The Chronicles of Munchkin Land » Blog Archive » Let’s Switch Shoes for a Day or Two

"May the love hidden deep inside your heart find the love waiting in your dreams. May the laughter that you find in your tomorrow wipe away the pain you find in your yesterdays."

This blog is neither pro-adoption nor anti-adoption. This is merely the story of a mother and her journey towards healing.

Let’s Switch Shoes for a Day or Two

Watch Two A-Holes at an Adoption Agency.

First of all, I love SNL. Secondly, this is one of my favorite skits. Third, yes, I’d be annoyed if this was a skit portraying birth parents poorly.

So, shoe’s on the other foot. Comments on YouTube include:

That was scary, I know people like that! Very scary. Whats even scarier, is that they actually give people like that children…

I’m aware that SNL exists simply to poke fun at people/things/issues and paraody life. However, we rarely see adoptive parents stereotyped so negatively on national media. I want to know how real (as in, a couple who doesn’t embody the two in this sketch) adoptive parents would feel if they were constantly portrayed as uneducated, egotistical, money-slinging baby mongers ON A DAILY BASIS.

How would it feel?

I have to say, as two prospective adoptive parents, my husband and I were relieved to see how obvious the spoof was. However, your point is extremely well-taken — I can see how frustrating it must be to have stereotypes constantly associated with your birthmother status.

I thought it was particularly silly and overwhelmingly obvious what they were doing.

But I too see your point that we don’t have to live with as much of a stereotype being adoptive parents.

Hope you are doing alright.

I laughed my tush off at this! I decided that’s what I’m going to say when people ask why we adopted, “Because I really loved the movie Annie!”

I know — not really what you were saying but there I go rambling…

huh. link won’t work for me.

Should work now. Something went crazy with the link!

The thing is, this is so obviously a spoof. We’ve got it easy, we adoptive parents, we get to hear about how “brave” and “strong” and “good” we are no matter how we may try to disabuse the speaker of those ideas. It’s got to be hard to be on the other end. How would it feel? Pretty rotten, I’m sure.

I am an SNL fan since I was a little, little kid. The two A-holes sketch is always my favorite. As an adoptive parent, I was not offended, but thought it was hilarious. Also working in adoption, I see parents just starting out who “resemble” vaguely that mentality. That’s where family preparation comes in and the education that you c;an’t order kids like you do a cheeseburger thru a drive thru window. Way back when on SNL I remember an adoption sketch with Doug and WEndy Whiner and another prior to that where the adoptive couple was actually given all kinds of choices for what they wanted their kids to look like: “do you want boy/girl, brown hair/red hair, hands or pods??” getting more and more ridiculous as it went along.

Okay, after all that rambling, I am not offended by the occasional parody sketch. I would be more offended if there was constant media attention given to goofy, uneducated parents in shows like Dateline, etc. Much like they often villify birthparents now.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Subscribe via RSS