30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days

Carrie Goldman is an adoptive mother who writes and edits Portrait of an Adoption for the Chicago Now blog .

Every November she runs the successful 30 Adoption Portraits a series of guest posts in honor of November being National Adoption Awareness Month. It’s a special series called 30 Adoption Portraits in 30 Days with feature guest posts by adoptees, birth parents, adoptive parents, waiting adoptive parents, and foster parents-turned-adoptive parents.

This is the third year of the full series with 30 Adoption Portraits – 2011 & 30 Adoption Portraits – 2012 completed.   The series also runs in Huffington Post as well as hitting social media etc. In the past 10 days, the series has had 65,000 page views this year. It is a very good opportunity to share your own adoption truth with people who might not have had exposure to the painful side of adoption before. It’s definitely not a case of “preaching to the choir”.

While some of the views on Portrait of an Adoption might indeed make you see read and you’ll find yourself sputtering, please take a moment to get it together. Try not to respond in anger or the likely hood of your point of view being dismissed is much higher.  This is a great opportunity to be heard and every time we educate, calmly and with logic and reason, truth prevails.

Case in point: I have a piece running in the 2013 30 Adoption Portraits. I am rather excited to have the opportunity to have a say in the series and how that came to be is actually a lesson in itself. It’s also Max’s birthday today. So this will keep me a bit occupied I hope!

When Anger is Controlled; Opportunities Open

Of course, I knew about the site and the series and would read and sometimes comment. Back in July, there was a conversation happening on Facebook where, if you can believe it, I got kind of mad and worked up.  Just to give you this jist.. it was a comment about “those anti adoption people”  being wrong for  stereotyping all adoptive parents as baby stealers, because the “anti-adoption people” were “all angry and bitter“. The hypocrisy got to me. I was about to go off in my snarky way and basically blast Carrie and the series publicly, but then I said to myself, “Wait a minute Claud.. before you make this into a public pissing war and start calling out folks.. send an email instead and see if this could be resolved  in a better way” and so I did.

I wrote Carrie an email. And she responded by calling me on the phone in about 30 minutes. Where we talked for over an hour about how both sides stereotype and her readers exposure to the thought of being “anti adoption” and  the way we all communicate and how the anger doesn’t help anyone.

Introducing What “Anti-Adoption” Means to A New Group of Folks

 Since the original conversation had lots of ” What’s anti-adoption!” and ” Who could BE anti-adoption?” coupled with the recent New Republic piece on the “Anti-Adoption Movement”  Where I am named, I figured it was time to really spell out what it means to me to be  called “anti-adoption”. The result is this piece which will hopefully reframe the concept of being “anti -adoption” in a way that is palatable for anyone who wants what is best for children and mothers and parents overall.I would appreciate your support over there and it would be great to interact with that community on other pieces to show that we are not crazy, we are not bitter ( without reason) , the anger is justified and at the adoption industry, we are not to be dismissed and our truth is often based on facts.

Just a little teaser:

You May Call Me Anti Adoption if You Must

“….I understand that we want adoption to be about being the best possible experience for all the parties involved, but I will say that we are not there yet.  We still have a lot of work to do to before adoption is the way we want it to be, the way we believe it to be, the way it should be, the way it has to be.

If that has to be called “anti adoption”, then I will wear that label proudly…..”

These are very important conversations to have especially when they can reach a wider audience with many who have never even had the reason to think this way before.

So, just count to ten and take a deep breath and comment if you can!