Coming Out » The Chronicles of Munchkin Land

I Need Some Witty Comebacks, Please!

Adoption, in General, Anxiety, Coming Out, Firstmotherhood, Motherhood, Pregnancy, Stupid, Stupid People 18 Responses »

Oct 102007

I’m a ball of nerves. You know, other than everything mentioned in my previous post. As most of you know, I’m speaking at a conference this Saturday about adoption. I’m talking about the influx of birth mother blogs into the blogosphere and why we aren’t going away. I’m speaking about birth mothers, as a birth mother. I’m the only birth mother on our specific panel. I’ll be speaking to a room of people who know that I am a birth mother.

Did I mention that I will be 32 weeks, 6 days pregnant at that point?

Anyone else know where the nerves are coming from?

Because I can talk about adoption, birth motherhood and whatever until I’m blue in the face. In such a setting, where I’m not trying to win friends or make people like me, I don’t necessarily feel the same nerves as I do when I’m telling people that I hope will be my Best Friend Forever about our adoption story. It’s just a different thing.

But this whole speaking about birth mothers as a birth mother while pregnant? I’m all twisted up inside.

It’s only happened once, and it was in a chat room setting, not a real life setting. While pregnant with BigBrother, I was talking about my pregnancy and so on. Some other chatter asked who I was giving “this baby” to. Excuse me? This person couldn’t understand why or how I was going to parent this child since I had already given up one. Didn’t that mean that I was a bad parent? Isn’t that why I gave up the first kid? The fantastic list of questions went on and on. I was stunned. Here I was, a successful, married woman who had purposefully conceived a child and I was being told that I couldn’t possibly ever parent another child since I “gave up” my firstborn. I was, forever, a bad parent. Unfit.

And while I want, desperately, to believe that the general public isn’t as moronic as that particular person, I know it’s simply not true. Someone, if not multiple someones, will be sitting in that audience on Saturday thinking one of the following things:

Oh, look, that sex-crazed little whore went and got herself knocked up again. Doesn’t she know how to keep her legs closed?

Or:

I wonder who will parent this baby? I have some friends who are looking to adopt.

Or:

Didn’t she learn anything the first time she got pregnant?

The variations continue on. You can tell me that people won’t be thinking that but we all know that someone, if not multiple someones, will be. And it’s disheartening. And it makes me want to cry a little bit. (Possible hormone issue right there.)

So, are there any witty comebacks in case someone has the audacity to say any of these things to me? I mean, I could go into the whole “I’m a great mom, a successful woman, married to a great man and this baby was just as planned as his older brother.” But that seems boring. I need to shock some pants off in my hometown. I’m feeling a bit snarky.

Whatcha got?

Mainstream Recognition Forces Lack of Secrecy

Adoption, in General, Anxiety, Blogs, Coming Out, Speaking Out Comments Off

Sep 282007

I was checking articles, blogs and links about adoption this morning, trying to plan out next week’s topic list for the bp/fp blog. I clicked on one, entitled “More Than Mommy Blogs,” and proceeded to choke on my coffee. And then I just sat there and pondered things for a bit. I was going to write a brief aside. But things started getting jumbled and I just needed to write without worrying about the length of my sidebar.

I was mentioned, after a paragraph about The League of Maternal Justice (whom you should support, by the way) in the Toledo Free Press (as in, Toledo, Ohio). A brief paragraph at best, simply talking about the fact that I write the bp/fp blog, that I’m a birth mother (though, bless this writer, she never uses the term birth mother!) and that I’m from Ohio. She uses my whole name, which is never an issue because I’m not ashamed of either my role as a first parent or anything I’ve written (sans some bad middle school poetry).

Three things hit me as I pondered the paragraph:

1) I was just mentioned in a post about Mommy blogging. My mommyblog was not mentioned. The adoption blog was. That feels nice to me.

2) The topic of adoption was mentioned in a mainstream format without judgment or malice. People are going to click through that normally wouldn’t give two thoughts about the plight of generations of birth parents.

3) My sister-in-law lives in Toledo.

Regarding the last one, I’m not really concerned about it. First of all, she not only knows about the Munchkin but asks about her frequently. She loves the hilarious stories about Munchkin-antics. (Who wouldn’t?) Secondly, she’s quite busy and doesn’t have much time for reading. As I said, I’m not concerned about it. It was just a fact: I was just covered in an online paper in a city where a relative of mine lives. This continues to happen in my life. And I think I’m glad. It forces me to be honest, to live my life openly.

It’s really, really easy for birth parents to hide behind the secret veil of birth parenthood. It’s not a topic most people think to broach when you’re discussing children. “Oh, so you have two kids here. Have you placed any for adoption that we should know about?” No, it’s just not brought up unless the first parent brings it up. Considering our adoption is fully open, I can’t hide it well. If you come to my house, my living room features pictures not only of the Little Man but of the Munchkin, her brother, her Mom (and random other family members).

If things were different… for example, if this was ten to twenty years ago or if our adoption wasn’t fully open or any number of different variations, it would be incredibly easy for me to hide under the cloak of invisible birth parenthood. It would be. While I seem open and willing to discuss the topics concerning first parents in today’s adoptions, it’s only because I don’t have a choice with the logistics of our relationship. If things weren’t what they were and I didn’t have pictures of us together to prove that we had a bond… would I be so outspoken? Probably not. My anxiety would get in the way, as it does sometimes even now, and tell me that I wasn’t worth the wasted breath. That no one cared about my emotional journey. No one cared about birth parents.

It’s kind of like the whole BlogHerAds over there on the left hand side. Quite a few of my specifically adoption related posts have been linked since I added this blog. More than I thought they would pick up. I thought they’d grab each week’s less adoption related post. (Though they didn’t grab the Pro-Life bumper sticker one which bummed me out, choosing a much more tame topic.) I’ve had a lot of click through’s on posts that the normal mommyblogging set really doesn’t read on a day-to-day basis. It’s unnerving, really, which was some of the cause behind the Naked Blogging post. Here are all of these moms, some of whom are equally awesome bloggers, reading things that could potentially place me in the line of judgment.

Surprisingly, I haven’t had one off-color comment on any of those posts. True, they could be so appalled that a birth mother was linked on their blog. But I like to think it’s because I’ve gained some respect from other motherly types.

Or maybe I just ramble so much that no one makes it through an entire post. Now that is a possibility.

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