Thanks, But No Thanks

I have noticed a disturbing trend in the community of those affected by adoption...a trend to "soften the message" and to "compromise." While I think that a lot of us can meet in the middle in areas where we agree and put aside the areas where we don't agree, there is such a thing as asking too much.

Such an impasse, where too much has been asked of some of us old broads who have been there and done that, has recently been reached and we have had to stand our ground. What I would love to ask everyone in adoption activism and natural family preservation is, when is enough, enough? Where can we draw a line and say, "this is as far as we are willing to go?"

How can we be anti-adoption, yet pro-adopters? That just doesn't make sense to us. Those who adopt or who wish to adopt are the ones who are fuelling the industry that continues to enforce a social myth, has a huge congressional lobby and is part of the misleadingly named Child Welfare network. Many good, but financially disadvantaged people are having their children taken from them for little to no good reason, and many of us older moms, now reunited, are having people the age of our children demand that we pay ultra-respect to the people who adopted them by forcing us to call them "parents." Yet, these same adopted people will refer to us as "b****mothers."

We are being corrected by "professionals" half our age who have no idea of the reality of the experience of the mother of adoption loss, especially those of us from the BSE. We are tough old birds. We have been through the worst that our families, social workers, uncaring medical professionals and our own children can put us through and we have survived with our self-esteem and zest for life intact. Still, we are having our hands slapped by very young adoptees who erroneously think that, if we use the term, "adopters," we are disrespecting their feelings for their adopters. How can we make them understand that we respect their feelings but hate the self-serving act of adoption?

I have a friend at the YMCA. She is in her late 70's and adopted two children, now adults. She and I have been around the block, a couple of times, over this. She knows I respect her as a fellow human being... Heck, I even like her...but that I don't respect her feelings for the mothers of her adoptees (they are her "worst nightmare") or her act of adopting. She told me that women like me scared her to death because we don't allow her to maintain her fantasy of being the superior woman to "parent" the children she adopted. She is, if nothing else, honest.

The bottom line is that we moms cannot operate where we are not allowed to be honest and where we are not respected as the original and true parents of the children we had taken for adoption.

And let me make one other observation. When a person who is, admittedly, neither a true adoptee nor a mother, comes on a support list and starts asking leading and intrusive questions that sound like an interview, it isn't paranoid to suspect that person of ulterior motives. I am no one's lab rat. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and swims like a duck, it has to be a duck. I doubt that many of us will go back to a place where there is this kind of atmosphere. Thanks, but no thanks.