If birthmothers had to be identified all the live long day some people might find the need to pelt us with rocks or at least, if one was ever to take seriously what one reads online, hurl vast insults and barbed comments as we went about our days. I could see a lot of us spending a lot of time in tears because what people say out of fear or weird anger or ignorance or just plain judgment can be really harsh.
I know many birthmothers who have “chosen” to relinquish a child to adoption have great difficulty explaining the very subtle coercion and thought process that goes into it. It’s not so obvious to be called brainwashing. It is often not forceful enough to be openly accepted as coercion. We don’t even know or want to call ourselves “victims”. Is it the sophisticated manipulation tactic known as “Gaslighting”?
If there are other options that CAN BE sought BEFORE adoption, then the adoption itself, not matter how happy anyone claims to be, is a tragedy. “What about the mothers who truly aren’t able to parent?” If we want adoption to really be a good thing, ethical, and used as it should then we have to then ask, ‘What is the obstacle in her way that is making it less than idea for this mother to parent this baby?
We all worry. We all fear so much that we will lose what precious little we have managed to obtain, that we are frozen solid in fear. Adoptees, birthmother, fathers, siblings.. all dancing to a song that we don’t known the melody to but desperately tying to sing along hoping we don’t step on another’s toes.
Silence left to its own devices, breed’s silence. So speak and be heard. One word after the next, express yourself and put your life in the context – if you find that no one is listening, be loud.
Make noise.
Often, because I spend much of my time & energy pointing out the negative aspects of adoption, I have been called “anti-adoption”. The very concept of those two words applied together — “anti” and “adoption” — are met with disbelief. But before you are horrified and that title is cast upon my head like a noose, I would like to explain what the words, anti-adoption, mean in my world, You might just find that you agree.
I do not “relax” well. I feel guilty when I am not producing things, making things, painting things, cleaning, things, commenting with a vengeance, writing, building sites, networking, etc. Yet, I have been waking up past TEN FREAKING AM and then staying IN BED until NOON. Yes, really. WTF. And that’s what I was doing on Christmas Eve morning, until, that is, I started crying….
In many ways, you are restarting your life from scratch. You were not a birthmother before. You did not have this child before. Now you do. You are newly born as a mother, as THIS mother, for THIS child and that mother has been relinquished as well. She is gone. You mourn not only your child, but the mother you would have been, the girl who did not live with this sorrow, the woman who didn’t hold sadness in her eyes.
US Adoption Agencies routinely defraud Medicaid for birthmother medical expenses, then double bill adoptive parents and keep the profits. The cost of adoption is taken on by the American tax payer to the tun of 200 million a year!
So when you help Cassi be a more successful author by buy “Playing with Fire”, then you put money in her pocket, which in turn, puts money in my bank account, which then allows me to spend more time sitting in fort of the computer all day doing what I do exposing Adoption Truths!
Maybe you or she or even some well meaning friends might suggest that your daughter relinquish this baby to adoption and this will, no matter what you might have been lead to believe or what you might read in most publications, will NOT allow her to continue life as planned. By encouraging or supporting your daughter to relinquish her baby to adoption you are, in a most literally, sense helping to destroy the child you now know as your daughter.
Forget Tollhouse cookies, show her you really care by baking your birthmother unicorn poop cookies. It’s really just a sugar cookies recipe, BUT a bit more crafty. Maybe you are not the crafty adoptive mom type but, let me put to you this way, she made you baby and I don’t care how you cut it, placenta and amniotic fluid is way messier than some flour on your granite kitchen island, so get over it and get baking.
Little did I know when I made up the rainbow vomiting gnome #NAAM2013 shirts the word “barely” survived would be appropriate for me.
I could not stand to see nonstop “Yeah Adoption” posts or images or news articles. And 30 days of adoption activism was NOT scheduled and so it just went quiet.
I’ve learned to be gentle with my younger self. I really didn’t stand a chance up against that agency. They are very good at their business. They know exactly what to say and withhold. I was a prime, easy target for them and they did not hold back. They pounced and turned the knife to the very end.