This.
This is why I am not quick to share my birthmotherhood with every Tom, Dick and Harry. Or, mostly, Jane. Jane is a judgmental wench.
The pervasive belief that all who relinquished their child for adoption were going to harm their child. Which, of course, then tumbles and spills over into an automatic judgment of how I must parent my children now, most evident in the question I was once asked, in person, face-to-face with someone I still see on a regular basis, “And they let you have more children?”
Who is they? And why on Earth wouldn’t they let me have another child?
Let’s me say this: I was not ever a threat to the well-being of my children.
From moment one when those lines showed up on that pregnancy test in that pink-tiled upstairs bathroom, I knew I would do anything to protect my Munchkin. I would have given my life — and nearly did so three times during the duration of that complicated, life-threatening pregnancy. I fought, tooth and nail, to keep her inside, to keep her safe, to make sure that she had all the time she needed so that she would be healthy; my own health meant nothing to me as long as she was okay. When they came to talk to me about what would happen if she came early, I told them that she needed to be cared for first, that she was their first priority. I would have given my life for her. I endured endless months of bed rest, horrible medical procedures and a general lack of support for my daughter.
And I’d do it again.
The truth is that all of that health stuff only further complicated my singleness and poked holes in my fear and anxiety that I wasn’t “enough” for my daughter. That’s how we came to this place, where I am here and she is there and we are separate. No one told me that “enough” is relative. No one told me that if I was strong enough to endure the agonizing pregnancy with the Munchkin that I was surely strong enough to parent her. No one told me that “stuff” doesn’t make a parent. That adoptive parents fail just as much as we do. That it would be okay. So my anxiety lead the way. And here we are.
So tell me where in all of this that I was a danger to my child.
Tell me why I shouldn’t have been “allowed” to have other children.
Tell me why people look at me like a murderer when they hear that I placed my firstborn for adoption.
Tell me that they don’t doubt my parenting ability, question whether they should let their kids come over without their perfect-parent supervision.
Tell me that you are perfect.
I will be honest. I am human. I am not a perfect parent. I fall short for my parented children almost daily. But they are never in danger. They are always well-fed, except when they refuse to eat a meal that they liked just fine two weeks ago. They are always clean, except right out of the mud pit under the slide. They are always loved, even when they deliberately disobey me by reading past the final lights out. (Those young readers! Love ‘em! But man, go to sleep because tomorrow you will be a bear!) They are always safe, because this specific issue — this unnecessary judgment — has forced me to be a helicopter parent. What if we’re at the playground and BigBrother is on the monkey bars and falls and breaks his arm? Is someone going to see that as an example of me not paying enough attention to my children? What if they’re playing outside in our totally safe yard and someone kidnaps him? Is that then an example of how I am not an attentive mother? And so I hover.
Because of you.
Because of your unnecessary judgments.
Because of the way the news media only jumps on the most sensational stories of adoption.
Because of the way television and movie writers portray birth parents.
Because of the way we forced so many mothers into silence in decades past by telling them that they weren’t good enough.
Because of a need to see birth parents as unworthy, adoptive parents as worthy.
Because I fear that one misstep on my part will be judged more harshly than one misstep on your part.
All because as a scared, very sick, very determined-to-protect-my-child expectant mother, I chose the only path that I thought was available to us at the time.
I hear all the time that being an adoptive parent makes you a better parent because you waited and you “chose” a child. I say that being a birth mother makes you a better parent because you’re too scared to do anything wrong because you know everyone is just waiting for you to fail. Obviously, I don’t believe that at all, on either side, or in any variation that you want to say that one type of parent (attachment parenting, step-parent, those who endured miscarriages (of which I am one), and on and on) is better than another. It’s all false. Lies. Lies we tell ourselves and one another to make ourselves feel better about our choices, our lot in life, our short-comings. We’re all the parents we were intended to be, no matter how we came to the place where we are today. It’s a crap shoot, at best.
I have a grand dream that one day the sun will set on this pointless argument.
And those who are so concerned about the parenting abilities of me and the mothers and fathers like me — or anyone else who just dares to be different than the socially accepted norm — will, if not fully respect my family, go back to focusing on their own families.
