Pre-Dawn Darkness

It's another insomnia-fest morning. Have you ever noticed, when you are awake by yourself in the wee hours, how thoughts can turn gloomy? I have the usual worries that can become exaggerated at times like this. I have some health issues that become death warrants when the sun has yet to grace the horizon. I worry about selling the house now that the housing bubble has burst, and how we can make our move to retirement next year. I worry about all my children and my grandchildren and then worry about my husband, who is not worried about himself, at all. All in all, it's a lot of useless worry to no avail.

Then I start perusing the different adoption boards and sites and the anxiety gets kicked up more than a notch and pure discouragement sets in. I bounce from discord to discord, watching people do all in their power to be as counter-productive as possible. This group doesn't like that approach and the other group is involved in keeping a feud alive and the other group after that is commenting on the foibles of the first two groups and nothing is happening in the way of healing or redress or action. Add into the mix the individuals that keep whole groups hostage to their egos, animosities, vendettas and prejudices and there you have my vision of the online world of adoption at 5:00AM.

So there is an ominous black cloud over my head and I light into these offenders with my keyboard and someone else lights into me and off we go. I had a portion of my post about adopters called "hateful" yesterday, so someone else doesn't like what I say. The bright spot in that matter is that, to paraphrase the old hit pop tune, It's My Blog And I Can Delete If I Want To. (You would delete too if it happened to you.)

Seriously though, I keep wondering if the community of the badly adoption-affected will ever get their(ooops! OUR) crap together. There is room, I suppose, for disagreement, but the power struggles and name-calling I observe make me wonder if either we or this nation are mature enough to do the job. We need to do more than to talk to each other...we need to LISTEN to each other. I find myself going back to the '60's again and hearing Art and Paul sing about "People hearing without listening." I think that, for many, what some of us have to say is just too scary for them to hear within the parameters of active listening. Even if we find areas of disagreement in what we hear, we can validate the big message and agree to disagree on the rest.

Now I am one of the dreaded (*cue thunder-clap, creaking door and scream) Anti-Adoptionists! I want to see the whole specious insitution scrapped and something more child-centered and less mercenary take its place. I think that this country can do just fine without the legal lies and pretense of adoption and I DON'T think that a child needs just someone they can call "Mom and Dad," when they already have a heritage and history. I would love the see the structure of legal guardianship strengthened and expanded to create a system that has everything to do with the best interests of the child and nothing to do with the selfish needs of adopters.

I see now, that some of our number who disagree with my stance have done the old conservative spin-doctor thing with the terms involved and have equated being anti-adoption with terrorist extremism. Reminds me of how the Republicans and the far right have worked to turn the perfectly good word "liberal" into some kind of curse. And that darn sun isn't up yet!

So maybe, as another adoption-affected person put it, "I'm so tired, but I can't sleep. I'm standing on the edge of something much too deep." The intensely personal nature of adoption trauma keeps many of us locked up inside the dark, sleepless place inside ourselves and, maybe, we just have to hang in there and keep waiting for morning to arrive.