Second-Class Citizen Moms

"this treatment mothers get,
where once adoption gets its hooks into you, you are fair game for one
and all, is so animal kingdom to me--all the other animals, even
family members, pile on in the most uncivilized way once you have
been cut out of the pack for this very special and awful abuse" -E.

The words above were written in a post to a private group by another OUSA Mother of Loss and it gave me a very visceral jolt. I have often thought that there were two groups of people against whom discrimination and derision were still allowed or considered "politically correct." One group is the population of obese Americans and the other would have to be the single Mother of adoption loss. It is sad to say it, but what my friend wrote is true. Once you become pregnant while single and/or have the bad taste to be financially strapped and/or have not completed your education, you get immediately placed on the list of possible prey animals (birfmudders). Once you have been lured into the adoption surrender trap, you are fair game for one and all, to use, dismiss and abuse.

Your family usually wants you to just shut up and act like it never happened, the adopters want you to go away and stay gone or, at least, stay in your place (casual "friend" or some kind of "auntie") and the general public either abhors you for being the kind of mother that would "give your child away" or puts you into the *crackwhore niche. Too often, our adult, surrendered children seethe with anger at us, not understanding the coercion and browbeating that many of us endured or the seductive nature of the appeal to our love for our unborn child and concern for that child's "best interests." We're damned every direction in which we turn. Oh yes, we might get the occasional "thank you," from adopters who think that we just gave them some kind of "gift," but even that has the unsaid sentence after it.."now just go away." I, personally, do not appreciate the specious "Thanks" that get thrown our way like some kind of alms for the poor and my children were NEVER "gifts" for strangers.

Believe me when I say that NO ONE tells you that your child might grow up to hate you for surrender. They tell us, instead, that they will hate us if we keep and raise them, that they will thank us for saving them from a life with nasty, old, unfit us. They don't tell us that we will suffer an ongoing grief that is outside the pale and that it never goes away. Our families develop some kind of mental block that keeps them from being able to support us in our grief and everyone treats us like we deserve this kind of treatment. For WHAT? Being sexual beings...loving not wisely but too well..falling for a line of bull from some guy...forgetting a birth control pill..surrendering to overwhelming forces??? Damn people, this is definitely a case of the punishment NOT fitting the NON-"crime."

*Back to the "crackwhore" persona..if any of us speak out and speak up, you can bet your last dollar that the drug-addicted, neglectful, abusive Mom will be trotted out and held up as a reason for the insanity of adoption to continue. We get defined by our lowest, common denominator. Not many people wants to acknowledge that this particular person is part of a miniscule minority among the Mothers who have LOST (I love saying that because it seems to irritate someone out there) children to adoption. Yet, you see very little about the abusive adopter (some even kill their adoption-acquired children) even though it happens quite often(see "adopter abuse" threads at msn group, Anti-AdoptionTruth). Nope...the adopter seems to escape the predator that wants to cut the M.O.L. out of the herd and pounce because the adopter is one of the predators.

They say that predators always go for the weakest member of the herd. In our case, they go for the disenfranchised, the titular "unfit", the deeply wounded woman who dared to be fertile, single and less than rich and famous. And if we fight back and stand up with pride and show our own claws, those predators become incensed to the point of outrage. It's funny, but once I did start standing up and fighting back, I found out that many of the animals that were preying on us were NOT lions, but hyenas who are vicious, ugly and who tend to be rather sneaky, unprincipled, unfair and basically, cowards.

My friend's wonderful comment has helped me realize that the predators and the guardians of the status quo are not going to fight fair. We are in for a bloody fight, I think...tooth and claw will be deployed and some will bear scars after the melee is over. But I also saw a nature film once, where a herd of animals stood back-to-back and fought off the predators to save the young among them. That will happen with us, I think. We are smarter than the average herd animals and we are sick and tired of being food for the adoption predators. They might as well show their talons now, because we are standing up, speaking out and fighting back.