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.)




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