad feeling that we both have, that we in a certain way, did this to ourselves. Though she was up here at the time, and I on LI and in NYC, being the same age, getting pregnant at the same time, having boys 5 days apart, it was the same time frame and the same social order that we experienced. The greatest difference is that I went the agency route and she fell in with a private lawyer/ private adoption. And as she said “I did this.. I found them”.
“So did I. I called my agency. I sent myself away”
A Case of Birthmother Blues Sitting here now.. feeling all nasty. I din’t know why. Feeling on edge.. like something is about to happen..got so much to do, but not really… should be doing more, but what? Rye is after me to find some job that I can do one handed… I want to laugh.. every thing I find that is work from home sounds like a pyramid scheme and…
I want you to imagine, really, being Judy Bennett. I want you to think about if Stephanie Bennett was YOUR child, if Evelyn Bennett was YOUR granddaughter, and you were just an “Obstacle”. I want you to think about what you would do if you had this agency in front of you and keeping your grandchild from you. What if no one cared? What would you do for help?
The fact is..there are ENOUGH moms who relinquished who are saying…hey, it didn’t work like that. And enough adoptees say the same thing. Human nature is different than the plan and the beliefs. They were built on faulty principles Not your fault, not mine..lets blame the adoption industry. They have known for some time, they have had the information at hand, and still they kept throwing this pipe dream at us all and selling us all down a river.
Even with all that you see here, all that I DID sign, all that I was told, I still felt that I had no choice. I did this because it was the only thing I could do. And I signed all, I agreed to all, I waived all because I was trying to be the best dern birthmother the agency had ever had. I wanted them to be so proud of me. I wanted acceptance and I knew that by being “strong”, by being determined, I would make them happy. I would prove my worth.
To me there is a line. It doesn’t matter to me where you are when you are above (or below even) the line. You can be the most militant abolish adoption and hate it in all forms. You can be someone just struggling though. You can think that it worked out good for you personally. You can want reform, call yourself a first mom, an birthmom if you want. You can be in CUB, be in OriginsUSA, joined the social workers guild based on your experience, speak at conferences. I can’t judge that, that is YOUR truth. WE all fit somewhere..and does it matter exactly where you are on your journey?
Yes, I “decided” to lose my child. Yes, I was “very sure”. Yes, technically, I had ‘other options’, but in my heart, in my head..there was no other option just this thing that I must do for us both. I believed what I was told. I wanted to believe it since at least believing it gave me some hope. Of abortion, of parenting..both were dark and cold as seen by me. My views were skewed. Our lives at stake. And I was in no position to make this life long decision. Yes, I needed to be protected from myself.
How else can a mother be able to walk away from her child except that she feels that it is the best and only thing for her baby’s well being? Where else does she get that strength except from her internal momma bear? And what if that momma bear has been given the wrong messages? What is it is based on crazed idealistic fantasies and stupid lists based on doubt? What if she could harness all that internal strength needed to fight the grief and instead use it to fight all the reasoning behind a possible loss? What if she stopped trying to be the “best birthmother” but tried to be the best mother? What if adoption reasoning and lists and generic feel good thoughts of grateful and happy adoptive parents didn’t get in the way of natures supreme processes?
Sometimes, it comes with the birth of a second child that makes us realize what motherhood means, what was truly lost, what is gone forever.
Sometimes, it just comes with maturity. We become less self absorbed and see what we decided does not just effect us, does not just “build a family” that makes us feel good, but that the loss continues to grow and effect others in our lives in ways we could not see.
I tell the pregnant and considering adoption to look beyond the immediate. Not just at NOW, but at later.
Sometimes things are just not controllable Birth control is not infallible. Some infertility is not fixable. Hyper fertility is not always fixable either. I do my best to control it, but all I need is one sperm. You know, they are really, really little. Kinda hard to find and catch sometimes. Slippery little buggers with only one thing on their mind. In over 20 years, I missed 8. I have a normal sex life…how many of those guys have I seen a week, a year, in the past twenty years? Eight out of 200 million kabillion is NOT a bad ratio.
My eyes stare into the camera as if saying “Mine, still mine.” Then I put those maternal feelings aside and took on the mantle of being a good birthmother. I look at this face of my own and think, “How could anyone not have seen it and not felt the absolute cruel injustice of separating me from this babe? Why did no one say ‘just don’t'”
It worked out reasonably well until it all fell apart. I am not going to name names but our constant adoptive moms from Anti-Adoption Insights ended up getting fed up with feeling defensive about their positions.In anger, they created Evil Adopters Haven on MSN to kind of mock the attitudes of the hard core anti-adoption folks on Anti-Adoption Insights. It got pretty ugly, pretty fast.