Faith » The Chronicles of Munchkin Land

Why Christians Need to Be Aware of How They Speak About Birth Parents

Oct 092011

Before I launch into this post, I want to address something important. I am aware that not all birth parents share my faith. This post is about to get all faith-tastic up in here, and more specifically of the Christian faith. I am speaking of my experience, my beliefs and my faith. Just a heads up.

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I attended the Women of Faith conference in Pittsburgh this weekend with the women of my family. As a whole, it was a great experience. I love a chance to sing some great praise songs, listen to some faithful and inspirational women, eat nachos with jalapenos and generally have a good faith experience.

But… there was a moment during which it was almost derailed.

Let’s back up to 2003: I was pregnant with the Munchkin. It was a difficult time as a whole. Those who have read my blog for years know that I fell into adoption when my kidney disorder landed me on Level III bedrest. It has worked out for us, as I chronicle here, but it wasn’t an easy time.

During that time, the Pastor at my parents’ church basically threw my family under the bus. For all intents and purposes, I shouldn’t have been able to come out of my daughter’s relinquishment and immediate postpartum phase with my faith in tact.

But I did.

I don’t get all “God meant for me to be used as a vessel for Dee to be a Mom.” I don’t believe that. I believe that free will — which we all have — came into play. I believe that my faith has allowed me certain room to heal — and to be angry and to rant and rave and get back to healing — along the way. I’ve been angry with and/or at God at times, but I always come back to a peace that, despite that free will decision, I can still use whatever free will I have left combined with His grace for good.

Now we can get back to Saturday morning, October 8, 2011 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. My hometown, where a Pastor put my faith to the test eight years earlier.

Lisa Harper is on the stage. And she is rocking it. She’s funny. She has on great boots. She has this smile that reminds me of one of the women in my family. I want to give her a high five. And then she tells us that she has started the process of adoption.

I start the inward cringe. I know where this is going. But I pray — not just hope, but I pray — that she won’t take it there. She’s a single woman, and I want to believe that she has an understanding of what other single ladies might have been through, gone through, dealt with at one time or another. She starts talking about the kind of child she’d like to adopt. I give her leeway. I allow her space. She’s new to this, right? She doesn’t know what can of worms she is opening, right? I allow her the wiggle room that I don’t always offer others.

And then she slams me into the floor. My breath catches. I can’t feel my toes.

“I’d like to adopt one of those chocolate babies that their birth mamas and daddies have passed over.”

I won’t even get into the race issue. That’s something else entirely.

I just blinked. I felt every woman in my row cringe; every woman in my family who knows the beauty that is my daughter, the love that I have always had for her, the hard work I put into making our open adoption work. They knew. They knew, and they have never relinquished a child. They knew, and they’ve said their fair share of stupid things over the years. They knew.

I didn’t tweet immediately (but I did eventually, to which @womenoffaith didn’t reply like the other ones I tweeted which were full of good things). I wanted to let it slide. Lisa even included a prayer at the end of her time specifically stating that if anything she said offended anyone, that God would erase it so that the message wouldn’t be lost.

I can tell you that for the women in Row W on the back side of the stage, the message was lost.

I tried to let it go. But the truth is, in a crowd of 8,000+ women, I wasn’t the only birth mother in the crowd. In fact, I know I wasn’t the only birth mother in the crowd. Some of my birth mother (Internet-started) friends who happen to live in Pittsburgh were in attendance. And they were caught off guard by that comment as well. I’m just the most verbal one. My sister-in-law laughed, knowing I was going to blog it. It’s what I do.

I get that Lisa has not yet adopted. She isn’t fully indoctrinated into what is and is not acceptable with regard to adoption-speak. She’s learning on the fly. She’s being baptized by fire.

But.

As a public speaker, you have to be responsible for what you say on a stage. If you don’t know enough about adoption and birth parents and the intricate “stuff” of the in between, then don’t speak about it on a stage to a room of 8,000+ women. You run the risk of doing more harm than good.

So let me tell you, Lisa Harper, something you need to know: I did not “pass over” on my daughter. I wanted her. So desperately. I loved her with all of my being. I was heartbroken when I had to hand her over to her parents. I didn’t “pass over” on the opportunity to parent her. I didn’t just think, “Well, I’ll just hand her over to someone else because I don’t want to do this and it will be all okay.” It has been the most difficult road I have ever had to walk. It has changed who I am, at the very core of my being. I am grateful for the open adoption I have with her, with her mom, but it still remains the hole in my soul — the colander in my heart that won’t be filled by God or anything else. I miss my daughter every single day.

I just want you to think, Lisa, the next time you speak. In that room, there will be a woman who relinquished her child for adoption. It will be the hardest thing she has done in her life. It will be that one thing that she still questions God about: the whys, the reasons, the heartache, the hurt. It will be the one thing that she still cries about in prayer, the one thing that still makes her doubt if she had just been a “good enough” Christian if it would have worked out differently. So before you make some flippant comment about birth parents who “pass over” their children, think about the wedge you’re driving between those parents and the God you are representing on stage.

And then — more importantly — think about the child you might one day adopt. They will hear the undertones in how you speak about their birth parents. They will know that you think less of their birth parents, even if you use God-speak to say what a “gift” they were. They will read this post one day and know that you think their birth mama just “passed them over.” Your child will take your cues about how to feel about their birth parents and thus how to feel about themselves.

Please think before you speak on a stage. Your words hurt me, and I wasn’t alone. Your words run the risk of hurting children in the future, one of whom might be yours someday. Think, Lisa. I’m a real, faithful, hurting child of God who made a decision that altered the course of my life. I am not less than you, and neither is any other birth mother or father.

Please remember that before you speak next time — because there will always be a birth mother in attendance. Always.

(PS: Angie Smith made me cry — hard — with her story of Audrey. I love me a blogger. I love me a Mom who wanted to give her child a chance at life no matter what. I love me a redhead. She redeemed the day for me and I’m going to go buy her book right freaking now. The end.)

The Tragedy of Separation and God’s “Plans”

Adoption, in General, Faith 11 Responses »

Aug 082009

I just finished reading The Shack. As I said on twitter, it wasn’t an easy read. It wasn’t. Death of children and spiritual issues that are hard to wrap your head around don’t always go down the same way as a light, summer chick-lit romance. However, it was a soul-searching, powerful read for me. Near the end of the book, a paragraph reached out and grabbed me, hard, and forced me to listen, to consider how it applied to my life.

Mack, just because I work incredible good out of unspeakable tragedies doesn’t mean I orchestrate the tragedies. Don’t ever assume that my using something means I caused it or that I needed it to accomplish my purposes. That will only lead you to false notions about me. Grace doesn’t depend on suffering to exist, but where there is suffering you will find grace in many facets and colors.

I had to put the book down after I dog-eared the page. (Apologies to my Mother as it is her book.) I sat for a minute, really thinking about that paragraph. For those not familiar with the book in question, that particular paragraph is spoken by God. Far-fetched to be sitting down and discussing the ins and outs of how the world works with God while still alive.. or is it? I won’t debate the dramas of the book that are being had by those who are overly religious and not at all in tune with the fact that God can do whatever God pleases. I will however apply the above paragraph to my life.

To our adoption story.

It has never set well with me when adoptive parents say something like, “God meant for this child to be ours.” Those words always struck me as off, wrong somehow. I couldn’t quite argue as to why though. I mean, God knows the plans that He has for our lives. Right? As such, who am I to argue that He didn’t plan for me to become pregnant so that D could be her mother. That paragraph spoke to me and to the situation and to the reasons why the theory that God wanted me to hurt simply isn’t true.

God didn’t intend for me to be separated from my firstborn child, my only daughter. The religious but compassionless among us can claim that to be so but that’s not what was intended. I made choices, out of my free will, that lead me to a place to make a decision. Hindsight leads me to believe that I could have spent a little more time in prayer over that decision, which is not to say that I didn’t pray but, still, hindsight is very good at assuming such things. That aside, I believed that I was making the best decision I could at the time. God didn’t want me to hurt and suffer. That’s not the intent here. And I am so very thankful that he sent D.

Separating a mother and child, even in a necessary situation (abuse, neglect) is a tragedy. It just is. It causes trauma to the mother, to the child. You can debate that a newborn placed at birth and a two year old removed by CPS will have varying levels of trauma and I’ll agree with you. That aside, the traumas of the tragedy exist. From the point of my signature, the actual point of the definite decision to place, God began working through that plan, that course of action. Free will is tricky like that.

Just because we have a beautiful relationship doesn’t mean that the grief and loss I have experienced are what God intended for my life. Just because I have spoken of His healing presence in my life doesn’t mean that God’s heart didn’t break with mine when I placed her in someone else’s arms. As He continues to work through me and in me, I hope that more peace and more hope are given not only to myself but to others. But I wasn’t put on this Earth merely to be a vessel for someone else’s child. I made choices. I made decisions. And through those decisions, God worked with me and through me.

Now if I could only accept the forgiveness offered for what I feel that I have done wrong. Some days I think I have. Other days I know I have not. More work to be done.